Newham | >Re-PHOTO

Housing For All – Focus E15

On Saturday 19th September 2015, two years after the start of the Focus E14 and a year since their successful occupation of empty flats on Stratford’s Carpenters Estate gained national headlines about both their own treatment by Newham Council and the problems faced by others around the country in finding homes, Focus E15 organised a march, rally and party.

In a ‘long read’ published in The Guardian at the end of June 2022, Oliver Wainwright writes about the particular problems that Newham and the other ‘Olympic boroughs’ are facing and how these have been worsened since the Olympics came to the area. His ‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out details how the many promises made before and after London’s winning bid have failed to materialise.

As Wainwright states, in the area “there are almost 75,000 households on the waiting list for council housing, many living in desperate poverty. Thousands of former residents have also been rehoused outside the area since the Olympics took place.

Wainwright quotes the former directory of the agency which bought up land for the Olympic site and evicted local businesses as saying “There is no pretence any more that the legacy is trying to get a positive outcome for East Enders .. It is driven by a total market ideology, dressed up in some good aspirational talk, with a few baubles thrown out to keep local people happy, while mostly catering for the rich. It is a massive failure at every level“

Although Wainwright points out the naivety of London Mayor Ken Livingstone in his ruthless support for the bid – which he saw as the only way to get the billions needed to develop the area – he makes clear who the real villain was, Livingstone’s successor Boris Johnson.

Many pointed out the problems over the years the bid was being made, and locals and others actively campaigned against the Olympic bid, over the removal of many successful businesses from the area, the demolition of a fine cooperative housing estate, the removal of allotments and the cycle circui, the loss of green space. People warned that the Olympic priorities would result in a development very different to that serving the needs of the area. And it has.

I’m pleased to have recorded at least some of that opposition in My London Diary over the years. I’d come to know the area over a number of visits since the 1980s and knew some of those involved in the protests which I photographed throughout the period, as well as continuing my photographic documentation of the area, much of which was published in my 2010 book ‘Before the Olympics‘, where I wrote ‘Stratford Marsh was one of the areas I found most interesting from the start; then a curious mixture of wilderness and industry … What was once an exciting and varied area with a great range of wildlife is now sterilized and under concrete.

The 2008 financial crisis meant the government had to pick up many of the bills, and large parts became publicly owned. Wainwright points out that the sale of the athlete’s village for around half what it cost to build meant a £275m loss to the taxpayer, who had funded the social aspects including a “school and health facilities, while the private sector kept the more profitable parts of the scheme – the shopping mall, the offices and the luxury flats.”

Newham’s Mayor until 2018, Robin Wales, encouraged the development of high-priced flats as attracting a wealthier demographic to the borough, and at the same time presided over a policy of ‘displacement and relocation of low-income households, as far afield as Stoke-on-Trent’. The Focus E15 mothers he tried to disperse away from London named it clearly – ‘Social Cleansing’.

The huge redevelopment in the area since 2012 has resulted in only 110 genuinely affordable homes. Newham currently has over 27000 applicants on the Housing Register and some 4500 families in temporary accommodation. Newham began emptying one notable large estate in central Stratford, the 1967 Carpenters estate of 710 homes in 2004 and by 2012 more than half of the homes were empty. The residents had wanted the estate refurbished, but Newham hoped to sell it off. When protests led to UCL withdrawing plans for a new campus, they looked for a developer, but those plans were dropped in 2018 and a new start made.

*Bridge House – LB Newham’s Housing Office*

There is much more in Wainwright’s article than I’ve mentioned, along with some of my own thoughts here, particularly about the huge failures of Boris Johnson and the failure to provide the kind of overall planning that could have occurred had the area been developed as a new town with the legacy corporation reinvesting “profits back into the future of the place, as happened in the postwar New Towns and places like Milton Keynes.” But instead it has been a commercial operation and one that has turned into a financial disaster for the taxpayer, rich pickings for developers and a social and environmental mess.

Wainwright describes the outcome in his final paragraph as “a nice park dotted with impressive sports venues and high-end homes, with some cultural attractions on the way.” I have to disagree, particularly about the park. It’s a park that is still scarred by the Olympics with large arid areas which I think will leave much of it forever beyond redemption, though there are some nicer parts. But I can only echo his next sentence: “But the poorest and most vulnerable, in what remain London’s most deprived boroughs, have lost out.“

The Focus E15 march began with a rally in Stratford Park. It was supported by people from a huge list of organisations I list on My London Diary. They they then marched around Stratford town centre, past the bus station, the station and the Theatre then back down the Broadway, stopping briefly outside Foxtons, where Class War staged a brief protest inside the estate agents offices.

They then moved on to the LB Newham’s Housing Office at Bridge House for another protest. Finally the marched on to the Carpenters Estate to hold a rally in front of the flats they had occupied for two weeks in 2014. Their occupation had led to these flats being re-occupied along with a few other of the roughly 400 empty properties on the estate.

