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Planning around London's megaproject
VIEWPOINT
Planning around London's megaproject Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs Robert Home
One of the largest developments in the world is being built at Canary Wharf as part of the waterfront development of London's docklands. There are growing fears of oversupply in London's office markets while the public sector is committing large-scale investment in transport infrastructure to serve the new developments in the Isle of Dogs. This article examines the strategic planning issues for the London region and the defects of a market led planning approach. The author (formerly at the Polytechnic of East London) is now at the Department of Land Management, University of Reading, UK.
1Theme feature on London Docklands,
Chartered Surveyor Weekly, Vol 29, No 8, 23 November 1989, pp 52-70.
In May 1988 the U K Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, officially launched one of the largest construction projects in the world. This was Canary Wharf, in London's Isle of Dogs - itself already the l a r g e s t c o n s t r u c t i o n site in Europe. The Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone (EZ) had been proclaimed as one of the main successes of the Thatcherite deregulatory approach to inner city regeneration in the 1980s, and Canary Wharf was to be its finest achievement. It represented a new kind of development for the UK, the megaproject: a huge private sector commercial development incorporating all the kinds of land-use usually associated with a central business district. A scheme like Canary Wharf was made possible by the 'non-plan' environment which the Conservative government had created in the docklands. The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) had from the start of its operations prided itself on operating without a strategic plan, so that it could respond quickly to market demand without tying itself to achieving 'artificial' performance targets. Only a year after construction began, however, the optimism was being fast replaced by gloom. With the UK economy going into recession, the property press in late 1989 was running headlines like 'The sun sets on
0264-2751/90/020119-06 © 1990 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
Docklands boom', set against images of the jungle of construction cranes at Canary Wharf: Criticised to the point of tedium, the island faces a future where the sheer volume of office space emerging from the development pipeline will create a tidal wave of oversupply unless demand materializes in an equally impressive fashion.1 So is there a great disaster of freemarket planning in the making?
The background to Canary Wharf The redevelopment potential of London's docklands arose out of the restructuring of merchant shipping in the 1970s. Ports in the U K and across the world had been forced to close for various reasons, the most important of which was the change to containerized goods handling and larger cargo ships. Many thousands of docks related jobs were lost and large tracts of land and buildiag became redundant. In London the release of several thousand hectares of surplus dockland close to the heart of the city represented a massive development opportunity. This was recognized in a major planning study in 1973, but at the time the consultants' proposals were unacceptable to the local community, who had the report shelved. A Docklands Joint Committee was subseq u e n t l y f o r m e d and p r o p o s e d a strategic plan, after lengthy public consultation. That also proved un-
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VIEWPOINT acceptable, this time to the incoming Conservative government after 1979, which was committed to private sector solutions to inner city problems. Instead an urban development corporation (the London Docklands Development Corporation or LDDC) was created in 1981, with wide ranging powers and the objective: to secure the regeneration of the a r e a . . . by bringing land and buildings into effective use, encouraging the development of existing and new industry and commerce, creating an attractive environment and ensuring that housing and social facilities are available to encourage people to live and work in the area.
2G. Ledgerwood, Urban Innovation: The Transformation of London's Dock~ands 1968-84, Gower, Aldershot, 1985; Docklands Consultative Committee, 'Four year review of the LDDC', 1985. The terms of reference of UDCs are in Part XVI of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980. 3Quoted in R. K. Home, Inner City Regeneration, Spon, London, 1982, p 126. '=Department of the Environment, Monitoring Enterprise Zones, 1982-3. 5Docklands Business World, No 10, 1989.
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The LDDC's area of responsibility was some 2 200 ha of redundant docks stretching east of Tower Bridge on both sides of the River Thames. 2 Under the same legislation the government introduced the EZ as an experiment in deregulation and attracting private sector development to derelict areas - an experiment likened at the time by one Labour MP to 'using a Tiger Moth to reach the moon'. 3 The main benefits of EZ status were freedom from planning control, relief from business rates and 100% capital allowances (the last incentive being particularly attractive for new office development). One of the 11 EZs in the first round of declarations (in 1981-2) was at the Isle of Dogs, covering an area of 195 ha which included 49 ha of water, The EZ included the West India and Millwall Docks and British Rail goods depots, while the land was almost entirely owned by the LDDC or other public bodies. At the time most of the land was vacant and derelict. 4 After a slow start the Isle of Dogs became one of the government's EZ success stories. Until about 1985 development was mainly commercial and warehousing ('shiny sheds'), providing accommodation for publishers and City support services. Then a severe shortage of new office space in London, and the restructuring associated with deregulation of the City in 1986, led to the beginning of large, high specification office developments such as South Quay Plaza and Harbout Exchange. In early 1989 the gov-
ernment was claiming that £4.4 billion had been committed to Docklands by the private sector, five million square feet of new business space created and that 15 000 dwellings were completed or under construction. 5 The situation had been transformed by the Canary Wharf scheme for the north end of the EZ, first proposed in 1985. Other megaprojects had been proposed for London since the early 1980s: one at Coin Street (on the South Bank) was abandoned because of local political opposition, and another (the Broadgate redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station) was going ahead. But Canary Wharf was by far the biggest yet. When construction began in 1988 on the first phase, the whole project was for ten million square feet of offices, half a million square feet of shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, 6 500 car parking spaces, and a 400-bed hotel and conference facilities, all on a 71-acre site which would include building out over the water. Sceptical planners likened the 800 ft main tower (a third taller than the NatWest Tower, which is currently the tallest in the UK) to Dr Who's Tardis (the time machine in a long running science fiction TV programme). While critics bewailed the effect of the views from Greenwich across the river, the scheme was given approval with no opportunity for public consultation.
