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.
Olympic Site & Budget Cuts: Wednesday 5th December 2012 was a cold day in London, with the temperature just three or four degrees above freezing during the day, but there was plenty of blue sky with a few clouds and it seemed ideal weather to wrap up and go and see what progress had been made in restoring the Olympic site, still largely off-limits some months after the end of the games. And later in the early evening I returned to Westminster for a protest against the cuts which had been announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in his autumn budget statement.
Olympic Area Slightly Open – Stratford Marsh
Much of the area around the Olympic site had been closed to the public in May, including the Greenway, the elevated footpath on top of the Northern Outfall Sewer which runs close to the Olympic stadium, but this was now re-opened in part.
The section between Stratford High Street and the main railway lines which run from Liverpool Street station to Stratford and on further east was however still closed and would remain closed for years as work was now taking place for Crossrail – opened as the Elizabeth Line in 2022.
I started my walk in the early afternoon around the Bow flyover where the Bow Back rivers were still closed to traffic with a yellow floating barrier, but the footpath along the Lea Navigation had been re-opened. One improvement made presumably for the Olympics was a pathway and footbridge taking walkers under the busy road junction and across the canal.
Finding the new entrance to the Greenway meant walking between fences on the Crossrail site down Pudding Mill Lane, and probably I would have abandoned the route had it not been for signs put up by the View Tube café – though when I finally reached this I found I was the only person to have done so and the cafe was deserted.
There were still fences everywhere as you can see from my photographs but I was able to walk along the Greenway to Hackney Wick and then along the towpath beside the navigation. But the footpath beside the Old River Lea was still blocked off.
By then the light was beginning to fade and the Olympic stadium was gaining a golden glow. I walked a little further along the towpath and photographed the Eton boathouse as the sun was setting setting before crossing the canal and making my way to Hackney Wick station.
Several hundred students, trade unionists, socialists and others marched with UCU London Region down the Strand and into Whitehall shouting slogans against public service cuts, the rich, David Cameron and George Osborne in particular.
Opposite Downing Street they joined with others already protesting there including CND and Stop the War who were calling for the government to stop wasting money on the war in Afghanistan and vanity projects supporting the arms industry such as Trident and its planned replacement.
“The Afghanistan war — which everyone knows is futile and lost — is costing around £6 billion a year. The yearly maintenance costs for Trident are £2.2 billion a year. The cost of renewing the Trident system — which this government is committed to do — would cost up to £130 billion. Two aircraft carriers are being built at a cost of £7 billion. Then there’s the £15 billion to be spent buying 150 F-35 jets from the US, each of which will cost £85 million plus an extra £16 million for the engine.”
The rally began shortly after the marchers arrived. By now it was only just above freezing and speakers were asked to keep their contributions short because of the temperature.
Among the speakers were John McDonnell MP, Kate Hudson of CND, author Owen Jones, Andy Greene of DPAC, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett and others including a nurse from Lewisham Hospital threatened with closures, from the NUT, UK Uncut and other trade unionists.
Kate Hudson CND and Romaine Phoenix Coalition of Resistance/Green Party
Many of the speakers called on trade unions to take effective action against the cuts. calling for union leaders to stop simply speaking against them and take the lead from their members and start organising strike action. But of course few did and the cuts continued unabated.
Barging on Bow Creek: On Wednesday 12 October 2011 I was pleased to get paid to go back to Bow Creek and take photographs of a working barge on Bow Creek in Poplar.
Bow Creek is the lower part of the River Lea, between Bow Locks and the River Thames. Bow Locks mark the southern end of the Lea Navigation and since London’s oldest canal, the Limehouse Cut opened in 1770, most canal traffic took advantage of this to take a more direct route to the Thames and avoid the dangerous and meandering tidal Bow Creek.
The River Lea remains tidal some miles above Bow Lock, but this tidal section is separate from the navigation, although there are various channels and locks such as City Mill Lock and Carpenters Lock on the Olympic site which link the two.
