ABSTRACT
The competing visions of regeneration that dominated the political debate about the redevelopment of Docklands in the decade before the LDDC’S arrival left their mark on local people’s perceptions as the Corporation embarked upon its “vast task” (House of Lords 1981:13, para. 8.1). Labour’s plans to retain the docks and attract manufacturing industry not only appealed to the dockland communities but also raised expectations, or reinforced existing beliefs, that this was possible, sentiments ably demonstrated in the comments of this former docker:
I went in [to the docks] on…February 29th 1960…and Friday 13th [June 1980] was the day I finished… and I only finished then because of a conspiracy of getting the docks here moved… You’ve probably been told a lot of lies about regeneration of a derelict area. It’s total nonsense … They say it quite
openly: “containerization, palletization, modernization”, that is why they moved. Total nonsense. We were doing that since sort of middle sixties because the place got flattened, especially the docks, so everything was brand new and every modern equipment that was coming onto the market we was picking up… If it wasn’t for [the LDDC] we’d still be working in there.
