Rising East Online

Gateway To The New Venice

Vicky Richardson

‘Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea-moor, or a lurid ashen-grey; lifeless, the colour of sack cloth, with the corrupted sea water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of space in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its level gloom.’

No, it’s not Thames Gateway, though it could easily be. This is from John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851), which was actually written in London so perhaps it was partly inspired by the Thames, after all.

In some ways there are remarkable similarities between the Italian coastline as it meets the Adriatic – where the land slides imperceptibly into swamp, half in and out of the water – and the topography of the Thames Estuary. In other respects, the two places could not be more different: Venice was once a desolate area of marsh and reeds but became the richest example man’s collective creativity. Whereas Thames Gateway is an abstract concept, a nowhere place dreamed up by a policy wonk in Westminster, a shaded area on a map and a soundbite that no one in real life ever uses. People might talk about Chatham, Medway, Southend or Barking, but who ever says ‘I live in Thames Gateway’?

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Opportunity knocks

It may have originated in a policy document, but when the government identified the Thames estuary as a growth area that could contain 200,000 extra homes, this was the opportunity to create a new city, to extend the reach of London along the river. It could be a modern-day Venice, a city built in the most inhospitable terrain, ‘a waste of wild sea moor’, but using the most skilful designers and engineers to create something fantastic and inspiring against all the odds of nature.

Thames Gateway could be the opportunity to test out truly innovative construction methods, and to use the power of the river to transport people and materials. As we argued in Blueprint a few months ago, constructing the Gateway could be just the excuse needed to really invest in the technology to transform housing production, with houses built in factories like giant iPods, and floated down the Thames to site on barges.

It might yet be the opportunity to turn around the property market, producing enough new homes to bring down the price of housing and so make buying a home a realistic option for many more people. But as it is, the trend for children to live with their parents looks set to continue, and house building looks likely to remain restricted to the usual clusters of uninspiring developer-led homes.

There are exceptions, but they are limited. Many leading architectural practices are already working on isolated parts of the area, under the terms of masterplans commissioned by the Greater London Authority’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit (AUU) and the London Development Agency through the latter’s Design Advisors panel, which includes such luminaries as Norman Foster, Will Alsop, Josep Acebillo and Peter Hall. Yet what is missing is any sense that this is an opportunity to pioneer alternative visions for the city, or any grand overall vision that can inspire people about living in Thames Gateway. Even Richard Rogers, who heads up the AUU, says that he is ‘deeply concerned as to whether Thames Gateway will fulfil its potential’.

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Over here, over due

Civil servants and politicians have long identified the area as a regeneration zone. When Michael Heseltine was secretary of state for the environment, he set up a working party to consider developing the East Thames Corridor. At the time the plan was criticised because the Conservative government offered insufficient infrastructure investment. Ironically, some of the most coherent features were initiated more than 10 years ago, although they are now proudly claimed by the New Labour Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) as evidence of its commitment to developing the area. Thames Gateway Bridge – for which a design by Marks Barfield Architects is currently undergoing public consultation – was the subject of an official enquiry in 1985 when it was known as the East London River Crossing.

A change in political leadership has done nothing to shift the emphasis towards public investment, however, and the latest ODPM paper on Thames Gateway, published in March 2005, says the measure of the success of the Gateway will be the extent to which it attracts private investment. For the most part improvements will be delivered by the private sector without any public financial support, though I’m not at all convinced that the private sector is the best way to pay for the necessary schools, hospitals and community projects that make up a city.

Already many critics are worried that the rush to parcel up the best plots of land along the river and sell them to housing developers has scuppered hopes of creating an overall vision for the area, or of using the river for anything other than the odd leisure pursuit.

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Brief visions

Launched in 2004, ‘ Thurrock: A Visionary Brief for Thames Gateway’ was one of the first and only attempts to create an overall standard and develop large scale principles. Led by the General Public Agency, it combined the best international good practice on urbanism with the views of local people. One of its ideas was a centre for marine studies at Purfleet, to work out how to harness the power of the Thames for education, industry, power and transport. Yet such a project will be impossible if the present strategy is taken to its logical conclusion, because land will never be made available for such public amenities.

‘A Visionary Brief’ is now sadly mired in bureaucratic delays and local authority wrangling. There are concerns that Thurrock Council is incapable of delivering its proposals because of the extent to which it has privatised

its services – a problem encountered across the Thames Gateway area. Rogers has described this confusion of public and private agencies as a ‘quagmire of mediocrity’, and has argued that what is needed is for the London Mayor’s Office to be empowered to push through developments.

