Israel, City Island, Mayfair & West Hendon: I did a lot of travelling around London ten years ago on Thursday 22nd January 2015 by public transport and on foot. First I made the journey by rail, underground and DLR to the Excel Centre for a picket calling on HP to stop supporting Israeli prisons and military, then walked to the Lower Lea Crossing to photograph building work on City Island and on to the DLR at East India station to go to Canning Town From there the underground took me to Green Park and the Ritz where I met a small group from Class War on a visit to ‘Rich London’.
I had to leave them on Bond Street to make my way- tube, a short walk between stations in West Hampstead and rail to Hendon with another short walk to meet West Hendon Estate where residents were just coming out from a meeting to march from the estate to a rally outside Hendon Town Hall and I walked the just over a mile with them. But after around 20 minutes of the rally I felt very tired and had to leave for home – another short walk and an hour and a half of travel.
Stop Arming Israel picket HP at BETT
Protesters had come to picket the Excel Centre where Hewlett Packard’s Vice-President for Worldwide Education, Gus Schmedien, was speaking at the BETT education technology show, to ask ‘What about the Palestinian Children You’re Helping Kill?’ They had set up a highly educational display close to the entrance and also gave some speeches and handed out fliers.
HP supply equipment and services which keep both the Israeli prison system and the Israeli military running and so support the killing, torture and other illegal activities of the Israeli regime.
Many of the teachers and others going into BETT stopped to take leaflets and talk with the protesters, some taking photographs of themselves or colleagues in front of the protest.
Building work both on the former Pura Foods site on Bow Creek, now renamed City Island and on the Limmo Peninsula site on the eastern bank of Bow Creek was now going ahead.
City Island isn’t an island but in the downstream loop of the s-shaped bend of Bow Creek south of the East India Dock Road and is surrounded on three sides by the tidal river.
Building on City Island was abandoned after the site had been cleared and a single building erected when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and it was now shooting up fast. The elevated Lower Lea Crossing
Class War visit ‘Rich London’ – The Ritz and Old Bond St
Ritz security were very polite to Class War and watched the protest outside the hotel
I met with a small group from Class War outside the Ritz where they were holding their banner with its quotation from US Anarchist Lucy Parsons (1851-1942), “We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live“.
From there they took the banner to stand in front of some shops on Piccadilly and then onto Old Bond Street, pausing outside De Beers and then into the Royal Arcade.
It seemed a fairly aimless wander, Stan took a seat with Churchill (who is wearing a Class War ‘Spot the Tory’ sticker.)
I left them holding up the banner outside Sothebys to go to Bond St and make my way to West Hendon.
Residents on the West Hendon estate overlooking the Welsh Harp reservoir were fighting the the redevelopment of their estate for sale to the rich. Its waterside location makes it a very desirable location for developers and estate agents.
The residents were campaigning for all who live on the estate to be rehoused in the area and I arrived at the end of a meeting in the community centre with speakers from other housing campaigns including Focus E15 from Stratford.
I took pictures of them posing outside the community centre then went inside where free hot soup was very welcome before we went outside for a march around the estate. A banner was dropped from one of the balconies with the message ‘Public Housing Not Private Profit’.
Part of the area to be built on was York Memorial Park, a green open common designated as “a War Memorial in perpetuity” to the 75 people killed and 145 severely injured by a bomb dropped here on 13th February 1941. Over 366 houses were destroyed and a further 400 damaged by the blast, with 1500 people made homeless.
You can read more about this on ‘Broken Barnet‘ which relates how the promises that this would be preserved “were quietly buried by Barnet Tories, once they had made a deal, in secret, with Barratt London” and that at the Housing Inquiry they even denied the existence of the park – where there is now a 29 storey tower block of luxury flats.
We stopped here for a short memorial service to a Hendon war hero, Dorothy Lawrence, the only female Sapper of WW1, serving in the Royal Engineers, 51st Division 179th Tunnelling Company, BEF. You can read more about her and her unfortunate life after this in my post from 2015.