Bow Creek continued to be used for navigation, including for bring coal to West Ham Power Station and the huge Imperial Gas Light & Coke Company gas works at Bromley-by-Bow.
But the gas works closed in 1976 although its gasholders remain – they were still in use for gas storage until 2010. (I went inside the site to photograph them in 2022.) Planning permission has now been granted for 2,200 new homes on the site, retaining the seven gasholders. The gas works dock is now Cody Dock, a creative and community hub with moorings and a short walk from the DLR at Star Lane, hosting many intersting events.
West Ham Power Station ended production in 1983 and was then demolished to build a business park. In the lower sections of Bow Creek there were still a number of timber yards and a ship repair business still using the creek at least in the 1980s, but I think all all commercial traffic has now ended.
Much was made during the construction of the Olympic site of the use of barges to carry waste away from the area, and a new lock was built at great expense on the Prescott Channel at Three Mills Green, but I think barges were only used for PR photographs and the huge majority of waste was taken out by lorries.
So I was pleased to hear that “the people cleaning up the gas works site at Poplar … were using barges to carry out the highly toxic soil from the site* and “… “was delighted to be given a commission to go and photograph the barging.”
This is what a rubbish recycling plant looks like
On My London Diary I write more about my relationship with the River Lea which had begun in 1981 when “I heard a story on the radio that commercial barge traffic was about to come to an end on the Lea Navigation, and decided to travel across London to record its last days.” From then I carried out a major project on the river, but was disappointed to have a funding application turned down.
I returned to the River around ten years later and again in the early 2000s, with more frequent visits after the Olympic bid was successful – although access to the main site was soon impossible. In 2010 I published Before the Olympics, ISBN: 978-1-909363-00-7 with over 200 pictures from the source to the Thames.
The My London Diary post also describes my experience on the visit – how I had to dress up to take the pictures – and that although I’d been promised I would have half an hour to take photographs it actually ended up as 11 minutes.
After taking the pictures – both for the project PR and myself – I had the rest of the day to take a walk along Bow Creek again and made my way to the Thames on the Greenwich meridian, where I found “a new marker installed in the Virginia Quay estate next to West India Docks station, built since I carried out my ‘Meridian Project‘ in the 1990s and made an unsuccessful bid to create a’Meridian Walk’ to mark the new millennium.” Now there is a sculpture trail, The Line, which in part follows Bow Creek – and includes work at Cody Dock.
All pictures in this post are from Wednesday 12 October 2011. There are many more pictures from my walk as well as the barging at Barging on Bow Creek
Lea Navigation & Olympic Site: Saturday 1 October 2011 was a fine day and I decided to go early to Stratford and take a photographic walk around Bow & Stratford Marsh, before a meeting at the View Tube on the Greenway overlooking the Olympic site.
I took the Jubilee Line to Stratford and then walked over the footbridge leading to the Carpenters Estate and then on to Stratford High Street. A great deal of new building was taking place there, including a new bridge to carry the Olympic crowds across the busy road on a route from West Ham station along the Greenway. The bridge was demolished shortly after the games ended.
This section of the Greenway – the path on top of Bazalgette’s Northern Outfall Sewer rebranded in the 1990s – was closed off by fences and I kept on walking down the High Street. A few yards along was one of the few remaining commercial sites, though by then derelict and for sale. It was demolished and the site flattened for the Games, though it was only five years later than penthouses on the new block here were offered for sale.
A few yards off the High Street was City Mill Lock, now behind a row of flats. I continued on to the Lea Navigation. The industrial sites on the High Street had now been cleared and there were now huge advertising structures.
I had come mainly with the intention of making panoramic images, but these don’t display well on this blog, but you can see them larger on My London Diary. A footway now carries the towpath under the Bow Flyover and the High Street and then across the canal where the towpath continues on the opposite bank.
