45 Squared 9) COMPRESSOR SQUARE, E16
Borough of Newham, 50m×30m
Here's a hypothetical square which was never built, except it's in the National Street Gazetteer so it officially exists. Locationwise it's in the Royal Docks immediately adjacent to Royal Albert station, which is renowned as the DLR station furthest away from anyone's home. But had plans gone ahead it would by now have been surrounded by a mass of highrise development, as pictured here in a complex hybrid planning application from 2014. The long building on the waterfront is Newham council's HQ which was already present, but the surrounding densely-packed blocks are part of a hilariously optimistic Anglo-Chinesevision championed by Mayor Boris Johnson which ultimately neverhappened. Compressor Square would have been where the red arrow is.
Eight new squares were planned along the 1 kilometre length of the ABP development, each surrounded by a canopy of trees in an attempt to replicate the smart residential townscapes of west London. In the end only one such square was built, one stop up the DLR at Beckton Park where a huddle of empty office blocks now forms a tumbleweed memorial to entrepreneurial hubris. But nothing up this western end ever got off the drawing board, let alone off the ground, so what's here is pretty much all grass right up to the Holiday Inn and Rowing Club Boathouse. The exception is a long redbrick building called Compressor House tucked below a bend in the DLR viaduct, which is the unlikely reason the adjacent piazza was due to be called Compressor Square.
Compressor House was built in 1914 as cold storage for cargo, one of a series of buildings set back behind a long chain of warehouses along the northern edge of Royal Albert Dock. Nigh all of those have gone but this smartbuilding was retained, complete with the original hoists, rails and winching machinery used to move produce internally, alas in an increasing state of disrepair. You may be surprised that to hear that the £1.725m needed for renovation was sourced from the last government's Levelling-Up Fund, because Newham somehow managed to claw a chunk of that. Their ultimate intention was to "bring the building back into active use for both financial and placemaking purposes" and that procurement process is now underway. So if you have a unique vision that supports digital innovation, community wealth building, good growth and UK Government funding outcomes you have until 24th March to submit an Expression of Interest, and hey presto your organisation could be leveraging Compressor House as early as September.
The refurbishment of Compressor House is nigh complete but still quarantined behind a ring of barriers erected by contractors MGL Projects. It looks very smart with its Port Of London Authority medallion above the main doors, and I can well imagine the Mayor walking in to open something culturally enthusing in six months time. Out front is a semi-formal array of trees surrounded by low shrubbery that looks like it may be semi-dead, and beyond that isn't the square the 2014 developers proposed but an access road threaded along the dockside in the 1990s. It has hardly any traffic and also a huge metal bar across the carriageway to ensure that no large vehicle accidentally proceeds and smashes into the DLR viaduct.
And beyond that is just a lot of gravel and grass. The grass stretches down to the dockside and is already dotted with daisies despite it only being early March. Around the edge are more seats and benches than might be deemed necessary, although staff from the neighbouring Newham council offices probably spill out in the summer and I suspect they get good use when there's a regatta. Instead I got to watch a couple of sturdy locals exercising an Alsatian, the kind that's too jumpy to be let off its lead so was instead forced to run round in circles while attempting to grab a plastic ring. Most of this area should have been flats, remember, offering DLR passengers a hemmed-in journey rather than a broad panorama across City Airport.
Intriguingly the emptyoffice blocks up near Beckton Park station are now destined to become student accommodation instead, not much of it affordable, because foreign parents are all too happy to pay over the odds for their offspring to live in converted open-plan hutches immediately adjacent to a roaring flightpath. The team in charge of that transformation look and sound insufferable, judging by their RAD website, but at least they're doing something to try to bring this dead stripe of dockside to life. Meanwhile the area in front of Compressor House remains a development hiatus, there being no current plans to contribute its potential to our capital's housing crisis. Compressor Square thus exists only as a virtual red line in the National Street Gazetteer designated 'Under construction', and the only body that could delete it is Newham Council's highways team who, amusingly, are based immediately nextdoor.
