NEW BEGINNINGS

EUREKA!

Our first visit to Wapping proved exciting. For a start it was closer to ‘the action’ than we could ever have imagined: emerging out of the underground station, we were greeted by the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Londoners have a curious mental block about the eastern side of their city, an area largely overlooked as the capital grew out westward. It’s assumed to be far away; but it’s not. Here, we were right on the doorstep of the Square Mile, a short stroll from City Hall.

Our own demographics had also changed in twenty years, which made Wapping an even more attractive option for us. When we first started out, Clerkenwell’s location had served us well, with the majority of the team living in North London. But the results of some judicious internal research had surprised us. With the rising rents many JTP staff had moved east and south-east.

For a surprising number the journey to work would likely be cut, not lengthened. The London Overground and the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) had opened up many travel options that simply didn’t exist before. Wapping itself was just what we were looking for – a place in flux. It felt alive, real, expectant. The walk across the open expanse of St Katharine Docks was spectacular and sent spirits soaring. Then Pennington Street, with its unrhythmic cobbles, instilled more excitement. It was quiet and in need of some love, but had a magical air to it – old London, Dickensian even. Likewise, the numbered former dock buildings had an austere beauty to them. We were sure we’d found something special.

Stepping inside Pennington Street Warehouse confirmed all this – right here was the place for us. It had an extraordinary calmness and presence. Designed to store precious imports in pristine condition over two hundred years ago, it positively oozed history, with raw brickwork, elegant arches, inexplicable scars, random nooks and unexpected crannies. We loved the surprise, the honesty, the beautiful inconsistency – it was a building of huge personality with enormous potential.

Architecturally, it was exactly what we were looking for. A challenge without doubt, but we could immediately see the possibilities. In front of us stood a dark, unbroken series of brickwork arches untouched for decades. But we knew we could add a skylight, remove a section of ground floor and bring in sunlight to transform the magnificent vaults below. It required an act of imagination and a leap of faith, but we were convinced we could make it work. At first, St George were a little reluctant to sell and we could understand why. Works to the Pennington Street Warehouse would be out of sequence. For them, it was on the back burner, one for the future. Their focus instead was on Gauging Square, the all-important first phase of reimagining London Dock that would set the tone for the next decade of apartment sales. They had buildings to build, infrastructure to deliver, a new public square to create and curate, and a new brand to establish.

Negotiations were protracted – not just around the value of the property, but why it should be brought forward.

In the end, our sheer enthusiasm, along with St George’s understanding of the benefits a creative business could bring to this development, clinched it for us. Suddenly the deal was done. It was smiles and handshakes all round. We had our new home.

Now, the hard work could begin. PRACTISING WHAT WE PREACH

As with Great Sutton Street, the design of the new studio evolved through a process of Collaborative Placemaking. This three-stage technique, honed by JTP over more than twenty years, revolves around detailed scrutiny and knowledge of a location, involving all stakeholders and user-centric place design to nurture a sense of community.

First, we understand. Discerning the DNA of a place is fundamental to its success. Places have history, geography and micro-climates, as well as the social, cultural, political and economic energies that run through people’s daily lives. We don’t stop until we get under its skin to identify what makes it special.

Then, we engage. By putting local people at the heart of the creative process we give them a voice and shared ownership in their own future. This creates goodwill, inspires community spirit and helps build consensus around a new vision.

Finally, we create. This is the interpretation of collective vision, using our imagination to design new places and breathe life into old ones. Elegant solutions to complex problems, which bring people together and nurture strong communities.

So, now it was up to us to start the process of really understanding the place we had just committed to.

UNDERSTANDING

GETTING TO KNOW WAPPING & LONDON DOCK

What makes a place?

Nestled between the north bank of the River Thames and the ancient thoroughfare known as The Highway, Wapping is steeped in history. From its transformation as a small riverside village into one of the busiest docks in London, to being seriously damaged during the Blitz, to being the centre of Rupert Murdoch’s printing and publishing empire – it has had many incarnations. Now, JTP finds itself in the heart of an emerging London neighbourhood that we hope to help positively shape and grow.