Lack of leadership and a centralised power that could force through ambitious developments is one problem, but even if such an empowered authority existed, where are the inspiring urban visions for it to push through? We seem to have reached an unusual point where there are no alternative ideas on how to plan cities. For the past 600 years, from the Cittá Ideale of the Renaissance to the Walking Cities of Archigram, Utopian cities have represented the optimistic desire for change. As Lewis Mumford wrote: ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at’. Back to present-day reality, however, the ODPM notes: ‘To make a success of the Gateway we need to take a tailored and flexible approach, working on a local basis to agree local priorities and meet local needs.’ Visionary, it ain’t.

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Voles before vaporetto

Worse still, the one idea that seems to have captured some people’s imagination is the very opposite of building a city: Terry Farrell’s notion of a large national park is an anti-urban idea, the antithesis of the impetus that created Venice. Instead of saying, let’s use our skill as designers to bring people together in a place where they will be inspired by new possibilities, he’s saying let’s leave the best bits of the site to the water voles and birds.

In an effort to find a positive quality with which to promote the Gateway, Farrell and others have come up with the spurious idea that its USP is wildlife and nature. But this is really scraping the barrel. Apart from obscure psycho-geographers who ever takes a walk through the Thames Gateway?

Marshes that are home supposedly home to water voles and birds are in fact vast mud flats inaccessible to anyone. Terry Farrell’s vision of a national park stretching to London is an abdication of responsibility. As an influential architect Farrell is in a position to come up with a glorious urban vision. The combination of land and water has often inspired architects and city-planners to identify the most wonderful and remarkable structures. But Farrell’s is the very opposite of an urban vision. He admits that he thinks building new cities is actually a problem, which he says is confirmed by the urban growth in China. Instead, the river and its wildlife should be left to itself, while people are crammed into dense urban areas within the existing confines of London.

Similarly, Rogers recently downshifted his aspirations for Thames Gateway because of inadequate investment in transport infrastructure. In July he announced that he was turning his attention to the western part of the area – areas such as Greenwich and Charlton – which he says could be developed as densely as Islington or Notting Hill. While many people aspire to live in the period houses of these areas, architects will have to do more than appeal to our sense of upward mobility to solve the future demands for urban development. Recreating Islington in the Royal Docks is not my idea of Utopia.

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‘Sustainability’ as failure

The title ‘Sustainable Communities’, which seems to precede every other government statement, is a kind of apology. Loaded with meaning, it expresses the sense of failure in the post-war New Towns; the flawed provision of mass housing in the 1960s; and the further failures of developer-led housing in the 1980s and 1990s. Sustainable communities is a phrase that says, the solution is not to be found in ideas, plans and buildings. It anticipates the problems that new development creates, not the possibilities. It’s an apology for the fact that under Tony Blair the number of new homes built is lower than it has been since the second world war – 180,000 (most of these are being built by private developers).

John Stewart, economist to the House Builders’ Federation, has calculated that at the rate new homes are currently being built, each existing home will have to last for 1200 years. The problem is that many professionals, whether in the public or private sector, think that development (building things) is a problem in itself. We are often warned about the problems being stored up in the new cities of China, instead of celebrating the remarkable achievements of the Chinese in transforming their country and economy so fast.

One of the statistics that is supposed to grab our imagination is the target for 80 per cent of new housing in the Gateway to be built on brownfield sites. But why should the worst land be reserved for people, and the best for water voles? This target panders to the idea that in the UK we have a shortage of land on which to build. In fact there is a surplus of green sites. The amount of Greenbelt land, a category created to keep the ugly urbanites in their place, doubled between 1979 and 1993.

The fixation on urban density and on developing only on brownfield land is inhibiting possibilities for new cities. Yet he threat to greenfield land in the Thames Gateway (as in the rest of the UK) is much hyped. With the intensification of agriculture, land is increasingly becoming available for other uses. Large areas of countryside are being turned into nature reserves, and landowners are searching for alternative sources of income. The drive to protect greenfield land is simply another expression of distaste for urban development, and the sense of pessimism that currently affects designers, urbanists and planners.

The Thames is the reason why London exists. A truly sustainable approach to the Gateway would utilise its strength and potential to be the vital artery of a new city to the east of London. The challenge might seem immense at the moment, given the economic and bureaucratic barriers, but after 600 years of urban experiments, why should we give up now?

We have the skills, talent and enthusiasm to make the Thames Gateway something really spectacular. London is an amazing international hub. Just like Venice (which attracted Palladio, Titian and many others), the best designers, artists and thinkers come here for stimulation and because it’s a place where they can make things happen. We ought to be able to channel that creativity into creating a new city on the banks of the Thames.

In Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities there’s a line where Marco Polo says, ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’ Isn’t it our responsibility to make sure that one day people will talk about the Thames Gateway in the same spirit?

Vicky Richardson is editor of Blueprint.

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