I made far too many pictures around this part of the canal before I could drag myself away, although the sky was not at its best for panoramic images and I would have prefered more distinct clouds rather than the large areas of blue. Only the first section of Cook’s Road was still open, but I could walk along beside St Thomas’s Creek to Marshgate Lane and then make my way to the bright yellow View Tube.
Here I was one of five photographers taking part in what was billed as a ‘Salon de Refuse Olympique‘, showing our artistic responses to the area. It was interesting to see the very different work that the five of us presented. You can read more about this in a post published here two days after the event in 2011, Northern Outfall Sewer 1990, 2005, 2010… which includes the three pictures I contributed for a forthcoming book as well as a lengthy text based on my presentation.
The Olympics have certainly changed this area, and the changes which were showing back in 2011 have continued. Many more pictures – both panoramic and normal aspect ration – in my post on My London Diary at Lea Navigation & Olympic Site.
London Loop – Enfield Lock to Chigwell – If you want a good walk on the outskirts of London to walk off a little of the excesses of Christmas I can recommend this section of the London Loop. In the book guide we – myself my wife and my elder son – used on 28th December 2006 it was section 13, but now appears to be split into two parts as Sections 18 and 19. You can download excellent walk guides from Inner London Ramblers. Bits can be muddy so you need walking boots.
It’s not a particularly long walk and starts and ends at stations. Photographers always add a little by wandering around a bit and running up slopes to get a better view. But back in 2006 a little under 9 miles was fine for me, though now I might prefer to split it into the two sections.
The rail journey to Enfield Lock takes around an hour and a half for us, changing from the Victoria Line to Greater Anglia at Tottenham Hale, and coming home from Chigwell which is on the Central Line just a little longer. The walk itself at a moderate pace with a stop to eat our sandwiches a little over 4 hours, and in December to finish in daylight means starting walking around noon, though we made it a little earlier and arrived at Enfield Lock just after 11am.
My first picture online came not long after, although the rather decorative length of piping in the top picture may not appeal to all. I think it was over the Turkey Brook, though I can’t exactly remember the location. But soon we were walking past the 1907 Lee Conservancy Offices at Enfield Lock and then a short distance beside the Lea Navigation.
Then we crossed the navigation taking the footpath to Sewardstone walking to the north of King George’s Reservoir and following one of the branches of the River Lea and then crossing another wide flood relief channel and then coming to something that looks rather more like a proper river.
The route from here is uphill for some way. Somewhere we passed two horses heads and and on the Sewardstone Road a nursing home.
A few yards along the busy road (its the A12) we left and continued uphill, pausing at times to admire the view across the Lea Valley.
Here we got another view of the rather mysterious structure that had loomed above the Lea Navigation which is Enfield Power Station, built in 1997-9, a gas-fired power station built partly on the site of the decommissioned Brimsdown Power Station.
A little further on there were more views, across the reservoirs to Ponders End. But soon we came to more rural scenes including the pond and houses of Carrolls Farm.
The next section of the walk involved a lot of woods and is part of Epping Forest and also includes the Scout camp at Gilwell. The IL Ramblers notes recommend an alternative route which gives better views, but we only had the book and I made few pictures on this section – none of which are on the web.
We stopped to eat our sandwiches beside Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge on Chingford Plain where we also bought crisps and soft drinks to go with them, and sat around rather too long before taking a look at the building and then continuing.
Here we got a little lost in Epping Forest as the directions in the book were perhaps rather less clear than those online, so I think our route was just a little different to that intended. We found the Butler’s Lodge, but despite the promise in the book it was not serving tea.
There were some views on our way, but the suburbs here are not really picturesque. I think the river in the picture below is the Roding rather than the Ching which was more of a small ditch where we crossed it.
Parts of the route led along roads and perhaps the best that can be said for them are that they were downhill – and by this time I was getting tired. Eventually we came to the station and sat down and waited for a train.