If you’ve not yet read ‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out please do. You can read more of what I wrote back in 2015 and see many more pictures on My London Diary:
Focus E15: Rally before March
Focus E15: ‘March Against Evictions’
Class War Occupy Stratford Foxtons
Focus E15: Anniversary of Carpenters Occupation

Stop The Arms Fair – 2017

The world’s largest arms fair currently takes place in London every two years, at the Excel Centre, a large exhibition centre in Custom House, East Ham in the London Borough of Newham. Organised by Clarion Events, the Defence and Security Equipment International show is “fully endorsed” by the UK Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Trade, but condemned by London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan and most Londoners and opposed by a week of protests organised by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and supported by many other groups.

Sadiq Khan has failed to stop the arms fair taking place, lacking the powers to do so despite his repugnance. Amnesty International criticise it for selling weapons of torture and those that have been shown to have been used against civilians, and CAAT point out that it is attended by official military and security delegations from countries which are noted abusers of human rights, including those on the UK’s official list of countries subject to arms embargo.

Of course with the UK the high profits to be made on arms sales often trumps such listings; Action on Armed Violence points out that “five of the UK’s human rights priority countries feature on the DIT’s ‘key markets’ directory for potential arms sales (Bahrain, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia)” and that “UK export licences for small arms and ammunition have been approved to 31 destinations on the embargoed and restricted list” betwwen 2015 and 2020.

In September 2017 I photographed protests outside the DSEI arms fair on four days in the week before the fair as well as a related event elsewhere and a wreath-laying ceremony on the opening day. There are fuller accounts on My London Dairy – links at the end of this post.

No Faith in War DSEI Arms Fair protest – ExCeL Centre, London. Tue 5 Sept 2017

The second day of protests against the world’s largest arms fair held in London’s docklands was ‘No Faith In War’, a series of events organised by various faith groups.

Quakers held a meeting by the side of the approach road to the East Gate of Excel, and some sat on the road to block it. Eventually police lifted this woman carefully and carried herto the side of the road. Some who persisted in blocking the road were arrested and taken to police vans.

Four people abseiled from a roadway bridge to block the road. It took police a long time to find a safe way to remove them.

People held a mass on the roadway – police waited until they finished then made them leave.

At the west gate people walked very slowly in front of the lorries. Eventually police pushed them off the road. Some were arrested. Others had come to support them and sing hymns and religious songs. There were various other activities at both gates.

Protesters block DSEI arms fair entrances – Wed 6 Sep 2017

Stop the Arms fair protesters carried out a series of lengthy lock-ons on the roads at both East and West gates blocking access to London’s ExCeL centre where preparations are being made for the worlds’s largest arms fair.

Police teams took quite a long time to carefully separate the people who were locked together to block the roads. There was also some street theatre from various groups. One pair of protesters managed to lock themselves on the roadway inside the centre gates – but police would not let journalists get closer to photograph them.

I went back to the East gate to find another pair locked on there. The protesters managed to block both entrances for several hours – and there were quite a few arrests.

Protest picnic & checkpoint at DSEI, London. Thu 7 Sep 2017

Veterans for Peace came to set up a banned weapons checkpoint. Police waved lorries on past their checkpoint, encouraging one lorry to drive through the protest at a highly dangerous speed, and removed protesters from the road with threats of arrest.

At lunchtime North London Food Not Bombs moved onto the road and blocked it to serve protesters with an excellent road-block picnic. After 15 minutes police moved in to clear the road, threatening the diners with arrest.

DSEI Festival Morning at the East Gate – Sat 9 Sep 2017

Several hundred people listened to a programme of speakers, workshops, spoken word, choirs and groups and stopped lorries bringing arms by walking in front of them until pushed aside by police.

Festival of Resistance – DSEI West Gate – Sat 9 Sep 2017

Things were a little livlier at the West gate, where cyclists in a ‘Critical Mass’ were arriving and Charlie X, a Chaplin clone who protests in mime had just been freed from the lorry he had locked on to but had been arrested and was being led away by a dozen police. They also arrested one of the cyclists for having a bike lock around his neck. He had it to lock the wheels to his bike if he had to leave it anywhere. If carrying a lock or chain for your bike was an offence, every cyclist in London would face arrest.

DSEI East Gate blocked – Sat 9 Sep 2017

I took the DLR back to the East gate, arriving to find the road blocked by a lock-on, with two people joined through a pipe which the police were struggling to remove. Finally they did and arrested to two involved. People were blocking the road and holding a religious service, but police forced them off the road – with at least one more arrest of a woman who refused to move.

While the police were removing the two locked on, a man had locked himself to the lorry – and he too was removed and arrested. Other people came onto the road to block lorries and there were poetry and musical performances. Then a group of seven people joined arms in a circle on the road and refused to move. They were still there when I had to leave, stopping off briefly at the DLR entrance to the Excel Centre to photograph a musical protest there.

#Arming The World -Woolwich Arsenal, London. Tue 12 Sep 2017

Ice & Fire theatre and Teatro Vivo with designer Takis, gave their first performance of #Arming The World, a satircial weapons catwalk show spreading information about Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) at Woolwich Arsenal with actors dressed as arms dealers, a Paveway IV Missile, a Eurofighter Typhoon and CS Gas.

Wreath for victims of the arms trade – Royal Victoria Dock, Tue 12 Sep 2017

East London Against Arms Fairs (ELAAF) held a procession carrying a white wreath with the message ‘Remember Victims of the Arms Trade’ around the Royal Victoria Dock on the day the DSEI Arms Fair opened, launching the wreath onto the water opposite the ExCeL centre.