Then we marched for a mile or so in the dark to Hendon Town hall where the third day of the Housing Inquiry had just finished ned for a rally with a number of speeches from people from West Hendon and other campaigners, including Jasmine Stone from Focus E15. Some who spoke had been at the enquiry and were able to tell the crowd what had happened so far. But I was too tired to stay to the end of the rally.
Around the Olympic Site: Thursday 4th January, 2007 looked like being a pleasant enough day for a bike ride around the area where preparations were getting into full swing for the London 2012 Olympics to see how things were going in the area. So I wrapped up warm and put my folding bike on the train to make my way to Stratford.
Clays Lane travellers site, Park Village and Clays Lane estate
Most of the central area of the site was already closed off to the public, but I was able to cycle to various parts of the perimeter and take photographs, though I was disappointed to find large areas where nothing was yet taking place already fenced off. From Stratford I went around in an anti-clockwise direction and on My London Diary you can read a fairly long piece about where I went and my opinions about what was happening.
Eastway Cycle Circuit now fenced off
It was becoming more and more clear that many of those who lived and worked in and around the area were being very shabbily treated, with nothing being allowed to stand in the way of the Olympic juggernaut. People were being lied to, promises being made and then abandoned.
Bully Fen Wood is Community Woodland no more
Probably the worst case of this was with the 430 residents of the Clays Lane Housing Co-Operative who were first promised they would be rehoused in conditions “as good as, if not better than” their present estate but were later told “at least as good as in so far as is reasonably practicable.”
Everything on Waterden Road was later demolished
The tenants there had already suffered from their cooperative estate with its strong community being transferred against their wishes to Peabody Housing following an adverse Housing Corporation inquiry, losing their mutual status. After their eviction under the Olympic Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) they were dispersed and many found they were having to pay much higher rents and living in worse conditions in places that lacked any of the feeling of community of Clays Lane.
Carpenters Lock and part of the closed area
I’d hoped to visit the Eastway Cycle Circuit and the Bully Fen nature Reserve, but both were fenced off, as were some of the footpaths I had hoped to cycle down, resulting in some fairly lengthy detours. Some of the closures claimed to be “temporary” – but some were still closed ten years later.
Samuel Banner, inventor of white spirit, founded the company in 1860. It relocated to Teeside
I commented “Parliament smooths the way for the Olympic Delivery Authority at the expense of people and environment, enabling them to slough off the inconvenience of democracy and justice. The situation for some of the local people – particularly those living in Clays Lane – can only be described as Kafkaesque.”
Huge areas were being flattened
I rode down Marshgate Lane and went onto the Greenway and then returned and went on to Hackney Wick, pausing to eat my sandwich lunch in a sheltered suntrap by the lock on the Hertford Union Canal before riding on the Greenway, turning back where this was blocked and coming back to the Lea Navigation towpath and on to Stratford High Street.
Bridge over Pudding Mill River to Marshgate Lane, Stratford Marsh.
From here I was able to go along a short length of footpath next to the Waterworks River before returning to the Greenway on the other side of the High Street, past some more areas covered by the CPO.
Bow Back River. Both sides in the foreground are part of the CPO area
By now the light was beginning to fade, but I rode on to Canning Town and took a brief look (and some rather dark pictures) of the Pura foods site then being demolished before riding over the Lower Lea Crossing to the station for the Jubilee Line back to Waterloo.
A Walk Around Bow Creek: I can no longer remember what meeting I had gone to somewhere in London on Thursday 21st September 2006, perhaps one at the Musuem of London in connection with a planned exhibition (later cancelled) but I had taken my Brompton folding bicycle with me on the train, as well as my Nikon D200 camera and a couple of lenses.