There are a few more pictures as well as those above on My London Diary.
December 5th 2012 was a fine winter’s day and I took advantage of the weather to try and walk around the area which had been fenced off for the London Olympics for around 5 years. In the evening I joined a protest in Westminster against the continuing cuts being aimed at the poorest and most vulnerable by George Osborne and the Conservative-led government.
Olympic Area Slightly Open – Stratford Marsh. Wed 5 Dec 2012
It was around April 2007 that an 11 mile long blue fence went up around the whole of the London Olympic site at Stratford, barring access to the whole site except for those working on it. Parts were replaced in 2012 with a 5,000 volt 4m tall electrified perimeter fence in 2012 for the games itself.
St Thomas’ Creek still blocked to boats
Even the public footpath along the Northern Sewage Outfall, the Greenway, had been closed in May 2012, but after I heard this had reopened on December 1st I had been wanting to visit the area again to walk along it.
Crossrail works
The View Tube, a cafe and viewing area set up on the Greenway had also reopened, under new management, and it was only signs for this that kept me going past a maze of fencing and hostile signage. The Greenway was still closed between Stratford High Street and the main railway lines because of ongoing work for Crossrail, and roads north of the railway were still fenced off.
Wire fences and yellow fences have replaced the blue
Despite it being a fine afternoon for a walk I was the only customer to enter the View Tube while I was there and the Greenway, normally a useful through route for cyclists and pedestrians, was still deserted.
I could see no signs of work going on to bring the area back into use. Ten years later the area is still largely a desert and most of the promises about the ‘Olympic Legacy’ have been reneged on. This is still an Olympic waste; though the developers have done well out of it, the people haven’t.
I walked along the Greenway, finding there was no access from it to any part of the area, with those electric wire fences still in place, and made my way along the Lea Navigation to Hackney Wick, making a number of pictures on my way.
Osborne’s Budget Cuts – Strand to Westminster, Wed 5 Dec 2012
I around 200 people outside Kings College at Aldwych who were meeting to march to join the rally at Downing St where Stop the War and CND were protesting against Osborne’s attacks on the vulnerable, continued in his autumn statement.
The march had been called by the UCU London Region, and was joined by students, trade unionists, socialists and others, and went down the Strand and into Whitehall shouting slogans against public service cuts, the rich, David Cameron and George Osborne in particular to join a similar number already protesting at Downing St.
Speakers at the rally pointed out the huge cost of military expenditure which was being poured into futile projects – and the pockets of the arms manufacturers:
“The Afghanistan war — which everyone knows is futile and lost — is costing around £6 billion a year. The yearly maintenance costs for Trident are £2.2 billion a year. The cost of renewing the Trident system — which this government is committed to do — would cost up to £130 billion. Two aircraft carriers are being built at a cost of £7 billion. Then there’s the £15 billion to be spent buying 150 F-35 jets from the US, each of which will cost £85 million plus an extra £16 million for the engine.”
John McDonnell MP
By now it was freezing, and when the speeches began the speakers were asked to cut their contributions short because of the extreme cold. Among those who spoke were John McDonnell MP, Kate Hudson of CND, author Owen Jones, Andy Greene of DPAC and Green Party leader Natalie Bennett.
Kate Hudson CND
We heard from a nurse about the campaign to keep Lewisham hospital open, where a few days earlier 15,000 had marched and formed a human chain around the hospital. The hospital is successful and well run, but huge PFI debts from another hospital in the area threaten its future.
Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett
A NUT member talked about the problems the cuts were making in education and campaigners had come from Connaught School in Waltham Forest where they are striking against the decision by school governors to pursue academy status despite the opposition of the teachers, parents, the local MP and councillors.
A speaker from UK Uncut urged people to join the protests against Starbucks the following Saturday and many of those who spoke called for trade unions to take action against the cuts, calling on union leaders to stop simply speaking against them and start organising strike action.
