DLR to Thamesmead approved says Mayor
An extension of the DLR to Thamesmead will be given the green light by Rachel Reeves next week according to Mayor Sadiq Khan.
If so trains would run on a line turning off after Gallions Reach and before Beckton to a new station at Beckton Riverside before heading beneath the Thames to a station in North Thamesmead.
That would be in place of the original extension plans to Dagenham Dock which would have run east from Barking Riverside that was scrapped by then-Mayor Boris Johnson. Any extension plan either to Thamesmead or Dagenham would include a new station at Beckton Riverside. Trains would run every eight to ten minutes.
As a result of the news expect a slew of clichés and stereotypes about Thamesmead to now be heard across much of the media, politicians and social media that’ll produce excessive eye-rolling, not limited to “A Clockwork Orange”, “everything in the town is brutalist” (it really isn’t) and “Thamesmead is remote and in the middle of nowhere”.
Housing
The catalyst behind it all is new housing in north Thamesmead.
Various figures are bandied around with some also including proposed housing at a new station over in Beckton Riverside. For north Thamesmead it looks likely to be around 10-15,500. Of those homes that require a high capacity network such as the DLR it comes to 7,500 at the top end according to the Abbey Wood and Thamesmead Opportunity Area Framework.
That’s because a Bus Rapid Transit scheme alone could accommodate 8,000.
The key question now is whether landowners Peabody and Lendlease will actually build housing at any sort of pace if the DLR is extended at high cost.
The omens from Peabody in south Thamesmead are not good. They’ve been extremely sluggish and after 12 years in charge of various sites within close proximity to the Elizabeth line, completed just one plot of seven. Typifying the problem, one vacant plot just 200 metres from Abbey Wood station is not set to be developed until the late 2030s.
Lendlease have had a poor record in places too, including the Royal Docks which was near excellent transport links.
Low build levels?
So what sort of housing levels will we see by the time any extension opens? Last week Greenwich’s new draft Local Plan was revealed and predicts just two thousand homes in north Thamesmead by 2038.
Of course Local Plans are hardly the definitive word but given Peabody have only managed around 600 housing completions in twelve years so far in south Thamesmead at plots close to Abbey Wood station with the Elizabeth line, Southeastern Metro and Thameslink services perhaps that’s not too far wide of the mark.
Huge swaths of vacant land remain around Abbey Wood station under Peabody’s mismanagement.
It’s also notable that land owners and developers in north Thamesmead have never drawn up a masterplan covering north Thamesmead despite the Bus Rapid Transit being known about for some time. It was supposed to open in 2026 but given Peabody and Lendlease haven’t built a single home it would have been a white elephant. It’s now due to start in 2029.
Aside from the BRT, bus services in Thamesmead are now generally excellent. Much of south Thamesmead is and always has been walkable to Abbey Wood station (Thamesmead starts 200 metres away from the station) which has always had fast and frequent links to central London.
Yes, bus services in the rest of sprawling town to the north were dismal from the 1960s to the early 2000s but it’s another story since. From around the millennium and into the early 2000s bus services rapidly improved.
If you’re so inclined, go to Google Maps or Bustimes.org and click on a stop in north Thamesmead or Thamesmead Central. It’s pretty much a bus every minute off-peak to Abbey Wood station which takes five minutes from the north of town or three from Thamesmead Central.
Here’s a sample seen right now.
All those services will call at Abbey Wood station with the exception of the 401 and 177 but even they head to a stop not too far away near the old Tavy Bridge site.
There’s plenty of worse places in London for transport than a bus every two minutes to an Elizabeth line station five minute’s away (three minutes if on a Superloop) where you’ll then have 20+ trains per hour to various parts of London.
Not all of Thamesmead is great but the myths of the past bear no relation to the reality of today.
Still, Peabody havn’t bothered to draw up plans for north Thamesmead let alone start building. If excellent bus services to Abbey Wood and Woolwich didn’t do it, a Bus Rapid Transit scheme on the way to Abbey Wood and Woolwich didn’t do it then will a DLR project? You’d assume yes, but look at south Thamesmead and Abbey Wood under their control.
