I used to live on the Isle of Dogs - just down and to the left from the intro photo on that article - on the Thames waterfront, albeit in a relatively modern 15-storey, multi-building estate.
I was always torn between wanting more access along the waterway edges - it would make a fantastic bicycle route into town, as well as further outwards - and wanting more privacy / protection from the kinds of idiots that thought partying in front of a residential building at 3am was acceptable behaviour. By partying I mean music, shouting, glass bottles being smashed, and so on.
The estate was in on-going 'discussions' over the previous several years with the local council about gating half the street, and consequently access to the foreshore. It was moot in terms of providing east-west access, as estates left and right had already gated their access. And it's clear this is one of the problems being described in the article - the 'let's make it less appealing so you want to _use_ it less so you can _lose_ it more easily'.
I'm back in Australia now, where I believe (IANAL and the information may be apocryphal) access to all tidal foreshore up to some distance, I think 30 metres? - was provided by law with two notable (military) exceptions. Whether that's the case or not doesn't affect the fact that it's practically impossible to obtain public access to foreshore areas in and around our capital cities.
I appreciate a few obnoxious folk might appear from time to time, as they do in all public places, but I think it is good they published this, and hopefully it will encourage more folk to do the riverside walks and explore London beyond the usual tourist, consumer and work zones.
On a separate note - if any Guardian devs are reading HN these days - what happened to your site? Drowning in JS incontinence, so much so that instead of responsive design, you now have non-responsive design. KISS is not just a band, but a way to think about design and software engineering!
Agreed. However you can't legislate against inconsiderate behaviour, which is what leads some people to prefer other people are physically precluded from their vicinity. It's undeniably going to cause some contention.
And, yes, I enjoyed many interesting trips along both north and south sides of the river, also both towards and away from the city - it was undeniably frustrating to have to make often quite large detours 'inland' just to get past a couple of hundred metres of fenced-off foreshore. Cycling through areas strewn with shattered glass wasn't much fun, either.
Such a shame we can't all reach a 'let's not be arseholes' consensus.
>you can't legislate against inconsiderate behavior
Sure you can. In my own experience I've had good luck calling the police with noise complaints, although I recognize the response is probably worse in many other places. I'm not claiming you can legislate against all inconsiderate behavior, but it's not a problem that is inapproachable with legislation.
I guess I used to run past your flat - it was on my route home from work. It could have been a very nice route, but as you say, developers had built right up to the river in places. I had to keep shuttling onto roads away from the river, and then back again. What could have been a nice place, available for all to enjoy, was spoiled to enrich a few people.
What sort of city planner would choose not to have a public walkway alongside the river?
>developers had built right up to the river in places
I also run that route, and what you say isn't true. The stretch under discussion has had warehouses built up to the river's edge long before urban hipsters started writing Guardian articles. In fact, most of the developments you refer to are converted warehouses. This isn't something that has been "taken away" from the public. Of course, they could knock the buildings down and create better urban spaces, but that would probably piss off the NIMBY crowd as well, who would then start a campaign in the Guardian to get them heritage listed.
Most likely people are noisy "in transit" rather than actually sitting outside a residence for several hours. It's unlikely you'll see a policeman in under 30 mins at which point they're just going to wake you up again to talk to you
London's developers are hell-bent on snapping up the best bits of the city for the wealthiest clients, and the government doesn't seem very motivated to protect them for public enjoyment.
It's pretty frustrating as a citizen feeling that no one's got your back - the rich and the powerful work hand in hand for their benefit and everyone else is left with the scraps - little bits of fenced of public space as a charity gesture for the people who made the foolish choice of not being filthy rich.
While I get how it must be tricky for Londoners to escape the chaos for a few hours, the UK is a tiny island and you're never more than a short train ride away from countryside.
Depends how you're defining "countryside". If you want to go to a large unmanaged forest, tough, there aren't any (e.g. Epping Forest is nice but it's too narrow to get lost in). If you want to go up a mountain that feels like an actual mountain, you've got to go over the border into Wales or Scotland. In all these cases you'll rarely be far from a village.
