The reason for the East End trip was that British Waterways (BW) is involved in plans to breathe new life into the area, which holds a hidden network of East End rivers and canals that could play a central part in the construction of the Olympic infrastructure and could also form the basis of a beautiful village on the waterways of east London.

The 2012 Olympics have the theme of sustainability and renewability and BW wants to apply these thoughts to the construction of the Olympic venue.

“Aggregates for the construction industry have always been brought up the Thames to the East End before being offloaded into lorries for the remainder of the trip to the construction sites,” said Richard Rutter, regeneration manager for BW London. “Why not take them further on the canals rather than the roads?”

And he’s right. The Olympics will take place just a few hundred metres north of Bow Locks (don’t say it too quickly), which are on the River Lee Navigation that leads into Bow Creek, which runs into the Thames at Canning Town right opposite the Millennium Cock Up and just west of ExCeL.

So it makes a lot of sense to move those aggregates by canal, rather than offload them into lorries and use up road space and fuel.

It won’t, however, be plain sailing to get the area into some semblance of order for this to happen. The London Thames Gateway Development Corporation (LTGDC), London Development Agency (LDA) and Greater London Authority (GLA) published the Lower Lea Valley Vision in May this year. It sets out a blueprint for the sustainable restoration of the waterways and underlines their strategic importance to the life, economy and environment of the area.

£15m lock

The first step would be the construction of a £15m new lock and flood control structure close to Three Mills, which is where our Bow Back trip started and where, for reality TV followers, the studio used for filming the first of the Big Brother series is located.

This project could be operational as early as December 2007 and would restore navigation on the waterways above Three Mills for the first time in 40 years and create a major new transport link between the Thames and the planned developments of the Olympic Park and Stratford City. 

The lock would be able to accommodate 350-tonne barges, each of which can take the same load as 17 lorries. This would save at least 100,000 journeys through London before 2012 and provide a green transport system for waste and recyclates in the future.

The plan, which has been developed in collaboration with a range of stakeholders including the LTGDC, the Olympic Delivery Authority, Transport for London, the Department for Transport, the Environment Agency and English Nature, is part of a blueprint for cleaner, greener, safer and more accessible waterways.

“This is the most important waterway restoration project in the country,” says Mark Bensted, BW’s London director. “It has everything – transport and tourism, wildlife and heritage, regeneration and development. Nowhere else in London can you find such a fabulous concentration of canals and rivers and we passionately believe that they can do for East London what the waterways have done for Birmingham or, indeed, Amsterdam.” 

According to Robin Evans, British Waterways (BW) CEO Bensted has almost got the £18.5m funding for the new lock on the Bow Back Rivers that will open up the whole lower Lea Valley regeneration area. 

But I think it’s going to take a lot of Polish workers to get it all ready for 2012.