The project will transform almost 5,000 acres, straddled by three of London’s most deprived boroughs — Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham — into a massive network of canals bordered by homes, businesses and waterfront cafés. The Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, the man behind the new £19 million Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, will work with Water City Group to advise how almost six miles of rivers and canals in the Lower Lea Valley can create a “green artery” through the heart of the Thames Gateway, copying the system that makes Amsterdam so picturesque. Van Egeraat has worked on more than a hundred similar projects in eight countries.

Andrew Mawson, who founded the Water City Group, says: “Twenty-five years ago this area was a complete mess. It’s still a mess but it’s slowly starting to look better and the catalyst for that has been London getting the Olympics. If you look at West London it’s green, but East London is brown — and why is that? It’s all down to wealth. We want to build a new place that cuts across those old boundaries.

“We know this scheme is ambitious but it will work. Just look at Canary Wharf: no one believed in that when it was first suggested, and I can remember when planners wanted to fill in the Limehouse Basin because they said children would fall in and drown.”

Plans for the area, announced by the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation, include a £27 million school, new canal basins, moorings and flood defences and even a “Beckton Beach” created from thousands of tons of imported sand. There will also be parks in the Olympic zone at Abbey Mills, Leven Road and Leamouth, lots more bridges and boat-hire facilities. Perhaps controversially, some of the proposals put forward include moving City Airport further east.

At the moment the area is a fragmented and unattractive environment, with a horrible horizon of vulture-like cranes and abandoned brownfield sites. But computer-generated images of how the place will look when work is complete show a bustling business environment criss-crossed by bright blue waterways and dotted with cafés bristling with parasols.

A similar project, across four Amsterdam boroughs, recently transformed a comparable site. Over five years €30 million (about £20 million) was spent to create jobs and lift land values in “neighbourhoods in crisis”. Jim Sneddon, the corporation’s director of development, says: “These canals and rivers have simply been forgotten over the decades but they have the potential to be something really special. It will be a bit like Amsterdam, yes, but even so it will still be uniquely London. We want it to be a flagship project that planners from around the world come and admire. We’re very excited about it.”

Sneddon says that the waterways will be cleaned and the River Lea will be managed so that the water system never dries out. Eventually the waterways will be navigable from the Thames and through the Lea Valley up to Hertfordshire. “We want a huge range of house prices in the area to make a proper community. At the moment, anyone who makes a lot of money in the East End has to move to Essex to get a bigger house. Any building next to water is automatically more attractive and more valuable. There will be £1 million homes in the East End sooner than we think.”

Mawson says that the water city, in conjunction with the Olympics, will lift land values in East London, but only if the right architects are employed. He cites the example of Melbourne, which hosted the 1956 Olympics. “Talk to the locals there and they will tell you that the Olympics did nothing for them; in fact, it left a deprived area with more poverty than when they started. We are determined that won’t happen in East London. We want to raise property values and leave people with something.”

So presumably that means no Amsterdam-style cannabis cafés or red light district? Mawson, who was a clergyman for 25 years before he took up urban regeneration, is quite emphatic about that one. “Certainly not!”

Fact file

The planned Water City will involve:

www.watercity.org.uk; www.bbbc.org.uk

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