‘What’s that?’ A little girl pointed up at us, wearing an almost comical expression of horror. ‘It’s a horsey,’ said another little girl, clearly better versed in the ways of the country. ‘And it’s got socks on.’ She was right, too: Taylor, 18.2 hands, dark bay, not only wearing blue bandages around each shin but carrying a nervous journalist on top.
To think this was my idea. Last year I met a Canadian from one of the glittering Canary Wharf apartment blocks on the Isle of Dogs, east London, who told me she rode every Saturday in an urban park called Mudchute Farm. The memory only surfaced when High Life asked me to write about the borough of Tower Hamlets, newly catapulted into the international spotlight by the arrival next door of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012 and British Airways’ new route from City Airport to New York.
I thought a larky little canter around these east London wolds — hillocks of spoil discarded when Millwall Dock was dug in the 1870s, hence ‘Mudchute’ — would give me a good view of the challenge ahead. If I pointed Taylor due north, the growing cluster of designer buildings squatting on former docklands — Canary Wharf and Citigroup Tower by Cesar Pelli, HSBC Tower by Lord Foster and so on — were perfectly framed by his furry ears.
What I couldn’t see was the densely populated, 8 sq mile, low- rise borough beyond, running up to Victoria Park in the north, and from Liverpool Street station in the west to the River Lea (or Lee) in the east. It’s had a few lucky breaks — the border lassoes the Tower of London and takes in half of Tower Bridge, plus the retail and fashion hubs of Spitalfields and Shoreditch and the much-loved Columbia Road Flower Market — but Tower Hamlets is also a borough with problems. It has the highest percentage of children eligible for free school meals in Britain.
We gazed at the skyline. ‘I remember there being nothing but those,’ said Kimberley from the stables, pointing at two housing blocks. ‘And I’m only 33.’ I temped at the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) in the 1980s, when Docklands was Europe’s biggest civil engineering project. Every time I go to Canary Wharf, or fly over it, I’m stunned by the offices, malls and concrete Celtic knots of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR). I can’t believe they actually did it.
Still reeling from Mudchute Farm — how could I have missed, in my adopted city of 20 years, a stableful of horses tended by little girls in giant hats and teeny jodhpurs, a farmful of pigs, chickens and sheep, and a café with its own bread oven and chef who forages for wild plums and berries? — I took the DLR north to investigate the Canary Wharf malls. There are four of them, filled with every high-street name you can imagine, including Jamie Oliver’s latest wheeze, Jamie’s Kitchen. From the Four Seasons Hotel, I could see the 21st-century Thames and practically swim in it — the glass-walled pool was parallel, full of the ferociously fit urbanites who have replaced the dockers.
