The Edge Condition - Re-Use of Industrial Heritage on Urban Waterfronts: A Case of London's Second River

This article offers an investigation of the re-use of selected waterfront industrial heritage buildings. As an indication of the London Lee Valley’s amenity value and industrial heritage, over thirty mills are located on the river and Lee Navigation canal, which today represent an important physical legacy and cultural heritage, alongside a network of locks and bridges. The river creates an edge condition, simultaneously linking and separating the surrounding landscape and framing our experience of this obsolescent infrastructure. These watery fragments of the past slip into view as you descend into the valley towards the River Thames, offering a glimpse of London’s pasts, presents and possible futures. How might we identify an afterlife for this strange environment? And what narratives can be suggested through the adaptive re-use of the waterfront architecture that persists? Water provides a medium for land and buildings, and mediates both as its flows over time and space, eroding and reshaping the built and natural environment as it goes.