An £18bn project long in the making wasn’t and isn’t enough to see consistent plans and development from the organisation.
Abbey Wood station
For most existing Thamesmead residents the DLR will be no quicker to reach than Abbey Wood station given the town’s sheer sprawl over what was once Erith marshes. Given a bus would be required to reach the DLR anyway, why not opt for a bus to Abbey Wood station where there’s more rail services to more destinations?
Consider this: you live in Thamesmead Central and want to reach somewhere in central London. You can take a three-minute bus ride running every minute or two to North Thamesmead for the slow DLR running every 8-10 minutes (which granted is far from bad) OR take a three minute bus ride – with buses every minute – in the other direction to Abbey Wood station with 20 tph (of which the Elizabeth line alone is more frequent than the DLR) which is far faster to various parts of central, west and north London and even most of the east.
Who is going on the slower DLR option? No one in most of Thamesmead. So if you hear some proclaim the extension as good for Thamesmead, it’s not. It’s good for a small part of Thamesmead. That’s fine for that part of the sprawling expansive town but it offers little in terms of better connectivity for the majority of the town.
But is spending such vast sums worth it for a small corner of Thamesmead when so many areas with homes already underway require better?
Impacts
Extending to North Thamesmead also ensures the old Dagenham Dock extension is all but dead.
TfL have mentioned passive provision but that seems extremely unlikely any time soon. There’s only so much money on the table.
Unfortunately that ensures 20,000 homes (with totals recently doubled) and up to 50,000 residents at Barking Riverside will have one solitary station for a vast expanse of high density homes. A service with short trains and low frequency.
An attempt to improve Thamesmead could very well see Barking Riverside become a failed town, with car-dependent sprawl.
As for Dagenham Dock where around 3,000 homes are underway no DLR means they’ll have the c2c rail service with two trains per hour off-peak.
Perhaps in 30 years time we’ll see people asking where it all went wrong for Barking and Dagenham. They may very well point to the DLR cancellation by Johnson and this Thamesmead plan by Khan.
Belvedere
Politicians are lining up today to comment though few ever seem to have any real knowledge of the town. Talk of Local Plans? Abbey Wood and Thamesmead area frameworks? Bus Rapid Transits? The old Greenwich Waterfront Transit plan? Little recognition.
Not only are Labour celebrating the extension plan but so are London’s Tories though they keep talking of a Belvedere extension, which not only isn’t approved but like passive provision for Dagenham Dock appears extremely unlikely to ever get the green light.
Not least as the DLR requires grade separation to extend. With a tram you can use street level running. The DLR requires a tunnel or viaduct though areas of Thamesmead to reach Belvedere. That’ll go down well through existing built-up areas.
I’m also still seeing people think the DLR to Thamesmead links to Abbey Wood station. It doesn’t. If it ever does it’d again need expensive grade separation.
It’s one of the major flaws as opposed to a tram network south of the river along the lines of the old Greenwich Waterfront transit scheme linking towns to the Elizabeth line at Abbey Wood and Woolwich, Jubilee line at North Greenwich and the DLR at Woolwich and Greenwich which all connect to east London.
Ultimately with the DLR plan it facilitates just 7,500 additional homes in one corner of Thamesmead according to the GLA’s own document. A DLR plan that doesn’t serve most of the town such as Thamesmead Central, Thamesmead West and Thamesmead East nor link to nearby Abbey Wood station.
It will not aid a now-doubled 20,000 homes in Barking Riverside alongside 3,000 in Dagenham AND almost certainly won’t extend to growth areas such as Belvedere.
Given other sorely needed projects such as the Bakerloo line again miss out (and that’s a place thousands of homes actually are now rising unlike north Thamesmead) and 70,000 new homes due to line the Thames from Erith to Greenwich peninsula will have relatively meagre funding (the Bus Rapid Transit budget for example is just £23m) is the north Thamesmead DLR the best choice of scant funds?
That 70,000 figure is met by combining new totals under Greenwich Council’s draft Local Plan released last week and Bexley’s Growth Strategy for Belvedere and Erith.
