Walking the River Lea from Hackney to the Thames

Reflecting on a cold cold January walk on an Easter weekend as we look forward to Spring despite forecasts of April snow. If you want a snapshot of how London is changing you could do no worse than take this stroll from the edge of the Olympic Park and hug the banks of the River Lea to its confluence with the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf.

You see the towers of new Stratford and hug the contours of the Stadium. Across the Navigation the old wharfs and industrial heart of Hackney Wick is being remodelled. Passing beneath the Bow Flyover the Navigation once again provides a slideshow of change, here to the East the developments around Sugar House Lane that have been rising sluggishly from the factories and warehouses on the south side of Stratford High Street. A similar vista greets us through Bow as well till we hit the huge distribution centres of Sainsburys and Amazon beside the riverbank as we approach Cody Dock.

River Lea Walk 









River Lea at West Ham



Forced away from the Riverbank at Cody Dock we wander into a slice of living history – the old industrial Lea Valley landscape around Bidder Road and Stephenson Street. Pylons rise over car and scrap yards, paint shops, and other staples that were once essential to the functioning city. These spaces keep being pushed further East till eventually they’ll end up in the sea. Someone first urged me to come down here some 7 or 8 years ago, just after the Olympics, ‘Go and see it while you can,’ Chris said.


A path beneath the A13 takes us into Bow Ecology Park where once Shipworks straddled the Lea. On the other side of the water one of the many simulacra produced by New London rises on what they call City Island or ‘mini Manhattan’ in the marketing literature. A tight cluster of colourful tower blocks tethered to the reality of Canning Town by an iron bridge. In lockdown it appears like a fever colony, no one permitted to leave the isolation blocks save for supply runs to Sainsburys Local.




Bidder Road, Lower Lea Valley 
Bidder Road





City Island on the River Lea
City Island





City Island on the River Lea
City Island and Canning Town




Once you find a way off City Island through yet more new building developments around the mouth of the Lea that borrow names from the recorded past, we find our way to Trinity Buoy Wharf. Jim Finer’s Long Player installation continues to mark time in the lighthouse, and the River Lea slides into the Thames and heads off along Bugsby’s Reach bound for the sea.
						
		

	



	
		
Sweet East London Walk – Forest Gate, Upton Park, Plaistow

		

			
		

		

			
		

	

		

			

		

		

			
Trebor Walk through Forest Gate and Upton Park to Plaistow


When one walk begets another something magical happens. Stopping to admire a fine industrial building on Woodford Avenue on a Sunday afternoon drift to Chigwell, I mussed to my camera that I had no idea what it had been, but it always caught my eye. Several people in the YouTube comments informed me that this had once been the Headquarters of Trebor, the iconic confectionary company. A quick search online revealed that the company had actually started life in nearby Forest Gate, and that their 1930s HQ was still intact despite being struck by a bomb during the Second World War. It became an irrestitable focus for an East London quest.


The route I devised for the video above would loop together a number of resonant locations in the area:


Tylney Road – The Tylneys were incredibly wealthy and owned lots of estates including Wanstead House. The road aligns with Wanstead Park on the far side of the Flats.


Manor Park Cemetery – the grave of Jack Cornwell who was postumously awarded the VC at the age of 16 for bravery at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Serving on HMS Chester, the ship came under attack and the gun crew were killed or mortally wounded. Cornwell was shredded with shrapnel but continued to man the last gun stood alone on deck where he was found full of shrapnel still looking down the sights waiting for further orders.


Trebor Building, Katherine Road – Trebor got their sugar from Tate at Canning Town – there was a Trebor Terrace in Katherine Road near where they built their factory.  Other sweets produced at the time included Mixed Fruit Drops, Rock Allsorts, Pineapple Drops and Pear Drops. This Art Deco factory was built in the 1930s on the site of the original factory. The warehouse was hit by a bomb in 1944 and had to be protected from sugar looters. The Green and white of the building matches the colours of extra strong mints. Trebor moved their HQ to Woodford Avenue in the 1950s. Read more here


Green Street and Queen’s Market – the Eastern Boundary of the old Borough of West Ham. In 1086 West Ham had a population of 130


Upton Park ‘Boleyn Ground’ – merger with Boleyn Castle FC in 1904 produced West Ham United. Ann Boylen stayed at Green Street House.