More on all these events on My London Diary:
Wreath for victims of the arms trade
#Arming The World
DSEI East Gate blocked
Festival of Resistance – DSEI West Gate
DSEI Festival Morning at the East Gate
Protest picnic & checkpoint at DSEI
Protesters block DSEI arms fair entrances
No Faith in War DSEI Arms Fair protest

Chariot Festival, Olympic Site and Notting Hill

Chariot Festival, Olympic Site and Notting Hill. Sunday 27th August 2006, sixteen years ago was a busy day for me, travelling to East Ham to photograph a colourful Hindu festival, then on to Stratford for a short walk along the High Street and Bow Back Rivers, before taking the underground and ending up on Ladbroke Grove for the Children’s Day of the Notting Hill Carnival.

It was part of a very full few days for me, having got back to London after a couple of weeks in Paris and a few days with family in Beeston. Friday I’d put my folding bike on the train to Greenhithe and spent a day cycling around there and Swanscombe, Saturday I’d walked around 12 miles on the London Loop and after the events here on Monday I’d returned to Notting Hill for the carnival itself, after which I needed a few days rest. The text here is taken from My London Diary – with a few corrections, appropriate capitalisation and some additional comments. There are some more details in the captions on the picture pages of these events.

Sri Mahalakshmi Temple Chariot Festival – East Ham

Sunday morning found me in East Ham, where the Hindu Sri Mahalakshmi Temple was holding its chariot festival. It was a colourful and friendly event, but I soon felt I’d taken enough pictures and left.

It’s hard to show the flames when the offerings of food are made to the god, and difficult to catch the colour of the occasion.

more pictures

Lea Navigation and Bow Back Rivers – Stratford

On my way back from East Ham I stopped off at Bromley-by-Bow and walked up to Stratford High Street and along the rivers and channels there.

Parts were so thickly covered with bright green growth that they looked as if I could have walked along them.

There was another site demolished on the high street, with new housing starting to go up.

more pictures

Notting Hill Carnival – Childrens Day – Notting Hill

But the big event of August is always Notting Hill Carnival, and I was there both on the Sunday afternoon for Childrens’ Day and for the main event on the Monday, shooting both black and white film and colour digital.

[I noted back in 2006 that when I would get round to processing the black and white film is “anyone’s guess”. I think it was around ten years later that I finally admitted I wasn’t going to develop the chromogenic black and white films myself and the chemicals were probably past their best and I sent them for commercial processing. Though by then I wasn’t sure whether I had taken them in 2006 or 2007. But back to my 2006 post.]

Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older, but I didn’t get the same buzz from this year’s event as in previous years, though most of the same things seemed to be around.

Perhaps this was the problem; most of them did seem to be the same, two years on from when I last photographed the event. Last year, 2005, I tried to go, dragging myself to the station with a knee injury, but the pain was too much to continue. This year my knee held out, though I was glad to sink into a seat on the Underground at Latimer Road at the end of the day.

I didn’t take many colour pictures on Children’s Day, and most weren’t of children, and I think I probably didn’t stay long, but there are many more on the pages which follow on from there taken the following day.

more pictures

March for a People’s Olympics

Ten years ago on July 27th 2012, as the London 2012 Olympics were getting underway in Stratford, people, mainly from the local area, marched to call for an end to the corporate takeover of the Olympics and the draconian policing and military presence largely aimed at the protection of brands and for the games to meet its legacy promises.

The authorities had done their damnedest to stop the protest taking place – first they had tried to ban it altogether, then Transport for London had refused permission for them to march along any roads which were emergency backup Games routes. But protesters agreed with police that they would leave the road if there was any emergency. Tower Hamlets council tried to ban any speeches or other events on Wennington Green where the march ended, and protesters were threatened they would be arrested if they carried banners, placards or t-shirts with political messages – though it was hard to see any legal basis for doing so.

The ‘Whose Games? Whose City?’ protest went ahead despite the threats, with only one small incident when police seized and searched a man who had cut a piece of police tape. A crowd of marchers supported them and shouted for his release and after a few minutes he was set free without charge and the march continued.

The threats and public controversy had doubtless persuaded many not to come to the event, where around 500 marchers mingled with press and TV from around the world at the starting point in Mile End Park at midday. The organisers, the Counter Olympics Network (CON) had made clear that they were not against the Olympics as a sporting event but against the way it had been taken over by corporate interests. In my long account of the event on My London Diary I quoted from several of their statements, including:

"the close ties between the Olympic brand and its corporate sponsors who, despite IOC claims of vetting on ethical grounds, include serial polluters, companies which seriously damage the environment and which wreck or take lives, Coca Cola, Rio Tinto, BP, Dow Chemical. G4S, Cisco, and Atos deny people their human rights in a variety of situations while Macdonalds helps to fuel the obesity epidemic. London2012 provides benefits at taxpayers’ expense while receiving little in return."

CON also pointed out the many broken promises made about the games and the very doubtful legacy the games will leave, particularly in East London.

"the lack of benefits for local people and businesses, the fantastic expansion of security into our daily lives, the deployment of missiles and large numbers of troops, the unwarranted seizure of public land at Wanstead Flats, Leyton Marsh and Greenwich Park."