'The need for an extra Square Mile': market led strategic planning The planning of the Canary Wharf megaproject happened to coincide with the abolition in 1986 of London's strategic planning body, the Greater London Council (GLC). There was no planning inquiry into the scheme (although judging from experience of other megaproject inquiries like Coin Street and Sizewell that would probably not have made any difference). Yet Canary Wharf has major Londonwide implications and has been called the largest single development ever contemplated in the UK. The enfeebled strategic planning bodies, the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC) and the South-East Regional Planning (Serplan), found the LDDC
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VIEWPOINT dominating public expenditure to the disadvantage of other areas but seem to have been powerless to influence the situation. The C a n a r y W h a r f d e v e l o p e r s , Olympia and York, saw their opportunity in simple market terms - 'the need for an extra Square Mile' to supplement the Square Mile of the City. There were several elements in the situation: •
•
•
6'Canary Wharf', supplement to Euromoney, December 1986. The original developer was one G. Ware Travelstead, but the scheme was subsequently taken over by Olympia and York, a firm who from Canadian origins now own and operate 24 million ft2 in New York alone. 7Quoted in R. K. Home, 'British planning law and the politics of inner city renewal: the case of Coin Street', Urban Law and Policy, Vol 7, 1985, pp 75-87. SR. K. Home, Planning Use Classes, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, pp 58-59. 9Jones Lang Wootton, London Docklands Enterprise Zone Occupier Research, August 1989.
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a serious undersupply of quality office floorspace in London's central business district (CBD), resuiting in rentals of £60 per square foot; the opportunity for London to become a major world financial centre (perhaps the third centre after New York and Tokyo, to which it is favourably linked by time zones), with the single European market in 1992 further enhancing its chances (although Mrs Thatcher's antiEuropean stance could be a liability); the availability of a large, cheap development site with no strings, close to the centre, and a willing partner in the LDDC, which had political backing right from the top (Mrs Thatcher herself). 6
Thus the Canary Wharf developers, together with the L D D C , have effectively determined the strategic future of London's CBD into the twenty-first century. London is to experience a major structural shift eastwards in a relatively short space of time, ignoring the preferred office locations identified in earlier strategic plans. Planning authorities are no longer to plan and control the supply of office floorspace, as the Secretary of State (backed up in the courts) had said in connection with the earlier Coin Street scheme, when rejecting a mass of evidence from the G L C on the subject: 'The supply of, and demand for, offices is essentially a m a t t e r to be d e t e r m i n e d by the market. '7 Within a short time, however, the large amount of cheap office space coming on stream at Docklands found itself only one of several competing sources of supply. The situation in
Docklands forced the City Corporation to relax its tight planning and conservation policies to allow new and bigger schemes. Government deregulation of planning procedures, giving freedom to change industry and warehouse space into offices (under the 1987 Use Classes Order and 1988 General Development Order), added 16 million square feet to the pool of potential office space from conversions in inner London. 8 The abolition of the GLC released a further million square feet of office space at County Hall, while a further six million was proposed at King's Cross, By 1989 the forecasts for office demand and supply were looking distinctly out of alignment, with a dramatic increase in supply facing a slow down of demand following the 1987 Stock Market crash and a probable economic recession. After the tight office market of 1985-87 there is the prospect of a massive oversupply in the early 1990s, with twenty million square feet built or planned in Docklands (three-quarters of it in the Isle of Dogs alone). This is the equivalent of about a third of the current City stock of floorspace. Docklands may compete on price (at about £20 per square foot) but even at those prices there are few takers. As potential occupiers can afford to be more fussy, a major criticism of the Isle of Dogs working environment is its poor transport and amenities precisely those two elements which the public sector might formerly have been expected to ensure. As one recent study found: Unanimous criticism was directed at the transportation and the amenities. The transportation situation had become materially worse since November 1988, with more people commuting to and from the Isle of Dogs. Whilst there has been a significant improvement in the provision of pub/restaurants and retail service facilities in the last year, all respondents understood that until the area developed further, more amenities would not be forthcoming.9