ACT I: STUPENDOUS LONDON DOCK

As the capital grew, so too did consumption and, with it, demands on the banks of the River Thames for landing cargo. By 1558, twenty quays had appeared between London Bridge and the Tower of London. Poorly planned and inadequately policed, they were beset by chaos. Ships could wait a month to unload, taxes were evaded, and theft was prevalent. According to historic reports, a full quarter of goods ended up being pilfered by specialist thieves – scufflemongers and lighthorsemen, coalwhippers and long-apron men – rogues who thrived in a climate of disorganisation and lawlessness. Despite this, by the late 18th-century, London had become one of the busiest ports in the world. As it grew in stature and trade expanded, demand increased for better landing and storage, as well as greatly enhanced security – especially for luxury commodities. These were now arriving by ship from all across the world – ivory, spices, coffee and cocoa as well as wine and spirits. These exotic goods needed better oversight during landing and in bonded warehouses before they were released to the capital and beyond. As a result, the construction of brand-new facilities began to the east of the Tower of London, including London Dock, East India Dock and St Katharine Docks. Cut deep into the banks of the Thames, these huge feats of Victorian engineering were surrounded by elegant brick-built warehouses and securely enclosed with an imposing perimeter dock wall.

The London Dock complex, the first of the new facilities, was made possible by an act of Parliament passed in 1800, granting the London Dock Company permission to purchase land and construct a purpose-built cargo facility. Built at a then astronomical cost of more than £5.5 million, the private company received recompense from the government through the granting of a 21-year monopoly for all imported tobacco, rice, wine and brandy that had not originated in the East Indies.

Designed by architects and engineers Daniel Asher Alexander and John Rennie, London Dock occupied a total area of about 90 acres and consisted of Western and Eastern docks linked through the short stretch of Tobacco Dock, with connections to the Thames through Hermitage Basin to the south-west, Wapping Basin to the south, and Shadwell Basin to the east.

London Dock, 1806

After five years of construction, London Dock opened on 31 January 1805 to great pomp and circumstance, with the new docks greatly lauded as ‘stupendous and beautiful works’ by commentator George Courtney Lyttleton in his books The History of England, which were published at the same time.

In his account of the opening day, Lyttleton describes how the first cargo of wine from Oporto was greeted by a vast crowd of all ranks of people assembled to witness the brig Perseverance, a vessel from Liverpool entering the docks. The event was announced by the discharge of cannon from the wharfs whilst the band on board played ‘God Save the King’.

With its close proximity to the centre of the city, London Dock thrived for a century by facilitating the flow of luxury commodities from around the world. But its comparatively limited space, inconvenient lock entrances and lack of a direct connection to the railway eventually made it vulnerable to competition.

As cargo vessels increased in size, new larger facilities were constructed further east along the River Thames, where more land and deeper water were located. With the opening of the Royal Albert Dock (1880) and also deep-water docks at Tilbury (1886), London Dock fell into a long, slow decline.

London Dock was one of the first enclosed commercial docks in London

Alongside other fading cargo facilities in the east end, London Dock was taken over by the Port of London Authority in 1909. They oversaw several decades of managed decline until finally the advent of the container shipping revolution of the 1960s marked the death knell for the complex. On 30 September 1968, after 163 years of operation, the lock gates of London Dock closed for the last time and the facility fell into disrepair.

ACT II: DEINDUSTRIALISATION

Painful times followed. Just as London had been one of the earliest cities to benefit from industrialisation, so it was among the first to suffer from its reverse effects. Between 1960 and 1980, shifts in technology and the forces of globalisation decimated inner-city industrial heartlands. More than 1.6 million jobs were culled across the UK and huge tracts of land were laid waste in east London.

