More Colour from 1994 in Enfield: In More Ponders End, Enfield Wash, Palmers Green & Brimsdown 1994 I posted a set of pictures made in the first three months of the year. This post includes some more taken in March 1994 mainly along by the Lea Navigation in the London Borough of Enfield and ends with a couple taken in April or May.
My archives from back then are a little disorganised but I’ll try hard not to post any that I’ve previously posted, although a one here is from a site where I’ve previously posted a panoramic images.
The Lea Valley was an important industrial area of London well into the 20th century and had been the source of some key inventions, including the start of the electronics industry. Some of the factories were along the river, perhaps originally on sites that had made use of its wharves, but now all reliant on road transport, with all of Brimsdown between the railway and the canal being huge industrial estates off Mollinson Avenue.
Here the separation of industry from the canal was emphasized with a concrete fence, now rather decaying at the edge of the bank and tell fence topped with barbed wire at an angle to keep intruders from the canal out of the site.
I don’t remember exactly where at Brimsdown this factory was, but like the rest of the industry here it will since have been demolished, replaced by large distribution sheds, some set well back from the water and almost hidden by trees and bushes growing unfettered along the water’s edge.
There are houses and a few shops at Brimsdown on the other side of the railway line in what is perhaps part of Enfield Wash, which then included this hairdressers. The Sun’s March 1994 topless ‘Page 3 girl‘ in the calendar (also part reflected in the mirror at right) confirms the date of the picture.
Columbia Wharf, Ponders End, Enfield, 1994, 94-03-2-24
In a previous article I posted a panoramic view of Columbia Wharf looking down from the Lee Valley Road. Here from a little further East on that road with the navigation in the foreground you see the wharf and background the Ponders End Flour Mills, the gas holder and four tower blocks in Ponders End.
Much redevelopment has gone on in Ponders End and only one to those towers remains and there is no gas holder. But the shed at the wharf is still there and in use although Abbey Stainless Components Ltd are no longer there, nor is that large crane and the van boasting ‘NORTH LONDON’S CARRIER PIGEONS IN TRANSIT has long flown the coop.
Ponders End, Enfield, 1994, 94-05-1-53
A more pastoral panorama of Ponders End with Wright’s Flour Mills and the four towers in the background.
Lady Jayne remains a well known brand in the Ladies hair trade. I think this shop was probably in the High Street, much of which has now been redeveloped.
Tyre & Exhaust Centre, Ponders End, Enfield
Tyre Services Tyre & Exhaust Centre at 151 High Street on the corner with Stonehorse Road, a short ‘No Through Road’ off the High Street. This building was still there in 2022 but had became HiQ and then National Tyres and Autocare – a Halfords company and was by then permanently closed. I expect its days were numbered. Much of the area of the High Street around it was redeveloped around ten years ago.
More colour pictures from 1994 to follow in later posts.
In March 1994 I spent some time photographing in the London Borough of Enfield, and going a little beyond its borders into Waltham Cross. Mostly I was taking black and white pictures – some of which you can see on Flickr in the album 1994 London Photos – but I did also take some in colour, including a few colour panormas.
Mollison Avenue in Brimsdown is a busy road running roughly parallel to and between a railway line and the Lea Navigation with the area between these crammed with industrial and commercial sites. Now much of it is occupied by delivery centres and I think there are rather more fences than in 1994.
This was a picture largely about shapes and as with many olds getting the colours to look natural is a problem – as you can see particulary in the foliage here.
The colour is rather better in this image of a large pipe bridge, possibly carrying gas, over the navigation. The view here looks rather rural, but as usual there is a line of tall pilons.
Here I made use of the curvature from the swing-lens camera – as well as the obvious pipe there is a second interlocking curve with the bridge, the grass bank and the towpath.
Columbia Wharf, Ponders End, Enfield, 1994, 94-03-3-23
Columbia Wharf was now a wharf in name only, with lorries now delivering carpets. This is now a part of ‘Ponders End Waterfront’. I think this picture was taken from Wharf Road.