Planning the infrastructure backwards In their study of changing planning styles in the 1980s, Brindley, Rydin and Stoker used the L D D C to exem121
VIEWPOINT
l°T. Brindley, Y. Rydin and G. Stoker,
Remaking Planning, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989, Chapter 6. 110p cit, Ref 1. ~2LDDC, Transport in Docklands, 1988. ~Summarized in The Planner, 24 November 1989. ~4Docklands Business World, No 10, January-March 1989, p 25. 122
plify a 'leverage planning' approach, which they defined as 'the use of public investment to stimulate a weak or flagging private market in land and property development'. 1° In 1989 the government was pointing to what it saw as a highly successful leveraging ratio in Docklands of 10:1 - £10 of private investment to £1 of public. But within months the huge scale of private investment (the first phase of Canary Wharf alone is costing billions) was dragging an ever increasing commitment of public funds in its wake, particularly in transport infrastructure: this might be called reverse leveraging. As a headline in the property press put it, 'Govt is accused of bailing out LDDC'. u After the relatively modest numbers of jobs created on the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s, recent forecasts suggest that 40 000-50 000 would work in the Canary Wharf development alone, and a total of up to quarter of a million on the Isle of Dogs if all the projects were occupied. Since the housing stock on the island can accommodate only a fraction of these numbers, how are all the rest to get on and off it'? The Isle of Dogs is misnamed, being not an island but an isthmus surrounded on three sides by water. It was obvious from the outset that its accessibility problems would be expensive to overcome. Road access is poor because of the lack of river crossings and the delays and congestion on the already overloaded A13 trunk road. The LDDC put in a new spine road to open up the EZ, and is building a major new road across the top of the peninsula, linking Canary Wharf with Wapping to the west and the mouth of the River Lea and the Royal Docks to the east. The vast scale of p r o j e c t e d d e v e l o p m e n t has now meant a major design revision of the first phase, the Limehouse Link, to accommodate Canary Wharf in particular. Even the free market LDDC recognizes that road transport is not the only answer to the Isle of Dogs accessibility problem, and the largest transport infrastructure investment is going into rail: the Docklands Light Railway ( D L R ) , and the newly approved
underground Jubilee Line extension. The first phase of the DLR, opened in 1987, provided 12 km of track and 15 stations. It was the cheapest practical option available at the time, using existing track and railway alignments where possible, and was no sooner finished than it was found to be inadequate for the demand. Extensions are now under construction - that to Bank and the City costing £150 million - and the carrying capacity is being expanded at great expense from 3 500 passengers per peak hour each way to a total planned capacity on trains running to Canary Wharf of 15 000 per hour. ~2 In November 1989 the government announced the Jubliee Line extension from Green Park via Waterloo and London Bridge to Carnary Wharf and beyond, at a projected cost of £900 million, of which private developers were claimed to be contributing £400 million (Olympia and York £200 million). 13 (Water, although the Isle of Dogs has it everywhere, seems to offer little solution to the access problems. Riverbus services are generating much less than the expected numbers of passengers, and optimistic projections of one million passenger trips a year from Canary Wharf would still represent only a small fraction of the total movements likely to be generated from the development.) The spending on infrastructure in the early years (the £77 million initial cost of the DLR being by far the biggest item at the time) had to be extracted from a highly reluctant central government. It is now being totally dwarfed by the new funding coming through: DLR extension £240 million, road i m p r o v e m e n t s £650 million, Jubilee Line extension £900 million, £350 million extra grant for the LDDC 1990-2. It is hardly surprising that the incoming LDDC chairman in 1989 summed up what needed to be done in Docklands with the words, 'We have got to spend a lot more money', going on to identify as the three main priorities the eastern extension of the DLR to Beckton, the road programme, especially the Limehouse Link, and 'securing jobs for the local community'. 14 C I T I E S M a y 1990
VIEWPOINT This massive investment is at the expense of other competing national projects. The Jubilee Line extension came bottom of the list for its contribution to relieving traffic congestion in the capital, and in the 1970s had been dropped as not cost efffective. Of the announced increase in the Inner City programme in November 1989 85% went to the LDDC. 15 No wonder Serplan was lamenting the diversion of funds to Docklands which might otherwise have benefited its own strategy for the Eastern Thames Corridor in the run up to the opening of the Channel Tunnel. 16
What happened to the waterfront?
