In Barking Riverside, where the opening of a Morrisons Local was cause for celebration, residents have been waiting for a rail link since the 1990s



Barking Riverside has a decent case for the title of most isolated place to live in London. There are other contenders, of course: the wrong end of Muswell Hill, near the North Circular, or the wonderfully named Pratt’s Bottom, near Bromley, a 30-minute walk from the nearest train station. But these sit in the middle of a sprawling, settled suburbia. Barking Riverside, the UK’s largest brownfield regeneration scheme, is estranged even from the traffic-clogged A13 by swaths of industrial land, which cut it off from Barking town centre and the other more lived-in bits of east London’s edgelands to the north and the Thames to the south.



Despite there being 1,800 people already living in Barking Riverside (and an estimated 2,500 in the 90s-built Barking Reach and Great Fleete developments nearby) there’s nowhere to sit and have coffee, no pub, no police station, no youth club, no football pitch – unless you hire it from the school – and the doctor’s surgery will only open when there are 10,000 people living here.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest People in Barking Riverside speak to ITN in March 2014 following government proposals to improve transport links to the suburb.

“It’s like living on an island,” says Yvonne Thomas, chair of the local residents’ association. “Before the shop opened in February, to get a pint of milk on a morning could take an hour in the car because of the traffic.”

The shop is a Morrisons local – and the fact that it took so long for it to open, coupled with the lack of a train line anywhere nearby, has left most residents here feeling frustrated and some a little duped. “The shop is a Harrods for us,” says Khushnood Ahmed, who has lived here for seven years since moving from East Ham. There probably hasn’t been another place in London where the opening of a Morrisons has meant so much to a community. When an ice-cream van turns up, residents ask it to leave: they don’t want to upset the store.

Barking Riverside is an ambitious yet stalled plan to create a new London suburb on the site of a disused power station. It was known as Barking Reach when the first homes were built in the mid-90s, but the promised train line used as a carrot to attract residents still hasn’t arrived – a victim of austerity, evaporating political will and sluggish planning negotiations.

It's like living on an island Yvonne Thomas

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Prescott visiting the site of the Barking Reach housing development in the 1990s. Photograph: Paul Bookless/London Borough of Barking and Dagenham

Instead, to get to Barking Riverside involves taking one of two buses from Barking town centre, but traffic slows them to a crawl during rush hour. The nearest tube is Upney or Barking, a brisk 40-minute walk past River Road, passing factories, wreckers’ yards, and lorry-hoovering depots spewing acrid air. There are only two roads out, and both are private: the council hasn’t taken ownership of the roads yet. “We were promised trams at first,” says Thomas. “Then the DLR. We will get it all eventually, but we don’t want ‘eventually’ – we want now, because we’ve lived here for long enough.”

Thomas has lived in one of the earlier-built houses at Barking Reach for 13 years. Her children grew up on the estate, but then there was no school and they had to commute to Upminster, on the edge of Essex – a 30-minute drive, or an hour-long bus and train journey from Riverside.

“We get very tired of being told what we’re going to have and [then seeing] what we end up getting,” she says, cutting an exasperated presence as she leads me backstage at the recent open day, complete with a circus and local food stalls. Organised by the Arts Council-funded Creative Barking & Dagenham, the goal of the open day is to showcase an area that remains unknown to many in the borough. At the Rivergate Centre, a square that is the focal point of the sprawling development, the 28-strong NoFit State Circus has taken over, complete with trapeze artists, while kids on skates weave around a Balkan-style band that plays from the side of a truck.

Barking Riverside has a church and an Anglican primary school, but no mosque. “We have prayer in a room upstairs of the centre,” says Ahmed, who is the founding director of the Riverside Muslim Association, which has 250 members. “Last year we did an Eid festival over here, and thousands of people came.” Ahmed sees the circus event as important to bring the more disparate wider community together: there are often few opportunities for mixing beyond their immediate bonds. “People have moved into the UK at different times, and it takes time [to mix] if you are coming from another country.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An ‘oddly serene atmosphere’ at Barking Riverside. Photograph: Barking Riverside Limited

Events like these and others by community art groups such as make:good are helping forge a sense of community here, but their very need betrays the folly of Barking Riverside. Even in the context of London’s absurdist property market, the residents’ plight is almost Beckettian: Waiting for BoJo.

