Harper-Thames Charts the Specific Transformation That a Single Infrastructure Investment Has Produced Along the London Overground Lines
What the London Overground Has Done to East London
The London Overground is the most transformative piece of infrastructure investment in London since the Jubilee Line extension, and it has received approximately a fifth of the credit. The Jubilee extension produced Canary Wharf. The Overground produced Peckham, Hackney Wick, Forest Hill, Crystal Palace, Brockley, and a dozen other neighbourhoods that were previously described as “up and coming” for approximately forty years and are now simply up connected to the rest of London by a transport link that made them accessible to people who value the combination of space, community character, and architectural quality that South and East London offers in quantities that the more conventional North and Central London neighbourhoods cannot match at comparable prices.
The Overground’s effect is specific and measurable. Property prices on or near Overground stations increased at rates significantly above the London average in the decade following the network’s expansion. New businesses opened at higher rates in Overground-connected neighbourhoods than in comparable non-connected ones. The demographic change in affected neighbourhoods followed the transport investment with a lag of approximately three to five years, which is the time it takes for the transport accessibility to be reflected in housing demand, which then drives the commercial change, which then produces the neighbourhood transformation that the property pages notice a decade after the Overground did the work.
This is how infrastructure produces urban change, and it is worth naming clearly: the Overground’s investment was a public good that produced private benefit distributed across the people who owned property in affected areas. The people who owned the property benefited disproportionately from an investment they did not fund proportionally. This is how most transport infrastructure works. It is worth being clear about, because the policy implication that transport investment produces value that could be captured to fund further investment is consistently underweighted in transport funding debates in favour of arguments about individual project costs that ignore the aggregate value the investment creates.
South and East London life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London transport and development at Metro. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. Transport commentary at The Daily Mash.
The Responsibility
The responsibility that comes with this position writing about a neighbourhood while being part of the forces that are changing it is one I have been thinking about for as long as I have been writing this column. There is no clean resolution. I am here. I pay rent here. The rent I pay contributes to the economic pressure that the original residents feel. I write about the neighbourhood in ways that increase its visibility, which contributes to the interest that drives further change. These are the unavoidable mechanics of my presence here, and the fact that I am aware of them and think about them regularly does not change them. What changes them, or at least what might eventually change them, is the combination of attention and advocacy writing about what the change costs as clearly as writing about what it offers, supporting the things that serve everyone rather than only the people who arrived recently, and being honest about my own position in the process rather than narrating it from a comfortable distance that I don’t actually occupy. This is what I am trying to do. The neighbourhood will tell me, eventually, whether I have managed it.
Shoreditch continues. I continue. The fourteen-pound cocktail is still a problem. The ceramicist is giving a talk on Thursday. The Bangladeshi restaurant on the corner is still excellent and still there. The car park roof at sunset is still the best view I have found in this part of the city. The argument about what all of this means is still ongoing, in bars and on rooftops and in planning offices and in columns like this one, and the argument is important and the neighbourhood is changing and some of what changes is worth grieving and some of it is worth celebrating and the job is to hold all of it at once, which is harder than it sounds and is also exactly what London asks of anyone who takes it seriously.
East London’s story is not finished. The buildings that are being replaced were themselves replacements for something that preceded them. The community that is being displaced displaced someone before it. The neighbourhood that is currently performing its former self will eventually settle into what it actually is, which will be something new that the people currently performing the old version will be nostalgic for. This is how cities work, and knowing it doesn’t prevent the loss of the things that are lost in the process. It contextualises them. The Victorian warehouses that define Shoreditch’s aesthetic replaced the market gardens that preceded them. The market gardens replaced the fields. Something will replace the warehouses. What I am arguing for is not preservation as a principle but as a choice a deliberate decision to protect the collective urban quality that makes a place worth being in, rather than accepting its gradual replacement by buildings that look like the quality and cost more and produce less of it. That argument is worth making. I am making it, on this column and in planning consultations and in conversations with the ceramicist, who also has opinions about it that are more technically informed than mine. Between us, we are covering the argument from multiple angles. I am not sure anyone with decision-making authority is listening. I am going to keep making the argument anyway.