The Nikon D200 was my third digital SLR camera and the first that was really great to use, with a decent viewfinder. Really the later models that I went on to buy offered only minor improvements and for most purposed the 10Mp images were large enough. At the time Nikon was still saying that the DX format was large enough – and it was only really marketing issues that made them later bring out “full-frame” cameras. And they were correct; I’m now finding the even smaller Micro Four Thirds does a great job, and the even smaller sensors in some phones have produced some remarkable images.
The smaller sensor meant that the 12-24mm Sigma lens I was using was equivalent to a 18-36mm full-frame lens, but also, because it avoided using the outer regioins of the image circle it maintained higher resolution into the image corners and had less vivnetting than if used on full frame. And the 1.5 multiplication factor made my longer zoom very much more compact than a full-frame lens with the same coverage.
I hadn’t taken any of my panoramic cameras with me, but did take some images with the intention of cropping them to a panoramic format, and some are among these pictures mainly from those I posted on My London Diary.
Having the Brompton meant it was much easier to travel around the area in the roughly two hours I spent taking pictures. It’s a great way to get around and unlike with a car you can stop pretty well anywhere, as you can if walking.
Here with some small alterations is what I wrote about this on My London Diary back in 2006:
I took off from a meeting and cycled to Canning Town, and wandered through the East India Dock estate to the walkway which leads to the Bow Creek Nature Reserve.
To my surprise, the gates on the bridge over the DLR which should lead to the riverside walkway to Canning Town Station were unlocked, and I was able to go over the bridge, only to find the path still blocked. I was just about able to take a few pictures, but not quite from the location I’d long wanted to reach to photograph Pura Foods.
I’d come to photograph the demolition of Pura Foods, soon to be replaced by a mixture of housing and retail development – and including a new bridge to Canning Town Station. This is in addition to another new bridge planned to take the riverside path from Canning Town across the Lea close to the Lower Lea Crossing down to Trinity Buoy Wharf Arts Centre, which was once promised for completion by December 2006.
[The development of London City Island was stalled for some years by the financial crash – and the lower bridge plans abandoned.]
Locals won’t be sorry to see Pura go, one of the few remaining obnoxious industries in this belt to the east of the city, although a successful campaign by local campaiging group TELCO against the smell had previously led to them cleaning up their act. Pura Foods was disappearing fast before my very eyes as I rode along the riverside path and then over the Lower Lea Crossing.
Canary Wharf Workshop – On Sunday May 9th 2004 I led a small workshop group of photographers on a walk which started at Canary Wharf and then went to Canning Town and the River Thames. Although photography is theoretically banned on the Canary Wharf estate we had no problems with security, probably because we kept to obviously public areas and I had asked those taking part not to use tripods.
I was never a fan of the redevelopment of London’s docklands under Michael Heseltine and the London Docklands Development Corporation set up in 1981. Of course development was needed after the docks became redundant, but we should have seen a development that was made for the interests of the population of London, not simply for the mates of the Tory Party.
The area needed some kind of overall planning authority, but one that worked with the local authorities in the area rather than against them, ignoring their priorities.
Of course there were gains from the work of the LDDC, perhaps the main ones being the Docklands Light Railway and the Jubilee Line Extension to Stratford. Certainly by the time it was wound up in 1990 it had changed the whole area significantly. But many of those changes had sacrificed local needs to business profits.
The piece that I wrote about the day reflected my political views about what had taken place. A year or so later London won the bidding for the Olympics, leading to yet more development in the area by an authority that disregarded local needs and led to inappropriate development, still proceeding, in East London. I’ll reproduce what I wrote in 2004 here, with minor corrections, particularly to capitalisation and spelling.
May 9th 2004 found me taking a group of photographers for a walk around some parts of London’s docklands. We started at the centre of this ‘crime of the century’. I still don’t quite understand why a Conservative government felt so at odds with the City of London that it decided to set up offshore competition in the Enterprise Zone.
The feeding frenzy that ensued, trousering public property and tax breaks into the private pocket at an unprecedented rate was inevitable.
