Iain Sinclair on The Bad Old Days

Seeing that bit of the Thames Path by Lovell's Wharf the other night when I was investigating the interesting ship reminded me that Graham sent me a link the other day which reminds us that it was not ten years ago that Greenwich was an almost impassable enclave - a place so close and yet so remote that only the most hardened of tourists visited. The bad old days before the Jubilee Line and the extension on the DLR when the only way to get here was by the foot tunnel or the overground.

Iain Sinclair was visiting the Dome just before it opened, back in 1999. His jaded eye makes me really sit up and realise that Greenwich has come a long way in just a very few years. Not all of it is good, but a lot is. We have regenerated - a bit - we just haven't noticed it happening.

Perhaps now is a good time to realise that we have a new problem - how to stop all this regeneration from throwing out the baby with the bathwater and leaving Greenwich with no character whatsoever...