‘Package deal for a new Thames’ (16 July 1967) was an illustration of how London’s docks would soon look, with unloading and reloading a ship being cut from six days to six hours. ‘Tilbury’s container port… is the prototype of the new Port of London, able to compete with the European giants, like Rotterdam.’
The sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott planned a ‘new, lived-in Thameside’, and the ‘fresh opportunities to make the Thames the showpiece it could be, for visitors and Londoners alike… on impressive Venetian lines’.
This was the latest of the changes pushing the port downriver towards the sea. ‘The economies are great,’ wrote Young and Willmott. ‘The Port of London authority is now showing tremendous energy in building at Tilbury the largest container port in Europe.’
They rather lamented what had happened to London in the 20th century: ‘We have destroyed Regent Street. We have tolerated a hundred dreary office blocks; the Hilton hotel overshadowing Hyde Park; and on the river itself, the Bankside Power Station.’ The Hilton is still a building you’d rather be looking out of than towards, but Tate Modern has reinvigorated that part of Bankside.
They painted a cheerful picture of riverfront renaissance: ‘New piers and people living near them would, along with tourists, support more river services. London would have its hovercraft buses and water taxis as Venice has its vaporettos, Paris has its bateaux mouches and Amsterdam its rondvaartboten.
‘People from Millwall, Woolwich or Greenwich would be able to copy the fortunate Swedes who go by motor boat from their summer homes in the Stockholm Archipelago to their offices or factories in the city.’
To which we can now add Boris Island and the garden bridge to the file marked ‘Not bloody likely.’
