Rising rents are arguably one of the biggest pressures in the housing market right now.
According to a recent study by estate agency Stirling Ackroyd, tenants are currently paying an average of £1,966 a month for a one-bedroom property near Canary Wharf.
While wider inflation has fallen back to 2.3% and average two-year fixed mortgages have dropped back to less than 5% in May, with cheaper borrowing expected later in the year, rents are forecast to climb ever higher.
One study from Savills predicts more than 6% growth over 2024.
Increasingly, affordable housing providers are highlighting shared ownership properties as a less expensive alternative to renting.
A show home interior at East River Wharf
case study: East River Wharf
Take Legal And General Affordable Homes’ East River Wharf scheme, for example.
Its properties form part of Riverscape – essentially an extension of Ballymore and Oxley’s Royal Wharf development on the banks of the Thames at Silvertown.
Located roughly 15 minutes from Canary Wharf itself via the DLR and Jubilee line, these one, two and three-bedroom homes are set in a wealth of green space close to Lyle Park in a freshly regenerated part of Docklands.
Neighbouring Royal Wharf boasts a wealth of amenities including a pub, restaurants, shops and health services.
Residents will enjoy access to a health club with a gym, pool, spa and fitness studio as well as a 16th floor sky lounge with views over the Thames to Greenwich and Canary Wharf.
The apartments at East River Wharf include private balconies, open-plan design and fully fitted kitchens with integrated Siemens appliances.
But, alongside the quality of the finish and the facilities, the key attraction lies in escaping the grind and uncertainty of the rental market.
A deposit of £4,844 could be enough to secure a one-bedroom home at the scheme – 5% of a 25% share worth £96,875.
Monthly costs are expected to be about £1,465.
By purchasing a portion of the property, a buyer can essentially secure a £387,500 apartment with no threat of eviction.
They also enjoy all the freedoms to enjoy living in the space they might expect if it was owned outright.
In contrast to renting, purchasers of shared ownership homes are not subject to landlord inspections or controls on how they decorate their space, for example.
Properties come with fully fitted kitchens
capital appreciation
They also own an asset that, in the case of East River Wharf, is highly likely to appreciate.
The area has already undergone extensive regeneration, but there’s much more in the pipeline for Royal Docks.
Major infrastructure and housing investments are in the pipeline over the coming years with homes, businesses and facilities set to be built locally.
Already an attractive area to live in, these developments are likely to bring fresh demand as buyers look east for high quality homes to purchase in the future.
Royal Wharf is already well served by the DLR and bus routes as well as a dedicated pier for Uber Boat By Thames Clippers services, which run all the way to Putney along the river.
The view from the communal residents’ lounge at Riverscape
secure a property
A spokesperson for Legal And General Affordable Homes said: “The amenities at East River Wharf are best in class, with a state-of-the-art residents’ gym, pool and spa.
“Plus, concierge services and 24-hour security ensure our residents always feel at home.
“There is also a primary school located on the development, which is perfect for growing families.
“Whatever your stage in life, East River Wharf is a modern and secure place to call home with shared ownership.”
Under the shared ownership scheme, buyers purchase part of a property.
They pay a deposit and arrange a mortgage to cover the cost.
They then pay a reduced rent on the rest of the property and the appropriate service charge.
Purchasers need not be first-time buyers but cannot own another property.
Owners can choose to increase the portion of the apartment that’s theirs until they own the whole property, in a process commonly known as “staircasing”.
Equally, buyers are free to sell their share either through the affordable housing provider or independently, if they decide to move home.
Properties at East River Wharf start at £96,875 for a 25% share
key details: East River Wharf
East River Wharf is located at the Riverscape development beside Royal Wharf.
The closest transport link is West Silvertown DLR station on nearby North Woolwich Road.
Prices for a one-bed start at £96,875 for a 25% share.
- Jon Massey is co-founder and editorial director of Wharf Life and writes about a wide range of subjects in Canary Wharf, Docklands and east London - contact via jon.massey@wharf-life.com
The takeaway cafe serves coffee roasted up the road and is a collaboration between a Walthamstow-based roastery and entrepreneur Roxanna Lyssa.
You’ll see her behind the counter most days serving up lattes, toasties and cakes, and following in the footsteps of her grandma who served coffee and tea to dockers in the 1930s. We lured her away from the grinder to find out more.
past vibe
I stepped away from a 15-year career to re-evaluate where I was going and got a part-time job as a barista with Perky Blenders.
Six months later, in November 2019, a franchise opportunity came up, so I put together a business pitch for Good Vibes. We launched in June 2020
I worked in visual merchandising and product management for Lacoste UK previously, which was a fantastic part of my life and I acquired so many transferable skills. I started that career on the sales floor and progressed to head office.
