In wandering round Limehouse this morning, I found my way into Roy Square (originally named after its developer and now coyly called The Watergarden), another of the early examples of docklands housing, designed by Ian Ritchie in 1986.   It wasn’t helped by being used for the displacement of tenants from the Barleymow Estate five years later:-

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Limehouse Basin is much shrunk from what it once was.   It was originally constructed as the Regent’s Canal dock in 1812, but the Regent’s Canal itself was not completed for another eight years, by which time the dock had been enlarged to accommodate the coasters which brought food and coal from East Anglia and the north of England to feed and heat the greedy capital.   By the mid-nineteenth century, it was already too small for the new steamships and so was used instead for the construction of lifeboats.   When we moved to Limehouse in the early 1980s, it was much larger than it is now, a disused expanse of vacant water, subsequently filled in and converted into a marina:-

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