That so much argument for the DLR plan to north Thamesmead revolves around outdated notions of Thamesmead that havn’t existed for 20 years such as having one bus every 30 minutes or some such claim, it isn’t a good sign.
Future
So here we are; a project approved and born out of short-sited cuts by Boris Johnson to the DLR Dagenham Dock plan and the Greenwich Waterfront Transit south of the river.
In turn an awkward bodge job under Mayor Sadiq Khan emerged which doesn’t assist both sides of the river as much as TfL’s original plans would have – and a plan already overtaken by events.
Since being drawn up under Mayor Khan proposed homes in Barking have doubled. In Greenwich borough far more homes will be now built under the new Draft Plan out just last week which follows a recent trend of escalating totals.
Yet funding for transport services for those tens of thousands of new homes either side will be far more limited than the DLR plan which sucks up vastly more cash. It’s hard not to see this project as both poorly conceived from better earlier schemes and now already behind the times.
It’s also somewhat interesting to hear Mayor Khan and Greenwich Council today celebrate a DLR extension to Thamesmead and how the town needs better transport when in the near term TfL are cutting buses to parts of Thamesmead in January 2026. A move supported by Greenwich Council.
Politicians
Thamesmead’s MP Abena Oppong-Asare also never objected to those bus cuts for much of Thamesmead during the consultation period though today is claiming she is in favour of improved transport:
“This is a huge step forward for Thamesmead.
“For too long, residents have been cut off from the transport links that much of London takes for granted.”
I’m not sure she actually knows her constituency very well if residents “have been cut off”. Is a walk being cut off, or a five minute bus ride? Is a transport link that benefits few existing residents assisting with this mythical “being cut off”?
If anything, more will be when those bus cuts are introduced next year. Buses that connect areas of Thamesmead to transport links.
There’s so much cobblers being written and said today about Thamesmead it might be a good idea to go through some in turn in a future post highlighting just how little many MPs, the Mayor and other politicians know about the town. If they did, they wouldn’t push bus cuts and a DLR scheme which hinders more than it helps.
The Woolwich DY to Charlton link is indeed great, but never knew it cost £1.5m to build!
So a project that doesn’t help new housing in Barking and Dagenham as well as most of Thamesmead, Belvedere, Erith, Plumstead, Abbey Wood, Woolwich, Charlton and Greenwich is being heralded by the Mayor as good for housebuilding as it permits 7,500 new homes at the expense of previous schemes which would assist 100k new homes? Bonkers.
Put it this way, with limited funding I’d place far more emphasis on assisting tens of thousands of potential new homes in north Bexley borough and north Greenwich borough than just a £23m Bus Rapid Transit compared with spending vastly more on a tunnel under the Thames to one north Thamesmead stop. Even some in the designated north Thamesmead development area (it’s spread across a big area) would use a high quality transport link to the Liz line stops nearby at Woolwich and Abbey Wood ie not just a low capacity bus but something of higher capacity and high frequency.
Any DLR extension should then assist Barking and Dagenham’s recently increased housing totals as originally proposed.
Pretty much then what TfL planned in the 2000s before Johnson arrived. The great shame is Khan didn’t revive those schemes but pushed the flawed current DLR project to the detriment of many growth areas on either side of the Thames. That he proclaims it as pro-housing is laughable when it hinders so many areas of proposed housing growth. Benefitting 7.5k new homes at the expense of projects that would benefit almost 100k?
Yep I suspect this is it for transport improvements in London for 20+ years. Even if a funding package somehow means the treasury aren’t paying (please no PFI like the Lewisham extension) the optics alone will ensure it. You just know the “London gets all the money” MPs and media will ensure that. Andy Burnham will go mad.
So goodbye better services for Barking Riverside or the West London Orbital. Bakerloo line? Forget it let alone substantive improvements along the corridor south of the river. Belvedere? No doing at potential housing sites. Charlton? A slow crawl of building for years to come.
What a shame.
Agreed. I think we can wave goodbye to the Bakerloo for another 20 years. Goodness knows how transport will be when homes are all built out. Or won’t as the transport is poor. It’s vastly more likely to be built out being so close to central London with resultant capture of development revenue as a result of a new tube line than north Thamesmead with the DLR particular if Peabody have anything to do with it. As it is part of that potential revenue is being lost.
