‘The journey is part of the experience. Not arriving, but the quest for finding a route there, is more important.’
So says author and London chronicler, Iain Sinclair. His book City of Disappearances is an anthology of space, and what has previously inhabited that space. His London is like a dream the city itself is loathe to wake from. But wake from it we must, to the grim reality of today’s East London. To Sinclair it is like waking up to a nightmare.
‘The O2 building, although it’s celebrated with its modern Dome structure, people don’t realise that it was built on the foulest of grounds.’
There is so much we don’t get to realise. Sinclair warns that:
‘The whole narrative of the city is being presented in a different light because of regeneration.’
Even as he mouths the word ‘regeneration’, you can see the 64-year-old’s brow crease with quiet indignation, like an elegant swan furiously pedalling underneath calm water.
Sinclair is addressing 200 people in the lecture room at the Museum in Docklands. Here we are surrounded by the past: upstairs a harrowing narrative of the slave trade; downstairs a chronology of ships and docks; outside, surviving references to days gone by.
Sinclair talks about his book not being a nostalgic look back at London, but rather to ‘keep the revelry and the glory of the place alive.’
I think back to an East London that I once knew. Long before regeneration became a property developer’s wet dream. Like Sinclair I too find myself wanting to shake the city awake and at the same time get back to the reality of its past. Not out of nostalgia for what was, but for the future we might have made of it – perhaps we will still.
Meanwhile tourists flock to the sights of the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and Harrods, revelling in the opulence, wondering at the glorious instruments of a colourfully dysfunctional history. But if they want a real eyeful they could do worse than come to Stratford.
Driving along the busy, noisy, petrol-fumed Mile End Road, they would pass over the Bow flyover. Today it carries commuters out to Essex and East Anglia. But the area’s singular history remains: hundreds of years ago this was the stamping ground of arable farmers; then the first river bridge into London; latterly the place in urban myth where the Krays had a rival gangster buried alive in a concrete post.
Past the flyover, you’re into what politicians call Stratford City, aka the regeneration of Stratford. The one-way system still gets jammed with traffic, same as ever, and to the right the 1980s Shopping Centre is noticeably unreconstructed. To the left, though, the bus station has been seriously updated since the days when I boarded the 262 to get to school: now it looks like an outpost of Stansted airport.
Standing inside the bus station looking out, a gleaming, silver sculpture catches your eye, and next to that an electrical clock counting down every second to the moment of Olympic gratification in August 2012. For local residents who are paying for the party, there may be little pleasure; but no doubt it will bring satisfaction to politicians, developers and those with huge salaries who can afford sumptuous, overpriced apartments.
As the red digits on the clock change constantly, so new developments are continually finished. Second by second, this small part of the metropolis is inching away from the kind of people who previously inhabited it.
It was here, at this very spot, that television cameras captured joyous scenes as London was named host city for the 2012 Olympics. Local residents jumping with joy, dancing in the streets, looked liked they were going places. Sadly they did not realise they are not on the VIP guest list.
Driving along Stratford Broadway through to Maryland Point, you can see the old railway sidings where workers would toil away as huge containers packed with sugar, cotton and other commodities passed through, fresh from the docks, en route to locations all around the UK. The trade from those industries dried up long before Thatcher’s regeneration of 8.5 square miles of Docklands (1756 acres of former dock land and 417 acres of dock basins).
Before Blair continued Thatcher’s project, it was possible to stroll along Temple Mills and through its snaking, winding roads to Eastway where as a boy I would play cricket on warm summer Sunday mornings. The therapeutic sound of leather on willow, and of light applause from spectators, offered active recreation and a moment of tranquil reflection for us locals. I still remember the smell of freshly cut grass filling my nostrils. This peaceful panorama, outlined against a hazy blue sky, is now a distant memory. Luscious green cricket pitches have been replaced by bulldozers, cranes and diggers raking up history in a furious effort to create the new Olympic Centre. These are the tools that make the dream of regeneration come alive, or so the politicians tell us.
