Cultural placemaking: Unveiling London’s latest cultural quarter

Tell a Royal Docks resident you work on cultural placemaking and they may tell you to hop it – and rightly so. This is a place – and a people – already steeped in culture. Once the largest enclosed docks in the world, the Royal Docks sits in the UK’s youngest and most diverse borough, Newham, rich in history and identity. All the ingredients are here.

I’d never heard of the Royal Docks before applying to become head of cultural programme and partnerships there. The brief: put culture centre stage in the area’s regeneration.

Having co-led Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre through its glory days of international touring, Anglo-French collaborations, outdoor arts and developing a second theatre – I was up for the challenge. And the docks are compelling.

Constructed between 1855 and 1921, through investment in dockside innovations, cranes, railways, warehouses and factories, the Royal Docks became east London’s biggest employer. But with the advent of container shipping, they closed in the 1980s, leaving empty sites, shuttered pubs and derelict halls as workers left.

Creating a cultural quarter

When I saw Royal Victoria Dock – the first of the three huge expanses of water that make up ‘the Royals’ – my nerves vanished. But then the language started: Cultural Placemaking, Meanwhile, Developers…

And the question: how do you create yet another cultural quarter in London, in this extraordinary post-industrial area, with 260 acres of water and wide swathes of brownfield sites? The answer: you don’t create it – it’s already here. You just unveil it.

Our vision became London’s Cultural Engine – a place that makes culture, not just stages it. A hub for creativity, ideas and production. The fit was perfect: the Royal Docks is London’s only Enterprise Zone, at the westerly tip of the Thames Estuary Production Corridor, and industry and manufacturing are in its DNA.

And by becoming a place of making, the docks could fuel London’s cultural ecosystem, create jobs and support local talent.  By ‘our’ vision, I mean the 1,000+ residents, businesses, creatives and developers who helped shape the strategy.

So, how did we achieve it?

The short answer was by unlocking space, supporting creatives and making work. Over five years, our team has worked with developers and businesses to carve out affordable creative workspaces. Today, there are eight facilities – from The Factory’s film and music studios to Bow Arts at Royal Albert Wharf, boutique creative factories at The Pump House and Brunel Street Works, and incubators at the Royal Docks Centre for Sustainability.

Around 200 – 300 creative businesses now operate here. These creatives form a network, meeting monthly to programme activities and festivals. We also launched a Cultural and Creative Workforce programme, supporting Creative Newham’s producer traineeships, event management training and pathways for local young people.

This all fed into the first Royal Docks Originals Festival (RDO) – a biennial celebration of work made here – launched just last month. Two years in the making, RDO was a joint endeavour of creatives, residents and businesses. We called it ‘a movement, not just a moment’. Held over three weeks in September and Octover, it featured over 50 projects, 146 artists and 1,500 residents.

The RDO programme showcased our spaces and talent. Highlights included Rekindling, a fire installation by French company Carabosse with 16 local musicians and 500 residents; new public art with schools and locals by Chila Burman, Graphic Rewilding, and Joy Yamusangie; and projects in The Compressor House – once a refrigerated dock warehouse. A careers day brought 70 young people to explore job pathways with representatives from ABBA Voyage, English National Ballet, Excel London, BBC, Broadwick Live and more.

No need to import culture – unlock it

RDO went better than expected, but there’s more to do. And that bring me to ‘the water’.  Perhaps the boldest strand of our strategy concerns the docks’ defining feature – 260 acres of impounded dock water.

Activating the docks is a huge challenge but also provides a unique opportunity to position them as London’s international centre for water-based arts and events. In 2021, we commissioned a modest pilot ‘water project’ and later we started to expand on this, working with Greenwich and Docklands International Festival on water-based events and with Totally Thames. Building on this, we have completed a strategy and feasibility study for water-based work, with Rekindling, staged across both land and water at Royal Victoria Dock, marking our first major step,

The challenges were significant, not least because the fire installation was under London City Airport’s flight path. After months of meetings with airport officials, pilot groups and safety advisers, a plan was approved. The result: a spectacular event with 7,500 audience members, delivered safely, on budget and with immense community pride.

The ambition to become London’s international centre for water-based arts and events isn’t without obstacles. There is a scarcity of large-scale water-based works anywhere and resourcing the work is challenging. So, we’re exploring the potential to develop a consortium of co-producers with similar aspirations worldwide, inspired by Australia’s Major Festivals Initiative and UK’s Without Walls.

Another challenge is the dock itself: a vast rectangular basin bordered by housing and public buildings, making logistics like ticketing and ‘creative reveals’ complex. But starting small and having a big vision seems to have expanded imaginations. What once seemed impossible now sparks “how can we?” instead of “no”.

The Royal Docks story is unfolding. But what’s clear is that culture doesn’t need to be imported or imposed here. It is already written into the place, the people, the history and the future. Our job is to unlock it, amplify it and make it visible – authentically, ambitiously and together.