That doesn't address the political and social issue though: who is a the city for? Who should have access to public space?
I believe that in a crowded city it's really important that things like parks and riverbanks are accessible to everyone. Otherwise you slowly create a city of gated communities, a two-tier society. Saying "you could go somewhere else" is basically admitting that the city is becoming unlivable to the common man.
Who has, wants, and/or needs access to a riverfront is a marvellously practical problem to solve. A lot of high-school kids are equipped with the scientific know-how to get a relatively robust answer to this question, and there are many, many smart mofos in universities around the globe who could get a pretty damn definitive answer, taking into account relative harm/benefit and everything!
But no, that just won't do. Instead let's reformulate it in ideological terms - who should have access? Now the whole planet is entitled to chip in. Facts just became irrelevant. Yay. "So let's go collect some 'facts' for our story," said someone at The Guardian before cherry-picking a few half-notable views from the (now global) distribution of opinions. One tiny little change to the premise and this problem went from something well-defined and manageable to a thinly veiled pitting of rich against poor with no objectively defensible outcome. The Guardian - our dear moral leaders who spend their days paving the path to social equality - pouring petrol on the class warfare fire to sell papers? Well I never.
This is all fine if the point is entertainment, but this bullshit - coupled with a super out-of-date version of democracy we like to get sentimental about - is how we govern. It's madness. It's certifiable, crack-a-jack, put-you-on-strong-pills craziness of the highest order.
So there a few CCTVs cameras and an increase in private property - since the public seems not to use it anyway - along a river ?
London is becoming a city for the elite bankers and capitalists, everyone knows it. The world is a massive place. Rather than working like peasants I suggest to the people complaining to have some dignity and create wealth somewhere else where they think is a much fairer place.
I am slightly frustrated that so many young people spend their prime years enriching a city that cares little for them and takes so much wealth from them.
I honestly don't even know how to begin to explain this to you.
There are highly valuable pieces of land (as happens with nice waterfronts) that developers have promised to make accessible to everyone in exchange for being able to develop there. They then make those places as unappealing as they can to the public by using misleading architectural cues, being less tahn helpful in enabling the access they promised, or even having guards flat-out lie about the public's access to a space. If this does not seem like a bad thing to you, and I mean this with no malice, I don't believe there is enough common ground between you and I for me to be able to explain why it is.
If you think this is just a London thing, it's happening in San Francisco (which, yes, has similar issues with inequality) [1] and is an ongoing issue along the entire coast of California where the beach is public up to (at least) the high tide mark, and often with trails to get to it too. But landowners there also put up fake signs, block off access paths, and hire security guards to lie about whether the general public is allowed there or not.
This is also an issue in Oslo. Traditionally (and currently) the population has the right of assess 2 meters inland from the high tide mark. People with houses (typically elite suburbs) on the waterfront have tried to stop this as they don't want someone walking across their front lawn or parking their boat there.
Given Norways egalitarian society, I was more surprised the people pursuing this felt it was worth their effort given the likelihood of success.
“The idea that London’s spaces have always been open and democratic is a myth. (...) It took a long, hard fight to bring streets under public control, and there is a constant push-back against it – if people aren’t galvanised and engaged with these spaces then they will slip away into private hands.”
I was always torn between wanting more access along the waterway edges - it would make a fantastic bicycle route into town, as well as further outwards - and wanting more privacy / protection from the kinds of idiots that thought partying in front of a residential building at 3am was acceptable behaviour. By partying I mean music, shouting, glass bottles being smashed, and so on.
The estate was in on-going 'discussions' over the previous several years with the local council about gating half the street, and consequently access to the foreshore. It was moot in terms of providing east-west access, as estates left and right had already gated their access. And it's clear this is one of the problems being described in the article - the 'let's make it less appealing so you want to _use_ it less so you can _lose_ it more easily'.
I'm back in Australia now, where I believe (IANAL and the information may be apocryphal) access to all tidal foreshore up to some distance, I think 30 metres? - was provided by law with two notable (military) exceptions. Whether that's the case or not doesn't affect the fact that it's practically impossible to obtain public access to foreshore areas in and around our capital cities.