Greening the Thames.

The only new park on the Thames for a hundred years attempts to civilize the relentless philistine flow of London's money down towards the derelict docks in the east. It could be a real local focus.

As everyone knows, London's Docklands have been radically transformed over the last 20 years, with a slow but irresistible glacier of money flowing from the City, the traditional centre of power, moving towards the east and overwhelming everything in its track with dull but flashy office towers, semi-private condos, yet leaving here and there a tragic fragment of previous structures preserved isolated apparently by accident.

One of the earliest signs of new thinking about the river and its role in the city was the creation some 30 years ago of the Thames Flood Barrier, the dramatic engineering structure that prevents the centre of the capital being inundated when floods of water are coming down river, and high tides advancing from the east. Until quite recently, the Barrier seemed almost impossibly far away. But now, the whole area has begun to be altered by the relentless cash flow, which was, as far as possible, directed to producing something like a European city rather than an American one by the now defunct London Docklands Development Committee (LDDC). As part of its strategy, the LDDC was determined to create a park sequence which could give the whole eastern area of the gaunt Royal Docks a sense of cohesion and urbanity, of greenness in the grey, and a prospect of higher values and vitality to adjacent sites. A framework plan was produced which called for a landscape link between the Royal Victoria Dock, through a projec ted urban village, to a new generous park next to the barrier. It was to be the first important open space of any kind created on London's river in the twentieth century.

Patel Taylor, working with Groupe Signes and Ove Arup & Partners, won the design competition. Quite a little park on the Victoria Dock (AR April 2001) was the first result of their project. At nine hectares, the much bigger Thames Barrier Park is ordered in a few clear moves. Much the largest part of the site is made into a plateau criss-crossed by paths. But it is far from being the kind of featureless plain common in London's twentieth-century parks because it is organized visually by a geometry of clumps of different varieties of trees on a beautiful prairie of wildflowers. Perceptions of the river and surrounding new housing are constantly changed by a structure that is both geometrically rigorous and botanically relaxed.

Into this artificial plain (created partly by the process of reclaiming a site heavily polluted by defunct industry) is carved a great green trench. Its depth and size are intended to evoke the docks that used to exist on the site. Its axis is determined by the line between the entrance water piazza and the dramatic silver armadillo backs of the Barrage out in the river. In the piazza, fountains splashing on stone pavements welcome you from the car park, which is soon to be topped by a light railway station and linked by bridge across the road to the other elements of the landscape composition. Perspective down the green dock is enhanced by planting the battered walls with lonicera nitida, and by making very long parallel herbaceous beds full of plants chosen to be colourful and fragrant in most seasons, with paved and grass promenades between. The long lines were scented and sparkling when I went there, but I shall be interested to see how they will survive against the savage attentions of the average Londo n litter lout. Bridges cross the chasm linking the two halves of the plateau, and offering dramatic views of the cleft and its relationship to the Barrier.

At the end of the green dock is a delicate pavilion for remembrance of the war dead of Newham, the local borough. It has irregularly placed slender steel columns supporting a thin slatted timber roof topped with stiff transparent polycarbonate. From here, you can contemplate the river and the promenade, a properly ordered walk on the river side (rarely to be found in any of the new developments down in Docklands). Detailing here is robust and direct in the functional, nautical traditions of canal and harbour side. North, east and west perimeters of the plateau are surrounded by wide pedestrian cum cycle paths. To the north, the way is raised on an embankment so you overlook the whole composition, down to the Barrier and to the more eastern parts of the river, where still flourishing old-fashioned industry provides a sublime backdrop, dark, sinister and dramatic. Along east and west sides of the plateau, paths are flanked by well grown shrubberies, which mediate between the dense walls of private housing (com pleted in the west, expected in the east) and the public interior of the space.

Back on the plateau is the only other building in the park: the cafe, which is clearly and simply made of concrete, glass and great oak timbers, a solid yet elegant structure detailed with the directness that pervades the whole place. It looks out towards the Thames and its barrier over the soft meadow landscape that changes in colour and form with the seasons. Only time can tell how the park will be used, and what people will do to it, but at the moment, it looks as if it really will become the 'special place with its own clear identity' which the LDDC called for in the competition conditions. And if the proposed landscaped links are built between the little park on the Victoria Dock, and this new one, London will have a green urban sequence as fine as the one Nash made for the Prince Regent 200 years ago.

Design team

Groupe Signes and Patel Taylor

Structural engineer

Ove Amp & Partners

Photographs

Martin Charles