Enfield Wash is close to Enfield Lock station which I used several times to walk around the area. I have a small suspicion that this launderette may really have been in an area that locals would call Enfield Lock, but I decided given the subject that Enfield Wash was more appropriate.
I still can’t decide whether I preferred the landscape or portrait version of this launderette interior – taken through the window when it was closed.
Shops and Cross, Waltham Cross, Broxbourne, 1994, 94-03-1-61
From Enfield Lock Station a short walk took me to the Lee Navigation towpath which is also the Lea Valley Walk and a couple of kilometres north uder the M25 I was out of Greater London and in Waltham Cross. At right is the Eleanor Cross, one of twelve built to the orders of King Edward I to mark the overnight resting places of his wife Eleanor of Castile who died near Lincoln in 1290 as her body was en route to Westminster Abbey.
Much restored it now sits in the pedestrianised shopping centre, one of only 3 surviving Eleanor Crosses. The one in front of Charing Cross Station is a Victorian 1865 recreation.
Rainham,Purfleet, Thurrock & Ponders End: On Saturday 11th December 1993 I took a train from Fenchurch Street to Rainham and then walked along by the river to Coldharbour Point. There the path stopped and I returned to Rainham and took the train to Purfleet where I could pick up the riverside path again and walk on to Grays. Probably I walked about 9 miles in all and by the time I finished it I think the light would have been fading, with sunset at around 4pm.
Tilda Rice, Rainham, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-64
On this walk I made a little over 200 black and white images, a selection of which you can find on Flickr in my 1993 London album beginning here.
Purfleet, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-65
Waste Paper, Purfleet, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-51
There are more colour images from this walk, including a number of panoramas, mixed with pictures from other occasions starting here on the final two pages of my Flickr album of colour pictures from 1993.
Notices on Fence, Purfleet, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-53
But today I found some more pictures from that walk at the start of my album 1994 London Colour and I’ll share these in this post. They will have come from a cassette of film which I took in 1993 but only developed a month or so later in 1994.
Waste Paper, Purfleet, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-56
Works, Purfleet, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-46
QEII Bridge, Dartford Bridge, Pipeline, River Thames, West Thurrock, Thurrock, 1993, 94-01-1-11
The final image in today’s post is something completely different on the same film, a shop window in Ponders End which I found it strangely weird. As it is on the same film as the others I think it was probably also taken in December 1993 although my caption stated 1994.
Visteon, City & Fashion Victims: On Saturday 4th April 2009 I went to protest in support of the Visteon factory occupation in Enfield, came back the the City but missed a protest over the police murder of newsvendor Ian Tomlinson and then photographed a fashion show protest on Oxford Street against the slave-like labour of workers in Bangladesh producing cheap clothes for Primark.
Solidarity at Visteon Enfield
I wrote a few days ago about the Visteon pensions scandal where former Ford workers who were transferred to parts manufacturer Visteon, ‘An Enterprise of Ford Motor Company‘, in 2000 had lost up to half of their pensions when Visteon went into administration on 31st March 2009 when administrators KPMG immediately closed the company down.
An Enterprise of Ford Motor Company, Limited
Together with workers at the Visteon Belfast site, the workers at Visteon Enfield had occupied their factories and were refusing to leave until Visteon and Ford made good on the firm promises made in 2000 they had that they would receive the same pensions and redundancy arrangements they had enjoyed previously.
Workers on the roof demand the terms promised by Ford when the business was sold off
Workers in Belfast had occupied their factory immediately after a 5 minute meeting had told them they had lost their jobs and that they had an hour to take any personal possessions and leave work immediately – without pay. Enfield workers occupied their factory the following day.
KPMG’s response was to go to the courts and secure a court order for repossession, while Ford simply denied all responsibility in the matter (though five years later were eventually forced by Unite to pay some compensation.)