*A man celebrates after the crowd made police release him*

Later in his speech on Wennington Green, Chris Nineham of the Stop The Olympic Missiles Campaign declared that the London Olympics had already set a number of records, including the largest ever number of arrests on the first day, the highest ticket prices, the most intensive application of branding rules and the highest level of militarisation of any Olympic games, with far more being spent on security that even in China. There were now more troops in London than at any time since World War 2, and more than at any time in Afghanistan, where our military activities were now making us a terrorist target in London. Among the other speakers was Melanie Strickland, one of the 182 ‘Critical Mass’ cyclists arrested the previous night for riding near the Olympic stadium.

*Industry on the Olympic site, Marshagate Lane, 1990*

I had known and photographed the Olympic area since the early 1980s until the public were all excluded from the vast site in 2007 and after when we were only able to peer over the blue fence. In 2010 I brought out a book ‘Before The Olympics’ which included many pictures of the area in the thirty years or so before they took place, as well as looking more widely along the length of the River Lea and the Navigation. Most people miss that parts of the area were formerly thriving industrial and commercial sites, others a verdant wilderness – and of course some thriving allotments. Of course there have been some benefits following 2012 – more housing is something London desperately needs, but much was already being planned before the bid succeeded. But the park remains to me deeply disappointing.

*Allotments on the Olympic site, April 2007*

The book is still available and you should be able to view a preview at ‘Before the Olympics‘ though Blurb appears to be having some problems at the moment; it is a ridiculously highly priced softback, but there is a more reasonable PDF version. The book includes many of my pictures of the area which are also on my The Lea Valley web site including mainly black and white images from the 1980s and 90s and colour from the 2000s. Later images from before and after 2012 are on various pages of My London Diary. There is a large collection of the black and white images in my Flickr album River Lea – Lea Navigation 1981-1992 including many from what became the Olympic site.

Housing Crisis & the Carpenters Estate

Housing Crisis & the Carpenters Estate: Like many other areas, the 1945 Labour government laid the foundations of a sensible policy on housing which has now been lost. Among other things the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act brought in the need for planning permission and included a charge on developers which was assessed as the difference between the cost of the undeveloped land and its value after it had been developed. It gave local authorities the power to use compulsory purchase and either develop land themselves or lease it for private developers, and provided government grants to authorities for major redevelopment.

Times were hard after the war, and there were shortages of material with so much needing to be done. Even so around 600,000 new council homes were built in the first five years, and built to high standards. One of the election-winning pledges made by the Conservatives for the 1951 election was that they would build 300,000 houses a year – something they managed under Housing Minister Harold Macmillan in 1953, including both private and council houses, but it was achieved in part by reducing the standards of properties.

The Tories made other changes, including removing the development charge and limiting government subsidies, which in 1956 became limited to the building of high rise flats. While Labour had seen council housing as a way to provide good quality housing affordably to all, the Conservatives increasing limited its scope to providing only for the least well off, with private development and private leasing providing good profits for building firms and private landlords at the expense of house buyers and tenants of private rented properties.

Although it was Labour who had first proposed the idea of ‘right to buy’ it was of course Thatcher who made it policy and introduced it in a way which was intended to severely reduce the amount of council housing, in particular forbidding the use of the receipts from sales to
build new council homes. Cash-starved local authorities were often unable to keep up proper maintenance of their housing stock and much was allowed to deteriorate.

Labour under Blair and Brown continued the Tory policies, including the transfer of council run properties to housing associations, and amplified their effects with their programme of ‘regeneration’ which led to the wholesale replacement of large council estates – most still in sound condition which could have cheaply been repaired and brought up to current standards. But developers profited hugely from demolition and redevelopment for private sale and councils hoped also to cash in, though in some cases they made a significant loss, as at the Heygate in Southwark, where around 1200 council homes were demolished, the tenants and leaseholders displaced largely outside the area, and the two and a half thousand new properties built included only around 80 at social rents. Other Labour policies, including the disastrous Private Finance Initiative also worsened the housing crisis.

You can read very much more detail on the history of council housing on the website Municipal Dreams and in the book by the site’s author Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing published in 2019 which presents a detailed and balanced view.

The young mothers of Focus E15 came up against the the housing crisis when their Labour Council in Newham decided they should be evicted from their hostel. Most were told they had to move into private rented properties with little or no security of tenure miles away from families, friends and facilities in the Stratford area, some in Wales or the north of England. They got together and decided to fight the council, then run by elected Mayor Robin Wales and its policy of removing the poor from the area – social cleansing.

Newham is a borough with one of the worst housing problems in the country, and although there has been a huge building programme, partly around the 2012 Olympic site, this is largely student housing or private development. But one council estate close to the centre of Stratford had been largely empty for around ten years. Newham had ‘decanted’ the residents beginning in 2004 hoping to cash in on what would be a prime development site. The Carpenters Estate was a very popular estate, with low rise housing and three tower blocks overlooking the Olympic Park, a stone’s throw from the excellent transport links of Stratford Station and the town centre.

For some years Newham had hoped to sell off the area as a new campus for University College London, but local opposition and protests by students and academics at UCL led to the college abandoning the plans. In 2020 the council handed over the regeneration project its Housing Company Populo Living.

