Ailsa Street

The site is typical of London’s River Lea, occupied by scrapyards and waste recycling, cut off from the rest of Poplar by an urban motorway, and with a wide, muddy tidal creek running past. The London Development Agency commissioned us to produce a development framework to support a Compulsory Purchase Order procedure for the long-term comprehensive redevelopment of the site. In order to justify public-sector intervention, we were required to demonstrate outcomes that the market wouldn’t or couldn’t achieve, but show a .

We proposed connections to neighbouring areas: a footbridge across the River Lea, a pedestrian crossing over the A12, and streets connecting to north and south. We responded to the challenge of mixing industrial and residential uses through the careful disposition of public spaces. The main open space takes the form of a widened street, with a local park and play space. A series of residential closes radiate outwards, wide, short streets connecting to the creek edge, lined by apartments on one side, and houses on the other. Each close would provide the access, street space and car parking for up to 50 households, forming the basic unit of community life.

Employment capacity would be retained, with compact light industrial units beside the motorway. A series of residential blocks would combine houses and apartments, with 3- and 4-bed flats on the lower levels, and 1- and 2- bed flats above. Family units would access back gardens that merged with the river edge planting and habitat.

The process was quasi-judicial but the project was a statement of the benign power of public action, balancing industry and family accommodation, collective space and ecology in this complex city edge location. The project was exhibited by the British Council at the Venice Biennale in 2008. But ten years on, neither public nor private sector have managed to progress the site, which remains in marginal low-value usage.