Thames view - housing development at London Docklands in England

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1998 by Penny McGuire

After long years of muddle, argument and indecision on the part of various authorities and politicians, London Docklands is being gradually redeveloped. Yet only a few architects and developers have had the courage to respond to the scale and traditions of the Thames.

Gustave Dore's nineteenth-century engravings of London Docklands depict the extraordinary activity of the Thames at the time, together with all the accompaniment of trade, the hoists and signs of warehouses, the bristling masts and rigging of ships that crowded the river and obscured the buildings. Life was harsh but the river was alive. Seeing the engravings, you feel the melancholy and abandonment that afflicts much of the Thames today. Travelling east down the river from Tower Bridge to Greenwich you find that even the old warehouses, which these days provide expensive and sought-after flats, are apt to have a forlorn air, handsome though they are. Most forlorn of all however are, at one extreme, the monstrosities of Canary Wharf; at the other, genteel housing estates that, built over the last decade or so, line the river in too many places. Out of scale with the surrounding flatlands and with the river, which is surprisingly wide at Limehouse Reach, exuding in their different ways the dreaded good taste of the timid developer and planner, they are eloquent of missed opportunities.

As the big commercial developers have realized, riverside dwellings are bound to be popular because living by water exerts a powerful and universal appeal. But the drama and traditions of the Thames, like other important city waterways, demand more complex and sophisticated responses than either extreme provides.

CZWG have now designed a number of housing schemes in Docklands. To the two schemes built in the '80s - China Wharf near Tower Bridge, and Cascades east of Canary Wharf(1) - they have added Dundee, at Limehouse, west of Canary Wharf, and another under construction at Batson's and Regent's Wharves south of Cascades. It is the biggest so far, providing 240 flats of various sizes. Away from the river front, the yellow-framed silhouette of Bankside Lofts, completed earlier this year, towers over the Tate Bankside Gallery (due to be finished in May 2000); and at Atlas Works in Millwall an extraordinary collection of decagonal towers containing 150 flats has been given planning permission. Two further schemes for a small block of fiats at Rotherhithe and a private house at Bermondsey near China Wharf are under way.

The practice's ubiquity is deserved. Piers Gough and Rex Wilkinson are well known for their flamboyance, if not provocation. Here in Docklands, with space, air and water around them, they appear to have come into their own and travelling downstream from Tower Bridge you find yourself delighted and amused by the buildings. These architects and their brave developers are some of the few(2) to have responded to the scale and drama of the river, and without their contributions to the riverscape the trip would be dispiriting indeed.

From the outrageous scarlet-wreathed pagoda at China Wharf onwards the buildings are big, bold and exuberant, their forms echoing the heroic scale and mass of traditional warehouses and grain silos. Other resonances of an industrial past are present in the architects' treatment of surfaces, creating texture and grain through the abstract patterns of windows, projecting balconies, bristling metalwork and other protuberances reminiscent of dockside landscapes. Close to, the mass turns into an organic honeycomb of dwellings.

All the schemes so far have been for private housing and the flats have been sold almost before being put on the market. CZWG's quixotic image is apt to obscure the ingenuity of their planning. Most sites have one aspect better than another; but because of the romance of water, riverside sites are apt to have front- and back-sides. The usual plan is to put more expensive dwellings along the waterfront, pushing the rest to the rear.

CZWG's efforts to break down the hierarchy while at the same time providing a riverside landmark is apparent in shape of plans and clustering of buildings. Dundee, for example, provides 160 flats and is on the outer bend of the river. The drama of the site is expressed by the building, an irregular horseshoe that embraces an inner court, rising at the apex to form an 11-storey cower. In front of it straddling the riverside wharf is a steel structure; inspired by a travelling dockside crane, it is made up of balcony decks linked by bridges to the tower apartments and held within a vertical frame of V-shaped members. The tower is flanked by two wings facing up and down stream and decreasing in height from seven to three storeys as they reach inland, along Lime Kiln Dock on the west and the site boundary on the east. Flats look onto water on one side, the inner court on the other. The V-shape is a recurring theme, appearing in the base of the steel tower, and in the vertical struts that support balconies and animate the surface of the building. Such an abstract evocation of the dockside landscape - the network of steel projecting from the solid mass of the building - has been achieved without resort to pastiche.