With no obvious future for London Dock, the land was sold to the Borough of Tower Hamlets, based on an (unrealised) ambition for reuse as public housing. These powerful forces were bent on erasing the past, modernisation was the future, and with a heritage lobby barely out of infancy, the end was in sight. The elegant historic warehouses were torn down, and the colossal Eastern and Western basins filled in. Sadly, only Pennington Street Warehouse, Spirit Quay in St Katharine Docks, and Tobacco Dock – which linked the Thames to Shadwell Basin – survived.

The deindustrialisation of the 1970s marked a low point for urban dwelling, as the inner city hollowed out and the middle classes fled to the suburbs. Where once places like London Dock had teemed with life and represented a thriving economy, these abandoned areas now came to symbolise all manner of urban ills in the popular imagination. Shady, unpoliced areas with empty streets, vacant buildings and overgrown lots.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

With its empty warehouses, abandoned parking lots and an air of desolation, London Dock became a popular set location for iconic productions – many of which were shot in and around Pennington Street Warehouse.

The Sweeney (1974)

The talk of its day, 1970s British police drama, The Sweeney, followed two members of the Flying Squad – a branch of the Metropolitan Police – as they tackled armed robbery and violent crime in London. The episode ‘Poppy’, which aired in 1975, sees a high-speed car chase down a deserted Virginia Street, alongside the derelict Pennington Street Warehouse, culminating in a shootout in the abandoned buildings. As with many Sweeney pursuits, things do not end well.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

In the somewhat prophetic Long Good Friday, Bob Hoskins’ character Harold Shand, a prosperous English gangster, uncannily predicts the future of Wapping when he declares the 80s would be a new era for London with his vision of unbridled commerce built around a revived Docklands. And he wasn’t wrong. Since the film's original release, the renewal of the docks as a lustrous appendage of the City is the film’s most remarkable prescience.

The Bill (1983)

One of the longest-running British television series, The Bill is set in and around Sun Hill Police Station. The original station set was on the corner of Artichoke Hill and Pennington Street. However, the set was next to the News International printing works and during the industrial strikes there were altercations between the strikers and actors from The Bill, who were mistaken for actual police officers. Working conditions got so desperate that Sun Hill Police Station was relocated.

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

Bond, James Bond, helped save global civilisation here. In the pre-title sequence of The World Is Not Enough, Bond (Pierce Brosnan) recovers ransom money taken from oil tycoon Sir Robert King (David Calder). But the money is booby-trapped and King gets killed in an explosion. Bond sees the assassin and chases her with a Q-modified speedboat down the canals of River Thames which, in actuality, is the ornamental canal at Wapping Lane.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Tom Cruise came here to carry out an impossible mission for the sixth time. A twenty-minute scene sees Pennington Street Warehouse transformed as an underground safehouse for Ethan Hunt and his IMF team to meet and architect a different kind of master plan!

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Peter Parker might have been far from his home in New York, but Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Commander Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) were just a stone’s throw away from our home, Pennington Street Warehouse, whilst filming scenes around St Katharine Docks and walking through the newly developed business district of Moretown.

Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

In this spin-off of the Fast & Furious franchise, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham reprise their roles as Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw to battle a cybernetically-enhanced terrorist (Idris Elba) who is threatening the world with a deadly virus. The low stone arches of the Pennington Street Warehouse vaults give yet another stellar performance as Shaw’s armoury.

ACT III: FORTRESS WAPPING

In 1979, a quiet land sale took place involving Pennington Street Warehouse and an open tract of London Dock. The purchaser? Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch – proprietor of News International and publisher of The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and the News of the World. No one could have guessed this was to be the start of a chain of events leading to a violent struggle and an outcome that would forever change both the media industry and trade union movement in the UK.

Fleet Street had been the centre of the British print industry for centuries, with The Times being printed there since 1785. Over time a powerful ‘closed shop’ trade union had grown up to improve and protect printworkers’ rights, which Murdoch saw as threatening the viability of the newspaper publishing business. Costs needed to be cut. In his estimation the production of papers in London required ‘three times the number of jobs at five times the level of wages’ as titles in other countries.