But after 15 years, I wanted to go back on the frontline and do something on my own. I just wasn’t sure what.
A coffee shop was never in mind, but life seemed to push me in this direction. I got into coffee because I love the product.
My background really helps with what I do now. Small details all add up to the overall impact. I appreciate the importance of storytelling.
I hope that, when we’re engaging with our customers, they feel part of the journey and understand what we sell and why we sell it.
Because they knew me and my background they trusted me to establish the coffee shop under my own brand identity.
As long as I serve the coffee to their standard and respect their brand guidelines, they’ve let me run with it.
present vibe
I’m pleased to say that, two years down the line, we’ve created a community and I do think we’ve got good vibes.
We’re known for being that authentic, open-minded spot where people can be themselves and talk about what they want or order whatever kind of coffee they want. We’re not going to judge.
It’s not just been about the coffee and the food, it’s also about the people. I love interacting and chatting and seemingly that’s my strong point. I’m known for my banter.
Royal Docks vibe
I wanted to drive culture and I could really see the potential for that in the Royal Docks with all the regeneration that’s happening here.
I grew up in east London but hadn’t been here before, so when I found out you can come to the docks and ride a cable car, go open water swimming or try wakeboarding it blew my mind. It was pretty surreal to find that in London.
Good Vibes has just embedded itself in that. We do offers for the swimmers and for the wakeboarders because we want to be seen as part of the framework across the dock – we’re all in this together.
The cafe serves up Perky Blenders’ speciality coffees – image James Perrin
coffee vibe
In the office I was a person who had their own ground coffee and French press on the desk.
I’ve always loved and respected coffee and now, doing this, I think I’ve found a bit of mad scientist in me.
There are so many variables that you can control or manipulate in order to determine the end product – the temperature of the water, the extraction time, the grind size.
We sell a range of up to six different blends or single origins at a time. We also do drip coffee so we serve incoming blend on our espresso.
But then we’ll feature single origins or coffee-of-the-month blends on our drip coffee.
The venue offers a range of food options – image James Perrin
food vibe
We are supplied by The Bread Station in Hackney and Cakesmiths in Bristol. We sell croissants – almond, chocolate, raisin and buns – cinnamon, cardamom, hazelnut and vegan cakes – banana chocolate, carrot cake, blueberry Bakewell and chocolate brownie.
For lunch we’ve become known for our toasties. We use organic sourdough bread and fillings like chilli jam and spinach, tuna melt, chicken and avocado. I do really good homemade guacamole.
The secret is choosing the right ingredients and making it with love, care and also consistency.
I’m a stickler for guidelines, because I was setting rules for the whole country at Lacoste. Customers getting what they expect to receive is so important to their experience.
We also do Brick Lane bagels with fillings including vegan cream cheese and, going into winter, we’ve added jacket potatoes and soups from Leyton-base Zuppe in flavours like sweetcorn and coconut chowder, smoky roasted tomatoes and peppers and red lentil dhal.
natural vibe
I try to avoid any sort of artificial colours, flavourings, emulsifiers and additives. You won’t get a caramel latte in my coffee shop.
I’m really against anything artificial and what’s good with a food and drink business is that you can encourage wellbeing through what people consume. You can educate people and advise them on how they can enhance their wellness.
Sweet treats from Cakesmiths at Good Vibes – image James Perrin
caring vibe
During lockdown I had a lot of residential customers coming over who would sometimes spend 30 minutes chatting to me because they were trapped in their flat all day without anyone else to see.
It’s not just physical wellness you can help through a coffee shop – it’s also mental health because that small transaction and a few minutes can actually change someone’s mindset.
You can make someone feel better about themselves or you can take them away from the stress of the phone or their computer.
I’ve really tried to build a coffee shop that is more than just a cafe – to make it a place where people can come to connect.
personal vibe
I’ve definitely suffered with anxiety in the past. Being in the corporate world with higher responsibilities, you do get to a point where things just become too much. It built up over time.
I think there was a point where my to do list was three A4 pages and it was never going to be completed.
I never had a feeling of accomplishment. Now, when I’ve made a lovely cup of coffee and handed it over, I do feel a sense of achievement.
I don’t know what changed, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I needed to slow down and find myself, because I started working there when I was 18.
It was my first job and I’d always been Roxy at Lacoste.
Suddenly, 15 years later, I was like ‘Who is just Roxy?’. I think I’ve found her now and Good Vibes is my happy place.
spreading vibe
We do wellness workshops with Yoga and meditation called Vibe And Flow. I’m due to start an event series from November, which is exciting, because it goes back to that idea of creating a culture.
