millennium village
although master modernist owen is deeply sceptical about this place (my house!), I'm a big fan - yes, it's like living in a failed vision of someone else's future, but it's also like living in a Ballardian hotel where the toilets have public locks on 'em (they switch from red to green, even in the one-bed appartments! you'd think you'd probably know if someone was on the bog in a place that small)...the alienation, eerie silence, and the low-flying but soundless planes from the city airport drift down like feathers from a futurist sky.
The communal gardens are more or less completely empty at all times, impeccably tidy and the peace is only occasionally broken by a group of boistrous lads from the David Beckham football academy down the road, who quieten down when they realise they've blundered into a DEADZONE populated by washed-out Canary Wharf zombies, stumbling towards the mirage of Ikea-like building blocks stacked up on the swamp like precarious rabbit hutches for the terminally aspirational.
Other local joys:
Greenwich gasometer - it goes up and down a lot, but you never catch it moving.
'On the west of the peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock.' - Iain Sinclair
I love the dome. And it loves everyone. They're gonna try and turn it into a giant casino but they're gonna FAIL because Bugsby's Marshes is HAUNTED and NO GOOD will come of trying to project any nu-labour schemes for its regeneration. It's a GHOST CITY, permeated by the stench of yeast and plague! Go home projects! You'll NEVER WIN!
And the brilliant, brilliant Thames Barrier. Work started on this in 1974, but it could have been 2074 and sent back in a time machine. That's how frikkin cool it looks.
Tho you do have to put up with these fuggin images of twats on sofas eating noodles in some kind of corporate pyjama orgy all over the billboards.