Docklands in Conflict
Today, everybody knows where the Isle of Dogs is. The presence of the tallest building in Britain, most of the ex-Fleet Street papers and some of the priciest new housing in the country has seen to that.
The thing is, whether they come from Inverness or Islington, they’ll probably call it Docklands.
“Even now, try and say to someone you live on the Isle of Dogs, and they go ‘Where’s that?’” laments Christine, an Island dweller.
People have always known that the Island was a bit different, remote even from the rest of the East End.
Now, a new book, Docklands – Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision*, looks at the history of this idiosyncratic chunk of Tower Hamlets, what makes it unique, and how a self-contained, isolated area dealt with the upheaval of the biggest urban regeneration project in British history.
Author Janet Foster starts with the background history of the Island and how despite its hundreds of years of habitation, most particularly the boom years between 1800 and the start of this century, many Londoners passed by, with no idea of the Island’s existence.
Local disenchantment
All that was to change in 1981 with the foundation of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). Something needed to be done to rejuvenate 5,100 moribund acres in the heart of London, that was for sure. Whether it was done right depends on your point of view.
As the Canary Wharf development gathered pace, local disenchantment set in.
“The people on the Isle of Dogs started to realise this glossy utopia was not for them,” comments one local woman.
One protest march showed the depth of feeling. In May 1986, hundreds dressed in black and carried a coffin down the streets, mourning the death of their community. Their destination was Canary Wharf where a symbolic burial took place.
An incoming businesswoman could see the problem. “This is the first time since the dock wall went up in 1800 that the area has been open to the public,” she commented.
And it wasn’t just the Islanders who felt railroaded by the furious and sometimes insensitive development. Rich-ard Rogers, himself a modernist and architect of the Lloyds Building, Stansted Air-port and the Pompidou Centre in Paris described the development as “a hymn to greed”.
“The tragedy is immense,” wrote D Widgery in 1991, in Some Lives, A GP’s East End.
“Docklands was the world’s choicest building site… an area larger than the city of Venice. It didn’t need to become a jumble lot of giant offices at the whim of land prices driven dizzy by speculation and recession.”
Even the former chairman of the LDDC, Sir Christopher Benson, admits the new authority made big mistakes with a population which had recently had the trauma of having its core industry, dockwork, entirely swept away.
Demoralised people
“There’s no shortage of hard-working people in Docklands, but they’d been utterly demoralised,” he said.
“We failed to discover how deep was that desolation. We just regarded them as people who didn’t understand what we were about. Perhaps we should have started with community feeling on the board.”
The contrasts were the hardest thing for many Islanders to take. As redundant land was sold off as prime development real estate, and the Govern-ment poured in millions of pounds in grants, many campaigned in vain for cash to be spent on their decaying council properties.
Foster spent most of the Nineties collecting the material for her book.
In the meantime much more has been swept away and big business seems to dominate the Island more and more. The LDDC has gone but there’s probably another seven years of development to come.
But the overwhelming feeling from reading this book is one of sadness. Not just from what has gone – the Island had to change and be rebuilt – but at what could have been.
Docklands – Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision
by Janet Foster.
Published by UCL Press, ISBN 1-85728-274-4, price £14.99.