I went to the factory at Ponders End, Enfield along with several hundred other trade unionists and others for a rally outside the plant to show our support for their case. A number of those who spoke at the rally had organised collections for the occupiers in their workplaces, reporting unanimous support for the dismissed workers, and others had also brought practical support – sleeping bags, food and money – to enable the occupation to continue.
I was later than I had hoped by the time my train from Ponders End reached Liverpool Street and had missed the rally at Bank in memory of the news vendor Ian Tomlinson who died of a heart attack minutes after being attacked and violently pushed to the ground in an unprovoked attack by a riot policeman, dieing from a heart attack minutes after. The murder had been captured on video by an onlooker and The Guardian had published the video – still on their web site.
After the rally the protesters had marched away – and I could see and hear a police helicopter following them on the way towards Bethnal Green. I didn’t have time to try and catch up with them, but wandered through some of the streets in the City, including some that Tomlinson had wandered through as he tried to make his way home through the area where police were kettling and attacking the April 1st Financial Fools Day G20Meltdown protesters. On 4th April those streets were empty.
War on Want and No Sweat were drawing attention to Primark profiting from selling clothes made by sweated labour in Bangladesh with a ‘fashion show’ outside the company’s flagship Oxford Street store.
Models used the pavement as a catwalk, walking in chains “to symbolise the slave labour conditions of the Bangladeshi workers who make the cut-price fashions on sale at Primark. Workers who make the clothes earn as little as 7p an hour and work up to 80 hours a week.”
The Primark store opened here in 2007 and flourished as the recession made people turn to cheaper suppliers with their profits in the year to September 2008 up by up by 17% at £233 million.
Notices in the store windows claimed they “care about the conditions of the workers who make their clothes, but the reports by War on Want tells a very different story. These clothes are only cheap because those who make them get poverty pay, work long hours and get sacked if they try to organise or ask for improvements in their dangerous and unhealthy working conditions.”
Although the links on the My London Diary post are now out of date, War on Want are still campaigning for garment workers around the world including in Bangladesh, as are No Sweat.
In 2009 I commented:
Primark and others could still have a moral and reasonably profitable business if they restrained their greed and ensured that the workers who make their clothes worked in reasonable conditions and got a living wage – which in Bangladesh is only around £45 a month. But that is over three times what workers making clothes for Primark are currently paid.
Primark’s profits continue to rise, and although it claims it has “improved working conditions and implemented ethical initiatives, reports and investigations suggest that worker exploitation in its supply chain, including issues like low wages and unsafe working conditions, unfortunately still persists” according to Google’s Generative AI.
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.
Tottenham, Kilburn and Ponders End – I travelled to Tottenham and Kilburn to photograph protests but fortunately the people from Ponders End had come to protest at Westminster. All three protests I photographed on Saturday 29th March 2014 were about the inhumane policies of the Tory Government.
Mothers march for justice – Tottenham
Rev Paul Nicolson
Rev Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty, an indefatigable lifelong campaigner on behalf of the poor died in 2020, aged 87. His first job after National Service in the Army had been with the family firm selling champagne around London, but after a dozen years until he discovered a vocation to become a worker-priest and was ordained as a deacon in 1967 and then a priest in 1968. Around 1981 he became a parish priest in Turville, the location chosen for The Vicar of Dibley, making his priority the support of the poor in a area of extremes of wealth.
He resurrected the practice, now common of being a McKenzie Friend, which allowed him to stand with and represent those brought to court over debts, particularly those unable to pay the Poll Tax. His revelations on the activities of bailiffs enforcing debts lead to a Code of Practice which, at least when enforced, gives some protection to the vulnerable, and it was his initiative in commissioning the Family Budget Unit to investigate the actual costs of living that led the the UK and London Living Wage being established.
Spiderman led the march
His work in later years was largely about housing and homelessness, and I met and photographed him on many protests. He set up the charity Zacchaeus 2000 (Z2K) but then resigned as its chair so he could campaign politically through Taxpayers Against Poverty.