It is substantially more expensive but also has substantially better benefits than the flawed DLR to north Thamesmead.
Charlton too is a good point. Those 8k potential homes at Charlton Riverside have been painfully slow to start. Imagine a frequent Bus Rapid Transit in the near term through a new spine road link as seen in the 2015 masterplan (or a tram). Housing would rise far more quickly. Quick and frequent trams to the Jubilee at North Greenwich (past all the unbuilt Greenwich peninsula sites – again long stalled) in one direction and Woolwich Liz line the other via Southeastern stations would facilitate vast levels of new housing to rise quickly. Not too far away from TfL’s GWT plan in the 2000s. They actually planned a depot in Charlton.
Not happening though as Thamesmead sucks up the cash for the DLR – and the mad thing is Thamesmead itself would instead benefit to a greater degree with better links to Abbey Wood.
Much money will be spent on a DLR tunnel so they can say “we have better cross-river links” without thinking are they links to anywhere actually useful. For most in Thamesmead it’s a no.
Thamesmead takes forever to reach. Good news
When did you last visit and where in Thamesmead out of interest? Because now if you exit the recently rebuilt Abbey Wood station with 20+ trains an hour and take a left, walk to the big Sainsbury’s, cross over and you’ll be in Thamesmead. All of two minute’s walk.
Want all other parts of Thamesmead such as the far extremities to the north? Leave the station and go to the bus stop outside. A bus running just about every minute will take you to every corner in five minutes or less. Take your pick from the Superloop SL3 or 472 or 301 to name but three. Not bad for a town often cited as being somewhere beyond the Himalayas for remoteness.
I can tell you vast areas of London which take longer to reach from a station with far worse transport.
In fact I’ve just heard another nonsensical claim about Thamesmead today. Apparently with the DLR it’ll now take 35-40 minutes to reach the City and Liverpool Street. That’s slower than now. A bus every two minutes to Abbey Wood from north Thamesmead takes 5 mins or three mins from Thamesmead Central, then allow a 5 minute connection at the station for the frequent Liz line which reaches Canary Wharf in 10 and Liverpool Street in 19 mins.
But even before the Liz that you could reach the City in 35-40 mins from almost all of Thamesmead. A bus in 5 mins to Abbey Wood station then the train to Cannon Street on Southeastern or City Thameslink via, well, Thameslink. Currently 8 trains an hour. It was 10 in the peaks until recently. For decades Abbey Wood station has had fast trains to the City and West End.
The amount of bollocks written about Thamesmead is astounding. Sure its not perfect but some talk about it as if its still the 1970s when unless in south Thamesmead where you could always walk to Abbey Wood station the bus service was rubbish.
@J Smith: ‘The amount of bollocks written about Thamesmead is astounding.’ Agreed.
The DLR does go over grahnd in case you aint eard, juss use it to Bank. Thass why I think is better to ave the DLR reachin Thamesmead n all on ere.
It’s amazing how ignorant the media are of Thamesmead, repeating the PR put out by the likes of the mayor with not a whiff of suspicion as to whether this is the best option or not. They presumably think Abbey Wood is a completely separate area nowhere near Thamesmead.
Yep and today really has shown up many outlets who copy and paste what they’re told.
See The Guardian stating today Thamesmead is one hour from the City of London. How do I do it in less than half that I wonder. 5 minutes on a bus to the Liz line (472, or 301 or SL3 or even the slower 244 or 177), change at the station then 19 mins on a train from Abbey Wood to Liverpool Street. Or I could take a bus to Woolwich in 5 mins and take the Liz which is 16 mins. TfL have put out BS and a lot of the press and media – who have never been Thamesmead in their life – repeat it wholesale. See also many politicians. This gross ignorance is a key reason this flawed scheme is going ahead.
They’re not only clueless about Thamesmead but areas like Barking and Dagenham. Not fashionable. No research into housing totals planned.