Expressway has got 200 businesses in it, so the range of people that I get to meet and collaborate with is unreal and I’m just trying to connect those dots.
We also spread the love by selling products from my customers like Beinsense in Royal Docks and England Preserves in Bermondsey.
Going into Christmas I run a campaign called Give The Gift Of Local.
future vibe
All my costs have gone up significantly this year. I got through Covid and thought ‘I can survive anything’.
But then we came into this year and people are spending less money and we have fewer customers. It then makes operations very difficult because I’m running a very tight ship.
But I’m still here, still working. I’ve got myself going in the right direction and I just want to try to grow the community aspect and collaborate with the people that I’ve got to know to see how we can all try and do better with what we’ve got.
My brand tagline is: ‘Make waves to change the tide, not dominate the ocean’. I was never trying to come in and take over or be on top of anyone or be better than anyone.
Good Vibes is about trying to change direction for people, show them a different way and just contribute to something positive.
Refugees have to leave everything they know – not just places and people, but communities, careers, sights and sounds they have found comfort in their whole lives.
They arrive in a new world and are expected to assimilate. But how do they do this when everything around them is unknown?
This is the struggle Dash Arts seeks to capture with its new production Dido’s Bar, an immersive retelling of Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, set in Royal Docks.
“I’m Jewish and British, English and a Londoner and have always felt I’m many things – on the edge of so much,” said director Josephine Burton.
“I’ve enjoyed being in that liminal place between different communities. It’s how I see the world, so I’m interested in seeing other people’s otherness too.”
The story of migration and love will be told through the eyes of refugees today and unfold in a real life bar built in part of a former Tate & Lyle warehouse.
Audiences will, we are told, be immersed in a strange world when they arrive, where they are unsure what motivates the people around them.
They will mingle with the cast as the story of Trojan refugee Aeneas unfolds around them.
But instead of being set in ancient Italy, the production has been transported to a jazz bar with a line-up of live musicians.
It’s set to run at The Factory from September 23 to October 15, 2022.
“The audience will walk into the venue, with a house band warming up in the corner and they’ll grab a drink from the bar,” said Josephine.
“Then the drama of this amazingly powerful love story between Aeneas and Dido and the great battle between Aeneas, the foreigner, and Turnus, the local boy, will creep up around them.”
Josephine is co-founder and artistic director of Dash Arts, which is based in Whitechapel.
For the last 15 years it has worked with 9,000 artists to create work that bridges divides across art forms, cultures, languages and communities.
“We go on a bit of a journey and spend a lot of time listening, understanding, meeting and researching artists and eventually creating work with them,” said the 45-year-old.
“It’s like opening up a Pandora’s box with this extraordinary wealth to explore, understand and then share with audiences.”
Dido’s Bar has been two years in the making and was first inspired back in 2017 when Josephine met Kurdish Iranian refugee Marouf Majidi in Finland.
“I had been on an exploration of what it means to be European which had emerged out of the Brexit referendum,” said Josephine.
“I met Marouf in Finland in 2017 on my way back to the airport over a coffee and he told me his story of traveling to Europe.
“He fled Iran as a refugee and was relocated to Finland, where he settled and eventually studied at the Sibelius Music Academy in Helsinki, where he now teaches.
“He’s been on an extraordinary journey from the music conservatoire in Tehran where he studied Persian classical music, to teaching Finnish folk music.
“He found it very hard at first to establish himself musically and connect with the musicians he was playing with in Finland.
“Eventually something shifted for him and he found his place, but he was no longer ‘in tune’ with musicians from central Asia.
“It was such a short meeting, but that thing he said about feeling out of tune lived with me.
“I picked up the phone three months later and said I really wanted to tell his story and wanted him to be at the heart of it.”
Marouf Majidi – image Ali Wright
He agreed, but at first Josephine struggled to find the right way to bring his story to the stage.
“I wanted to tell Marouf’s story and find a way of understanding what it is to be European through the experiences of refugees who travel here,” she said.
“It’s perhaps the people who move here and go through such a transformation, musically and emotionally, to insert themselves and settle in a new place, that can help tell us who we are. They can be that mirror for us.
“But I didn’t want to just tell a personal story, I also didn’t want to create a super band of musicians. I wanted to do something theatrical and dramatic.”
Her lightbulb moment came when she remembered a text she had studied 20 years ago as a classics student.
“I was chatting to someone about how the Aeneid is the story of our time, of the refugee and the struggle to find a place to belong,” she said.