150p cit~ Ref 1, p 11. 16Serplan, 'Development potential in the Eastern Thames Corridor', 1987. 17Royal Town Planning Institute conference, London, October 1989. 18Quoted from estate management student' project work for the author at East London Polytechnic, 1989. The problems of finding a unified approach to civic design are discussed in D. Gosling, 'The Isle of Dogs, London Docklands: discrepancy in approaches to urban design', Cities, Vol 1, No 2, 1983, pp 150-166. 19p. Hall, Great Planning Disasters, London, Penguin, 1981. Quotation from op cit, Ref 2, p 15.
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Experienced operators in waterside regeneration at a recent conference identified certain elements in success (few of which are in evidence so far at the Isle of Dogs): long-term vision, advance planning of infrastructure, an attractive environment for visitors, balanced land-uses, high quality landscaping and surface treatment, creative use of the water and a unified design a p p r o a c h . 17 The L D D C ' s marketing for the Isle of Dogs emphasized the environmental attractions of water, with photographs of wind surfers and silly slogans ('Looks like Venice, works like New York'), but missed the opportunity to provide a coherent and unified treatment for the waterside, even within the limitations of the laissez-faire E Z philosophy. After the excitement of the new buildings springing up on either side of the new DLR in 1987 and 1988, the completed developments on the Isle of Dogs provoke responses like 'threatening', visual anarchy', 'unwelcoming'.is They largely turn their backs on the water, and there is little water based activity in the Millwall and East India basins, whose hard edges have not been softened by any unified approach to landscaping or ground surfaces. The profusion of design styles has created an environment hostile to the pedestrian, with poor signposting and confusion about the demarcation of public and private spaces. The original EZ scheme identified 'sensitive boundary sub-zones' where details of
design or landscaping would require prior approval, but these were mainly intended to lessen the impact on the existing nearby housing estates rather than to enhance the waterfront environment. On the Thames river frontage the opportunity to create pedestrian walkways (as the GLC had done on the South Bank) has largely been missed, and new housing development is e n c l o s e d w i t h i n f o r t r e s s - s t y l e architecture, while the Limehouse Link road dominates the waterfront between Wapping and Westferry. In this E Z free for all the larger developments try to create their own environmental quality. Canary Wharf is big enough to attempt a complete urban environment within its own 71 acres, and aims to become one of London's main tourist attractions. The design incorporates many of the amenities that are lacking elsewhere on the Isle of Dogs, with several miles of landscaped leisure walkways; but it all takes a lot of packing in.
Conclusions Ten years ago Professor Peter Hall wrote a book about great planning disasters, from which Ledgerwood's study of Docklands found that: Large projects are liable to focus benefits on relatively few individuals, and impose costs over a wide group whose members each have relatively little to lose. Thus, the few beneficiaries have an incentive to marshal resources to catalyse a public decision to proceed with investment. This decision may occur even though rational analysis may suggest, as in the case of the Concorde airliner, that no objective case can be made for the long-term net social or economic benefits of the project . . . major public decisions tend to generate commitment among participating leaderships and develop a momentum which makes many of them unstoppable. 19 This is now happening on the Isle of Dogs. If the long-term future of the City required it to find 'an extra Square Mile' to the east, a coherent strategic p l a n n i n g f r a m e w o r k could have offered alternatives. Stratford, for instance, was identified in the Greater L o n d o n D e v e l o p m e n t Plan as a strategic centre and preferred office location, the first such centre east of
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VIEWPOINT :5
Figure 1. Millwall Inner Dock, Isle of Dogs. the City. It has far better transport links than Docklands, office space currently at £12-15 per square foot, an existing shopping centre and regional park, and substantial development land. It is making a strong bid to be a terminus for the Channel Tunnel rail link into London. But it has a poor image (as did Docklands ten years ago) and remains run down and starved of investment. The LDDC was given immense power and opportunity and its political influence has allowed it to extract more and more resources from central government. But it never pretended to be, nor could it be, a strategic planning body, which London now sadly lacks. A n d there are now other megaprojects coming along without benefit of strategic planning, particularly the choice of termini to link with the Channel Tunnel. At the local level, the LDDC could have used the E Z scheme to create a strong design philosophy for development on the Isle of Dogs, but that was ideologically unacceptable at the time.
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It was also a major landowner there and could have exercised more control, but it released its land for others to develop freely. Now it is the financial and political muscle and determination of the Canary Wharf developers that will ensure that the Isle of Dogs does not rot on the horizon as a disaster of free-market planning. London's CBD will be restructured, but at an unnecessarily high cost, and with many missed opportunities along the way. The office floorspace will eventually be let, attracting tenants from overseas through competitive international pricing if domestic demand is insufficient. But while the space remains unlet (perhaps for years), the costs will fall indirectly upon the public, whose money the financial institutions have chosen to invest in such unwisely phased developments. And so the limits of the free market approach to strategic planning are exposed. But then it is easy to plan with hindsight - as LDDC planners respond (usually through gritted teeth) to their critics.
