Everyone is stealing glances at the large clock on the wall: twenty past four. It has been a very long day in the council chamber. Chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence, the new proposal document has been discussed, revised and eventually approved.

Sensing the mood, the council leader calls a short tea and/or cigarette break. Ten minutes later, the meeting reconvenes to discuss the last detail of the document. The councillors return to their seats, and the representatives from the North Riverside Business and Community Association shuffle into the benches at the back of the chamber. Today, in honour of the final day of discussion, they have brought their famous banner with them. On the left hand side is the word NO, bright red and very large, next to three statements:

NO! TO CLOSING BUSINESSES
NO! TO UNAFFORDABLE NEW HOUSING
NO! TO THE NEW PLAN FOR THE NORTH RIVERSIDE

Residents and local business owners were quick to form the NRBCA in response to the first tentative consultation on redeveloping the area. Since then, they have met every Wednesday evening in the function room upstairs at the Ebb and Flow to discuss the council’s plans and distribute T-shirts. Garages and fabricators and pubs and cafés that have been open for generations, and survived the closing of the docks, were suddenly under threat from a document that imagined a future very different from their past.

It was beyond their power to stop the proposal entirely, but the representatives from the NRBCA made their voices heard in the council chamber, abridging chapters and diluting commitments. The result was seventy two pages of surveys, observations and noncommittal suggestions. But despite their efforts there was one thing, unwritten but present on every page, that the NRBCA couldn’t remove: the creeping sense that change was inevitable.

The council leader, weary, stands up. He is only a few years away from a carriage clock and a cottage somewhere far away from here. With his thick-rimmed glasses and stern black suit he looks out of place next to the NRBCA members, in their jeans and T-shirts. But thirty years ago that was him in the benches, a local business owner standing up for his community after the devastation of the war. A lot has changed. He sees nothing he can identify with in the men and women from the NRBCA. They all want the same thing, but to them everything is so simple, and to him it is so complicated. Their position fits neatly on a T-shirt but a seventy-two page document still falls short of explaining his.

He clears his throat and speaks to the chamber: “Now we come to the final item on today’s agenda, item 47: the frontispiece and title of our document. Our design team has prepared three options for you to choose from. You should have them in front of you.”

The chamber fills with the sound of shuffling paper. In the benches at the back, the members of the NRBCG are handed printouts to share. Then everyone is silent as they consider the options:

Option 1

A green background, with a network of city streets very faintly visible. On top, a sinuous blue shape recognisable as the iconic curve of the river as it wraps around the borough. In the blue shape are small italicised words, flowing downstream:

Jobs
Housing
Community
Leisure
History
Dining
Shopping
Regeneration
Tourism
Conservation

Above the blue shape is the title of the document, in lively lettering made to look handwritten:

What Next? The Future of our Riverside

Option 2

A loose watercolour illustration of the iconic warehouse buildings that line the riverside, surrounded by new office blocks, tall shapes of shining amber glass. In the foreground two men are smiling at each other and shaking hands. One is a businessman in a suit and tie, holding a leather briefcase. The other is a roadsweeper in an orange high-vis jacket.

Underneath is the title of the document, written in a curve of yellow text that looks like a smile:

The New North Riverside
A Place for All of Us

Option 3

A grainy black and white photograph, looking up at the distinctive iron gantries that cross between the warehouses. The voids of sky between the gantries are filled with colour photographs, visions of the future: A smartly dressed couple sit at a table outside a restaurant while a waiter pours a glass of red wine. They are all laughing. A woman walks her dog by the river on a crisp winter morning, thick scarf around her neck, admiring the view of the city. Two men in oil-streaked blue overalls and hard hats with their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera. A plate of sushi.

On the gantries themselves, in industrial-looking lettering, is the title of the document:

Building Bridges in the New North Riverside

It is dark by the river. The narrow cobbled streets hide in a deep shadow that the halogen lights cannot pierce. The old warehouses, once vital, sit empty. The cranes that line their walls leak rust down the brickwork.

The river ebbs and flows. A man walks slowly along the water’s edge, beneath the teetering warehouses. Occasionally he stops to examine objects he finds on the shore, detritus of the city that the river has collected and deposited. Every part of its two thousand year history is recorded here, from Roman coins to yesterday’s bottlecaps. He looks for evidence of its future, but it hasn’t yet arrived. It’s still upstream, but travelling fast.



In one of the quickest decisions of the day, the councillors decide on option 1. There are no objections from the NRBCA. Everyone is out before five.