Managing in New and Changing Communities

Here I must declare an interest: for nearly 18 years I have served as a member of the Church of England’s clergy in one of the fastest changing communities in the United Kingdom. In 1996, when we arrived in the Parish of East Greenwich, it contained two communities: Westcombe Park and East Greenwich. They both contained mixtures of housing tenure — owner occupied, private rented, and social housing (rented from Housing Associations or from the Local Authority), and both were relatively stable communities. The Greenwich Peninsula contained a couple of factories, a pub, half a dozen houses, the Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road, and lots of polluted and derelict land. The only public transport was British Rail’s Greenwich Line through Westcombe Park and Maze Hill stations and a variety of buses. And then came North Greenwich tube station in 1999, a retail park (B and Q, Comet, Sainsbury’s, a cinema, and restaurants), the Millennium Exhibition in 2000, the Greenwich Millennium Village (initially mainly owner occupied, but now mainly short-term leases), an ecology park, the first of many tower blocks, the first of several office blocks, Ravensbourne College, a cable car station, and the demolition of one of the factories. Now we have numerous construction sites; and in East Greenwich, where the Greenwich District Hospital used to be, there is another huge construction site. A large new hotel, a cruise liner terminal, more office blocks, and lots more flats are still to come.