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Greenwich has that elusive characteristic aspired to by devotees of the self-help manual: a well-rounded personality. Resisting the temptation to wallow in a glorious past embodied in the architectural riches of West Greenwich, the area is forging into the future. The brave new world of Greenwich Peninsula’s Millennium Village is a £250 million, 1,400-home template for responsible 21st-century urban living — and there is more to come.
A sharp rise in property prices when the DLR was extended to Greenwich in late 1999 sent property buyers scuttling eastwards, away from the elegant but increasingly unaffordable Georgiana that edges the park, towards the more downto-earth early Victorian terrace workers’ cottages scattered round the sturdy brick chimneys of Greenwich power station, and beyond, to the windswept wastes of the North Greenwich peninsula.
Shaking off its somewhat shady past as a malarial bog, site of chemical-weapons research and home to the Millennium Dome, the 400-acre peninsula is the grateful recipient of one of the UK’s largest ever regeneration schemes. The eco-friendly Legoland-style apartment blocks of the Millennium Village — with its cycle paths, its 50-acre ecology park and its low-energy Sainsbury’s — are to be joined by a ‘vibrant new urban quarter’. Over the next 20 years the consortium Meridian Delta will spend £4 billion on 10,000 new homes, as well as offices, shops, healthcare centres and schools. Bert Martin, director of Meridian Delta, is confident that ‘Greenwich Peninsula will set new benchmarks in urban mixed-use development and become one of London’s finest districts’.
Of course the area’s green credentials predate the advent of the eco-enthusiasts. Crowds have flocked for centuries to its incomparable park which sweeps down towards the Thames, cleaving Greenwich in two. Here couples court, squirrels torment dogs and benches are dotted with those lost in thought or mesmerised by the view over the river to the glittering glass towers of Canary Wharf and the City.
It is the winning combination of park — ‘bits of it are very pretty and landscaped; bits of it are wild and secret’ — and pub — ‘nice ones; rough ones; gastro ones; microbrewery ones and riverfront ones’ — that drew resident Simon Reid to the area, as well as its proximity to Deptford and Charlton ‘where cheap food and clothes can be bought’.
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