Barking Road – the West Ham Statue, the Tun Marsh – the Barking Road killed off the marsh men of the Plaistow Levels – great grazing land.


Greengate Street – Hook End which was at the end of Greengate St jct with Barking Road.


Plaistow – mentioned in 1414 probably means settlement around a place of play or village green – a village on the marshes. Plaistow Levels – Thomas Burke speaks of Plastovians in The Outer Circle – once a place of city merchants.


Plaistow Park – Part of Plaistow Park is on the grounds of the former Essex House, which dated back to Tudor times, demolished in 1836. West Ham Council acquired the land to create the public park, which opened as Balaam Street Recreation Ground in June 1894.


Doric columns from Wanstead House – bought by local Quakers and used in the portico of North Street Schools (off end of Greengate Street).


 

						
		

	



	
		
A Nostalgic walk from Leytonstone to West Ham Park – East London Walks

		

			
		

		

			
		

	

		

			

		

		

			
A walk from Leytonstone to West Ham Park


Nostalgia 


“The word nostalgia is learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning “homecoming”, a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning “pain” or “ache”, and was coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home. Described as a medical condition—a form of melancholy—in the Early Modern period, it became an important trope in Romanticism.” – wikipedia


Nostalgia is a tendancy in myself that I’ve tried to resist informing my work too much, as I’m a deeply nostalgic person. I suppose this is because it became synonymous with a certain type of sentimentality, a yearning for the past, ‘the good old days’. Growing up during the 80s this was associated with a post-war period that the rush to a digital future was desperate to dump in the dustbin of history. But I seem to be able to feel more nostalgic about last week than Saturday Swap Shop and Spangles.


The theme of nostalgia came up in conversation at the Wanstead Tap with Jake Green about his wonderful Pie and Mash book two days before the walk in the video above. Neither of us are particularly pie and mash people. But these survivors of late Victorian and Edwardian London seem to represent something that it’s sad to see is under threat.


I contributed an essay to Jake’s book of photos of London’s surviving Pie and Mash shops. The theme of the essay was a walk that linked together the locations of former pie and mash shops between Stratford and Islington – a Dead Pie Shop Trail.


“I find myself on a late winter’s day in West Ham Lane, Stratford, at the site of Lediard’s Pie and Mash shop. Steak Republic now occupies the site. The menu still boasts ‘World Range Pies’, along with milkshakes, gourmet burgers and traditional fish and chips. A fragment of carved stonework from the old building pokes through the gap between the plastic shop signage and First Impression Hair and Beauty Salon next door. The neighbouring stretch of West Ham Lane features numerous food outlets; Mummy Yum Chicken Ribs and Pizza, Top Chef Chinese Cuisine, a Polish Delicatessen, and Burj Chicken and Pizza. There is clearly still a market for cheap and simple food in the area despite Lediard’s demise.


The view West from here towards the next part of the Dead Pie Shop Trail is one of emergent skyscrapers, cranes looming over skeletal towers on the outskirts of Mega City Stratford. The grand old civic buildings of the County Borough of West Ham dating from the early 1900s are boarded up, abandoned. Change is sweeping not only through post-Olympic Stratford but London as a whole. What can we learn from the dead pie shops about the London that’s been lost and the city to come?”


west ham park
Cairn on the site of Upton House in West Ham Park


So it’s unsurprising that on a blustery Saturday morning last week I allowed my feet to lead me through the ‘memory grounds’ (Sinclair/Kötting) from my early days in Leytonstone to my first days in London as student living in a terraced house just off the Romford Road. I went down past St. Patrick’s Cemetery to the former workhouse and hospital at Langthorne, on a site that had once belonged to Stratford Langthorne Abbey. Along the route to West Ham Park the ghosts of former pubs lined the roadside like gibbets dangling highwaymen. The Cart and Horses where Leytonstone’s Steve Harris gave birth to Iron Maiden is in a state of stasis awaiting a block of flats to be built out the back before it can receive a full renovation. West Ham Church stands like ‘a still point in a turning world’ (a favourite phrase of my old walking buddy Nick Papadimitriou). And West Ham Park itself links us to a period of civic pride and a belief in the public good that I feel no shame in being nostalgic for.