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Planning around London's megaproject Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs Robert Home
One of the largest developments in the world is being built at Canary Wharf as part of the waterfront development of London's docklands. There are growing fears of oversupply in London's office markets while the public sector is committing large-scale investment in transport infrastructure to serve the new developments in the Isle of Dogs. This article examines the strategic planning issues for the London region and the defects of a market led planning approach. The author (formerly at the Polytechnic of East London) is now at the Department of Land Management, University of Reading, UK.
1Theme feature on London Docklands,
Chartered Surveyor Weekly, Vol 29, No 8, 23 November 1989, pp 52-70.
In May 1988 the U K Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, officially launched one of the largest construction projects in the world. This was Canary Wharf, in London's Isle of Dogs - itself already the l a r g e s t c o n s t r u c t i o n site in Europe. The Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone (EZ) had been proclaimed as one of the main successes of the Thatcherite deregulatory approach to inner city regeneration in the 1980s, and Canary Wharf was to be its finest achievement. It represented a new kind of development for the UK, the megaproject: a huge private sector commercial development incorporating all the kinds of land-use usually associated with a central business district. A scheme like Canary Wharf was made possible by the 'non-plan' environment which the Conservative government had created in the docklands. The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) had from the start of its operations prided itself on operating without a strategic plan, so that it could respond quickly to market demand without tying itself to achieving 'artificial' performance targets. Only a year after construction began, however, the optimism was being fast replaced by gloom. With the UK economy going into recession, the property press in late 1989 was running headlines like 'The sun sets on
0264-2751/90/020119-06 © 1990 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
Docklands boom', set against images of the jungle of construction cranes at Canary Wharf: Criticised to the point of tedium, the island faces a future where the sheer volume of office space emerging from the development pipeline will create a tidal wave of oversupply unless demand materializes in an equally impressive fashion.1 So is there a great disaster of freemarket planning in the making?
The background to Canary Wharf The redevelopment potential of London's docklands arose out of the restructuring of merchant shipping in the 1970s. Ports in the U K and across the world had been forced to close for various reasons, the most important of which was the change to containerized goods handling and larger cargo ships. Many thousands of docks related jobs were lost and large tracts of land and buildiag became redundant. In London the release of several thousand hectares of surplus dockland close to the heart of the city represented a massive development opportunity. This was recognized in a major planning study in 1973, but at the time the consultants' proposals were unacceptable to the local community, who had the report shelved. A Docklands Joint Committee was subseq u e n t l y f o r m e d and p r o p o s e d a strategic plan, after lengthy public consultation. That also proved un-
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VIEWPOINT acceptable, this time to the incoming Conservative government after 1979, which was committed to private sector solutions to inner city problems. Instead an urban development corporation (the London Docklands Development Corporation or LDDC) was created in 1981, with wide ranging powers and the objective: to secure the regeneration of the a r e a . . . by bringing land and buildings into effective use, encouraging the development of existing and new industry and commerce, creating an attractive environment and ensuring that housing and social facilities are available to encourage people to live and work in the area.
2G. Ledgerwood, Urban Innovation: The Transformation of London's Dock~ands 1968-84, Gower, Aldershot, 1985; Docklands Consultative Committee, 'Four year review of the LDDC', 1985. The terms of reference of UDCs are in Part XVI of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980. 3Quoted in R. K. Home, Inner City Regeneration, Spon, London, 1982, p 126. '=Department of the Environment, Monitoring Enterprise Zones, 1982-3. 5Docklands Business World, No 10, 1989.
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The LDDC's area of responsibility was some 2 200 ha of redundant docks stretching east of Tower Bridge on both sides of the River Thames. 2 Under the same legislation the government introduced the EZ as an experiment in deregulation and attracting private sector development to derelict areas - an experiment likened at the time by one Labour MP to 'using a Tiger Moth to reach the moon'. 3 The main benefits of EZ status were freedom from planning control, relief from business rates and 100% capital allowances (the last incentive being particularly attractive for new office development). One of the 11 EZs in the first round of declarations (in 1981-2) was at the Isle of Dogs, covering an area of 195 ha which included 49 ha of water, The EZ included the West India and Millwall Docks and British Rail goods depots, while the land was almost entirely owned by the LDDC or other public bodies. At the time most of the land was vacant and derelict. 4 After a slow start the Isle of Dogs became one of the government's EZ success stories. Until about 1985 development was mainly commercial and warehousing ('shiny sheds'), providing accommodation for publishers and City support services. Then a severe shortage of new office space in London, and the restructuring associated with deregulation of the City in 1986, led to the beginning of large, high specification office developments such as South Quay Plaza and Harbout Exchange. In early 1989 the gov-
ernment was claiming that £4.4 billion had been committed to Docklands by the private sector, five million square feet of new business space created and that 15 000 dwellings were completed or under construction. 5 The situation had been transformed by the Canary Wharf scheme for the north end of the EZ, first proposed in 1985. Other megaprojects had been proposed for London since the early 1980s: one at Coin Street (on the South Bank) was abandoned because of local political opposition, and another (the Broadgate redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station) was going ahead. But Canary Wharf was by far the biggest yet. When construction began in 1988 on the first phase, the whole project was for ten million square feet of offices, half a million square feet of shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, 6 500 car parking spaces, and a 400-bed hotel and conference facilities, all on a 71-acre site which would include building out over the water. Sceptical planners likened the 800 ft main tower (a third taller than the NatWest Tower, which is currently the tallest in the UK) to Dr Who's Tardis (the time machine in a long running science fiction TV programme). While critics bewailed the effect of the views from Greenwich across the river, the scheme was given approval with no opportunity for public consultation.