The long-term consequence has been a distorted development with few real buildings of distinction but some expensively finished tat, and a lack of overall planning. I’m not sure that London would benefit from gaining the Olympics for which it is currently bidding, but if it fails, probably part of the reason will be the Docklands debacle.
We started below the obscene gesture towards the old city, at least clear about its symbolism, then took the DLR down to Crossharbour with its silly bridge, walking back to the Wharf and taking the Jubilee to Canning Town.
Then back alongside the Lee (still waiting for that riverside walkway) to East India dock basin and along by the Thames, where a galleon appeared in front of the dome.
The River Lee is here better known in its tidal section as Bow Creek, and we are still waiting for parts of that riverside walk to be opened if they ever will be. There was a competition for a new bridge across Bow Creek with a wining design named, but money disappeared and it was never built. But a few years ago we did get a different new bridge higher up by Canning Town station and the development of the industrial site of Pura Foods as London City Island.
On My Brompton in Essex: On Thursday 26th August 2004 I went for a ride on my Brompton in Essex on the north bank of the Thames, in an area sometimes known as the Thames Gateway. If anyone doesn’t know, the Brompton is one of the best folding bikes around, with 16 inch wheels, folding quickly to a fairly small package which can be carried onto trains and buses. I don’t ride it so much now, as I find it rather heavy to carry, particularly when loaded with my camera gear.
Chafford Hundred, Grays, Essex
I bought the Brompton at the end of 2002, and spent a lot of time riding it for exercise on doctor’s orders during recovery from a minor heart problem at the start of 2003. It coincided with the purchase of my first digital camera capable of professional results, the 6.1Mp Nikon D100 DSLR.
Royal Victoria Dock
For a year or two I worked with both digital and film, particularly because at the start I had only one Nikon lens, a 24-85mm zoom, giving an equivalent on the DX format camera to 36-128mm on full-frame, but I used a range of wider lenses on film. By 2004 I had added the remarkable Sigma 12-24mm (18-36mm equiv) to my bag, and many of the pictures I made that day were taken with that lens. I think it was the first affordable ultra-wide zoom, and certainly the results on DX format were very usable.
Channel Tunnel Rail link under construction at Purfleet
As well as the Nikon I also had a film camera, a Russian Horizon 202 swing lens panoramic camera. You can see some of the pictures I made with this among those on the Thames Gateway (Essex) section on the Urban Landscapes site.
Dartford Bridge and Channel Tunnel rail link, Thurrock
I began taking pictures that day at Victoria Dock in Canning Town, having taken the Brompton on the train to Waterloo and then the Jubilee Line there, before cycling to West Ham station to catch the C2C rail service to Rainham, all on a Travelcard. It’s something of a blow that TfL now intends to discontinue the Travelcard, which provided relatively cheap and simple travel for most of my photography.
Here is what I wrote about the day back in August 2004 – with minor corrections, particularly changing to normal capitalisation.
I like to make good use of my Travelcards, so Rainham, the last station out of Fenchurch St in zone 6 is a good destination. I pointed the Brompton first to Purfleet, to take a look at the state of play on the high-speed rail link, and also a new development in the old chalkpits, then on towards the Dartford bridge.
The Bridge Act obliges the operators to transport cycles and pedestrians across free of charge, and I cycled up the path towards it to claim this right, before changing my mind and deciding i didn’t want to go to the other side. Instead I took the new road through the West Thurrock Marshes industrial area and on to St Clements church, now a nature sanctuary, in the middle of a detergent factory.
It’s a quiet and pleasant place to eat sandwiches, though the smell of the perfuming agent is pervasive. There I planned a route largely along side roads, cycle paths and footpaths to Upminster, taking in Chafford Hundred, South Ockenden and Belhus Park and woods. It made a pleasant ride, though I had to make a few detours, and the B isn’t too stable on slimy mud, so some paths made for interesting riding, with the added pleasures of bramble thorns and nettles.
