Curating the Postmodern City: London Docklands 1980-1998

The London Docklands Development Corporation’s urban renewal programme during the 1980s and 1990s was and remains the subject of much derision and despair. Dissatisfaction at the political character of the work and its insensitive realisation notwithstanding, the architecture and urban character of the regeneration have been largely characterized as a violation of both urbanity and good taste. However, the LDDC employed a number of significant architects and planners who had been closely involved in the more ostensibly egalitarian programmes of postwar urban renewal and New Town development, including Whyndham Thomas, Gordon Cullen and Edward Hollamby. This paper explores the presence of their thinking as revealed in the material fabric of Docklands housing. It argues that rather than a manifestation of failed planning and bad architecture, what we encounter in the Docklands is more accurately read as both a natural evolution of modernist planning approaches but also a perceptive prediction of the future identity of east London as a space of leisure, consumption and identity, in short, of desire. Examining buildings, drawings, interviews and developer’s promotional literature, this paper describes the ways a new urban realm was manufactured that superseded bounded modernist ideas of the city, replacing them instead with an unstable and indistinct sense of urbanity. Relying less on controlled articulation by architecture and more on the ongoing curation of perception and memory through non-planned hybridity, the LDDC’s vision, far from failing, gets to the heart of the postmodern condition.