Development Frenzy: Photos of the Regent’s Canal from St. Pancras Basin to King’s Cross

Development Frenzy: The Regent’s Canal from St. Pancras Basin to King’s Cross, a set on Flickr.

This set of photos is the 40th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began in May, and it follows on from three previous sets recording a particular journey I made on September 3, 2012, when I cycled from Tottenham Court Road, up Hampstead Road to Mornington Crescent, and then along Camden High Street, through busy Camden with its many lively markets to the Regent’s Canal.

From there I cycled along the tow path of this wonderful artery that avoids the traffic-choked chaos of London’s roads to St. Pancras Basin and King’s Cross — or, to be specific, the King’s Cross development project that is currently underway, which, it seems to me, is rather dangerously at odds with the spirit of the canal, as a place of calm, and an antidote to the clamour of money that is so incessant elsewhere.

Since the redevelopment of London’s docklands in the 1980s, waterside developments have increasingly become the preserve of the rich and the brash, and once the entire shoreline of the River Thames was exhausted (only a few undeveloped dockets remain), developers turned their attentions to the canals — and specifically, to the Regent’s Canal, which runs in a huge loop, all the way from Limehouse to Little Venice (near Paddington), where it joins the Grand Union Canal, via Mile End, Hackney, Islington, King’s Cross and Camden. In Hackney, for example, giant housing blocks tower over the towpath, and the same is happening at King’s Cross.

Obviously, change is part of London life. The Regent’s Canal, on which work began exactly 200 years ago, was originally an investment, and a thoroughfare for trade, thriving for only a relatively short time until the railways took over from the canals. Saved largely by devotees, the canals then became a haven for those who loved living off the beaten path in all manner of boats, or who loved — for pleasure rather than for work — navigating Britain’s extensive canal network, in which the Regent’s Canal had once played such a major role, joining the Grand Union Canal to Limehouse Basin and the River Thames.

With such changes in the last 200 years, there is no watertight precedent for refuting contemporary arguments that what London’s canals need is the proximity of aggressive office blocks and acres of speculative high-rise housing, but those advocating it — especially at the King’s Cross development, a 67-acre site east of St. Pancras Basin, between the St. Pancras and King’s Cross railway lines, where there will be eight million square feet (nearly 750,000 square metres) of offices, retail outlets, and a mixture of properties for sale or rent — have no argument that can sway those who prefer their canals to be places of quiet contemplation, or alternative thoroughfares, or places where history still lives, or simply places to dream, and to dream beside water.

For these people — and I count myself as one of them — what we’d like is for those with power and money to keep a sense of proportion when it comes to London’s canals, but instead, and with varying degrees of hypocrisy, developers, architects, corporate interests and politicians from the local to the national level are involved in grafting civic rationales for their development plans — and their turnover — onto what is, essentially, the brash show of money — that of transnational corporate vultures, moving into new state of the art headquarters, and/or investing in speculative housing for the mainly foreign investors who continue to drive London prices so high that, within a generation, the arrogant and careless rich may find that there is no one left to do their menial work, as everyone poor has been driven out of the capital altogether.

In some cases, the investors at work in King’s Cross and elsewhere are also involved in the creation and management of new high-rise blocks for those who are less wealthy, who may well discover that this housing, like the well-intentioned tower blocks of the 1950s to the 1970s, turns out to be as much of a disappointment as so many of those projects were. The only difference this time around, it seems to me, is that the developers are not councils, but private companies, or private-public partnerships, who are interested — solely, it seems — in squeezing far more money out of their tenants than the well-meaning councils of the post-war years would ever have contemplated.

This photo set deals with these extremes — the tranquility of St. Pancras Basin against the high-rise hubris of the King’s Cross developers. It may be that I am wrong, but increasingly, as more and more of London is privatised and ever higher skyscrapers rise up in the City and Canary Wharf, by and for the same people who nearly bankrupted the world in the global financial crash of 2008, and as high-rise unaffordable property continues to replace affordable housing all over the capital, from north to south, and from east to west, I am anxious to forego whatever limited civic improvements might accompany this Darwinian show of wealth and power, and to take back our streets, our houses and our canals for the people.

In future journeys, I will continue to explore these themes, but for now I hope you enjoy this last part — for now — of my journey along the Regent’s Canal.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.