My London Diary
All of the pictures on this post were taken on the Nikon D100. There are a quite a lot more on My London Diary.
Fire Risk Tower Blocks – On Saturday 12 August 2017 Focus E15 Mothers led a march from Ferrier Point in Canning Town to a rally at Tanner Point in Plaistow pointing out the danger of these two blocks with the same cladding as Grenfell Tower, and then on to the Carpenters Estate in Stratford demanding safe homes, not social cleansing in East London.
The May 2022 Fire Risk Assessment of 119-205 Butchers Road, Canning Town conducted for Newham Council was obtained by a Freedom of Information request and can be downloaded. The 11 floor block of 43 flats has a single staircase and then had 86 people sleeping there.
The report by Phoenix Green Group declared the likelihood of fire to be ‘Medium’ but the potential consequences would be ‘Extreme Harm’ and gave the building a ‘Substantial’ fire risk rating, stating that urgent action should be taken and listing what was needed. I can find no information on Newham Council’s web site of whether this has been done, or of other council properties which might still be needing urgent action.
The block on Butchers Road was not one of those visited on the march led by Focus E15 Mothers in their march around Canning Town and Plaistow to the Carpenters Estate in Stratford. This had begun at Ferrier Point in Forty Acre Lane, Canning Town around 5 minutes walk away, a rather taller 23 storey block with dangerous ACM cladding like that on Grenfell Tower.
The cladding on Ferrier Point was replaced with non-combustible cladding in 2019. Otherwise there would have been a very different story when fire broke out on a 12th floor flat there around 6pm on 22nd June 2020. By the time the Fire Brigade arrived at 6.22pm around 150 residents had left the building and the LFB had the fire under control by 7.45pm. Six people required treatment for smoke inhalation, one in hospital the others treated on the spot by London Ambulance staff.
Tanner Point in Plaistow was another stop on the march where residents were extremely worried as this also had fire-risk ACM cladding. Along with that on Nicholls Point, a little off the march route, this was also replaced in 2018-9.
The march was organised and led by the Stratford-based Focus E15 housing campaign but supported by other groups, including the Socialist Party, East End Sisters Uncut, the One Housing campaign, Movement for Justice, Whitechapel Anarchist Group, the Revolutionary Communist Group and local residents, including those from the blocks with dangerous cladding.
The march ended on the Carpenters Estate in Stratford, a once popular estate with over 400 empty homes which Newham’s Labour council largely emptied of people over 10 years ago and intended to demolish and sell off. Here there was a ‘hands around the Carpenters Estate’ solidarity event against decanting, demolition and social cleansing.
Events like this put pressure on Newham Council to speed up the removal of unsafe cladding from its taller tower blocks, but it seems there are still fire safety issues in other blocks that it owns. Years of actions by Focus E15 and others have stopped Newham selling off the Carpenters Estate and they are now going ahead with regeneration plans although these unfortunately lack the real commitment to social housing that the area so desperately needs.
London Sawmills, Bow Creek, East India Dock Rd, Canning Town, Newham, 1989 89-4b-15
I walked back a few yards to the west along the East India Dock Road and made this picture looking south down Bow Creek, again showing the stacked timber on the wharf. The closer of the two bridges visible was I think just a pipe bridge, probably to carry gas from the nearby gasworks from Poplar to Canning Town, and has since been removed.
The second bridge is a Dock Road Foot Bridge, more commonly called the Blue Bridge (a name it shares with several others in London), though it also carries pipes and is still in place. I think it was intended to provide a route for people living in South Bromley to Canning Town station, and it leads to a bridge taking the footpath over the DLR, but unfortunately this has been almost permanently locked. It has been at least partly rebuilt since I made this picture
Hidden by this bridge a few yards further downstream and fenced off is another bridge, Canning Town Old Railway Bridge, long disused which was built to carry a single rail track over the river.