Time Out were another one at it today. Apparently Thamesmead residents have to take a bus to get a train. Must have missed all the homes in South Thamesmead that are a short walk and start 200 metres from Abbey Wood station. Ironically the proposed DLR station in the north of town will require a bus to reach for many in Thamesmead given how large the town is – and so they’ll take a bus to Abbey Wood instead.
Certain stories really do bring out the ignorance of some and Thamesmead always does it. I get it, most aren’t reading Local Plans and planning submissions for 2,000 homes in Belvedere and the like, but have some scrutiny of TfL’s lazy PR.
It’s already going down terribly in other parts of the country. london gets all this and that blah blah.
Chuckle worthy though that reeves will approve the dlr when she won’t fund restoring south eastern rail cuts including at abbey wood. how does that make sense? i would love some sort of tram through thamesmead to woolwich and greenwich though as ive just been to france and they’re amazing. they can carry as many people as three buses at a time. proper people movers. magnifique
I can see it now: The ribbon is cut in December 2033 as the first train pulls in to the shining new station as the camera pans round to reveal miles of wasteland as Peabody haven’t managed to build a single bloody home.
How its funded will be revealing. Apparently the government will put up a small amount of funds but TFL will borrow the rest so if Peabody don’t build TFL (or rather Londoners) be on the hook for paying back a vast loan and no passengers. If TFL try to whack on big fare rises each year to make that up they can go rot. In Thamesmead I’d rather get to Abbey Wood and Woolwich not pay for this. If that happens more bus cuts to come too as they scramble to pay back a loan?
IAbsolutely Thamesmead Resident 1976. You are not wrong in what you say. Especially when you say we will see further bus cuts as TFL scramble to pay back a loan. That is the first thing the current Mayor of London and TFL do when they struggle to manage their finances. I cannot see the DLR extension taking place for at least another decade if not longer. It will also be at the cost of many other transport infrastructure improvements across Greater London including the Bakerloo Line extension.
TFL should never have agreed to axe route 472 which is a very busy local bus route between Abbey Wood and North Greenwich serving both Abbey Wood and Woolwich Elizabeth Line Station. Express route SL11 should be in addition to route 472 like other superloop bus routes do where they have an equivalent bus service like in the case of routes 269 and SL3 foc example. Unless TFL are planning to axe more local bus routes to replace them with limited stop Superloop routes.
I’m probably being dense but how is almost £2bn to be paid back via housing levies? It’s hardly Nine Elms which could pay back the Northern line extension cost. Nine Elms and Battersea are prime London sites near central London. Having an asset like the old power station doesn’t hurt sales either nor attract visitors to shops. The Old Kent Road may be slightly less glamorous but again it’s zone 2 and close to central London so one can see how revenues from property sales could pay back transport costs for a Bakerloo extension, and that also could also free up paths for national rail so wider impacts. North Thamesmead? It’ll be at the end of a wobbly DLR branch line out in zone 5(?) which will take ages to reach many places. Houses won’t go for much and scope to recover costs seems low given how remote it is DLR or not. Abbey Wood at least can get to major parts of London in 10-20 minutes as the Elizabeth line is so much faster than the DLR Beckton branch from Thamesmead.
Although i fully support more cross river crossings wetherr it be by DLR, new road crossings, bus services etc. I agree Thamesmead does need major public transport infrastructure improvements due to the amount of new homes that have been built and are due to be built over tbe decade or so.
I believe the majority of the journeys made by residents will be local with many residents using the Elizabeth Line Stations at Abbey Wood or Woolwich to reach Central London and other locations like Canary Wharf for work etc.
If funding does get the Go Ahead I can see other major transport infrastructure improvements being cancelled
I can also see other regional Mayor’s like Andy Burnham Mayor for Greater Manchester going mad as it will widen the North and South divide when it comes to funding for infrastructure projects from the Government.
I hope that the DLR Thamesmead extension it does get the go ahead and to see a new DLR station built at Thamesmead. As well with plans for an extension to Abbey Wood or Belvedere. And maybe could see plans for the DLR extension to Dagenham Dock.
I think the Thamesmead extension should still be given the go ahead. And with work to begin next year as well as more new DLR B23 Stocks to enter passenger service.