Member

Fortunately, by that point I had been in Bromley-by-Bow quite a long time. Indeed, as a clergyman, my church treasurer’s dad used to man the gates in Stratford railway yards. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has just described the dereliction of the six and a half miles of waterways, which were full of Tesco trolleys at the time. Yet members of my congregation in our community in Bromley-by-Bow had a rich knowledge of the Docklands and those waterways that had driven the economy of east London for 2,000 years. When you got to know the place and the people, it was a rich tapestry that had been forgotten by the London Government and some of us had to remind them. It was very much a project of trying to join the dots and create a narrative that took seriously the place, its people and the amazing history of innovation in east London, which we had forgotten for 50 years since the closure of the Docklands.