'The need for an extra Square Mile': market led strategic planning The planning of the Canary Wharf megaproject happened to coincide with the abolition in 1986 of London's strategic planning body, the Greater London Council (GLC). There was no planning inquiry into the scheme (although judging from experience of other megaproject inquiries like Coin Street and Sizewell that would probably not have made any difference). Yet Canary Wharf has major Londonwide implications and has been called the largest single development ever contemplated in the UK. The enfeebled strategic planning bodies, the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC) and the South-East Regional Planning (Serplan), found the LDDC
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VIEWPOINT dominating public expenditure to the disadvantage of other areas but seem to have been powerless to influence the situation. The C a n a r y W h a r f d e v e l o p e r s , Olympia and York, saw their opportunity in simple market terms - 'the need for an extra Square Mile' to supplement the Square Mile of the City. There were several elements in the situation: •
•
•
6'Canary Wharf', supplement to Euromoney, December 1986. The original developer was one G. Ware Travelstead, but the scheme was subsequently taken over by Olympia and York, a firm who from Canadian origins now own and operate 24 million ft2 in New York alone. 7Quoted in R. K. Home, 'British planning law and the politics of inner city renewal: the case of Coin Street', Urban Law and Policy, Vol 7, 1985, pp 75-87. SR. K. Home, Planning Use Classes, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, pp 58-59. 9Jones Lang Wootton, London Docklands Enterprise Zone Occupier Research, August 1989.
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a serious undersupply of quality office floorspace in London's central business district (CBD), resuiting in rentals of £60 per square foot; the opportunity for London to become a major world financial centre (perhaps the third centre after New York and Tokyo, to which it is favourably linked by time zones), with the single European market in 1992 further enhancing its chances (although Mrs Thatcher's antiEuropean stance could be a liability); the availability of a large, cheap development site with no strings, close to the centre, and a willing partner in the LDDC, which had political backing right from the top (Mrs Thatcher herself). 6
Thus the Canary Wharf developers, together with the L D D C , have effectively determined the strategic future of London's CBD into the twenty-first century. London is to experience a major structural shift eastwards in a relatively short space of time, ignoring the preferred office locations identified in earlier strategic plans. Planning authorities are no longer to plan and control the supply of office floorspace, as the Secretary of State (backed up in the courts) had said in connection with the earlier Coin Street scheme, when rejecting a mass of evidence from the G L C on the subject: 'The supply of, and demand for, offices is essentially a m a t t e r to be d e t e r m i n e d by the market. '7 Within a short time, however, the large amount of cheap office space coming on stream at Docklands found itself only one of several competing sources of supply. The situation in
Docklands forced the City Corporation to relax its tight planning and conservation policies to allow new and bigger schemes. Government deregulation of planning procedures, giving freedom to change industry and warehouse space into offices (under the 1987 Use Classes Order and 1988 General Development Order), added 16 million square feet to the pool of potential office space from conversions in inner London. 8 The abolition of the GLC released a further million square feet of office space at County Hall, while a further six million was proposed at King's Cross, By 1989 the forecasts for office demand and supply were looking distinctly out of alignment, with a dramatic increase in supply facing a slow down of demand following the 1987 Stock Market crash and a probable economic recession. After the tight office market of 1985-87 there is the prospect of a massive oversupply in the early 1990s, with twenty million square feet built or planned in Docklands (three-quarters of it in the Isle of Dogs alone). This is the equivalent of about a third of the current City stock of floorspace. Docklands may compete on price (at about £20 per square foot) but even at those prices there are few takers. As potential occupiers can afford to be more fussy, a major criticism of the Isle of Dogs working environment is its poor transport and amenities precisely those two elements which the public sector might formerly have been expected to ensure. As one recent study found: Unanimous criticism was directed at the transportation and the amenities. The transportation situation had become materially worse since November 1988, with more people commuting to and from the Isle of Dogs. Whilst there has been a significant improvement in the provision of pub/restaurants and retail service facilities in the last year, all respondents understood that until the area developed further, more amenities would not be forthcoming.9
