The sadness of Silvertown

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The journey on the Docklands Light Railway from Bank out past Canary Wharf to West Silvertown and Pontoon Dock gives an insight into the continuing challenge of regeneration. The contrast between the shiny skyscrapers and posh apartments that cluster round the DLR and the old communities are stark. And nowhere shows it more starkly than Victoria Dock, London City Airport and their environs.

Silvertown and North Woolwich are run down, deprived, depressing places – poor quality, badly maintained housing, an almost complete absence of real local facilities and a sense that no-one is doing anything to really change these places. Instead – as if in some science fiction novel – a gleaming bright (well concrete) new trainline slices through. And it’s user look down into the depressing streets beyond – streets full of people who have no use for the new railway since they have little or no money to spend and don’t have jobs in the shiny skyscrapers.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this depressing scene is an argument for not building the DLR, for leaving the docks as a sorry memory of a different age or for building only social housing. In their way these developments – along with the airport and the exhibition centre – are helping to transform the area. But we have missed out on the opportunity to make the strong connections with what is already there – the new roads, rail and apartments are built with their backs to the existing communities.

Those old communities now have no decent shops, no pubs and only the institutions of poverty – SureStart, a “learning centre” and a church-based community building – remain. Institutions that may do good but cannot make a place in the way that shops, pubs, eateries and markets might do. And the dwellers in the posh flats? Their time out is either behind the barriers of their gated world or elsewhere – whisked to a brighter place by the shiny new railway.

Policy-makers, planners, architects and developers have failed these places - reinforcing division and creating new barriers. Above all this is the disaster of our technocracy – which specialists, experts and governments dictating to local people. The new meritocratic Labour Party has failed the new East London just as comprehensively as the patriarchal Labour Party failed the old East London.

In stead of fencing in the poor we should be giving them access to these better places. We should be teaching and training their children better, letting them control their own institutions and promoting real local ownership and control. Above all we should worry less about security and more about community.

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