Pipe Bridge, Bow Creek, Tower Hamlets, Newham, 1989 89-4c-61
I walked on across Bow Creek and took this picture of the pipe bridge. As you can see it was well fenced off and although there were steps up and a footway across I could not access this.
All this brickwork on the Middlesex side of the river has gone, I think when the road bridge here was widened and a link road provided to the Limehouse Link tunnel but the brick abutment remains on the Essex side. The bridge was built to give sufficient clearance for navigation.
Pipe Bridge, Bow Creek, Tower Hamlets, Newham, 1989 89-4c-63
At the centre of the river I had crossed from Newham into Tower Hamlets. My street atlas names this area as South Bromley, but I don’t think anyone now knows where that is, as there is no station of that name, the DLR having decided on East India instead.
A few yards on along waste ground I made another picture showing the pipe bridge and the river, before turning back to the East India Dock Road. I made two exposures and I wonder if I may have chosen the wrong one to digitise as it is just slightly unsharp.
London Sawmills, Bow Creek, East India Dock Rd, Canning Town, Tower Hamlets, 1989 89-4c-65
Across the water you can see much of the planks produced by the sawmill on the wharf, as well as stacks on a further wharf downriver between the building around 50 yards away on land but half a mile downstream round what is now the Bow Creek Ecology Park. Behind the cut timber you can see part of the Pura Foods edible oils factory on the opposite bank of the invisible river, and above that the top of the flood barrier across the river on the other side of the factory.
Timber was for many years a major industry on Bow Creek and along the Lea Navigation, as the Surrey Docks just across the Thames was mainly a timber dock, with large timber ponds. Boats and barges would have brought huge trunks to sawmills such as this, and the cut timber was also mainly transported further on by barge.
Pura Foods, Bow Creek, Tower Hamlets, 1989 89-4c-52
I walked further east and used a short telephoto lens to make this image of Pura Foods. Their factory processing vegetable oils here at Orchard Place had grown considerably over the years, as had the smells from it, and many locals were pleased when the factory moved out in 2006.
Almost all of my pictures at this time were taken with a 35mm lens, giving a moderate wide angle view. The Olympus Zuiko lens I used was unusual in being a shift lens, allow me to move the optical elements relative to the film to give additional control over the perspective. It made it possible for example to photograph taller buildings without tilting the camera which would have resulted in verticals that converged.
Lens design has improved considerably since, and so have our expectations of lenses. Many of my pictures made then have a lack of critical sharpness at the corners which we would now find unacceptable. Digital imaging in particular means we now routinely look at images on a much larger scale on screen than the prints we used to make.
West Ham Power Station, Bow Creek, East India Dock Rd, Newham, 1989 89-4c-55
I crossed to the other side of the busy East India Dock Road, going along Wharfside Road under it, and made this view looking north up Bow Creek. As you can see the West Ham Power Station was then being demolished. This was the last in a number of power stations on the site since 1904, when West Ham Council built one here to power its trams. This was West Ham B, built in 1951 and it used coal brought up Bow Creek as well as coke from the neighbouring Bromley Gas Works.
Power production at the station dropped off from the late 1960s and it closed in 1983. By 1989 its two 300ft cooling towers had already been demolished and the rest of the station was following.
West Ham Power Station, Bow Creek, East India Dock Rd, Newham, 1989 89-4c-56
A second view shows more of the Newham (or Essex) bank south of the main power station building and the closer parts are again full of stacked timber.
Newham Council together with Tower Hamlets has plans for a number of new bridges in the area providing links across Bow Creek, at Lochnagar St, Poplar Reach near to Cody Dock and Mayer Parry connecting the Leven Road former gasworks site to roughly where the old power station was, now the SEGRO industrial park.
It had been a short and interesting walk and I made my way to Canning Town station for the slow journey home. Canning Town is much easier to get to since the Jubilee Line opened at the end of 1999.
