Rupert Cornwell: Bring back the Greenwich smell

The first I heard about the "Greenwich smell" was when I moved back to London four years ago and contemplated living in Greenwich. The splendours of the Royal Naval College and the Observatory, the proximity to Canary Wharf where I worked – what could have been more suitable? Wise friends nodded in approval. But, they added, there was just one thing: a noxious reek that every now and then came up the river from the East.

In the end, we didn't go to Greenwich. Not because of the smell which, for reasons I will shortly explain, by then no longer existed, but the basic matter of house prices. Instead, we settled in the more modest surrounds of Lee. But until they extended the Docklands Light Railway to nearby Lewisham, I used to walk through Greenwich on the way to work, part of one of those horrific commutes patented by London Transport: three miles as the crow flies, but for a wingless human an hour-long odyssey involving two buses, a trudge through the dingy, damp and claustrophobic Greenwich foot-tunnel under the river to the Isle of Dogs, before the final stretch on a then maddeningly unpredictable DLR. There was, however, one huge consolation. Not the unexpected absence of untoward odours on the air, but the fascinating daily glimpse of a place being transformed by a millennial make-over.

In many ways this is another golden age for royal Greenwich. Its old stones have been scrubbed. Its palaces gleam with fresh paint and polish. New transport links, pots of money from the Millennium festivities, universal recognition of its stupendous tourist attractions, not to mention the rocketing price of property in the shadow of a booming Canary Wharf, all add up to a new centrality for the town as dockland regeneration drags London's centre of gravity eastwards.

Even the wasteland of the peninsula is being turned into a developer's utopia for 21st-century urban living, complete with trendy "villages" flanked by hotels, giant discount shopping centres and a fancy multi-screen cinema where you can sip a daiquiri as you watch the main attraction. Such is Greenwich's new smell, the smell of Mammon. As for Mammon's physical personification, look no further than the two new great skyscraper towers, the London headquarters at Canary Wharf of two of the world's largest banks, whose names gleam out across the river.

Confronted by this fait accompli, Greenwich's elders seem grudgingly resigned to the fact that, barring an act of God or Ken Livingston, the words Citigroup and HBSC and their logos are now indelibly stamped on to that peerless view from Greenwich Park across Wren's English Versailles to London beyond. For me, it is an outrage. In New York, the mother city of Mammon and outsize buildings, the Empire State building, the World Trade Center and the Chrysler Building need no labels. Why can't these new piles be likewise ?

Instead, perversely, I find myself pining for an old Greenwich I never saw, a working Greenwich that drew its living from the river. There are times you can imagine it, even taste it, when the tide is high, the wind has turned the water choppy and a salty tang wafts inland from the open sea – just as it did when the Thames teemed with ships of every kind and size, and the dockland wharves bustled with exotic produce and exotic people from the four corners of the earth. And it wasn't that long ago.

As recently as 1950, you could go down to the Isle of Dogs and board a cruise ship that would take you round the world. Back then, the train trip to London cost 1s 6d (7-1/2p as opposed to Connex South East's current fare of £2) and you always got a seat. In those days, Greenwich was a town where most people worked locally, and so it remained until the dark years of the 70s and early 80s. Warehouses and small marine businesses used to crowd the waterfront, including the legendary Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Co, which provided the cable for the first undersea transatlantic cable in 1866.

But Greenwich's decline was sudden, swift and comprehensive. As the docklands withered and died, its own industries moved away or simply folded. The sole surviving trace of the telegraph company is some rusting machinery which once paid out the cable. Only two companies of real size remain: a plant belonging to the French Alcatel group, distant heir to the old cable business, and Amylun, descendent of the old refinery that used to be responsible for the "Greenwich smell" but which now, I am told, specialises in animal feed. If malodorous raw materials there are, they arrive not by river, but by rail and road.

And now Greenwich has a new monument to transience. Thus belatedly, I come to the Millennium Dome – that which a forlorner spectacle cannot exist on the face of this planet. The time for invective is past. A folly? Of course – even though, I insist, a most beautiful folly. But six months after the show closed, a visitor feels like Edward Gibbon as he sat in the ruined forum of ancient Rome. So compressed has time become that the Dome is already an archeological relic. Its 48 entrance turnstiles – each bearing the "Position Closed" sign meticulously put out, one presumes, on the melancholy last evening of 31 December, 2000 – could be the gateway to the underworld.

Ideally, the place would be turned into a hi-tech industrial park, which would have produced just the sort of skilled local jobs that would have respected Greenwich's tradition. But that seems destined not to be. More probably, the Dome will be pulled down, and replaced by one more "urban village", perhaps by another monstrous bank skyscraper to stare back across the Thames at Citigroup and HSBC. Right now though, it is merely a commuting interchange between the Jubilee line and a dozen south and east London buses, deserted for most of the day. Outside stretch endless expanses of tarmac, where the weeds are starting to poke through. The buildings and car parks are empty. At an abandoned taxi stand, someone has pinned the number of a local minicab service. Across the esplanade, a bored security guard waits for an invasion – by the homeless, by anti-globalisers? – which never comes.

It is all very sad. The waste of money of course, but also as a sign of how Greenwich may change again, not necessarily for the better. The place has always been a blend of toffs and toilers, of sumptuous elegance and grit, sweat and poverty, where the sublime Naval College brushes shoulders with the ugly upturned table of the old London County Council power station, a twin of the one in Battersea. Now Mammon, tourism and gentrification are poised to complete their conquest. Please, bring back the "Greenwich smell".

r.cornwell@independent.co.uk