The city of London owes its prosperity to the river Thames, being this waterway, famous for its tidal changes and urban extension, the primary source of supplies and communication that has supported human settlements throughout millennia.
However, since the Industrial Revolution onwards, the original close relationship between man and nature has rapidly vanished, separating people from its fluvial context, following the unsustainable sprawl of the city, covering this unique ground under thick layers of concrete and contamination. Currently, the London riverbank faces a crossroad urged by climate change: to maintain its character as a limit between city and ecosystem, or to become a border that rekindles this relation and regenerates the degraded spaces located within its proximity.
Soil, water and woods seems to be, nowadays, three undervalued components in a Landscape. The first, lost under the city; the second, relegated to play a role in our lives as a functional object, and the last one, as in many disturbances associated to forest industry. Each one sited without a proper place in urban areas.
This proposal seeks to continue the efforts done in the past decades in sustainable development connecting the citizen with the ecosystem around him by exposing the historic contradictive trajectory of this soil, through the intervention in a post-industrial terrain vague, lost in the urban transformation of St. Katharine’s & Wapping area, once a metropolitan store and market area and now a neighbouring housing and services zone near the financial centre of the city.