October 19th seems to be a good day for protests, and looking at My London Diary before I began writing this post I found something in most years I could chose to write about. It could be the last day of a trip to Paris, calling on Lord Browne, the chair of fracking company Cuadrilla to ‘Frack Off’, a protest against atrocities in Congo, Uganda and Rwanda as battles continue for their mineral wealth, a call to make caste discrimination illegal in the UK, AxeDrax protesting against generating electricity from biomass and coal, a student rent strike and so many more.
In the end it was a fairly random decision to pick Friday October 19th 2018, perhaps because it my day then began with someone I photographed a couple of days ago at Westminster, Neil Godwin.
BEIS refuse International Rescue climate help: Dept Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Friday 19th October 2018
‘Commander Neil Godwin Tracy’ of International Rescue came from Tracy Island carrying his ship Thunderbird 2 to the Dept for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in London to offer his organisation’s assistance to produce policies which which recognise the desperate need to cut carbon emissions to avoid disastrous global warming and climate change by banning all fracking.
London, UK. 12 Oct 2022. Charlie-X who protests in Chaplinesque mime was with Steve Bray’s group of pro-Europe protesters on the refuge facing the Houses of Parliament in a protest against the Tory government and its energy policies which will result in average energy bills of around £3,000 this year. Peter Marshall/Alamy Live News
Last week I photographed Neil as his alter ego, Charlie-X, holding up a picture of the Tory Party as a steak with maggots crawling out of it on a crossing refuge close to the Houses of Parliament.
Security at the entrance to BEIS prevented Commander Tracy from entering the building in 2018, and making his offer to the minister concerned. Police weren’t happy about his pasting a poster to the wall either, but he managed on his second attempt to paste one up for long enough for me to take a few pictures. We would all be in a better place had his magnanimous offer been taken up, and it seems to me four years later that our government (if we still have one by the time this post appears) is sadly in need of International Rescue to drag it out of the chasm of its own making.
Olympic Park walk – Stratford to Hackney Wick, Friday 19th October 2018
I’d been invited to photograph Commander Tracy at lunchtime and after this had a free afternoon before an early evening protest I wanted to attend. I decided to make another visit to what had before its Olympic destruction been one of my favourite areas of London and see how the new Olympic park was developing, and took the Central Line to Stratford Station.
I walked through Stratford Westfield which my caption described as “21st century version of Hell” and is a place where security take a dim view of photography and emerged into a new landscape from where a bridge took me towards the park.
Parts of the park are beginning to look quite attractive with water and trees, but much is still irredeemably arid, with extensive gravelled walkways with views of dull built boxes in the middle distance. You can see a little of these in my pictures though I tried hard to make the sow’s ear look at least mildly attractive.
But it came as something of a relief to walk across the new footbridge over the Lea Navigation and into Hackney Wick. The buildings here aren’t great architecture but at least they are more varied and most now visually relieved by graffiti – as the strapline across the top of a former pub reads ‘MEANWHILE IN EAST LONDON LUNACTICS DECORATE A BUILDING’ and there had been no shortage of lunatics, some more skilled than others.
The Olympic Nazis had cleaned much of Hackney Wick’s finer decoration and it was good to see and photograph this resurgence. I walked across the footbridge to Fish Island, where there were also new buildings, but much of the older remaining, then on and across the long bridge over the A12 East Cross Route (a part of London’s ruinous motorways built before the overall scheme was abandoned) to Old Ford Road and a bus stop. For once the bus windows were clean and I took a few more pictures as it went along Roman Road.
Mail group end your transphobic hate – Daily Mail, Kensington, London. Fri 19 Oct 2018
Thousands had complained about articles in the free daily newspaper The Metro which had published articles demonising trans people, particularly trans women and had carried an advertising campaign for a transphbic group who call themselves ‘Fair Play for Women’.