Battle lines were drawn. In months of protracted negotiations, News International and the trade unions fought over new working practices requiring the end of the ‘closed shop’, a nostrike clause and flexible working. Unbeknown to both employees and union chiefs, News International were simultaneously building a new facility at London Dock, incorporating the latest Atex automated printing system imported from the United States. For those involved in fitting out the plant, the cover story involved the launch of a fictional newspaper for the capital, ‘The London Post’. The reality was more far radical.

When negotiations between the unions and News International foundered, a strike was called, and on 24 January 1986 over 6,000 employees stopped work. Dismissal notices were immediately served on those taking part in the industrial action and, more shockingly for the strikers, newspaper production was switched overnight from Fleet Street to the new, secretly equipped plant in Wapping. Anticipating union hostility, the new facility was heavily secured, with the massive blank walls of the Pennington Street Warehouse protecting half the plant and high razor-wire fences surrounding the rest. In the headlines of the British press and the collective imagination of the country, this area was now ‘Fortress Wapping’.

For more than a year the strike raged around London Dock. Local roads were closed. Hundreds of police were placed on duty each night to keep the peace along picket lines, as non-union labour was bussed in to keep the newspaper running and trucks shipped out daily editions. Costs were huge. Over £5m was spent on more than 1,250,000 hours of police time to control the dispute and 1,435 people were arrested.

The first anniversary of the dispute marked the beginning of the end. Scores of strikers and 168 officers were injured as around 1,000 police with riot shields stormed the ranks of 13,000 demonstrators. Like the miners' strike of 1984, those involved were exhausted by the year-long battle and running dangerously short of money. The print unions capitulated and urged members to accept News International’s redundancy terms.

By February 1987, the dispute had petered out. Within two years all newspapers had adopted the same new technologies and working practices. Fleet Street was finished as the centre of the UK newspaper industry. It was over. Printing, like the docks before them, had moved east. ACT IV: A CITY MOVING EAST

News International continued to print The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World at London Dock for more than twenty years until April 2008, when the last newspapers rolled off the presses and printing was relocated to a new facility off the M25. Over this period, under pressure for new development, London had started to grow eastwards.

The redundant West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs became the location for Canary Wharf, a new financial hub for the capital, offering large contemporary office floorplates that were struggling to fit into the historic urban streets of the Square Mile. Where once the flow of goods had been important, now the east of London needed transport infrastructure for the flow of people – workforces commuting across the capital to this long-derelict area.

The DLR led the way, a budget automated light metro system using redundant railway infrastructure opened in 1987 which increased accessibility and ended the sense of isolation which was inhibiting investment and grow. Just over a decade later came the Jubilee Line extension which dramatically improved connections to London Bridge, Waterloo, Central London and the fast-emerging Stratford interchange. Most recently, 2007 saw the launch of the London Overground system – a radical reworking of what was previously a poorly run network of suburban rail services. Together, these improvement in transport infrastructure opened the way for development between the Square Mile, Canary Wharf and beyond.

But London Dock had seen several false dawns. During the 1980s the refilled basins were developed for housing, served by Tobacco Dock, and a new shopping centre was designed within one of the characterful surviving warehouses. Billed as the Covent Garden of the east, it was unfortunately ahead of its time. Lacking a critical mass of surrounding housing, the retail stores struggled to survive, lasting just five years before closing down. Today, the buildings have been recast as a more successful event space and home to a small co-working community.

But finally, the time for London Dock had come. In 2013 the site was acquired from News International by developer St George. Their vision was to create a new urban quarter extending the life and vitality of St Katharine Docks eastwards to Tobacco Dock. It envisaged 1,800 new homes, around 7.5 acres of public open space, and a fully refurbished Pennington Street Warehouse acting as a cultural hub for the new community.

The first step is Gauging Square, with its fountains, cafés and restaurants, setting the placemaking tone for ten years of development.