For decades an intricate web of rivers and canals in East London has been populated by abandoned shopping trolleys, old tyres and a few stubborn anglers casting their lines between the industrial flotsam.

But a new era beckons for the Bow Back Rivers and tributaries of the River Lee as city planners try to entice visitors to a revitalised waterfront envisaged as the Amsterdam of the East End.

The ambitious vision takes a step towards reality with the opening of Three Mills Lock, the first lock to be built in London in 20 years. The £22 million project links a forgotten 3½-mile system of waterways around the Olympic Park in Stratford to the 2,200-mile national inland network that stretches from Bath to Ripon, North Yorkshire.

The opening of the “green gateway” means that barges, water taxis and pleasure cruisers could travel around the country before entering the Thames and mooring near the Olympic site.

Water will be one mode of transport for Olympic spectators in 2012. But the long-term aim of the project is to attract new inhabitants with a model of sustainable living made possible by holding back the tide to create a relatively constant water level.

Proposals include a “village of narrow boats” and a clutch of permanent moorings near the stadium.

Richard Rutter, the British Waterways regeneration manager, said: “Imagine the waterways of Holland and Belgium . . . We want to see riverside cafes, market boats, people hiring punts and materials being loaded from small wharves to be taken off for recycling. There is a massive demand in London for living on water and we need to meet it.”

Until then, it requires imagination to see past the graffiti, discarded beer cans and heavy brush on a stretch of brown water behind a Tesco carpark by the A12 in Bromley-by-Bow. Planners promise a transformation.

“We will have new towpaths and regrade the landscape so that it is less intimidating. People haven’t been able to get close to the water until now because industry has backed on to it,” Richard Jackson, the environment manager for the Olympic Delivery Authority, said.

Initial traffic through the new 62m (200ft) lock, with twin hydraulic water control gates and a fish pass, will be 350-tonne barges carrying construction materials in and waste out of the Olympic park.

Extensive dredging — removing 30,000 tonnes of silt, gravel and rubble — created a 2.4m-deep channel capable of transporting 12,000 tonnes of cargo a week. Olympic chiefs say that this equates to taking 1,200 lorry journeys off local roads each week, saving up to 4,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said: “By shifting noisy, dusty and heavily polluting freight vehicles from busy roads on to water, we can free up traffic and drastically improve the quality of our environment.”

The Bow Back Rivers, covering an area the size of the City, are one of nine national restoration priorities for British Waterways.

Major navigation works between 1931 and 1935 led to peak freight traffic of two million tonnes a year, but bombing during the Second World War devastated the East End and the rise of rail and road curtailed investment in the waterways, which fell into disrepair.

After 2012, it is predicted that use of the waterways could reduce local carbon emissions by 440 tonnes a year and generate 160,000 KWh of hydro power through a restored tidal mill capable of powering up to 40 homes or lighting the local towpaths.