Single Aspect Blog

UPDATE: 17th August 2015 – Guardian -> No change then

Some respectable architecture aside, it is a shaming place.

Following the arrival of my London Open House brochure I sauntered off to Barking along the District line to Barking station and took the 387 out to Barking Riverside.  (Actually I decided to walk and got lost but that’s another story).  If you know what you’re doing you can walk out of Barking Station, cross the road to stand H and get on the 387, Oyster card in hand.

Click image for full bus map

More photographs at my Flickr page

https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627415037691/

This is what Open House have to say about the development:-

Barking Riverside
Entry to Rivergate Centre, Minter Road (access via Marine
Drive), Barking IG11 0FJ
@     Sat 10am-5pm. Rivergate Centre open, new residential
areas viewable externally only. d P T G
Barking Riverside will have 10,800 new homes to be delivered over the next 25 years. First phase is under construction and includes the Rivergate Centre and 350 new homes. The George Carey Primary School is an exemplary new community building. Development team: van Heyningen and Haward Architects and Neilcott Construction.
Tube/Rail: Barking; 387,EL1,EL2

A fairly conventional housing estate on winding roads, with Raymond Unwin blocks at 45° to the corners by the roundabout which was a nice touch of the Garden City.  Bellway Homes hard at work further down the road towards the site of the Rivergate Centre which is all coloured panels and a church on the end, or religious building to judge by the cross on the front.

From Building Magazine 2002

Rouse cites two schemes that illustrate how the area is being squandered. At Barking Reach, on the north bank of the river, Bellway Homes is building 4000 homes on a site CABE believes could accommodate 12,000. And a little further east at Dagenham, plans to regenerate the former Ford car plant look likely to go the same way. “We need a strategic plan,” says Rouse.

Drive east from central London on the A13 – the only significant transport artery serving the northern Thames Gateway – and the problems soon become apparent. After passing the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, the traffic-snarled highway ploughs through a twilight zone of abandoned land, giant factories and run-down housing estates. A nervewracking right turn from the fast lane of the A13 takes you past a row of tatty industrial units to the first phase of Bellway’s Barking Reach scheme.

Low-rise executive houses, laid out in Brookside-style culs-de-sac with names like Galleon’s Drive and Schooner Close, are hemmed in between high-fenced wasteland and a huge Exel distribution warehouse. Nearby, enormous electricity pylons, which nobody is willing to pay to bury underground, march across land earmarked for more housing. A single bus stop advertises its destination: Dagenham. It feels like the end of the world, but it is only six miles from Canary Wharf.

“There’s no use kidding anybody,” says Tony McBrearty, deputy chief executive at Thames Gateway London Partnership. “Unless proper transport infrastructure is put in, places like Barking Reach cannot fulfil their potential. Bellway is saying, ‘Of course we’ll build more densely at Barking Reach, but we need the infrastructure’. If builders have confidence [that infrastructure will be provided] then these things will happen.”

https://www.building.co.uk/news/the-wasteland/1020280.article

I think that section quoted above from 2002 is very telling because if you go there now, apart from the new Bellway homes and the Rivergate Centre there’s been b*gg*r all change in nine years.  It looks very much like a stalled project coming back to life, albeit slowly.

UPDATE 31/8/12 Please note that the Rivergate Centre was not open on that weekend last year.  I have not been to see it and cannot therefore comment on its merits or otherwise.  I hope you enjoy your visit to Barking Reach.