The Anonymous Widower

A Divided City

London is a divided city and it has always been thus.

I am a North Londoner and can’t understand why anybody would want to live South of the Great Sewer. Compared to my childhood, it’s now grown up to be a river.

This is not just a white middle-class attitude, as I’ve been told by policemen, that criminals rarely commit crime on both sides of the river, and I’ve met several black South and North Londoners, who have my attitude to the other part of London.

In my childhood, the transport system made this divide a lot worse. We learned to duck and dive into the Underground and those in the South, learned how to get around using the Southern electrics, which to a North Londoner seem to have been laid out by the Devil to confuse outsiders.

It’s better now, with Thameslink, the Overground and the Victoria and Jubilee lines  adding extra connections between North and South London.

But one place, where the divide is still great is in the East. London has a housing shortage and two of the areas, where a large number of houses are to be built in the east, are Barking Riverside to the North of the Thames and Thamesmead to the South. The latter found its fame as the set for A Clockwork Orange and now surrounds the notorious Belmarsh Prison.

Both of these areas lack decent transport links.  Wikipedia has a section on transport for Thamesmead which says this.

Thamesmead’s location between the Thames and the South London escarpment limits rail transport and road access points. Thus Thamesmead has no underground or surface rail links. Most residents rely on bus services to reach the nearest rail stations.

Barking Riverside fares little better, according to this section in Wikipedia. Here’s the first bit.

Barking Riverside is connected to Barking, Ilford and Dagenham Dock by the East London Transit bus rapid transit service.

But at least the Gospel Oak to Barking Line is being extended to the houses at Riverside.

What was originally proposed was a new road bridge across the river called the Thames Gateway bridge, that would have originally opened in 2013.

But now in London’s Transport Plan for 2050, a rail tunnel is being proposed that links the Goblin at Barking Riverside to Abbey Wood station for Crossrail and the Kent lines, with an intermediate station at Thamesmead.

It will not be a low-cost option, as tunnelling isn’t a question of hiring a few navvies, so as the DLR extension to Woolwich Arsenal cost a couple of hundred million or so, we’re probably looking at a half billion pound project to connect the rail lines under the Thames.

But surely, if it improves the east of London and makes housing in Barking Riverside and Thamesmead more attractive, it surely must be high up the benefit cost scale.

August 3, 2014 - Posted by AnonW | News, Transport/Travel | Barking Riverside, Goblin Extension, Housing, London, London Transport Plan 2050, Thamesmead