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Like the round-shouldered, haggardlooking subject of a TV makeover programme who emerges at the end buffed, styled and botoxed into one of life’s pearly-toothed, wrinkle-free winners, Stratford E15, home to the real Albert Square, will shed its seedy skin over the next two decades in a Cinderella-like transformation. Fairy godmother Ken Livingstone has given his blessing to Stratford City, a £3 billion, 73-hectare regeneration programme that will begin next year and will conjure up 4,500 new homes, 465,000 sq m. of office space and 140,000 sq m. of retail space, as well as schools, games areas, water features and ecological habitats. All this may sound faintly reminiscent of those sinistersounding ‘master-planned communities’ so popular in the US, but the mayor is confident: ‘Stratford City will transform the area into a thriving new urban community.’ One of the driving forces behind this imminent metamorphosis is London’s status as Candidate City for the 2012 Olympic Games; wherever you turn in E15, you are entreated to Back the Bid and optimistic posters show an athlete majestically hurdling Tower Bridge. But even if the bid fails, the London Development Agency has pledged its commitment to regenerate the area.
Stratford already has good connections — the Jubilee and Central lines, the DLR and Silverlink Metro — and now, as you step off the Tube, mounds of earth and a crane-scarred skyline signal the arrival of Stratford International, the St Pancras Eurostar link scheduled to open in 2007. New Stratford may be no more than a glint in planners’ eyes at present, but knowing that Paris will soon be a tantalising two and a half hours away certainly takes the edge off trailing round Old Stratford’s depressing shopping centre to the distant drone of pneumatic drills.
All of this has led Halifax estate agents to predict a market-defying mini housing boom in east London, and in some quarters there are mutterings that house prices in Stratford will double. But those who cherish the area’s dog-eared charm have doubts about its glittering future. The poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a long-term resident, likes the area’s down-to-earth, unpretentious character. ‘Not like the South Bank — we don’t want that,’ he says of E15’s ‘cultural quarter’, which comprises the renowned Theatre Royal, an arts centre and Stratford Picture House. ‘But more like the East Bank. It’s very East Londony, artistic but not pompous.’
Lucy Vickery
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