A pedestrian walks past The Crystal building on Royal Victoria Dock
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)Set against a backdrop of derelict Thames riverfronts, classic Eighties gangster flick The Long Good Friday saw Bob Hoskins play crook-trying-to-go-straight Harold Shand and his grand plan to regenerate London’s docks.
Fast forward 40 years, and a lot of what Shand envisaged has come to fruition. A Thames from Tower Bridge to Canary Wharf lined with flats and apartments. The Isle of Dogs like a mini-Manhattan and further afield, the Olympics transformed a moonscape north of Stratford.
Central to this are the Royal Docks, a vast space enjoying a building frenzy of new homes, offices and leisure facilities. It’s also where a shiny new City Hall sits. Called The Crystal, the building looks like a great glass battleship on the waterfront. Some are unhappy at the move. Others see its potential to turbocharge regeneration here — as the old City Hall did for the area between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. Few would argue it isn’t an improvement on the decay of the early Eighties, but some are critical of the missed opportunity to tackle the deep-seated poverty that has characterised the East End for over a century.
Here, people generally earn less, have poorer housing, and live shorter. These are precisely the areas that ought to be top of the Government’s levelling-up agenda but are too easily forgotten about. But there is an opportunity to learn from the past and do better.
A vast swathe of further regeneration is taking place along the Thames, including schemes at Charlton Riverside and Thamesmead. Today City Hall hosts its first external event, Centre for London’s conference, East x Southeast, which will reflect on the regeneration that’s taken place and look to what more needs to be done to tackle this huge levelling-up challenge on our doorstep.
For poor Harold Shand, it doesn’t quite turn out for him as he expected. Yet he was prophetic about the huge regenerative potential of prime riverfront land in the heart of a global city. Forty years on, this task is still to be completed.
