The People's Plan for the Royal Docks in 1983 had two aims, the first was intended as evidence for the public enquiry into the airport. One of the points for the inspector of the enquiry was to weigh up the strength of the alternatives for the area. The second aim was to produce a plan for the area that included and involved local communities, voicing their needs and producing a plan of action to bring jobs into the area, improve transport infrastructure, better housing, and more lesiure, childcare, education and training facilities. And above all to make changes in the lives of the people that lived in North Woolwich and Silvertown. The document called the area 'the forgotten people, the forgotten Island'.
"Before they built the airport they told us there will be jobs, but there wasn't jobs. There is a few people who are working there, but they promised us so much more, it's not happened. They promised us that there wouldn't be Jets coming in here, but Jets are in here. You know as far as we knew when the airport started it was a STOLport, next minute we look, London City Airport. And even today if we're at a meeting and we say STOLport they will correct us and tell us it's London City Airport we were never told we just got papers through our doors. There was a lot of upset and anger about it, we had marches we went up the House of Parliament, the GLC (Greater London Council), they sold us out. They were the one's that sold us down the line."
- MS
"When I first heard about the airport, I remember reading about the first plane, the Dash 7, landing near Canary Wharf. I remember, plans and people talking about an airport in the docks. I remember people having a protest meeting outside the entrance to the airport, I remember attending meetings at a local school run by the Airport to explain things.
"Anything that brings employment into the area I will back one hundred percent. There wasn't much employment in the airport at that time, but I maintain that if there is one hundred people working at that place and ten of them are from the local area, then that's brilliant, that's ten people who have got a job from the local area.
- SK
"The people here they were born to the docks, they've grown used to it. Now the same people can't tolerate the airport, they complain non-stop about the planes and yet to somebody coming into the area from outside, you realise that it was much, much noisier when the docks were open. The planes are alright, one takes off now and again, but you haven't got the non-stop clattering and banging that you had. Also the area is much cleaner here now. We used to have all the factories belching out smoke, there was a lot of smoke and pollution round here."
- RG
"I think people here they are frightened now and I think that they have become more suspicious. Poverty does awful things to people. The reason I got so involved with the transport issue is that there is such a link between poverty and poor transport. Until, we are able to improve transport people won't be able to get in and out of the area easily in order to get jobs. There are no local jobs and that is the other big change that has happened since I came here."
- JG
We tried to redress some of that balance
"When I started here five, six years ago there had been a lot of involvement, but I felt not enough. The airport had been very good at passing out information. What I think wasn't happening then was we weren't engaging ourselves as part of the community, and if we have achieved anything in the last five/six years I think we have partly achieved that, we're now accepted, I think generally, even by those who don't like us - we're accepted as being part of the furniture now. And we are very active in a number of the local groups and whenever there's a committee for anything we seem to be on it, and we do support, sometimes tangibly - sometimes emotionally a wide range of local things.
"That I think has been the change that we have brought in the last five/six years - that is more engagement with the community, so we have demonstrated ourselves to being part of the community. One of the things that helped, is a number of us who had come from what you might regard as outside actually live in the general area of Docklands, nearly double figures of people are living in Britannia village, and people that are moving into the new Fairview development - Thames Barrier Park, I'm not very far away in The Isle of Dogs - and we now have people who are living as part of the community - we didn't have that five/six years ago. We had people that lived locally and then came and worked here but we hadn't had people that had moved in - and that showed I think once we started doing that, it demonstrated peoples commitment - people weren't just long distance commuters who would go away - probably fed up with commuting.
"I still have some commuters but not many, the vast majority of people do live locally, that's the second big change in the last five/six years. We wanted to have a reasonable relationship with the local community - we certainly didn't want to fight, it's counter productive for them and for us, so what was the thing we could do best. With an airport the benefit would be to fly to the places local people want to fly to, and a few people do that, but that wasn't going to engage the majority of the population because they were economically disadvantaged. And the flights didn't go where they wanted to go, they might want to go for two weeks to Spain, to the Costa's for example. But we fly to Zurich which was no good to them whatsoever. So although the product side was no good, there was the economic success side.
"We did employ a number of the local people at the airport, but I felt we could do a lot better. The unwritten understanding between the community and ourselves is that we will do whatever we can to promote people living locally working at the airport. It's been our biggest success in terms of relationship, with the population living around here and the local authority and the government. We have delivered that, there are now 1500 jobs - full time jobs here on the site, and off site - the taxi drivers and the bus drivers. Of the on site jobs seventy percent live within five miles and of the seventy percent half of those live within Newham.
"This is way ahead of any recent other incoming business has done in this area. It's way ahead of what Tate & Lyle do - who have been here for over a hundred years, it's way ahead of the council themselves in terms of local employment, and that has been the most powerful thing we have done.
"We had to do a lot of things to achieve that, we had to put money into the education system, and particularly into the remedial side -people who had left school without sufficient skills. We have had to put a lot more money into training people once we have got them on the payroll - but what we found was people were not more stupid than anywhere else in the country - it was a myth, they were equally as intelligent as people in other parts of the country - but what we'll call the system had let them down, the education system - not just that, housing and health were equally awful. That was disadvantaging these folk when they were competing against people who had better opportunities.
"We tried to redress some of that balance, I'm sure we haven't redressed it all, but we've redressed it a bit, to the point where I don't think you'd find anybody now who would fundamentally disagree that we have created a lot of jobs for local people. Now if you had asked that question 5/6 years ago then people would have thrown a lot of vegetables when I had said that. But I made a promise to them that I would do that, and we truly believe we have delivered that promise - still doesn't make us friends with everybody we're not naïve people, but it has moved us to the point where people see the value of the airport, local people and the community.
- AM
"Official documents always describe people as having 'poor self-esteem and low aspirations', saying that they need 'reskilling'. People round here have plenty of skills. How many of the people who describe us as 'unskilled' could cook school dinners for hundreds of children or build a wall? In ten years time computers will be so user-friendly that we shall no longer think using them is a skill. When people say we have low aspirations they mean we don't want to be like them - and they're probably right about that! We don't!! Again, I get tired of people saying there's twenty two percent illiteracy in the area. How do they know? Nobody's ever banged on my door and asked me if I'm illiterate! And I would like to know how they define the term!
"Maggie gave me a copy of the Peoples Plan. It was such a shock. It was not just a protest against the arrival of the City Airport. The plan for using the docks contained so much that would make use of the local people's skills. It was so imaginative - and they had so many skills to give - which have now been lost - or are at least invisible and denied. With the best will in the world, the primary role of the City Airport is to benefit business people. Not us."
- JG
