Exploring Old & New Barking – Abbey Ruins to Barking Riverside

There’s yet another new London taking shape on the edge of Barking at Barking Riverside:

“A brand new neighbourhood is being created alongside two km of Thames river frontage at Barking Riverside, one of the most ambitious and important new developments in the UK. Outline planning permission was granted in 2007 for 10,800 homes on the former power station site.”Barking Riverside website

The excursion began wandering through the footprint of the ruins of Barking Abbey, that great powerhouse of early medieval London. I then followed the banks of the River Roding down to Barking Creek and Creekmouth Open Space, before continuing along River Road to the huge Barking Riverside site, finishing at Dagenham Dock Station.

3 Comments

  1. John Hodiak   •  

    Hi John, Thanks for another great film. Don’t know how you remain upbeat walking through all the fly-tipping shit. The development looks a bit more community orientated than the usual corporate rape of the land – or am I just naïve? Thank god you didn’t refer to the map you took with you, otherwise with your prowess at orienteering you’d still be walking.
    By the way, the flower at 13.30 is a wild iris.
    As always, your work is a wonderful reflective oasis in a world (Britain) gone mad.

  2. JohnR   •     Author

    Thanks for the kind words John, greatly appreciated – thankfully that fly-tipping was fairly isolated to that spot but it was a proper horror-show.
    I think you could be right about the development, a lot more mixture of tenancies, shared-ownership etc., so happy to share your naivity.
    The good thing with River walks is the lack of navigation required, or yes I could be half-way across France by now.

  3. Pingback: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Barking Riverside - the lost byway

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