Battle of Beckton: Sheets of corrugated iron on Beckton Alps have been daubed with St George's crosses to cover up Lithuanian flags

Margaret Thatcher loved the maquette of Canary Wharf. She listened enthralled as the architects explained how a light railway would extend through the razed old docks. There was a toy train running round the mock-up. The whole thing was over 10,000 square feet. 

The little railway ended in acres of suburban housing. Little red brick cottages arranged in geometrical closes and perpendiculars. The developers explained to the Prime Minister this was where commuters to the financial towers would live. Just 20 minutes away from work and on the water's edge. All of them property owners. She adored the architects' model dream. 

The Docklands Light Railway still has the feel of a scale model. The stations sound as if they were named after pubs: Royal Albert, Royal Victoria, Galleon's Reach. But the high-rise housing over the easternmost spur of the DLR has seen happier days. Dirty England flags hang from balconies. Panoramic vistas over gargantuan retail parks. The Millennium Dome (now the O2) is filthy, begging to be torn down.  

Beckton is the end of the line, rebuilt for a middle class that never arrived. Now superimpose a poverty map of London over a Tube map. Dark red runs along the line to Beckton. More than 60 per cent of the children here grow up in poverty. But there is worse data. London is statistically parcelled up into 4,772 micro-areas. Beckton is the tenth most deprived. Twenty minutes from the headquarters of HSBC.  

Beckton doesn't look foreign at first. The unkempt trees leering over cracked pavements. The locals-only pubs. Grotty supersavers. Dreary parking lots. It looks like the abandoned set of Brookside. But this Tube stop sounds like a foreign country. Everyone exiting the ticket barriers is talking Polish or Bengali, Lithuanian or Romanian.