Follow the beacon: new Docklands skyscraper next to London's last surviving lighthouse in Goodluck Hope

Douglass Tower pays homage to Victorian designer Sir James Douglass and is next to London's only surviving lighthouse.
David Spittles28 August 2018

A new Docklands skyscraper celebrates the area’s splendid maritime past, often a missing architectural ingredient.

Thirty-storey Douglass Tower pays homage to Sir James Douglass, a Victorian civil engineer and prolific lighthouse designer responsible for many of the UK’s most famous coastal beacons.

The building is part of Goodluck Hope, a new neighbourhood bringing 804 homes and a riverside cultural hub to a booming part of east London, where Bow Creek meets the Thames.

Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse, alongside the site, was commissioned in 1864 by Trinity House, the UK’s lighthouse authority, and is the only surviving lighthouse in London.

Originally used to aid navigation on the Thames and to train lighthouse-keepers, it no longer functions and is home to various art projects.

Goodluck Hope is a new neighbourhood bringing 804 homes to a booming part of east London

The boldly coloured new tower contains 167 apartments and is crowned by a metal-framed “Lantern Room”, an enormous “lifestyle” space with a viewing platform where residents can work or chill out.

Apartments have winter gardens with movable glass panels that allow the space to be opened up or closed off.

A new riverbus pier is being built to connect this new address, only a river bend away from Canary Wharf, to the City and central London, adding a traditional mode of transport to the area’s fast-improving rail links.

Goodluck Hope revives a name dating from medieval shipping maps of London. Going up alongside Douglass Tower are traditional-looking brick-clad warehouse-style blocks.

A central street lined on one side by townhouses with “atelier” spaces for homeworkers will cut through the neighbourhood, while a listed dry dock, whose structure has been re-formed to the outline of a great cruise liner, is to become a club space.

Another dockside block will house a spa and swimming pool, café and restaurants, microbrewery and cinema, while between the buildings are passageways, or “slips”, that help reimagine the site’s maritime past.

Views across and along the river are spectacular. This Isle of Dogs outpost has an authenticity that much of the new Docklands lacks, being a working section of the river with tugboats and commercial vessels, and also having a primary school.

Here, too, incongruously perhaps, is the Royal Drawing School, founded by the Prince of Wales.

Prices start at £395,000. Call Ballymore on 020 7637 0800.