I only had time for a short walk on Friday 7th April 1989, cycling home furiously from the college where I was teaching at noon as I had no afternoon classes, picking up my camera bag and rushing to catch a train into London.
Canning Town, where I was heading, was on the other side of London and not then the easiest of places to get to before the DLR and Jubilee lines were completed. My journey involved a slow transit around North London on the line from Richmond on the North London Line to the old Canning Town station immediately north of the A13 East India Dock Road, next to Stephenson Street.
If you are not familiar with the geography of this area, a small clip from OpenStreetMap, slightly enhanced, will help. The East India Dock Road on this map is labelled Newham Way, which is here a flyover above the road itself. The former station I used was just to the north of this. Pura Foods was inside the loop which is now London City Island and there was no bridge across the river at the top of the bend.
A subway close to the station entrance took me to the other side of this busy road, where I had a view of Bow Creek, northern end of its loop dominated by Pura Foods, looking across waste ground where the DLR would shortly run. The flood barrier on Bow Creek became redundant when the Thames Barrier was built.
I moved slowly west along the East India Dock Road, stopping to take occasional images. There was a considerable amount of waste including old tires dumped here, but it was also a working industrial area, with workers cars parked alongside the river.
Essex Wharf, Bow Creek, Pura Foods, East India Dock Rd, Canning Town, Newham, 1989 89-4b-26
The main business on this side of the river appeared now to be the sawmill, though I also photographed the sign board for Haughton Engineering, but I’m unsure whether they were still in business.
It seemed to me an area which cried out for some panoramic images, and I took a set of three overlapping handheld pictures – the left of the set above – intending to combine them – which back then would have involved cutting and pasting the three together, but later I found I couldn’t quite get them to match up. Even when it became possible to do this digitally I found I hadn’t quite made these precisely enough.
It was experiences like this that led me a couple of years later to save up and buy a proper panoramic camera – I think the first one cost me around a month’s wages.
London Sawmills, Bow Creek, Wharfside Rd, Canning Town, Newham, 1989 89-4b-13
I continued walking west, the road on a low viaduct giving me a good view of the area to the south, coming to a timber yard where Bow Creek flowed into the area, going down south towards Orchard Place before turning north to go back towards the East India Dock Road where I had taken the earlier images.
London Sawmills, Bow Creek, East India Dock Rd, Canning Town, Newham, 1989 89-4b-15
I’ll post about the second and final part of this short walk later.
On Thursday 2nd March 2017 I had a meeting at Cody Dock about my photographic exhibition there later in the year. The weather forecast was good and promised me a day with blue sky and some clouds, perfect for my photography, particularly for some panoramas, where a clear blue sky or sullen grey overcast are both killers, so I rushed to get on an earlier train than I needed for the meeting to give time to take a walk along a part of Bow Creek before the meeting.
Years earlier there had been plans for a walk beside Bow Creek all the way from where it meets the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf up to the Stratford to join the tow path beside the Lea Navigation, but so far only some separate sections have materialised. The original plans envisaged two bridges taking the path across Bow Creek, and although a competition was organised (and won) for designs for one of these, neither had been built, largely because the money wasn’t there.
This section of the Leawalk has yet to open
Instead the plans were changed to make use of existing bridges, but vital riverside sections remain closed, either because of existing users of the land refusing access or because of new developments taking place in the area. One such development, that of London City Island has recently provided a new bridge which allows an alternative route to the mouth of the creek.
The red bridge built for London City Island
Part of the problem has probably been that the walk is along the boundary of two local authorities, Tower Hamlets and Newham, with sections in both.
Cody Dock
I walked one section before the meeting, but came to a locked bridge which led to a fairly lengthy detour, and ended up with me having to run along the West India Dock Road to catch the DLR to get to the meeting in time.
Cody Dock
There is currently no path between that road and Cody Dock which would have been a faster route for me. Instead I took the DLR from Canning Town one stop to Star Lane, from where a walk through an industrial estate took me to Cody Dock.
