Instead, the Government decided it should be called in to a public inquiry. This was due to have concluded last November, but has now just re-started and is unlikely to conclude before the beginning of May.

However, the Jubilee Line extension and Docklands Light Railway Lewisham extension, together with the earlier DLR Beckton extension and the newly completed DLR London City Airport extension, have significantly improved public transport access in the London end of the Thames Gateway.

Proposed further DLR extensions include a link to Dagenham Dock (Barking Reach extension) and to what will be the new Stratford International Station.

Large road schemes that were under construction, such as the M11 Link and A13 improvements, have been completed, as has the Medway Towns Northern Relief Road, while work on the the South Thames Development Route (STDR) has also made progress.

All have stimulated activity on key local sites.

Extensions to the East London Line have also been approved, as has phase one of the East London Transit Scheme.

Various river crossing proposals exist other than the Thames Gateway Bridge: the Silvertown Link would join the Greenwich Peninsula and the Silvertown/Royal Docks area; and a rail crossing at Woolwich will be achieved via the DLR extensions.

Commuters

One key factor in residential investor property buying is accessibility to work.

Analysis of travel-to-work patterns reveals that more than 90% of all workers who live in London Gateway currently commute to London. In only a few places is there a high percentage of local employment – Thanet and Canterbury at 80% and Swale, Southend and Thurrock all at around 60%.

Olympics

The hosting of the Olympic Games should provide a significant stimulus to the London Thames Gateway. The areas around Stratford, Barking, the Royals, the Lower Lea Valley and Hackney will benefit most from a boost to the local economy in terms of job creation and associated business activity, and during the Games themselves in terms of retail and tourist trade.

Around 3,000 dwellings are to be built to house the athletes, and following the Games, there is a ‘Legacy Development Proposal’ of 9,000-plus units to be built by 2020.

However, it is very apparent from even the most cursory glance to anyone passing through, whether by car or train, just how much work needs to be done in the area closest to the Olympics site by 2012. And the failure of the new Wembley Stadium to open on time does not inspire confidence.

Student population

Property investors scenting out new hotspots like to find plenty of students, and Thames Gateway does not disappoint.

The University of East London has four campuses, in East London and Dagenham, while at Chatham in Kent, three other universities in the region – Kent, Greenwich and Canterbury Christ Church – plus the Mid Kent College have set up the Universities at Medway joint initiative to improve education in the region.

campus in Chatham Maritime are set to rise from 2,000 this year to 6,000 in 2007. Between them, the partners offer a range of courses including science, engineering, nursing, business studies, law and music technology. The shared campus is also home to the new Medway School of Pharmacy, jointly run by the Universities of Greenwich and Kent and supported by Pfizer.

Property investors

With so many challenges facing it, Thames Gateway looks to be a long-term opportunity. At the moment, most of the developments either so far built or with planning permission are in and around London, and it will be interesting to see how growth materialises further away from the capital.

However, perhaps it is here that investors with a long-term view could most usefully look.

At Chatham, for example, more than 100,000 square metres of new office space has been constructed. On St Mary’s Island, more than 900 new homes have been built with 1,100 more to follow.

New leisure facilities include a 300-berth marina, and a multi-screen cinema is due to open in October, while Dickens World, an entertainment/visitor attraction dedicated to the life and times of novelist Charles Dickens, is due to open next April.

Ebbsfleet, also in Kent, is also a possible new hotspot. Here, the Springhead development will have 600 new homes, five minutes away from the new international and domestic station. Once up and running in 2009, commuting into London will take just 15 minutes.

The Thames Gateway covers some unglamorous places – but ambitious plans could make it the next hotspot for property investors

The Thames Gateway is an enormous regeneration project covering a region which stretches east of London starting at Westferry in Tower Hamlets, down to the Isle of Sheppey.

Forty miles long and up to 19 miles wide, it takes in much of the East End of London, a chunk of Essex and the Medway towns of Kent. Its relatively few landmarks include the Greenwich Peninsular, the ExCeL exhibition centre and Bluewater shopping centre. It is, in effect, the largest brownfield building site in the UK. It is fraught with problems, from planning delays through to flooding, and much of the region is, frankly, not very lovely.

But for residential property investors looking for the next emerging hotspot, the region has only one way to go – and that is up.

Certainly, towns that have been off the property-buying radar will – if all goes well – take centre stage: and here, we are talking not just about the Isle of Dogs and Stratford – which, because of the Olympic effect, are already becoming investment favourites – but places that require a leap of the imagination to see as fashionable: Canvey Island, Dagenham, Gravesend and Chatham, Thurrock and Bexley, to take some random examples.

