Narrative constructions of the Lower Lea as a place 2002-2007

A shift in authorship of the place narrative

While Newham Council’s work to promote the Arc of Opportunity had attracted considerable attention in planning news and among property developers, the designation of the Lea Valley as an Opportunity Area, marked the success of the local borough campaign to ‘put the area on the map’. 2002 marked the starting point of the practical influence of the London Plan, albeit in draft, on the Lea Valley. The first London Plan was published in February 2004, though the broad shape of the draft was in place two years earlier, 18 months into the Mayor Ken Livingstone’s election into office in 2000: a remarkable achievement. Now the Lea Valley was confirmed as a place that would accommodate some of London’s growth in housing and the economy and early ideas about London’s ‘centre of gravity’ moving eastwards were mooted.

While previous plans had also promoted the Valley as a place to accommodate London growth, in this period, authorship of that proposition shifted from the local to the regional bodies, led by the London Mayor. Some believed that the shift in perceptions of the Valley happened so quickly that memories of the condition of the Valley were erased:

Helen excerpt 1

Later on, a lot of people were really critical, and they were saying ‘But what have the boroughs got?’ ‘Where’s the true regeneration?’ ‘Well, what are we getting out of this really?’ And I was thinking, do you not remember? Did you not stand in the Lower Lea Valley six years ago? Is your memory really so short?

Fresh eyes and sober appraisals

The perception of east London shifted overtly in this period. The GLA brought fresh eyes to assess the development prospects for the Valley, reinterpreting the place for the purposes of the London Plan. This was an opportunity to build on the momentum generated by the local councils and to challenge the early perceptions that the barriers were insurmountable. However, the sober appraisals of the scale of the challenges were still in evidence. One of the Mayoral Advisors indicated that they didn’t know [in that early period] how to unlock its potential.

Helen excerpt 2

I remember going on a barge, around 2002, before the Olympic Bid, going up the canals. There were tyres, fridges and the rest. The Mayor’s Office did recognise the Lower Lea was a priority before the Olympic bid, but I also think it was dawning on us that it was also going to take a hell of a lot to unlock it.

The re-imagining of the Lea Valley as a London place, the site of a London project with an international profile, put pressure on institutions to develop an understanding of the place and to articulate a vision for its change. The proposal to bid for the Olympics meant that the UK’s most senior politicians began to visit and become associated with the area, buying into the emerging story of the place.

Scott excerpt 1

Thinking about what we achieved takes me back to the times when the waterway system was still derelict. We did a lot of work to explain the problems to politicians and government officials, to demonstrate the potential of the area and explain the role the waterways could play. We used to take government officials with us. I remember one time when we took Deputy Prime Minister Prescott out on a boat; I can always remember the moment. I can see him he’s on this fast rib and one of the guys on the bank said, ‘Shout if you want to go faster John’ and he said, ‘Bugger off!’ When we were on the boat on a fast rib and he got it, he got it, Prescott got it. We were having a real laugh we were going on the Limehouse Cut and one of these East End young lads, said to his friends ‘Hey, that’s Tony Prescott!’ John Prescott turned to us and said, ‘I get that all the bloody time!’

An opportunity for London

Later in 2002, soon after the designation of the Lea Valley as an Opportunity Area, Mayor Ken Livingstone committed to the London bid to host the Olympic Games on the condition that they would take place in east London. To date, the Mayor’s development agency, the LDA, had only intervened to a limited extend in land purchases in Stratford and the Lower Lea. The commitment to the Olympic bid transformed the LDA’s land and property focus, concentrating its resources and attention on land assembly to speculate acquisitions and the assembly of options on land to support the Olympic bid. This was the dramatic practical consequence of the elevation of the significance of the Lea Valley in London policy terms.

Helen excerpt 3

The Mayor had to take the considered view of things, and he didn’t take his time about it, you know, within 18 months we had really worked out which way was up. Within 18 months we had grasped the concept that the Lower Lea Valley was an important priority. The problem was, without the Olympics: How would we have tackled it? Where would we have got the investment? That’s why Ken said, ‘it [the Olympics] has got to be there’. That’s where we needed to spend the money, and there is no other way in a million years we would have got the money out of Government to address the scale of the problems that needed to be addressed.

In the hands of the GLA, the role of the Lower Lea was confirmed as a place with opportunity for investment, a place that imaginatively, could be conceived as the

future location for an expanding central London. The Plans constructed this story in an ideological sense: a story consciously constructed and told. However, there was also a shift in mentality: a more sub-conscious acceptance of the changed perception. The Olympics brought the establishment to east London and made its backwaters familiar territory. This was a time in which central London shifted eastwards and the Lea Valley was the fulcrum for the conversion.

Boundaries redefined

In 2003, the masterplanners had floated a thought experiment that the boundaries for the Olympic Park could be pushed out across areas like Fish Island. Their propositions were informed by their wider engagement with the Lea Valley regeneration perspective. Their client, the LDA, instructed the urban designers to draw a much tighter boundary, so as to concentrate on the land acquisition issues and to provide evidence for the CPO enquiries. EDAW removed about a third of the masterplan area, pulling in the land ownership boundary for the Olympics, but as a consequence also pulling in the planning and design boundary. Later, after the ODA was appointed, the boundary came in even further because, from a psychogeography point of view, the Blue Fence went up around the site for the Olympic Park and that became the focus. Since that time, the OPLC/LLDC’s pursuit of programmes in the fringe areas represented, intellectually, attempts to reverse the impact of the thinking the earlier initiatives had generated.

What would have happened if, psychologically, the Park gates had been placed a long way outside of the green space among the existing residential areas? The consequence would have been to push further out the management regime and the entry, so a visitor would have entered the Park gates and ‘park-land’, but you might be another half a mile from the green space. More people would have been living in the designated Park. The definition of the geographic boundaries in a different way would have consequences for the strategy of integration. The consequence of the designation of a tight boundary around what would become the Olympic Park was to create a group of neighbouring communities that were of another place right from the outset.

George excerpt 1

I remember the discussions at the time, we did all that work, I remember we did that piece of work on how many canal bridges do you need, let’s say on the western boundary. At a socio- economic level you would have immediately pulled more people in. You might have had a problem in the sense that you would have had a bigger constituency that you had to deal with, but at heart I feel you should engage with communities, that’s what it’s all about. So, it think if the boundary was wider, you could have created a stronger constituency that valued everything that was going on. You’d have immediately have given the local authorities a stronger seat. These may be all good reasons why people didn’t want to do it.’

Design thinking

2002-2007 is the defining period when the narrative themes, outlined in Appendix 2 below, took shape. Some of the conceptual groundwork of the Arc of Opportunity and the Leaside Framework was carried forward into new plans produced by EDAW for the GLA. The GLA’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit, later to be rebranded ‘Design for London’, worked closely with masterplanners EDAW and, in turn, the urban designers collaborated with the GLA’s planners, who were developing the GLA’s planning framework the Lower Lea Valley Opportunity Area Planning Framework (2007). The design concepts such as ‘water city’ and ‘tear in the fabric’, became defining ways of understanding the Valley, and some of individuals who helped formulate them would carry them forward and reassert them in future contexts. The entanglement of the themes in this period is discussed in 7.4 below.