The making and remaking of Hackney Wick, 1870--2014: from urban edgeland to Olympic fringe

This paper is concerned with issues of urban change in areas of London that have become the focus of regeneration strategies predicated on accommodating growth and development within existing city boundaries. Its focus is in the Lower Lea Valley in East London, which developed in the nineteenth century in the context of its peripheral location with respect to central London and which continues to lie at the seam between urban authorities. Today, this whole area is subject to regeneration plans based on addressing the physical and social manifestations of this transforming peripherality -- including environmental impacts of industrialization, post-industrial piecemeal development, spatial disconnection, and long-standing patterns of social deprivation -- by creating a framework geared towards attracting new investment, population and employment and, in the process, addressing the impediments to change that are seen to have been posed by fractured local policy. Taking one small part of this larger area, Hackney Wick, which is beside the 2012 London Olympic site in the London Borough of Hackney, the paper turns to planning history to explore its development from the nineteenth century in relation to urban boundaries. It uses this exploration as the basis for reflecting on the significance of contemporary boundary adjustments and plans predicated on facilitating the creation of local centrality for the remaking of an urban ‘edgeland’.