This 15-acre site on the Isle of Dogs waterfront has been mired in recent scandal, following revelations that Housing Minister Robert Jenrick intervened in the planning process to bypass a £40 million community infrastructure levy. The walk will be led by members of the Tower Hamlets Group of London Renters Union, who have been calling for the site to be used for social housing. Taking in the history of docklands industry as well as later housing and office development, the walk will reveal the many layers of contested history in this heavily gentrified part of London’s most income-deprived borough.

While the regeneration of brownfield sites has too often produced luxury housing that excludes local communities, the current moment of reckoning around the Westferry site raises radical possibilities about how former warehousing, factory and transport hubs might be used to create the housing and community infrastructure that we really need.

Originally a timber and grain yard, the site fronts onto the Millwall Outer Dock, designed by Sir John Fuller and constructed by John Aird & Co in 1868. The former printworks, built in the mid-1980s, had been operated by the Northern & Shell group until 2011 when the activities relocated to a media hub in Luton.

Key to the industrial expansion of nineteenth century London, the Isle of Dogs has undergone several major urban transformations throughout its history: from inaccessible wetlands and secluded marshes, drained by human intervention to create more arable land; through the formation of relentless industrial docklands and trade interchanges; to the monolithic structure of the printworks, now obsolete.