We are now seeing a few articles on the decline of Brick Lane and the gentrification of the westerly quarter of Tower Hamlets borough. Tower Hamlets is one of London's poorest boroughs as measured by a number of social factors, standing in stark contrast to the outer-London boroughs to the North and West of the city and the gilded wealth of the City of London to the West. It has a population of around 300,000 people which account for many of the inhabitants of the inner London area. It contains more than half of the tallest buildings in the borough, primarily in the Canary Wharf development area but increasingly now towards the easterly part of the borough.
Tower Hamlets incorporates much of the old East End of London, previously heavily industrialised; proximity to the docks along the Thames river required an abundance of labor to drive the machinery and transport of the materials that flowed into the UK via London. With the departure of so much industry and the switch to more efficient and scalable container based transport hubs nearer the coast, the entire dockside infrastructure effectively fell into disuse or was not repaired after the war and one of London's challenges since the 1960's has been what to do with a huge area which incorporates almost 35% of the available land in one of the worlds most expensive cities. An area incorporating Southwark and Newham primarily.
As with most discussions over land use within London, the key concern has been how to achieve an effective balance between private investment and public use. The population of Tower Hamlets is astonishingly volatile, reaching a high of 600,000 people in 1900 to a low of 150,000 in 1980. Much of this decline can be attributed to the decline of heavy industry in central London but the long-term impact of the devastation wrought by bombs in the second world war, where 48,000 houses were damaged, cannot be understated. Tower Hamlets' population has now climbed back to 300,000 as of 2016 and will surely climb again at the next census given the trend of developments. Or will it...
As with most discussions in any country over the use of the most basic resource, land, the discussion is an inherently political one, with many different interests jostling for control of the land and with many different layers of government playing a role in the decision-making process. The most emblematic of the schemes relevant to a discussion of Tower Hamlets is the London Docklands Development Corporation, which was established by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1981 and which was established as a consequence of the decline of the local infrastructure and the ineffectiveness of the local governments to deal with this perceived decline. Huge job losses, partly a result of the industrial policies of the Conservative government but also a consequence of technological changes, led to very high levels of unemployment and population decline. One cannot help but think that had this been an area out of sight in the North of England, the government would have been less inclined to do anything about it, but the centralised nature of British government and the proximity to that centre of power meant that addressing the under-development of the East End became a cause celebre for the Conservative government.
It would seem the primary development was the Docklands Light Railway or DLR, which was built during the course of the 1980's and which I remember using in the late 1980's as a kid. the DLR also accounted for around 50% of the cost of the total public funding provided to the LDDC. Which leads us to another fundamental driver of population in cities, Transport. Without being able to access a city, the city is effectively unusable. This was always an aspect of the South East of London as it has been overlooked by the transport planners within the city until relatively recently as so many of them lived in the Western and Northern parts of the city and thus had relative reliable connections to the London Underground network. The extension of the DLR and the extension of the Jubilee line at the turn of the millennium has significantly increased the accessibility of parts of the city, which in turn has supported an enormous growth in housing developments, population and also, consequently, the costs of accommodation.
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