With the world as it is at the moment and a long winter looming, roaming the byways of the past in mind and on foot could bring necessary relief in these uncertain times.


 

						
		

	



	
		
Through Old West Ham to Cody Dock & River Lea

		

			
		

		

			
		

	

		

			

		

		

			
A few years ago some friends, Stuart and Rayna (who made the brilliant A13 road movie), asked if I’d ever been to Cody Dock. I’d not only never been there but I’d never even heard of it. So a couple of weeks ago at the end of February, I plotted out a route from Stratford Broadway down through Old West Ham to Cody Dock.


My path took me past the site of Stratford Langthorne Abbey, and from Cody Dock I doubled back along the Lea Valley Path to Bow Locks.


The video features some wonderful music by Emily A. Sprague from the YouTube Audio Library

						
		

	



	
		
Old West Ham to Stanley Kubrick’s Beckton

		

			
		

		

			
		

	

		

			

		

		

			
Here’s some footage from the walk I did for Chapter 2 of my book This Other London in the summer of 2012, just before the London Olympics – starting in Leytonstone then going past West Ham Church and the site of Stratford Langthorne Abbey onwards to the site of Beckton Gas Works where Stanley Kubrick shot much of his Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket.


Beckton Gas Works


I’ve been sitting on over 4 hours of footage shot on the 10 This Other London walks slowly filtering out a few short videos but much of it remains unseen. The video footage, photos and notes took on an almost entirely different form once processed into a book, they’ve served their purpose and can stay in the bottom drawer. But every now and again I’ll dip back into that archive and release some of those raw video notes back out into the world.


You can download the audiobook of This Other London here

						
		

	



	
		
East to West Ham – through Forest Gate to Upton Park

		

			
		

		

			
		

	

		

			

		

		

			
It was a tweet I saw at breakfast showing the beginnings of the demolition of Upton Park, the Boleyn Ground, that set me off across Wanstead Flats to take a final look at the iconic home of West Ham United before it was gone forever. I’m not a Hammers fan but have been to West Ham a few times, first when I lived just up the road as a student and they would let you in at half-time for a couple of quid, which was more or less the time I got out of bed on a Saturday so it worked out quite nicely. I remember one game – Frank Mcavennie up front for West Ham, Tottenham legend Graham Roberts playing Centre Half for West Brom.


Old Spotted Dog Forest Gate


On the way I wanted to check the state of the great Old Spotted Dog Pub in Forest Gate where the London Stock Exchange moved during the Great Fire of London and we drank regularly in those student days 1990-91. It’s boarded up now – future in the balance, over 400 years of history in the hands of the Newham Council Planning Committee and some property developers – a desperately sad sight.


Queens Market Green Street


Queens Market on Green Street seems to have survived the grip of the developer and was a hub of activity – everything you can imagine is on sale beneath is murky roof – a cornucopia of wonders. A fella selling fruit and veg spotted my camera and auditioned for the role as the new “£1 Fish” star – he did a pretty decent job – have a look at the video above. His performance inspired me to buy two huge mangoes and four pomegranate.


Upton Park West Ham demolition


Outwardly West Ham seemed intact with only the carpark dug up, but peering through a crack the huge security doors at the side of the ground I could see the diggers at work tearing up the turf, the seats piled up around the pitch, the Trevor Brooking Stand starting to be dismantled. Can the Hammers import all this history over to the Olympic Park at Stratford (in actual West Ham rather than East Ham where the old ground is) – or will the club’s heritage be buried beneath the blocks of luxury flats built on the once hallowed ground.