The report makes unsettling reading. It highlights how residents’ well-being across a number of key dimensions (housing, livelihoods and participation) has been undermined by the protracted and ongoing regeneration process itself. It also underlines how residents often feel that their voices have not been adequately heard – or rather not listened to – by the major redevelopment players – Newham Council and UCL. The report’s findings thus reflect those from many in-depth academic studies of major regeneration schemes in deprived urban areas in which the supposed beneficiaries of such schemes – existing local residents – all too often feel neither empowered by their participation in the regeneration process nor feel that they will necessarily benefit from the outcomes (see inter alia Perron and Skiers 2003; Dinham 2007; Allen 2008; Gosling 2008; Imrie et al. 2009; Wallace 2010). None of this is inevitable however. There are examples where local deprived communities can exert a genuine influence on regeneration processes (McGinn 2004; Porter and Shaw 2009; Dillon and Fanning 2011), even in London, a city whose ever-onwards and upwards ‘property machine’ has a built-in tendency to drive out other, more potentially productive and sustainable land-uses (Hutton 2008).