One of the advantages of the past was that so many activities were free. Parents didn’t have to fund expensive activities like they do now. Sinclair himself bemoans the old London Fields Lido which opened in 1932 and closed in 1988:
‘These were excellent recreation areas where families and the community could come together and have fun. The beauty of it was that it was very cheap.’
It speaks volumes that it was local residents who organised themselves into a group, and decided to breathe life into the derelict site by cleaning the old Lido and restoring it to its former glory. Not a politician in sight until word spread of the Olympic circus coming to town. Then they were there, falling over themselves to provide funds to restore the Lido.
Walk past the Thatched House and onto Leytonstone High Street, you’ll see the Adam & Eve Health Club is still there. Walk further and you’ll arrive at modern apartments where Cathall Flats used to be. Built in the early 1970s this 20-storey block became synonymous with poverty and crime; but those keywords cannot contain the whole story. Turn the pages of time and you’ll find the concrete podiums where kids played football in the summer and in winter huddled together in tiny archways swapping football stickers, playing knock down ginger and running off through corridors shrieking with excitement. I still remember tenants hanging washing out on tiny balconies, apparently lost in their own thoughts as they glanced down onto the bare, unresponsive panorama below.
A new decade brought with it community-based housing associations and they brought with them that word again, regeneration. In this context, maybe it’s not such a bad word bad after all. Now gleaming new cars are parked in dedicated bays alongside smart little houses – the tower blocks long gone. Petite flowerbeds decorate tiny front gardens that offer welcome relief from concrete and tarmac.
The swimming pool is still there, although it’s now called a leisure centre. Its beige and brown façade looks strangely out of place among brightly coloured modern apartments. The local shop now sells you everything from fags and booze to groceries and electrical goods, and it’s open day and night, so you can drink cheap beer to your heart’s content. It never used to be like that.
Wandering through the new business park, past underage teenagers gulping alcohol, I enter the little war memorial park and approach its obelisk inscribed with the names of fallen soldiers. Here I find myself giving in to melancholy. The counterparts of yesterday’s war heroes slump idly across wooden benches supping cheap cider. Soon they’ll saunter over the road to the Green Man to take advantage of its extended opening hours. Closing time is a myth. In this sort of mind-numbing situation, a shared sense of positive purpose seems equally mythical.
Sinclair despairs not of this generation but of the regeneration in which it has grown up. Regeneration, he warns, will be ‘like a black hole with all these changes. It’s like the end of an era.’
The old buildings and landscapes will soon be consigned to dust. For every new fancy apartment block being built, years of history are buried away in landfill. Sinclair seems worried that there will not be any stories left to tell by the time regeneration finally comes to an end:
‘Before the Olympics project started, there was a freedom to imagine what you wanted. You could go for walks across Lea Valley, and be lost in your thoughts, but now a new city will be created. I don’t know what the consequences of this will be.’
He tells the story of his friend, a photographer, who had his camera confiscated and was arrested when he tried to document the scene behind the green fence ringing the perimeter of the Olympic site.
‘Photography is the real truth; it gives you the reality, a true picture. But if you can’t see things, then things become disturbing.’
The truth is that those with most to lose from this regeneration are up against those with most to gain from it. They are matched in a highly unequal contest. No one knows what this will mean for future generations. There is no point asking the property developers or the politicians for the truth. They have more immediate concerns to worry about. For now the landscape is filled with larger cranes, bigger diggers, growing numbers of construction workers, and architects with thicker sheets of paper, and foremen shouting louder.
The truth will have to wait.
Ian Simon is a recent graduate of BA (Hons) Journalism, University of East London
© 2009
So much of the infrastructure delivery in the Thames Gateway is dependent on funding via the Section 106 mechanism that the impact of the credit crunch could very well throw infrastructure plans for the Gateway into disarray.
James Stevens
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