Focus E15 came to the Carpenters Estate on Monday 9th June 2014 to highlight the scandal of the empty homes, bringing with them life-size or larger colour portraits of the mothers which they pasted on the shuttered windows of a small block of flats at the centre of the estate, along with posters stating ‘We Could be Here’, ‘This home needs a family’, ‘These homes need people’, ‘You could be here’.

The protest gained some publicity for their campaign, which had moved on from being simply about the mothers to a much more general ‘Housing For All’ campaign, which still continues, with the group holding a weekly Saturday Morning stall on Stratford Broadway, supporting homeless families in getting proper treatment from the council and preventing evictions in the area.

I returned with Focus E15 to the Carpenters Estate a few months later in September when on the first anniversary of the start of their campaign they occupied this low-rise block of flats on ‘Open House Day, gaining national publicity, staying in occupation for around two weeks, and have photographed various other of their events.

Focus E15 Mums Expose Carpenters Estate

Vedanta, Tampons, Roma, Monsanto & Mental Health

Vedanta, Tampons, Roma, Monsanto & Mental Health – there was a varied array of protests in London on Saturday 21st May 2016, and I was kept busy photographing them. Fortunately most were within walking distance of each other in central London, but I ended the day with a rally and march in Stratford.

Foil Vedanta at Jaipur Literary Festival – Royal Festival Hall, Southbank

I rushed from Waterloo station to the nearby Royal Festival Hall where I found campaigners from Foil Vedanta protesting against Vedanta’s sponsorship of the Jaipur Literature Festival. They say Vedanta, the most hated company on Earth, causing pollution, illness, displacement, poverty and deaths by its mining operations, sometimes criminal, in India, Zambia, South Africa and Australia, is attempting to whitewash its image by sponsorship of the festival.

They briefly interrupted a presentation in the main space of the Clore Ballroom to make their case. Earlier Foil Vedanta and Round Table India had sent an open letter to authors who had agreed to appear, signed by around 50 mainly Indian writers, poets, academics and activists, informing them of Vedanta’s criminal operations, and calling on them to withdraw, and some had done so, with others expected to criticize Vedanta in their presentations.

After the interruption the campaigners withdrew to the rear of the area where they continued to hand out leaflets and brief journalists, watched closely by security who insisted they keep the entrance clear but did not otherwise intervene.

More at Foil Vedanta at Jaipur Literary Festival.

Tampon tax now Osbourne! – Parliament Square

Campaigners met in Parliament Square and then marched to present a letter to Downing St calling on the government to fulfil their pledge to axe the tax on tampons. A massive campaign and lobby resulted in the removal of regulations preventing the removal of tax but it is still being levied.

Prominent in the protest were those from the 50:50 Parliament campaign for equal representation of women and men in Parliament who say that if there were more women in Parliament there would not be taxes like this – and much less of the public-school bickering that often dominates the House of Commons.

More at Tampon tax now Osbourne!

‘Dosta, Grinta, Enough!’ Parliament Square

As the Tampon Tax campaigners left on their march to Downing St, four horse drawn vehicles arrived for the protest by Roma, Gypsies and Travellers against the hardening attacks against their way of life.

Heritage wardens and police told them it was was against bylaws to bring horses on to the square and after a short rally on the grass they led protesters in repeated circuits of the roadway around the square before leaving as the main rally on the corner of the square started.

Changes in the laws have allowed local authorities to stop providing traveller sites, and laws against fly-grazing have made finding places to stay and moving around the country much harder. Alterations in local planning guidance have meant that local planning laws have been used in a discriminatory fashion to prevent them using land even when they own it – as at Dale Farm. The ‘Dosta, Grinta, Enough!’ protest called attention to these attacks by the government on their ethnicity and demanded an end to 500 years of persecution.

More at ‘Dosta, Grinta, Enough!’

March Against Monsanto Rally – Downing St

It was a day of several hundred world-wide protests against Monsanto, but there had been little publicity for the London protest and attendance for disappointing, and although there were good speeches these were to a small group of dedicated activists.

*Among the listeners were a couple of bees and this cow*

Monsanto dominates the worlds markets for seeds and agrochemicals at the expense of small scale farmers and communities around the world and is forcing harmful pesticides and genetically modified seeds on farmers in their corporate control of the world’s food system. The company has sued thousands of small farmers in the US and elsewhere to protect its patents which cover a wide range of crops and other products.

More at March Against Monsanto Rally.

Housing is a Mental Health Issue – Stratford

From Westminster the Jubilee Line takes a little over 20 minutes to get to Stratford Station, outside which I met Focus E15 housing campaigners who were holding a rally and march. It was Mental Health Awareness Week and they were protesting against Newham council’s policy of social cleansing, highlighting the mental health issues that arise from housing problems.

There is a huge boom in building around Stratford given great impetus by the 2012 Olympics, but as speakers made clear when the march paused in front of some of the the high-rise housing, this is being built largely for the rich – while those unable to afford sky-high market rents are being forced out. They say Newham is causing mental health problems for vulnerable people through evictions and placements with insecure tenancies away from families, friends and support systems in cities and towns across the UK.

