ABSTRACT
No evaluation of inner city policy can possibly exclude events in the London Docklands since the area was designated as a development corporation: London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) in 1981. The claims made on both sides are simply too extreme to ignore. For the government, the Docklands experiment points the way to the future. In his review of progress on inner city policy in April 1987, John Patten, then Minister of Housing and Construction, commented that
Radical and direct government action is being focused through the UDCs to tackle problems that the local authorities cannot and/or will not deal with alone and where the private sector has been deterred from investing. The two UDCs so far established, in Merseyside and Docklands have shown how successful this approach can be-in London Dockland spectacularly so.