Carole Duggan, the aunt of Mark Duggan, murdered by police in front of a banner with his picture
The march in Tottenham on 29th March 2014 organised by the Rev Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty demanded living incomes and decent truly affordable homes and rejected the unfair Tory bedroom tax, the housing benefit cap, unfair taxes, which were the cause of hunger and cold homes. He spoke before the march and walked on it with a placard hanging from a string around his neck: ‘We march for Freedom from Hunger, Cold, Outrageous Rents – Fight for a Living Wage’.
The march was smaller than hoped, several hundred rather than the hoped for ‘1000 Mothers March for Justice’, though more were expected to turn up at Tottenham Green East for the rally at its end, unfortunately after I had left. Those on the march included representatives from many local groups as well as others around London, and they carried an impressive number of banners.
A few miles to the west, the Counihan Battlebus Housing For All campaign, along with the TUSC Against Cuts and Unite Community was holding a two hour protest in Kilburn Square on the main Kilburn High Road over child hunger and housing problems, calling for rents to be capped and for everyone to have a home.
In 2010 food banks were rare things in the UK, used over the year by around 60,000 people. After ten years of Tory policies this had increased to around 2.5 million, around 40 times as many. Much of that increase is a direct result of government policies, including its inhuman sanctions policy against benefit claimants, as well as of poverty wages and unfair employment practices such as zero hours contracts.
Moving people onto Universal Credit resulted in many being without resources for five weeks, sometimes considerably longer. As I wrote “Our government appear to be completely out of touch with how many people in the country live. They simply cannot comprehend what it means to be without money, or without friends or family you can rely on for a few thousand when you have a problem. Many people on low income simply don’t have any such resources – all they have is debts and bills to pay.”
Things have got worse since 2014, and soaring energy prices along with the additional National Insurance payments coming in next month will again put more families into desperate levels of poverty – and increase those evicted as they cannot pay the rent. It isn’t that the country doesn’t have the money – we are still one of the richest countries in the world – but that increasingly the already wealthy are getting richer while the poor sink into more desperate poverty.
And it’s successive governments – including New Labour – that are to blame, with a failure to build sensible amounts of social housing, the encouragement of high cost private housing and buy to rent. The wealthy have got tax breaks while many working full-time have been finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. And tax avoidance has reached huge levels thanks to a failure to plug silly loopholes and face up to the problems caused by off-shoring. We should have a zero-avoidance policy not one that encourages it.
Fellow Students Fight for Yashika – Parliament Square
The final event I photographed was a lively protest by fellow students and supporters at Parliament urged then Home Secretary Theresa May to abandon the planned deportation of 19 year old model A-level student Yashika Bageerathi to Mauritius due to take place on Mothers Day.
She came here with her family who claimed asylum after physical abuse from a relative in Mauritius in 2012, but the claim was rejected and the whole family are under threat of eviction – and as she is now 19 they decided to deport her alone weeks before she was due to take her A levels in Ponders End.
We continue to see “a ‘tougher than you’ shift to the right over immigration played out by both government and opposition over the past years, each trying to outdo each other … So we get foolish and desperate measures like the immigration vans, and raids at tube stations and other public places by the Border Force based unlawfully on racial profiling.”
Migrants, including many who are here without legal right to remain, play an important part in keeping London running despite government attempts to identify and remove them. Estimates in 2014 were that there were around half a million in the city and without them, “London would grind to a halt. They do mainly the low paid dirty jobs no one else would want for pay that isn’t enough to live properly on in London – often at below the minimum wage because of their immigration status.”
The protests and a petition with over 170,000 signatures failed to have any effect on the heartless Home Office and Yashika was deported. But good news came later. Perhaps because of the huge publicity around her case she was welcomed and supported back in Mauritius and was able to take her exams there. Despite her studies having been interrupted by spells in Yarl’s Wood immigration prison she was able to gain her A levels and go on to university – and keep out of the media limelight.
I’m not sure why the name Ponders End so appeals to me. It has a rather down to earth quality (or perhaps down to water) which is apparently reflected in its etymology, stretching back over 600 years to the Ponder family, with a John Ponder being recorded as far back as 1373. He or his family apparently got their name because they kept or lived by a fishpond or mill pond on the River Lea. Ponders End was their end of Edmonton.