*Good homes on the Carpenters Estate have been kept empty by Newham for over 10 years*

The new tall blocks also produce a hostile micro-climate at ground level, and when the march approached one of the most recent, gusts of wind tore one of the banners in two. The march ended on the pavement outside Wilco’s in Stratford Broadway, where Focus E15 hold their regular Saturday morning street stall.

More at Housing is a Mental Health Issue.

Bromley-by-Bow Gasholders

Bromley-by-Bow Gasholders: A week ago on Monday 28th March I was invited to go with a team from Cody Dock on a site visit to the gasholders which are a prominent feature of the local landscape, seen by many thousands every day from the Underground and National Rail lines as they travel in and out of London as well as local residents and walkers along the Lower Lea and Bow Creek, including those following The Line sculpture trail. We were there invited to study the heritage, history and ecology of the Bromley-by-Bow Gasworks site which has just been sold by its future developers.

The seven gas holders, all to a similar design were built between 1872 and 1882 and are all Grade II listed. Nine were built on the site but two are no longer there, the base of one now forming a large circular lake in the site. Holder No 1 was given an extra upper tier in steel in 1925-7 to more than double its capacity. All were taken out of use in the 1980s.

The real value of the site is not in the individual holders although these were some of the “most aesthetically distinguished and finely detailed gasholders ever built” (according to the listing text) but in the ensemble, thought to be “the largest group of Victorian gasholders known to remain in the world, which is testament to the scale of Britain’s pioneering gas industry and its contribution to the Industrial Revolution.” It is a heritage site not just of national importance but of world importance.

Given their importance the group, together with the adjoining memorial garden with its Grade II listed memorial lamp and statue of Sir Corbett Woodall surely deserves both Grade I listing and preservation, and the former gas works offices could form a heritage centre for the area. The offices were for some time a gas museum.

Just across the Channelsea river from the site is the Grade I listed Three Mills and a little to the south the former gas works Dock at Cody Dock, now a thriving creative and community hub, the sites linked by a riverside path which currently stops at Cody Dock but which should long ago have been opened as planned to lead to the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf, passing on the way the Bow Creek Ecology Park. Many sites along here played an important part in Britain and the world’s industrial history, but unfortunately little evidence remains, making it essential to preserve what does.

We were shown around the site in the morning by two of those responsible for planning the development who expressed their wish for the development to retain these elements which make the site unique and to open them up to the public, but good intentions are not enough, particularly for company accountants.

Given what has happened at other sites greater protection is required to make sure that any development in the area leaves the gasholders intact and preserves their landscape value, in particular the views of the ensemble from the railway and Underground lines, from Three Mills and the riverside footpaths by the Channelsea River and River Lea and the navigation. We do need more housing, or at least more social housing rather than luxury flats many of which remain largely unoccupied as investments, but we also need to preserve important monuments such as these which record and could celebrate our history.

Many more pictures from the day, mainly inside the holder site in my album Bromley-by-Bow Gas Holders. You can click on any of the images above to see a larger version in the album – and browse from there. Most of the images have an horizontal angle of view of approximately 145 degrees. There are more pictures of the area in various posts on My London Diary including Bow and The Fatwalk, Bromley-by-Bow to Star Lane and Gasworks Dock Revived.

More Bow – a Grave, Halls, Co-op, Canal & Pub

More Bow – a Grave, Halls, Co-op, Canal & Pub continues my walk on Monday 1st August 1988 – the previous post was Bow, Kingsly Hall, a Nursery, Grime, Quakers & more.

Bear Family, Memorial, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Mile End, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-54-Edit_2400 — *Bear Family, Memorial, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Mile End, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-54*

The family vault of the Bear Family is marked by one of the more impressive monuments of Tower Hamlets Cemetery, with a long list of names, ages ad date of death which is headed by George Huxley Bear, who died in 1855 aged 4 years and six months. Several of the other entries are also for children, though their father lived to the age of 76. Child mortality was very much a feature of Victorian life.

I made two other pictures of this memorial, with its stems of wheat at the bottom and the consoling text from John XII, v 24 “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” As with all the other pictures you can click on this one to get a larger version and then browse back and forward to see them.

Bromley Public Hall, Bow Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-41-Edit_2400 — *Bromley Public Hall, Bow Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-41*

Until last year this was the Tower Hamlets Register Office. The Grade II listed building dates from 1880 and was built as the vestry hall for St Leonard’s parish and extended in 1904. At least one web site confuses this with the much older and very different Bromley Hall, on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach road, though to be the oldest brick building in London, built around 1490 but extensively remodelled with a Georgian frontage around 1700.

Former Co-op store, Bow Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-42-Edit_2400 — *Former Co-op store, Bow Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-42*

Stratford Co-operative & Industrial Society built this splendid store on Bow Road in 1919, proudly listing the names of its leading members under the bee hive signifying co-operation.

In my youth every high street (and some rather lower) had its own Co-operative store, benefiting from the huge buying power of the Cooperative Wholesale Society. We bought most of the few new clothes we could afford there as well as shoes and other items, and it was the Co-op who delivered our milk seven days a week. My mother’s Co-op number is still etched in my memory, essential when making any purchase, and leading to a ‘divi’ at the end of the year which saw us through Christmas.

In 1988 this was the PLH Kakkad Supermarket and although it sold a wide range of goods its frontage was devoted to Rothmans, “The best tobacco money can buy“. More recently it became a Costcutter and then a Nisa local since around 2008.

