Journal
On the Waterfront
In the past decade or so, one of the more effective initiatives of the British property industry has been to market the benefits of ‘waterside apartment living’, in which docklands, wharves, canals and other neglected sections of water have been spruced up with new homes and leisure facilities. Therefore, rather than sit in a state of dingy post-industrial abandonment, urban waterside zones now cast a new spell of lifestyle and recreation – boating, waterskiing, catering and contemplation. A roster of renewed waterside districts, from London’s Paddington Basin to Manchester’s Castlefield, attest to this shift. Indeed, as an article on this phenomenon notes (1), Sue Townsend’s fictional comic diarist Adrian Mole, upon growing up, found himself living in an Leicester canalside apartment.
There has certainly been a turnaround in British waterways, and one that has a benefit to the market. The article also notes that it is estimated that the proximity of water can add 20 per cent to the value of a home. In the 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (2), urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote presciently: “The waterfront is the first wasted asset capable of drawing people at leisure,” pre-figuring the new usage of neglected docks and shorelines with fish restaurants, aquaria and ‘curiosity ships’. Even the Thames in central London was undersold for many years. Now, from Sydney to Seattle, waterside areas have now become part of the new urban picturesque.
The relationship between land and water can be poorly planned, and elsewhere Jacobs warns of the possibility of underused waterside landscape that becomes a ‘seam’ and not a ‘barrier’ (3) – a situation that many will be able to conjure, and that should be one of the lessons of the River Lea, the watercourse at the centre of the site for the London 2012 Olympics (4). Discuss this article
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