Suddenly I find myself down by the dockside, thinking about the old days ...
I spent two separate weeks at Rotherhithe Youth Hostel, one in 1995, the other in 2002. Of course, when you look back from this distance, 1995 and 2002 seem like roughly the same period, but they weren't at all. A huge amount changed between. For me, the people I was with, for East London. I remember walking from the youth hostel to Canada Water's spanking new, vast (opened 1999) tube station one morning in 2002, and it was like "holy shit, the future happened here".
I didn't know East London well growing up, but we went to Greenwich quite a lot and to Docklands, as it was building up, a few times. But most of my view of East London was, to be honest, watching the London Marathon every year.
Still, even from a distance, the amount it has transformed in the last 35 years is quite extraordinary, and a little bit terrifying.
1995 was still transitional. It was still pretty rough round there, as far as I could see, but the youth hostel itself was extremely fancy for a youth hostel in the 90s. Key cards, adapted rooms, sliding doors, lifts everywhere.
Why were we there? It was our base, both times, for doing the groundwork for editions of 'Access in London', the guidebook to London for wheelchair users. Both times, we'd spent the week before running the playscheme in Portsmouth. 1995 was my first year. I remember generally being in a terrible teenage existential mood most of the week, muttering darkly about fakes and facades. HAaaaaaaahaahaa. We're so hilarious when we're young.
The first day of surveying was my 17th birthday and I trailed, on a bloody hot day of melting tarmac, traffic jams and swarming wasps, around various sites in the Lea Valley and it was not a very fun birthday, tbh. The next day, perhaps someone had got wind that I had not a very fun birthday, tbh, so I got to go to White Hart Lane and we went to the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University where we were told the biscuits we were eating were made with the special ingredient love and it was very funny at the time, promise.
But my strongest memory of that week was that I flooded a bathroom because, weirdly, I didn't really know how to use the shower. Like, I didn't think about shutting the door. That always stuck with me as a significant moment of cluelessness.
I was less clueless in 2002, and much less teenage, and I think we had a fun week. The area had changed a lot - pubs and bars and tube stations. I remember we watched the finale to Season 3 of Big Brother on the Friday night in a pub ... those were weird times.
One day, two or three of us were charged with surveying as many pubs in Stratford as we could get through. Stratford was not then what it would become.
But my main memory is we came back from that day to write up our surveys, sat in the bar in the hostel and drank a couple of pints while we did the work, which was time-consuming but not exactly tricky, and I remember thinking "gosh, drinking and working is easy actually if you're head's in the right place, don't ever do it again". And I haven't, which is pretty good going. Of course, back then, drinking and working was more common and less frowned on anyway, but I think telling myself not to drink and work that day in Rotherhithe was one of the best favours I did myself.
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