The protest was organised by Sister Not Cister UK. Protesters say that these attacks on the trans community will hurt the most marginalised – trans women, working class trans people and trans people of colour – who are also the most likely to be in need of the services that such hateful campaigners seek to deny them.
Jane Nicholl of Class War
More people were arriving to join the protest as I left, but I felt I had taken enough pictures which gave an clear idea of the event, and was feeling rather tired and hungry. Living as I do on the edge of London meant it would take me an hour or more to get home, with two journeys on the Underground and then then a train.
On Sunday 2 October 2011 a march and rally celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable St, when when Mosley’s fascists were prevented from marching into London’s largely Jewish East End.
Over a thousand trade unionists and anti-fascists came to march along Cable St remembering the day, including the then TUC Deputy General Secretary Frances O’Grady, and the marchers were led by Max Levitas who had been at the battle in 1936, then aged 21, and remained active as an anti-fascist until his death in 2018, including serving for a total of 15 years as a Communist coucillor in Stepney.
At the rally close to the fine Cable Street mural we were reminded that official bodies including the Board of Deputies of British Jews had advised people to stay away from Mosley’s march and that the local opposition was organised largely by the Communist Party of Great Britain, led by Phil Piratin, who nine ears later became Communist MP for Mile End. As well as large number of local people, both Jews and others, thousands of others opposed to fascism flocked in to defend the area.
An estimated 1-300,000 people gathered at all the roads leading into the East End, determined to stop the march on October 4th by 3,000 uniformed fascists. The fascists waited outside the Royal Mint while 7,000 Metropolitan Police, including their entire mounted section and an autogiro (a primitive form of helicopter with an unpowered rotor) overhead, attempted to clear a route for them.
When the anti-fascists heard the police were trying to force a route along Cable Street, Irish dockers, Jewish tailors and other anti-fascists built three barricades across the street with thousands arriving to stop the police clearing the street. Eventually Mosley abandoned the march and took his supporters back towards Hyde Park.
There were around 175 people injured, men, women and police and around 150 arrests. Most were charged with obstructing the police and received fines, typically of £5, but some thought to be ringleaders were sentenced to three months hard labour.
The event raised public awareness of the British Union of Fascists and led to the passage of the 1936 Public Order Act which prohibited the wearing of political uniforms in public except for ceremonial occasions, outlawed paramilitary organisations, banned offensive weapons at public meetings and gave power to the police to impose conditions on marches and arrest unruly counter-demonstrators. It also allowed the Home Secretary to ban protests in a area where serious disorder was likely and made it an offence to use “insulting words likely to cause a breach of the peace” in public speeches.
Mosley continued to have many supporters in the East End after the battle, and Bethnal Green was one of his strongholds. There were gangs of fascist youths in Mile End who assaulted Jews on the street and smashed the windows of Jewish homes and shops.
Hettie Bower (left)
Levitas was not the only veteran of the 1936 battle at the event, and there were other veteran antifacists taking part too. The oldest was was 106 year old Hetty Bower, still looking extremely well, and walking with the aid of a stick. Rather younger at 94, Beattie Orwell was still looking very sprightly and had been at the battle at the age of 19.
There were also banners from the Spanish Civil War which was also taking place 75 years ago, as well as those from many trade unions and political groups including those representing the newer communities of the area, with local activists reminding those present of the continuing need to fight against fascism and racism, and in particular the need to oppose the English Defence League, who just a few weeks earlier had attempted to march into Tower Hamlets but had been stopped by a popular mobilisation.
A short distance away in Grace Alley Wilton’s Music Hall, the oldest surviving Grand Music Hall in the world, was hosting a four day programme of events commemorating Cable St with various performances, book launches, exhibitions and stalls, street theatre and music along the alley outside.
I left Cable Street and took a bus to Bethnal Green, then walked along the Roman Road and and on across the motorway to Fish Island, on my way to visit the gallery space on the top floor of Forman’s, salmon smokers and one of the few local businesses that seems to have done well out of the Olympics.
