Architecture & Water documentary. Part 1: A river runs through it

Water has played a central role in shaping London's cultural and architectural identity since the Romans first settled the banks of the Thames 2,000 years ago. However, it's a resource that we've recently failed to nurture with the care that it demands. We've handed over decisions about its future to engineers and property speculators. Isn't it time that we began to think of alternatives, ones that might contribute to the creation of a more sustainable and egalitarian London? As potential sites for housing and industry, leisure and transport use, the Thames and its associated waterways present enormous possibilities for London's future growth. Let's explore some of the most radical ideas about how that potential might be realised. In the 20th century, the car influenced the way in which town planning was established. Water is going to do the same thing for the 21st century. London, of course, has faced the threat of rising water levels for over 30 years. The Thames barrier is a good example. Handling flooding has changed and the threat of flooding has changed dramatically. 18th and 19th century cities are just not designed to cope with this amount of water, so we have to change the way in which we tackle it. This is the sort of place where, of course, you could do serious flood capacity. Making space for water is about allowing water during a flood to actually flow through parts of our towns and cities, but in a way in which we've worked out where it will go first. Instead of, say, an industrial model or a Victorian model of getting water out of the city as quickly as possible in pipes, keeping it in the city and using it as an asset, as a floodplain, as a feature, as somewhere people want to go and visit. In front of the Tate Modern is an example. That is floodable space and it all eases the pressure on the river. It could be a building that is flood resilient, which means that it can cope with water coming in, or it could be resistant, a sort of dry-proof building, which means that it prevents water coming into the building altogether. It could be elevated on stilts to allow water to flow underneath it. It could be floating and, of course, it could be amphibious as well. One of the most extreme examples we have is a house that we've been designing in Marlow on the River Thames, and it sits on a buoyant base. So as the building rises up, the water will actually go in underneath the building, so it actually is reducing the flood risk to other people in the area. If the Thames was the thing that made London the world's first global city, could it also be the means to make it the world's first resilient city? When we think of the Thames, we tend to think of just that very small section in central London with the Tate and City Hall and Tower Bridge, but actually that's just a small chunk of a much larger infrastructure. You've got to consider things like the canals, hidden rivers, reservoirs. All of these have a part to play, and if you're going to have a meaningful conversation about climate change and architecture's relationship to the water, then you have to consider that much bigger network. Of course, the River Thames is central to London. It's the artery that ties everything together, and yet we also have a huge area of enclosed water space, which we estimated if you just used 5%, you could actually develop 2,000 homes across London in some wonderful central locations. If you look at the Lee Valley, for instance, the Olympics really brought what was historically a rather unattractive sort of waterway really back into use, and already that's been the catalyst for new developments. I think there's a huge amount of activity going on at the moment on what used to be, or still is, known as the Grand Union Canal. I think if you look at King's Cross, they've got this necklace of canals that are weaving through this new development. Water actually not only makes better master playing, but it also makes for a better environmental quality. If one took the Thames and its rivers and tributaries as the kind of central political problem for London, maybe that would really start to sponsor some very rich thinking about its future. Other arteries in the city, like the Fleet River, which is now sort of buried underground, you can actually get a sense of where the old rivers were. I would not be averse to actually seeing if these could be brought to the surface. Rivers that are buried under central London were seen as a nuisance when they were put into the tunnels, where they still remain. Bringing back rivers could be a solution, and we're seeing it in London. The Environment Agency is bringing back, or deculverting and or daylighting lots of rivers where it's possible to do so. Increasingly we've realised that actually rivers play an extremely important environmental role. Some of these rivers are gone forever. They've been so twist and turned and diverted and re-buried and re-buried and merged with sewers and sewer structures that many of them we'll never see again. We're told by the big infrastructure firms how these things are going to happen, and we accept them without it really being a cultural debate. Thames Tideway sewer will damage the Thames foreshore. Things like Tideway come along, or desalination plants or whatever, and they seem incredibly old-fashioned and really driven by a desire, by a kind of fantasy of control. If all new developments actually incorporated green space, green roofs, sustainable drainage, we could actually reduce the pressure on the existing areas, we could reduce the need for the super sewer, and we can actually create a much richer environment at the same time. Why are we leaving these projects to engineers? These are important urban projects. What is infrastructure for, rather than just doing one job? How does it make a good piece of city? The most interesting projects are the ones that combine different needs, in terms of making the city just a much more pleasant, nature-friendly place to live, and taking care or trying to manage water infrastructure. So the canal, of course, which was built to do one thing, actually ends up doing lots of things, and is incredibly engaging as a landscape. Of course, the canal has always been an industrial proposition, it's always been a transport thing, and it's always been a place where people live, because people lived on boats to move them around. It was such a slow process that you either lived on it or it didn't work. So it's always been that. What it hasn't been until the late years of the 20th century is a place of leisure, and I think there's an increasing tension there, in that a lot of investment in the canal is directed at making it accessible to people, wildlife activities and all these things, all of which are obviously kind of good in themselves, but they somewhat undersell the fact that there's vast numbers of people kind of living and working on the canal still. I think there's a place for the full range of uses in cities. I think it's important that we embrace industry in cities, in big cities. Where Ford produces cars, or it's kind of routines of sewage management, how can you possibly imagine that landscape to be part of London? It's very big scale, big new industrial buildings, what should they be like in relation to a marsh space, a visited space? Making bits of public space or architectural interventions that respond to the river always tend to come on the coattails of engineering projects. Something that's huge and feels tough, but in a way is quite fragile, the experienced sense of it. So how simple should those buildings be? How should they meet a long road or the edge of a marsh? You've got these very different types of architectural judgments and a lot of them operating in a world that doesn't particularly see itself as architecture. A kind of post-industrial topography, you know, that hasn't been resolved in terms of the rest of the urban fabric around it. All these lovely locks and things and all these lock keepers cottages and things that we can talk about those things purely in terms of what they did in 1750. They're a really good way of thinking about our industrial heritage, but way more interesting is what they're doing now. What they're doing in terms of lifestyle, what they're doing in terms of the economy of the city, in terms of the right to live in the city. Little moments where you can touch this wild space and there's some industry, but actually we can see the other London in the distance, the towers and the housing and the big scale other world. I think what we're learning is that our whole conception of architecture's relationship to water is completely out of date and far too simplistic. Once you get to ideas of infrastructure and preserving industrial heritage, but also climate change, that whole picture gets so much more complex. So what is the relationship of architecture to water in the 21st century and how can it have a meaningful relationship with different kinds of urban fabric? So I wait beside this place to see just where it leads A hole becomes a day of light and I feel its breath take seat Cause all that I see is yours You know I'll never wait but you know I'll never run Cause if I can I'll hold this word and I'll see that it gets done