ABSTRACT
London’s Turning is the title of a book that captured the spirit of the moment in 2008, when ambitious plans were being discussed to ‘shift the unequal balance of London’s development from the generally affluent west to the relatively deprived east of the city and its region’ (Cohen and Rustin, 2008). The subject of discussion was the Thames Gateway Plan for Sustainable Communities, one of the UK’s largest urban regeneration projects ever undertaken, yet only one in a long line of projects aimed at regenerating East London since the establishment of a metropolitan government for the London region in 1888 (Mann, 2008).