The political football of Barking Riverside been kicked around since the early 1990s, when Michael Heseltine was stalking the Thames looking for brownfield to develop. The project started life as a public-private venture between the Greater London Authority, English Partnerships and Newcastle-based developer Bellway Homes, and was part of the wider Thames Gateway strategy to build homes on largely post-industrial land to provide affordable housing, which was already scarce back then. Today the project is overseen by Barking Riverside Ltd (BRL) in a joint venture with Bellway and the GLA.

Connections to the transport network were a key component for approving the development, but when the job of finding the cash for a DLR extension was passed from Ken Livingstone to his successor, Boris Johnson, he canned the idea. George Osborne appeared to finally give a train line the green light in his March budget, when he promised £55m to support the extension of the London Overground to Barking Riverside. If it goes ahead – there’s another round of public consultations and an inquiry to get through before the Transport and Works Act Order can be passed – the new Barking Riverside station is slated to be completed by the end of 2020. By which time it would be more than two decades after the first residents were promised a train link.

Despite the name, you can’t actually see the river from the site: the view is blocked by hoardings, disguising building works on the site of the old Barking power station. Come evening, however, the mosquitos remind you that you’re on the estuary. Although Barking Riverside embodies the folly of a policy that requires any new development in London to be built on brownfield sites, it’s quite nicely landscaped: Dutch-style grey brick and timber structures with large amounts of open space – the unexpected payoff of building on marshland is the vast amount of land required for drainage – lend it an oddly serene atmosphere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The NoFit State Circus performs at the Rivergate Centre, at the heart of the sprawling development. Photograph: Barking Riverside Limited/Lesley Chalmers

Inevitably, the development is private: BRL sells parcels of land to developers, with planning consent from Barking and Dagenham council. BRL’s planning director, Matthew Carpen, says by the time the Overground arrives by the end of 2020, there will be 3,000 units, with a target of 30,000 people (in 10,800 units) by 2030. “A population the size of Windsor,” he says. “It’s unusual as you haven’t got any sites as big as this in London. It’s like the creation of a new city.”

You haven't got any sites as big as this in London. It's like the creation of a new city Matthew Carpen

So far, the homes in the older and newer parts have been built exclusively by Bellway, whose shares rose to an all-time high in March. The newer “City East” homes constitute a good deal, for London anyway: four-bed townhouses go for £319,000. The first residents were from the local area, but buy-to-let landlords are moving in. Of the present buildings, including units under construction, 32% will be social rented and 8% shared ownership, so 40% will be “affordable” in total. But as the development gets closer to the bankable riverside views, there is a fear that this will drop. The overall target for the development at the end is 41% affordable, with a minimum of 27% – but this will be “market dependent”.

Although Boris Johnson has called the development a new “garden suburb”, the “public spaces”, such as the new kids’ park that materialised this year, are in fact privately owned by BRL and run by a community interest company it set up. Eventually residents and representatives from Barking and Dagenham Council will become directors of the company, Carpen says.

The remoteness of Barking Riverside has nevertheless forged a real sense of togetherness, particularly among the earlier settlers. “People like that are pioneers,” says Carpen. “They came to the site and saw the potential, and they’re the ones who feel ownership of this site. When the momentum gains, they will benefit.”



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The promise of the railway, meanwhile, has given new life to a project that was in danger of getting lost in the political cracks. Thomas might not be here to see it, however. Her kids have grown up and she dreams of moving to France. “I’d move out like a shot, to be quite frank,” she says, before quickly checking herself: “But not because there’s anything wrong with here.”

Such defensiveness betrays the fact that Barking Riverside has become a real home to many people – a home they intend to protect against anyone’s disdain but their own.

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