Lea Navigation, St Thomas Creek, Bow Back Rivers, Stratford, Newham, 1988 88-8b-46-Edit_2400 — *Lea Navigation, St Thomas Creek, Bow Back Rivers, Stratford, Newham, 1988*

I walked further east and crossed the busy Bow roundabout to take this picture looking across the Lea Navigation and up St Thomas Creek, one of the Bow Back Rivers. Stratford High Street at right is now lined with tall flats, and Global Caravans with one stacked on top of a couple of containers is long gone, along with almost all of the rest of the industrial buildings. A few of those nearest on the left before Cooks Road remained but in derelict condition in 2021.

Bow Theatre, Bow Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-32-Edit_2400 — *Bow Theatre, Bow Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-32*

Walking back west up Bow Road took me to Bow Theatre on the west corner of Fairfield Road. This Grade II listed building was a new Poplar Town Hall built in 1937-8 and was said to be the first modernist town hall, designed by Ewart Culpin and his son Clifford. The frieze by David Evans depicts the various trades of the builders of the town hall and is said to include a welder, a labourer, a mason, a carpenter and an architect. Unfortunately it is hard to decide the occupations of some of those in my picture, partly as they are not critically sharp.

After Poplar became a part of Tower Hamlets, this was no longer a town hall, but remained in use for some years as council offices and also as a theatre. The council sold it in the 1990s and it is now Bow Business Centre.

Caledonian, pub, Fairfield Rd, Blondin St, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-34-Edit_2400 — *Caledonian Arms, pub, Fairfield Rd, Blondin St, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-34*

The Caledonian Arms on the corner of Blondin St is still standing but no longer a pub, having closed around 2000 and extensively converted to office and residential use in 2010. The building possibly dates from 1851 though it may have replaced a former building later that century. For years a Watney’s pub it later became owned by Shepherd Neame.

The cafe on the opposite corner has gone completely, its site part of a car park for new buildings down Blondin St. The name suggests that the street was built at the time of the famous tightrope crossing of the Niagra by ‘The Great Blondin‘ in 1859.

Douro St, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-35-Edit_2400 — *Douro St, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-35*

This was a short street with small houses shown in the picture with front doors opening directly onto the street and a car breakers behind the fence at left.

The cobbles and the small houses are still there, but the car breakers have been replaced by a large block of flats, Altius Apartments, at 714 Wick Lane, with 4 floors and a roof garden, at a taller 9 floor tower at the east end. The guide price for one of those small houses in the ‘Bow Quarter’ is given as £800,000 and the estate agents rather creatively describe Douro St as ‘tree-lined’.

*Tredegar Rd, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-36-Edit_2400*

Tredegar Rd is just to the north of Douro St, on the other side of the flats. I think this is at its junction with Wick Lane and I think absolutely nothing of what was in my picture remains, with even the road layout having altered at least slightly.

What was H Bates & Son Scrap dealers is now occupied by a block of around 12 floors, offices at ground level and flats above, but the ‘Bow Quarter’ area is so different that this could well be another nearby corner – also covered with new housing. But my next pictures show I turned south down Wick Lane to the rear of the former Bryant & May match factory, where the next instalment of this walk will begin.

Click on any image to see a larger version in my album 1988 London Photos, from where you can browse other images. You can view most of the sites today on Google Streetview.

Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction 2014

*Focus E15 Mothers and children party in the show flat – 17th January 2014*

Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction 2014
Housing remains one of London’s larger problems, with sky-high house prices and market rents. At the start of 2022 the average flat rent in London is over £360 per week – around £19,000 per year, while the average property price according to Zoopla is £681,427.

Housing has always been a problem in London, but in the 1950s, 60s and 70s things were beginning to improve, largely due to both Labour and Conservative councils building council houses and flats. By the 1960s over 500,000 new flats were added in London and nationally around a third of UK households lived in social housing.

The government’s minimum wage for 2022 will be £9.50 per hour from April – an on that rate you would need to work for around 38 hours a week just to pay for a flat – and of course would have no chance of ever buying a flat or house. Things have got considerably worse since 2010, and in boroughs like Newham average rents now are 65% of average wages.

The building programme slowed down in the 1970s as governments made it more difficult for councils to build, but the real watershed came with Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 Housing Act which gave council tenants the right to buy their properties at between 33-50% of market value – and stopped councils from using the proceeds to built more properties.

Further housing acts under Thatcher led to the transfer of much social housing to housing associations, which were allowed to access private finance while councils were very much restricted in their borrowing. Housing associations continue to build some new properties, but the numbers are small in relation to demand, and much lower than those built by councils in the 1950s-70s. Official figures for 2019 show only 37,825 new homes built for letting at below market rents while over 1.1 million households are on housing waiting lists – around 30 times as many.

So it is not surprising that councils such as Newham have a huge housing problem, and the council says it has the highest levels of overcrowded housing in the country, one of the highest proportion of people living in insecure private rented homes and in houses of multiple occupation and the largest number of homeless people – including those in temporary accommodation.

Newham was one of the first councils to get an elected Mayor in 2002, and Robin Wales held that post until 2018 when he was deselected as candidate. Many blame him for the particular failures over housing in the borough and point to properties on the Carpenters Estate in particular, some of which have been deliberately left empty for around 15 years.