“Aeneas flees Troy in the war-torn East and travels across the Mediterranean to seek sanctuary and build a new home in Europe
“It’s the story of both the experience of fleeing and having to assimilate and discover that, once you’ve arrived, it’s only the beginning of the story.
“Suddenly I realised it was the perfect way to tell Marouf’s story and to understand the role of Aeneas in a contemporary setting.
“The original epic poem is pages and pages long in Latin, involves mass battles and love affairs and is very involved and beautiful.
“We’ve taken that story and mapped it on top of Marouf’s.”
She developed the idea during a series of residencies with playwright Hattie Naylor and Marouf, who has composed the music alongside Riku Kantola.
Research and development in Scotland in February 2020 was followed by a residency in Finland – a few days together as part of Royal Docks Originals – and a residency in Cornwall.
Marouf then moved to London this summer to finish developing the show.
The cast of 10 is a mix of nationalities – image Ali Wright
“I remember the two of us bent over on the floor in Scotland in the rain with copies of the Aeneid in English, Latin and Arabic ,” said Josephine.
“We spent hours trying to work out what the story was and finessed it to the point where we would challenge each other to tell it in less than a minute, then 30 seconds, then 10.
“Then we did a lot of jigsawing and planning and brought in Hattie who had adapted the Aeneid for Radio 3 as a drama.
“She’d go off and write and then we’d write a song together. It really was a collaborative process.”
The result is a show where the epic warriors of the original story are now musicians trying to make it into the spotlight and the goddesses are sisters who own two bars – one on the edge of town and one in the centre.
It draws on the backgrounds of its international cast who hail from Morocco, Madagascar, Germany, Finland, and Eritrea, and uses their native languages to enrich the performance.
Josephine said: “The show now is about how to understand an old myth written 2,000 years ago that feels so resonant and timeless.”
It will be staged in Unit F of The Factory, disused sugar warehouses that have recently been transformed into a series of new venues and workspaces.
“It could never be in a black box theatre,” said Josephine.
“I wanted the audience to feel that they were somewhere impromptu and exciting and slightly makeshift. We spent quite a lot of time trying to find a place and saw some extraordinary places across the Docks.
“Then, last May, I visited The Factory when it was in quite an early stage of development.
“Projekt, our partners for the show, had just got Unit F from Tate&Lyle and, when we walked in, there were pigeons in the rafters and sugar all over the floor.
“It was sticky and black underfoot and it felt very powerful as a venue – I just knew it would amazing.”
Dash Arts has built the bar from scratch and it will serve up beverages from nearby Husk Brewing using local staff.
Newham artists will take to the stage each night and the show will be complemented by a programme of gigs, talks, food events and workshops to engage the local community, which has been shaped through the area’s history of immigration and dockers.
“It’s a perfect marriage for us of place and story because the audience is really going to feel that they’re coming to somewhere incredibly exciting and diverse,” said Josephine.
“Newham is one of the most linguistically diverse boroughs in London – there are hundreds of languages spoken there – and it has always been a first port of call for people.
“So to tell this timeless epic story today in Newham’s docks is really thrilling and right.”
The project has been co-produced with the Royal Docks Team and Jospehine said they have worked hard over the last year to embed it into the community, meeting local groups and running music workshops.
“There is a real sense of culture and community building happening there and I got very excited about that,” she said. “I had this real instinct that there wasn’t anywhere else to put Dido’s Bar.”
She hopes the audience will embrace the world they have created.
“I really want them to have a wonderful night and love the music because it’s extraordinary,” she said.
“I want them to feel as I felt, that this old ancient story has such resonance today, to feel moved by the protagonists and the journey they have taken.
“I hope they feel we have done justice to some of the biggest questions of our time, about how to assimilate into our communities.”
THE FACTORY – A NEW VENUE FOR ROYAL DOCKS
Once used by Tate & Lyle for sugar production, this 5.2 acre site on Factory Road is now a series of work and event spaces run by meantime use specialist Projekt (also behind the Silver Building)
It landed the first grant from the Royal Docks Good Growth Fund for a year-long refurbishment and opened the 100,000sq ft space in June.
Organisations that have made The Factory their home include Community Food Enterprises, Links Event Solutions and The Beams – a new venue by Broadwick Live.
Unit A is home to a cafe run by The Breadmeister, Unit D is a set of workspaces and Unit F is a refurbished warehouse that will be hired out for film and TV productions.
Projekt said the venue provides new work and event spaces that will “safeguard and grow the already burgeoning artistic and cultural community around the Royal Docks, as well as providing a significant amount of affordable workspace.”
