Greenwich Peninsula

A gasworks, then a dome nobody knew what to do with, then one of the busiest venues anywhere.

For most of its history this loop of the river was marsh, and then for a century it was industry. The South Metropolitan Gas Company began building here in 1881 and made the largest gasworks in Europe; its No. 1 holder, finished in 1886, took twelve million cubic feet of gas and was the biggest in the world. Colliers unloaded at the jetties, the Blackwall Tunnel went under the river in 1897, and by the time the works closed the ground was too poisoned to build on. It was cleaned for the millennium. Richard Rogers's dome opened on 1 January 2000, 365 metres across under twelve masts of a hundred metres each, held the Millennium Experience for exactly one year, and then stood empty for six while nobody could agree what it was for. It became The O2 in 2007 and is now among the busiest music venues in the world, with a walkway that takes people over the top of the roof. Antony Gormley's Quantum Cloud stands on a pier at the point, a thirty-metre haze of steel sections with a human figure implied somewhere inside it. The cable car has crossed to the Royal Docks since 2012. The Prime Meridian runs the length of the peninsula and is marked where it meets the river path. At the southern end the Ecology Park keeps four acres of the marsh that the rest of this was.

Photo by Lewis Hulbert, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons