The scale of the Thames Gateway is difficult to imagine: it is thirteen times the size of Manhattan Island. It is also:

• Europe’s largest regeneration project, covering 800km2 and containing 3,000 hectares of previously developed land (brownfield)
• Priority area for regeneration and providing housing for the South-East ‘housing crisis’, due to its proximity to London, good links to Europe, and large areas of brownfield land
• Targeted for 120,000-200,000 new homes and 120,000-180,000 new jobs by 2016 (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister –ODPM)

It is largely floodplain and marshland and was historically an important location for industry, docks, and naval bases due to the presence of the river. Heavy industry continues to occupy the area through to the present day and there are good freight links to the rest of the country.

Due to the area’s proximity to the European continent and its strategic importance as the gateway to London, there are historically important towns such as Chatham, Southend, and Rochester, and boatyards and naval forts dating back many centuries. It also contains rare natural habitats – salt marshes, grassland, and mudflats.

Today it contains some of the UK’s most deprived communities, which have suffered from the decline of the former economic mainstays of industry and port activity. In the popular imagination it has a reputation as a ‘Cockney Siberia’*, lacking ‘culture’, a refuge for East End gangsters, wild and lawless.

The Greater Thames estuary is a wildlife superhighway. It provides a vital link and migration route for many species, including one of the most important sites for waterfowl in the UK supporting an average of over 155,000 wintering waders and wildfowl.

“Ours was the marsh country … the low leaden line beyond, was the river … the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea … the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, published in 1841.

Thames Gateway Regeneration Context
The potential to develop the Thames Gateway as a solution to the increasing housing crisis was first mooted in the late 1980s by the Conservative Government and has been taken up with renewed vigour by the Labour Government in recent years. It has its own Regional Planning Guidance document (RPG9A, 1995, currently in revision) which established the boundaries of the Thames Gateway and strategic objectives.

It is one of the central features of the Government’s “Sustainable Communities: building for the future” plan which aims to produce a “step-change in housing supply” including “new sustainable communities in regions of high demand, such as the Thames Gateway.” The aim is to build at higher densities on brownfield land to solve the shortfall in housing supply, especially affordable housing for key workers such as nurses, teachers and policemen.

The Thames Gateway is the most important of four UK growth areas and within it fourteen ‘zones of change’ have been identified as the locations for concentrated regeneration and new building. The south-west Essex zones are targeted for 16,000 extra homes and 21,000 new jobs by 2016.

A major catalyst for change in the Thames Gateway is the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL), which will also be used for high-speed commuter trains from Kent and East London to the centre of the city. The CTRL does not however have a station in Thurrock.

*Jonathan Glancey, ‘Taking the yellow-brick road to subtopia’, The Guardian, 30 July 2003.