The first group to organise and call out the council on their failures over housing were young single mothers who were threatened with eviction after Newham Council removed funding from East Thames Housing Association’s Focus E15 Foyer in Stratford. Newham Council had tried to get them to move well away from London, in Hastings, Birmingham and elsewhere, away from friends, families, colleges, nurseries and support networks. These offers were for private rented accommodation, with little or no security of tenure and would leave them at the mercy of often unscrupulous or uncaring landlords.

For once the group stood together and determined – helped by friends – to fight the council, not just for their own cases, but also for others whom Newham is failing to provide accommodation. Though they attracted national publicity and won their fight to stay in the London they continue to hold a weekly protest and advice stall in central Stratford every Saturday – I visited it again in late 2021. Their fight exposed the failures of Robin Wales and was certainly one of the factors in his losing support in the borough.

You can read more about the protes when a group of the mothers with their children went into the East Thames offices and held a party in their show flat on on My London Diary in Focus E5 Mothers Party Against Eviction. The East Thames staff who came to talk with them were generally sympathetic and attempted to reassure them but told them it was the responsibility of the council and not the housing association to rehouse them.

An Olympic Bike Ride

*Businesses later demolished at the heart of the site for London’s 2012 Olympics*

An Olympic Bike Ride: At the end of 2002 I finally bought a Brompton, a rather expensive folding bicycle which then cost me around £600. Perhaps not a lot for a new bike then and certainly not now, but rather more than the £13-7s6d or so the other bike I was still riding had cost in 1958.

*Clays Lane Housing Co-operative – demolished for the Olympics*

I’d been thinking about it for years, and it would certainly have been very useful for the work that I’d been doing around outer London in the previous decade, but I’ve only used it infrequently for my photography.

*Eastway Cycle Circuit – lost to the Olympics*

Though it’s a great way to get to places, taking it by train or underground and riding from a convenient station, Bromptons are a powerful magnet for bike thieves, so easy to put in a car boot or van, and selling at a relatively high price. It isn’t safe to lock them anywhere in public view when even the best cycle lock can only detain the well-equipped thief for around 30 seconds.

*Bully Fen Wood – Community Woodland lost to the Olympics*

So rather than using it for my general photography – mainly of protests and other events – I’ve used it for cycle rides on which I’ve taken photographs, both around where I live – it’s easier to jump on and off than my full-size bike – and in and around London.

*Factory on Waterden Road – demolished for the Olympics*

Thursday 4th January 2007 was a nice winter’s day, not too cold and blue skies with just a few clouds, and I went with the Brompton to Waterloo and then on the Jubilee Line to Stratford. Preparations had begun for the 2012 London Olympics and I wanted to see and photograph what I could of the changes that were taking place.

*The footbridge has been kept in the new Olympic Park*

My account of the day on My London Diary begins with my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it would have been much preferable on environmental ground to shut down Heathrow and use that as the Olympic site, but goes on to describe a conversation I had with one of the residents at Clays Lane, then about to be demolished (spelling etc corrected.)

‘he talked of living in a fascist state, with lack of consultation and individual powerlessness, and of the games as having always had a militaristic overtone. hardly surprising there is little support for the games here, as initial promises that people from the Clays Lane Housing Co-operative would be rehoused in conditions “as good as, if not better than” their present estate were soon changed to “at least as good as in so far as is reasonably practicable.”‘
My London Diary

*Work on the site seen from the Greenway*

From Clays Lane I moved to the Eastway Cycle Track, already closed and fenced off – I decided against going through a gap in the fence to ride around it. The Community Woodland at Bully Fen Wood was also already closed. and I cycled on around the roads at the north of the site to Hackney Wick.

*Pudding Mill River and Marshgate Lane – all now gone*

Along Waterden Road I photographed some of the other industrial sites that were to be lost to the games, then turned along Carpenters Road and into Marshgate Lane, all soon to be fenced off and everthing on them destroyed. After taking pictures around Marshgate Lane I went back and into Hackney Wick, photographing the Kings Yard workshops on Carpenters Road soon to be demolished on my way.

*Kings Yard – demolished for the Olympics*

Hackney Wick to the west of the Lea Navigation is largely outside the Olympic compulsory purchase area, but some large areas of industry were scheduled for demolition and I took more pictures. I found the towpath here beside the navigation still open and rode down it to Stratford High Street, where more industry to the north of the road is also going.

I spent some time going up the roads and paths here going from the High Street into Stratford Marsh which were still open, then went east along the top of the outfall sewer past areas also covered by the Olympic CPO.

*St Thomas Creek, Bow Back Rivers – factories at left and right to be demolished*

There was still a little light and I came down from the ‘Greenway’ and cycled down to Bow Creek from West Ham, going down the path on the west side of the creek to the Lower Lea Crossing. I wanted a picture showing the Pura Foods site then being demolished, but also made a number of other twilight pictures from this elevated viewpoint, and also some from the Silvertown Way viaduct as I made my way to Canning Town Station for the train home.

*Pura Foods being demolished for London City Island development*

Many more pictures from this ride on My London Diary, starting a little way down the January 2007 page.