Ever heard of the Dead End Kids? When German bombers began 76 successive nights of raids on the London docks in 1940, Patsie Duggan and his team of tin-hatted teenagers, including his 13-year-old sister, Maureen, ran around Wapping, in east London, dodging flying debris, pulling people from burning buildings and doing their best to douse the flames.

By the time the Blitz was over, two lads had been killed and Patsie injured, but they had saved many lives.

Fast forward to today and Wapping is another country, a tranquil backwater now the docks are long closed. What the Luftwaffe failed to destroy, developers have transformed into expensive riverside flats; bright steel and glass apartment blocks rise alongside them, their reflections dancing in a far less polluted Thames.

Does the spirit of Patsie's daring team live on in Wapping's firmly multi-cultural teenagers today? Not if you believe some of the new East Enders. Residents of those shiny temples to modernity are lobbying for a riverside park to be fenced around and locked every evening against vandalism and rowdy behaviour.

Only this isn't any old park. The Dead End Kids would have been familiar with one of Wapping's bigger air-raid shelters at Hermitage Wharf. It took a hit in 1940 and again in 1944, when a doodlebug killed five ARP wardens. Then, just a few months before the end of the war, a V2 rocket blew it apart, killing six and injuring many others.

It's now the site of a memorial garden for East End victims of the Blitz, civilians who died in a nightly terror we find hard to imagine today. Open round the clock and well stocked with shrubs and young trees it's a welcome green space in a densely built area, with panoramic views up the river to Tower Bridge. Its crowning glory is a graceful dove of peace which stands as a symbol of hope after so much misery. This dove was cruelly vandalised last year, shocking local people. It's now fenced around but that's not enough for some. They want the park "caged" and locked at night because young men occasionally use it as an impromptu outdoor pub and make too much noise – as young men do. I know: I live in the area and am sometimes woken by their irritating carousing. But dialogue is better than denunciation. I talk to these youngsters and see a different side to them. They're not bad – they're just bored.

And to those who feel they would never be heirs to the brave Dead End Kids, I have seen them transformed by the need to act. Walking in the park one evening I saw a middle-aged man fall 20ft into the low-tide mud below, breaking several bones. These apparently feckless young men sprang into action, calling the rescue services and staying close by, calling down encouragement to him until help arrived and frankly thrilled at being useful.

Locking them out of the park will punish everyone and solve nothing, simply moving the problem to another area. The old East End could take nightly bombardments from the Luftwaffe but the new East End can't take the occasional bit of noise.

This seems curiously symbolic of modern Britain, where the mantra of education, education, education has been replaced with exclusion, exclusion, exclusion. And ask Tottenham where that leads.