As for the description ‘hub of Europe’, this is to do with the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link which will see shiny new international and domestic railway stations at St Pancras, Stratford and Ebbsfleet by 2009.

Priority area

The broad idea of developing this enormous area to the east of London emerged some ten years ago, triggered by overcrowding in London and throughout the rest of the south-east.

Three years ago, the London Gateway was confirmed as a priority area for new residential communities by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Sustainable Communities Action Plan.

The planning framework sets high targets for affordable housing with the emphasis on high-density, mixed-use development and an infrastructure focused on public transport.

As at 1999, the area contained over 3,800 hectares of brownfield land and 1.6 million people in an estimated 700,000 households. Regeneration is to be based on the existing urban structure and will utilise the natural resource of the Thames where possible.

Development will be focused on 14 ‘zones of change’ (see panel on next page), and the ODPM estimates that up to 120,000 new dwellings can be delivered by 2016, of which roughly half will have a London postcode.

Most of the development activity so far has been concentrated within a small number of large sites predominantly in London. These include the former gasworks in Beckton (4,000+ units) and Gallions Reach in Thamesmead (1,000 units). Some major schemes have been delivered outside the capital, notably at Chafford Hundred in Thurrock (5,000 units).

However, even within the London part of Thames Gateway, completions are running at around 3,000 units a year, whereas the target requires a rate of around double this figure. A similar shortfall is apparent in the North Kent region of Thames Gateway.

Only in South Essex is the shortfall, which is currently running in the hundreds rather than thousands, manageable.

The availability of brownfield land – which is where the Government wants new homes to be built – also varies considerably within Thames Gateway as a whole.

Bureaucracy

One immediate problem with the region is the sheer number of bodies involved.

There are no fewer than 17 local authorities, two county councils, three regional assemblies, three regional development agencies, two newly-created Urban Development Corporations, various Gateway dedicated bodies, at least eight Government departments and five Government agencies, plus various special groups designed to facilitate local area delivery of the plan. To date, seven privatepublic regeneration partnerships have been set up. There is no single organisation tasked with an executive overview role in the Gateway project.

Flooding and funding

Possible flooding is a major issue. Up to 108,000 homes are currently in the floodplain and a further 10,000 are likely to be built in areas with ‘significant’ flood risk. Around two-thirds of the Gateway has good protection but parts of Kent and London are vulnerable, with climate change expected to raise sea levels by anything from 20cm up to 110cm by 2100.

However, the single most crucial element of the whole project is funding. The Government has pledged £6 billion towards the Gateway programme. However, the final bill will be substantially higher and most of the funding will be expected to come from the private sector.

Private sector investment will, however, only go where it can generate a healthy return. Investment to date has been focused on the ‘safer’ bets in or close to London and those locations further east which have an established economic base with more immediate growth potential, such as Dartford and Ebbsfleet.

One option to kick-start broader-based inward investment would be to offer incentives to business to relocate to focal areas within the Gateway.

This approach has been adopted successfully in other regeneration areas such as London Docklands and at La Défense in Paris, and would also send a positive message to the corporate world about the longer-term future of the area as a business location.

Unemployment

A critical factor for the Gateway is the rebuilding of its economy to achieve the sustained growth vital for successful regeneration.

At present the area has a higher rate of unemployment than the rest of the southeast, lower economic activity rates and lower rates of workforce qualifications.

Less than one-third of the workforce of the Thames Gateway Districts are employed in managerial, professional and associate professional occupations.

Infrastructure

As any property investor knows, up-andcoming hotspots rely heavily on transport infrastructure being put in place in the future. This whole issue is absolutely key to Thames Gateway.

Lessons need to be learned from the earlier regeneration scheme at Canary Wharf in Docklands. This had a chequered start due largely to the fact that infrastructure was added piecemeal and as an afterthought. The Jubilee Line opened years later, but even now, there is not one public transport bus that goes from central London out to Docklands.

La Défense, in Paris, by contrast benefited from having infrastructure in place at the same time as commercial and residential development.

While some progress has already been made to improve transport within Thames Gateway, the new Thames Gateway Bridge – London’s first new road bridge over the Thames since before the second world war – has become mired in a public inquiry.

This bridge is intended to link Beckton with Thamesmead, and is regarded as so critical to the success of Thames Gateway that many supporters of the scheme think it should simply have been implemented.