Footbridge across the Hertford Union Canal to Hackney Wick
They had been moved from a factory more or less where the Olympic Stadium was being built to new modern premises on the opposite bank of the Lea navigation, designed and painted salmon pink to look like a lump of salmon and appropriately in the area known from its street names as Fish Island. As well as the smoking plant it also houses a restaurant and a large art space, with views over the Olympic site both from the front of the gallery and the adjoining roof terrace.
Shoreditch High St
After viewing the exhibition and taking some photographs there I walked from Fish Island over the footbridge to Hackney Wick, visiting a lively street market there and then walking along the Lea Navigation towpath to the Westway and back into Hackney Wick for a bus back though the City and on the Waterloo.
Bank, Victoria Park, Fish Island, Hackney Wick: In 1988 I was still teaching a full timetable at the sixth-form and community college where I worked, but because I took an evening class on Tuesdays I was able to finish the week’s teaching at noon on Friday. As a union rep I had persuaded my members against national union advice to some deviations from the national conditions that suited the peculiar circumstances of the college and made such arrangements possible.
Most of the pictures I made back in 1988 were either taken during the college holidays – we kept more or less normal school terms – or at weekends, but at noon on some Fridays I would rush down to the caretakers stores where I kept my bike, pedal home furiously, dump the bike, pick up my camera bag and rush to the station for a train to London. Until the clocks went back at the end of October there was then time for a few hours walking and taking pictures – in late October sunset is around 5.45pm. I think the pictures in this post were probably taken on the last occasion that year that my journey was worthwhile.
Doorway, Bank Station, Bank, City, 1988 88-10d-25
I didn’t make many pictures on this Friday afternoon – around 16 black and white frames and perhaps two or three in colour, perhaps partly because I broke my journey to make this picture. Rather than taking the train from Richmond to Homerton or Hackney Wick, I went up to Waterloo and took the Waterloo & City line to Bank. I’d some time earlier photographed this doorway at Bank station and had for reasons now unknown to me decided I needed another and different image. Possibly I’d been reminded of it when the earlier picture, a closeup of the three heads, was used on a bookjacket.
It perhaps took me a few minutes at Bank to find the doorway still there on King William Street on the side of the splendid Hawksmoor church of St Mary Woolnuth. Having make the single exposure shown here, I made my way to a bus stop for a No 8 bus to Bethnal Green and then walked up Grove Road to Victoria Park.
Old London Bridge, stone alcove, Victoria Park, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-10d-26
I’d realised when I got home from my previous walk that I had not photographed the shelters which were stone alcoves from the Old London Bridge. That bridge, built in 1176-1209 had until 1760 been cluttered with houses and shops, leaving only a narrow path across the river. These were cleared in 1760-63, more than doubling the width of the bridge, and seven stone alcoves were installed along each side.
The bridge was demolished in 1831, but these alcoves were sold and two found there way to Victoria Park when it was opened in 1845. Another is in a courtyard at Guy’s Hospital and two ended up on an estate in East Sheen along with some of the balustrade, though only one now remains in the grounds of some 1930s flats at Courtlands, close to the 1st Richmond Scouts HQ.
From Victoria Park I walked across the footbridge over the East Cross Route to Hackney Wick, then turning south and making my way down Wansbeck Road to the Northern Outfall Sewer on Wick Lane. Steps there took me down to Dace Road and along to Old Ford Locks. Unfortunately although I took a few picture on the walk, none are among those I’ve digitised. So here’s one I took in 1990 on Dace Road of Percy Dalton’s peanut factory.
Loading Bay, Lock, Old Ford, Lea navigation, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-10e-61
I walked across the gates at Old Ford Lock and took a few pictures there, including this one of the loading bay at Swan Wharf.
Bridge, White Post Lane, Lea Navigation, Hackney Wick, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-10e-62
The I walked north on the towpath. Now there are two new bridges on this stretch, from Stour Road and Monier Road, but in 1988 the next crossing was at White Post Lane.
