T11 Lecture 03: What went wrong with the Thames Gateway?

I sat there in the lecture theatre on Thursday evening and I knew I am supposed to find out something about Thames Gateway. Yet I still don’t know what went wrong with the Thames Gateway.

Mark Brearley spoke in length about ‘standing back’, ‘exploring’ and ‘troublemaking’, ‘trying to dream’ and ‘making projects’. But I felt he was speaking with some coded language and wasn’t sure whether there was any essence behind this code. Still there may have been a purpose there. I saw slides of highways in the rain, empty riverside fields and sadly looking new developments and all these between some ‘minty phrases’ which were supposed to tell a story. The tale of Thames Gateway is vague and unclear which is maybe why Mark chose to speak about in such meandering manner.

As far as I could figure it out the story was: there were ‘blind policies’ and there were people who stood ‘on the church steps’ and talked about a big regeneration plan. Those people finally sat ‘in the control room’ but still had to produce some maps since they did not know where they were going, lacked spatial understanding and general idea for Thames Gateway. As they were finding their way around this regeneration program they focused on projects, gave advice and helped in the process. In the meantime they analysed the existing situation but as ‘they were sleeping and trying to dream’ more things happened: extensions, leisure boxes, shopping centres, retail parks, suburban housing, and river frontage, DRL, Jubilee Line and Airport. But it all seems accidental in the big scheme of things. Around London Riverside with 50 local area strategies and subsequent policies no big plan becomes implemented in the end.

The second lecturer of the evening Geoff Shearcroft chose not to speak about Thames Gateway at all. Instead he ran through his research on Thames Valley.

Thames Valley, as I found out that evening, in contrast to Thames Gateway is ‘participatory, productive and popular’. These three phases house a lot of cars and car parks, many sheds, business parks, retail parks, industrial parks and a lot of suburban housing. This is what public wants we’re told because it is the happy area of Britain.

But what about Thames Gateway. It’s hard to grasp the issue. No one wants to speak about it directly and this is, I think, what went wrong.