After the meeting I was able to rejoin the riverside path, now renamed the Leaway after I and many others made fun of its previous title as the Fatwalk, and made my way to Stratford.
One of the works on ‘The Line’
On my way I was pleased to find a newly opened link from Twelvetrees Crescent (named after a Mr Twelvetrees who built a bridge there to his factory) to the footpath between the river and the Lea Navigation, enabling me to avoid the rather nasty detour between here and the path via the horrendously busy Blackwall Tunnel Approach road.
This part of the Leaway is now walked much more, not least because if forms part of of ‘The Line’ sculpture trail, which rather roughly follows the Meridian from Greenwich to Stratford. But those following this still have, like me, to take the DLR or walk along busy and dusty roads from Canning Town to Cody Dock.
There was still plenty of daylight left by the time my wanderings took me to the DLR Stratford High Street station, where I entrained back to Canning Town for a few more pictures which both lack of time and the position of the sun had made impossible before my meeting. Then it was back to the station for the Jubilee Line back to central London.
In the now over four years since the disastrous Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 there has been little change and no reckoning, with a tediously slow inquiry taking place that began by shifting blame unfairly onto the firefighters but is at last making clear some of the deliberate failures by local government, manufacturers and installers of the fatal cladding and others with a complete disregard for the safety of those living in the tower.
Cladding was not of course the only issue, and there were many other failings that led to the terrible loss of life. Most basic was the attitude of governments of both parties towards health and safety issues, describing essential safety regulations as “red tape” and dismantling what were essential checks to increase the profitability of builders and developers and reduce the liabilities of building owners. It was a system that needed reforming and strengthening, perhaps learning from practice in other countries to provide effective control and not abandoning to commercial whim.
Most of what has emerged in the inquiry only reinforces what was already made clear from informed reports – such as that by Architects for Social Housing – within weeks of the fire, adding truly shameful detail to the broader outline. It surely should have come out in courts within months of the fire and some of those responsible might well be behind bars and companies charged with massive fines, and the main point of the inquiry seems to be to prevent the course of justice.
A resident of Tanner Point speaking
Local authorities and building owners have been forced to inspect their high-rise properties, and the government has provided at lest some of the money it promised to replace unsafe cladding in the public sector. But little has been done for those living in private blocks who are still living in fear and now pay increased charges for extra fire safety provisions. A parliamentary briefing paper estimates the total cost of replacement of unsafe cladding at around £15m, and so far government has come up with a third of that. Government policy has changed from the initial promise to fund “remediation of historical safety defects, to a suggestion that leaseholders should be protected from unaffordable costs” and even the provision for a low interest scheme to ensure they would not pay more than £50 a month has failed to materialise despite the promise in the current Building Safety Bill.
In August 2017, a number of tower blocks in the London borough of Newham were found to have unsafe cladding. Housing activists Focus E15 Mothers led a demonstration putting pressure on the council to act urgently to make the blocks safe. The council came to a decision the following month to remove the cladding though work to do so only began in April 2018.
The march began at Ferrier Point in Canning Town, with other groups including East End Sisters Uncut, Movement for Justice, the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, One Housing campaigners and Whitechapel Anarchists joining Focus E15 and some tower block residents.
From there they marched to Tanner Point in Plaistow North for a longer rally outside, including some speeches from tower residents. Then came another long march to Stratford and the Carpenters Estate.
The Carpenters Estate was a popular estate, close to Stratford station and the town centre, and was viewed by the council as a prime opportunity for highly profitable redevelopment schemes, wanting to demolish the estate which is well-planned and in good condition. Focus E15 led opposition that in 2013 ended plans for UCL to set up a new campus here and have constantly urged the council to bring back people to the estate where despite a critical housing shortage in the borough, 400 good homes had been kept empty for over 10 years. The march ended with a ‘hands around the Carpenters Estate’ solidarity event against decanting, demolition and social cleansing.
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