Bridge, White Post Lane, Lea Navigation, Hackney Wick, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-10e-65
At left is the splendid 1913-14 Queen’s Yard works, part of the Clarke, Nickolls & Coombs Ltd “Clarnico” sweet and chocolate factory, formerly the largest employer in the area. Much of their five works were damaged or destroyed by wartime bombing and this building needed some restoration. The company was bought by Trebor in 1969 and the works closed. The white building fronting the canal beyond the bridge was the cocoa bean roasting factory built around 1900.
I walked over the bridge and along to Hackney Wick station for a train to Richmond on my way home.
After my stay in Paris in August 1988 I was back in London and managed to fit in one more walk before the end of the month, starting from where I had finished one of my previous walks in Bethnal Green.
Old Ford Rd, Old Ford, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8am-66
Old Ford Road runs parallel to Roman Road but a couple of hundred yards to the north, and almost certainly follows the real Roman route to the east out of London, fording the River Lea somewhere close to where the Northern Outfall Sewer (The Greenway) now crosses. The river here is a part of the Lea Navigation and now very much more constrained between banks than it once was, though then it will still have been tidal here.
There was a route here even before the Romans, leading along the way of modern Oxford St and Old Street to Bethnal Green and Old Ford and then continuing through what were then marshes to Wanstead Slip north of Stratford and on the Colchester.
There are long stretches of Victorian houses as well as modern flats along Old Ford Road, but the house at the left of this picture is No 218, and is a terrace beginning with 196 and ending at 224 a little to the west of the bridge over the Regent’s Canal and immediately north of the Cranbrook estate.
Roman Rd, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8am-52
I wasn’t sure what to make of this establishment on Roman Road, which seemed to be both a Patisserie and Bar, offering Light Lunches & Coffee, as well as catering for all functions, with rather curious window decoration and an odd bit of statuary in its entrance.
I did a lot more walking without taking many photographs, going south down Usher Road and then going east to cross the East Cross Route on Wick Lane before joining the towpath on the opposite bank of the Lea Navigation to get to the Middlesex Filter Beds at the north corner of the Hackney Marshes – something over 2 miles before I took the next black and white pictures in what had been turned into a nature reserve.
The filter beds were built in the early nineteenth century to combat cholera in London by providing clean drinking water which was still killing thousands but were unable to cope with the increasing population and were finally closed in 1969, left to become a nature reserve. I think they may have recently been made open to the public when I made this short visit. Going back more recently they seem to have been made a little less overgrown than they had become over the 19 years since they were abandoned. This image seems to me the more interesting of the five frames that I took – film was still expensive.
Walking back south along the towpath I made three exposures of this derelict building with its broken windows and the reflection in the canal by the Eastway Bridge. I probably took few pictures on this part of the walk as I had photographed fairly extensively along the Lea a few years earlier – some pictures you can see in the book ‘Before the Olympics‘ which has images from the source to the Thames.
Hertford Union, canal, Old Ford, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8am-26
At Hackney Wick I crossed the bridge and took the towpath beside the Herrtford Union Canal, a short section joining the Lea Navigation to the Regent’s Canal. Then there were still a number of canal wharves, mainly for timber, though it was a few years since commercial traffic here had ended.
Hertford Union, canal, Old Ford, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8am-32
Another view of the same wharf, and one of the lorries which now served them rather than canal boats. The Challenge, owned by the Docklands Canal Boat Trust, a registered charity formed in 1985 that provides boating holidays and day trips for people with disabilities, is a specially built boat for the purpose – and it was a challenge to get the money to build it. Still in operation it is now based on the Lea at Clapton.
There was still plenty of timber along this stretch of the canal.
More from the end of this walk in a later post. You can see a larger version of any of these pictures by clicking on them which will take you to my album 1988 London Photos.