Planning the infrastructure backwards In their study of changing planning styles in the 1980s, Brindley, Rydin and Stoker used the L D D C to exem121
VIEWPOINT
l°T. Brindley, Y. Rydin and G. Stoker,
Remaking Planning, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989, Chapter 6. 110p cit, Ref 1. ~2LDDC, Transport in Docklands, 1988. ~Summarized in The Planner, 24 November 1989. ~4Docklands Business World, No 10, January-March 1989, p 25. 122
plify a 'leverage planning' approach, which they defined as 'the use of public investment to stimulate a weak or flagging private market in land and property development'. 1° In 1989 the government was pointing to what it saw as a highly successful leveraging ratio in Docklands of 10:1 - £10 of private investment to £1 of public. But within months the huge scale of private investment (the first phase of Canary Wharf alone is costing billions) was dragging an ever increasing commitment of public funds in its wake, particularly in transport infrastructure: this might be called reverse leveraging. As a headline in the property press put it, 'Govt is accused of bailing out LDDC'. u After the relatively modest numbers of jobs created on the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s, recent forecasts suggest that 40 000-50 000 would work in the Canary Wharf development alone, and a total of up to quarter of a million on the Isle of Dogs if all the projects were occupied. Since the housing stock on the island can accommodate only a fraction of these numbers, how are all the rest to get on and off it'? The Isle of Dogs is misnamed, being not an island but an isthmus surrounded on three sides by water. It was obvious from the outset that its accessibility problems would be expensive to overcome. Road access is poor because of the lack of river crossings and the delays and congestion on the already overloaded A13 trunk road. The LDDC put in a new spine road to open up the EZ, and is building a major new road across the top of the peninsula, linking Canary Wharf with Wapping to the west and the mouth of the River Lea and the Royal Docks to the east. The vast scale of p r o j e c t e d d e v e l o p m e n t has now meant a major design revision of the first phase, the Limehouse Link, to accommodate Canary Wharf in particular. Even the free market LDDC recognizes that road transport is not the only answer to the Isle of Dogs accessibility problem, and the largest transport infrastructure investment is going into rail: the Docklands Light Railway ( D L R ) , and the newly approved
underground Jubilee Line extension. The first phase of the DLR, opened in 1987, provided 12 km of track and 15 stations. It was the cheapest practical option available at the time, using existing track and railway alignments where possible, and was no sooner finished than it was found to be inadequate for the demand. Extensions are now under construction - that to Bank and the City costing £150 million - and the carrying capacity is being expanded at great expense from 3 500 passengers per peak hour each way to a total planned capacity on trains running to Canary Wharf of 15 000 per hour. ~2 In November 1989 the government announced the Jubliee Line extension from Green Park via Waterloo and London Bridge to Carnary Wharf and beyond, at a projected cost of £900 million, of which private developers were claimed to be contributing £400 million (Olympia and York £200 million). 13 (Water, although the Isle of Dogs has it everywhere, seems to offer little solution to the access problems. Riverbus services are generating much less than the expected numbers of passengers, and optimistic projections of one million passenger trips a year from Canary Wharf would still represent only a small fraction of the total movements likely to be generated from the development.) The spending on infrastructure in the early years (the £77 million initial cost of the DLR being by far the biggest item at the time) had to be extracted from a highly reluctant central government. It is now being totally dwarfed by the new funding coming through: DLR extension £240 million, road i m p r o v e m e n t s £650 million, Jubilee Line extension £900 million, £350 million extra grant for the LDDC 1990-2. It is hardly surprising that the incoming LDDC chairman in 1989 summed up what needed to be done in Docklands with the words, 'We have got to spend a lot more money', going on to identify as the three main priorities the eastern extension of the DLR to Beckton, the road programme, especially the Limehouse Link, and 'securing jobs for the local community'. 14 C I T I E S M a y 1990
VIEWPOINT This massive investment is at the expense of other competing national projects. The Jubilee Line extension came bottom of the list for its contribution to relieving traffic congestion in the capital, and in the 1970s had been dropped as not cost efffective. Of the announced increase in the Inner City programme in November 1989 85% went to the LDDC. 15 No wonder Serplan was lamenting the diversion of funds to Docklands which might otherwise have benefited its own strategy for the Eastern Thames Corridor in the run up to the opening of the Channel Tunnel. 16
What happened to the waterfront?
