Architecture & Water documentary. Part 3: Water park

It's now been over 30 years since London's waterways were last a site of significant industrial activity. That change presented a golden opportunity to introduce new uses, but it's one that London's been slow to grasp. However, perhaps that's about to change. An increasing population is choosing to live on the water, while others are asking whether the water may yet fulfill its potential to serve as a territory shared by all Londoners. This place of exchange right at the heart of the city is now a void. One of the biggest underutilised assets that the City of London had is its relationship with the river. You've got this monumental river here. There's lots of old steps, but a lot of those steps are not in use anymore. Health and safety has gone crazy because nobody wants people to go close to the river. The modern story of the Thames is one of colossal missed opportunities. If you think about it, this is a public space that is seven times the size of Hyde Park, but for the vast majority of us, all we will ever do is look at it from a distance. We seem to have a kind of generational crisis of confidence in what fills that space, what has the capacity to reinvest that space with the sort of political, social charge. If you could submerge Upper Thames Street and really free up all of this space along the front of the river, that you'd have this amazing connection from really the west end right down to the Tower of London. And that if you added further across the city on two sides, do we need bridges? I don't know. Maybe we should have more connections across the waterway like we used to. If you go back to Shakespearean times, I don't know if you saw Shakespeare in Love, I mean it's this beautiful scene. The whole of the river is full of little rowing boats because that's how people moved through London from east to west, from one side to another side because there were hardly any bridges. How might a new river crossing be thought of as somewhere that really founds a new part of London? There is something really strange about our current political condition that means we as urbanists just lose the plot when we get close to water. Think about the Garden Bridge or Boris Island or the Cable Car or the Rolling Bridge or even the London Eye. These things are reducing our interaction with water to this absurd level of a spectacle. The river could become an area where people actually undertook recreational activities. There was a long history of swimming and water sports in the Thames from the naked jockeys who used to ride horses from Battersea Park across to Chelsea again, to water skiing, to endurance swimming. It was only in the 1950s when the water was declared biologically dead, which was partly to do with the bombing of the Bazalgette sewers, which were then leaking loads of sewage into the river, that we all began to think about the river as being this contaminated waterway that we would need to have our stomachs pumped if we went anywhere near it. What part of our scheme is all about is changing people's perception of the river and opening up a debate about how the river could be used into the future. We started off by having proposals for swimming actually in the river, which, in it, The Hampstead Heath, the Highgate and the Hampstead Ponds are, they're part of the river fleet. They're dammed, likewise is part of the Westbourne, so the Thames would just be adding to the range of swimming opportunities. We see the Baths as part of more of an urban landscape, so it's not something which has dropped in from Mars and is part of the civic sort of space along the edge of the river. The Thames, I'd need to see a few water tests before going in there, but it would be a dream, it would be fantastic. Imagine to be able to have like a beach by the Thames, that'd be amazing. How embarrassing that other cities are getting floating swimming places in the centre of town and we haven't got one yet. There is this incredible feeling, it's very, very similar to getting into the sea in a large bay and then looking back where you've come from and this sense of space. The edge of the Thames has always been a great place of invention, social invention, for architecture. If you look at the Strand, it's sort of full of ideas about how to be metropolitan, you know, so Bazalgette lays his sewer there, the Adams brothers come up with this idea of the terrace and then you get... Why couldn't you have floating islands? These floating islands could probably collect the rubbish from coming down the river but they could also be powered by the fantastic tide that comes in twice a day. The idea is that it's a whole floating village which has a floating pub in the centre of it, what village would be the same without one? We felt it's important that they should be surrounded by blue, by water, so it's effectively like a blue belt. In the same way you have a green belt that protects villages and keeps their kind of essence and their character, a floating village should have a blue belt so it's very much has an independent and exquisite unique quality to it. We see this very much as a sort of model for how floating cities could work. There are four piles, so the whole thing goes up and down with the tide and the brow, the entrance brow, is hinged at the bottom and goes up and down with the tide as well. We did not only manage to create an amazing spot and provide affordable housing, well living, but it was also an amazing community. We have these two floating event platforms and one of them would contain a Lido with a cover over it, but the idea is that they could actually move and be reshaped to form say a stage or something in the middle. As we're standing around the Corniche here, people could gather around and see events, they could see a floating cinema or things, and of course it could also be moved out of the way to actually create additional mooring points when you wanted to say have a boat show and you could actually use the whole of this space. I haven't found any other example of a water development where there is that kind of nomadic movement, what I really kind of like, like okay this is a base but if we want you just undo your ropes. In the weekend we go to Richmond, anchor up there, and instead of Tower Bridge I've got Richmond Park as my back garden. Being able to move every few weeks in a city like London is an extraordinary thing and provides you with an incredible way of existing with some sense of freedom. I live on a boat, I'm incredibly lucky I have this unique and changing perspective on the city, but the real question is how can these waterways that London has, how can they intersect more productively with conventional architecture and city making? There was a proposal a few years ago by a developer working or kind of competing to build a housing project near the centre of London and someone, I don't know if it was the architect or the developer or their quantity surveyor or someone in the team, had realised that as part of their scheme they could build a canal through the centre of the site, bring with it moorings and all of the kind of the things that people like to see on canals, boats and people, and indeed the whole investment in building a canal, it's obviously quite an expensive thing to do, could be covered by the increased price that you could sell flats for because they were next to a canal. So you can actually, following this model, build canals for free because of their huge impact on property prices. What we have to do is to be much more adaptable and forget the old models and forget the idea that we only have a solution which is about protection and we actually have to try and learn to kind of live with water and to plan for it over a longer term future rather than just the short political five-year terms. The river could be a living part of the city. This waterway is in a better shape than it's ever been in before. We need to seize the moment and give this waterway back to Londoners. I think the most important thing to think about is how powerful people can be when they come together and say this is important and we want to see a river again and we want to change the place, the urban place we live in. Okay, we've had no say in how it's been or how it's been put together before but now that we live here we want to have our say and we want to make it better. you know i'll never wait but you know i'll never run because if i can i'll hold this word and i'll see that it gets done because all that i see is yours