150p cit~ Ref 1, p 11. 16Serplan, 'Development potential in the Eastern Thames Corridor', 1987. 17Royal Town Planning Institute conference, London, October 1989. 18Quoted from estate management student' project work for the author at East London Polytechnic, 1989. The problems of finding a unified approach to civic design are discussed in D. Gosling, 'The Isle of Dogs, London Docklands: discrepancy in approaches to urban design', Cities, Vol 1, No 2, 1983, pp 150-166. 19p. Hall, Great Planning Disasters, London, Penguin, 1981. Quotation from op cit, Ref 2, p 15.
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Experienced operators in waterside regeneration at a recent conference identified certain elements in success (few of which are in evidence so far at the Isle of Dogs): long-term vision, advance planning of infrastructure, an attractive environment for visitors, balanced land-uses, high quality landscaping and surface treatment, creative use of the water and a unified design a p p r o a c h . 17 The L D D C ' s marketing for the Isle of Dogs emphasized the environmental attractions of water, with photographs of wind surfers and silly slogans ('Looks like Venice, works like New York'), but missed the opportunity to provide a coherent and unified treatment for the waterside, even within the limitations of the laissez-faire E Z philosophy. After the excitement of the new buildings springing up on either side of the new DLR in 1987 and 1988, the completed developments on the Isle of Dogs provoke responses like 'threatening', visual anarchy', 'unwelcoming'.is They largely turn their backs on the water, and there is little water based activity in the Millwall and East India basins, whose hard edges have not been softened by any unified approach to landscaping or ground surfaces. The profusion of design styles has created an environment hostile to the pedestrian, with poor signposting and confusion about the demarcation of public and private spaces. The original EZ scheme identified 'sensitive boundary sub-zones' where details of
design or landscaping would require prior approval, but these were mainly intended to lessen the impact on the existing nearby housing estates rather than to enhance the waterfront environment. On the Thames river frontage the opportunity to create pedestrian walkways (as the GLC had done on the South Bank) has largely been missed, and new housing development is e n c l o s e d w i t h i n f o r t r e s s - s t y l e architecture, while the Limehouse Link road dominates the waterfront between Wapping and Westferry. In this E Z free for all the larger developments try to create their own environmental quality. Canary Wharf is big enough to attempt a complete urban environment within its own 71 acres, and aims to become one of London's main tourist attractions. The design incorporates many of the amenities that are lacking elsewhere on the Isle of Dogs, with several miles of landscaped leisure walkways; but it all takes a lot of packing in.
Conclusions Ten years ago Professor Peter Hall wrote a book about great planning disasters, from which Ledgerwood's study of Docklands found that: Large projects are liable to focus benefits on relatively few individuals, and impose costs over a wide group whose members each have relatively little to lose. Thus, the few beneficiaries have an incentive to marshal resources to catalyse a public decision to proceed with investment. This decision may occur even though rational analysis may suggest, as in the case of the Concorde airliner, that no objective case can be made for the long-term net social or economic benefits of the project . . . major public decisions tend to generate commitment among participating leaderships and develop a momentum which makes many of them unstoppable. 19 This is now happening on the Isle of Dogs. If the long-term future of the City required it to find 'an extra Square Mile' to the east, a coherent strategic p l a n n i n g f r a m e w o r k could have offered alternatives. Stratford, for instance, was identified in the Greater L o n d o n D e v e l o p m e n t Plan as a strategic centre and preferred office location, the first such centre east of
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VIEWPOINT :5
Figure 1. Millwall Inner Dock, Isle of Dogs. the City. It has far better transport links than Docklands, office space currently at £12-15 per square foot, an existing shopping centre and regional park, and substantial development land. It is making a strong bid to be a terminus for the Channel Tunnel rail link into London. But it has a poor image (as did Docklands ten years ago) and remains run down and starved of investment. The LDDC was given immense power and opportunity and its political influence has allowed it to extract more and more resources from central government. But it never pretended to be, nor could it be, a strategic planning body, which London now sadly lacks. A n d there are now other megaprojects coming along without benefit of strategic planning, particularly the choice of termini to link with the Channel Tunnel. At the local level, the LDDC could have used the E Z scheme to create a strong design philosophy for development on the Isle of Dogs, but that was ideologically unacceptable at the time.
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It was also a major landowner there and could have exercised more control, but it released its land for others to develop freely. Now it is the financial and political muscle and determination of the Canary Wharf developers that will ensure that the Isle of Dogs does not rot on the horizon as a disaster of free-market planning. London's CBD will be restructured, but at an unnecessarily high cost, and with many missed opportunities along the way. The office floorspace will eventually be let, attracting tenants from overseas through competitive international pricing if domestic demand is insufficient. But while the space remains unlet (perhaps for years), the costs will fall indirectly upon the public, whose money the financial institutions have chosen to invest in such unwisely phased developments. And so the limits of the free market approach to strategic planning are exposed. But then it is easy to plan with hindsight - as LDDC planners respond (usually through gritted teeth) to their critics.
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