The River Lea was important for the movement of people and goods from the earliest times and was improved for navigation at various times in the middle ages; later the first modern gated lock on a river was built at Waltham Abbey in 1577 and the basis of the current Lea Navigation – including the Limehouse Cut – were laid in the 1770s, though there were further improvements well into the 20th century. You can read more on Wikipedia. In recent convention the spelling Lea is used for the river and natural features, and Lee for those man-made features such as the navigation but I tend to use Lea for both.
Because of its good transport links to London, industry began to arrive here in the 19th century, with wharves along the canal. Later with the growth of motorised transport development became centred along the Great Cambridge Road, the A10, a short distance to the west, particularly after its improvement in the 1930s. When I took these pictures back in 1983 the area was full of factories, but many were derelict, their demise accelerated by Thatcher’s national flight from manufacturing – something which was at the centre of my recording of out post-industrial landscape
The area had turned its back on the canal where all commercial traffic had ceased a couple of years earlier, but many of the structures were still present. Now almost all have been replaced by warehousing and some residential development. In later years I photographed around the little that remained, including Wright’s Flour Mill, parts of which date from the 18th century.
Back in 1983, there was no GPS and it was hard to determine the exact location of the pictures I took as I walked beside the navigation, and I made few records that would help. In a few pictures it is possible to see features which still exist, particularly the tall blocks of council flats close to Ponders End station.
The last two pictures are of one of Edmonton’s best known and largest industries, Thorn Lighting. Julius Thorn opened his Atlas Lamp Works Ltd in Edmonton in 1932, and later at the start of the war a second factory in Tottenham. The company is now part of the Austrian company Zumtobel. I think that these two pictures are part of their Angel Road site. The main production moved from here to Merthyr Tydfil soon after the Second Wolrd War, but speciality lamps were produced here until around the late 1960s.
More pictures in River Lea – Lea Navigation 1981-1992 on Flickr. Click on any of the pictures above to go to a larger version in that album, where you can also comment on the pictures.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
I’ve now put more photographs in my Flickr album River Lea – Lea Navigation 1981-1992 to add pictures from Broxbourne to the River Thames to my earlier uploads.
Enfield Lock
I’ve gone through the contact sheets from 1981-3 and selected and digitised a few more pictures I found of interest to add to those I’d scanned preparing for earlier shows, but I think there are pictures from some of the later years in that period I may add later.
But for the moment this album is complete – with 418 pictures. Because I made these on a number of different visits to the area, it was difficult to put them into sensible order – and a few are still obviously in the wrong place. But I’ve tried to put them at least largely in order as the valley leads down to the River Thames at Leamouth.
Back in 1981-3 I was not too concerned with the exact locations of the pictures, and my contact sheets seldom have little indication except for the contents of the pictures. I can no longer find the notebooks in which I wrote about the project, though a few of the vintage prints have locations on them and a couple even grid references. I’ve tried to give locations on Flickr, and already a few viewers have been able to help me on this, and correcting a few mistakes I made. Corrections and comments are always welcome, and clicking on any of the images in this post will take you to a larger version where you can post comments.
So, for example, this picture I’ve captioned simply ‘Broxbourne, Herts, 1983‘ but I could be quite wrong. It could be Cheshunt or somewhere else. And I’d be happy to be told exactly where it is. It’s easier to remember pictures further south as I’m more familiar with the area, though thanks to some who have already corrected a few of my confusions such as mistaking the Clapham Park flats for the Trowbridge Estate.
Most of the pictures in today’s post are from Enfield, Ponders End or Brimsdown, in the London Borough of Enfield, where a large industrial area is located to the west of the canal. I think most of the structures I photographed back then have since been replaced.
In a later post I’l post more selected pictures from Ponders End and Edmonton and then further south. But you can see them already at Flickr album River Lea – Lea Navigation 1981-1992.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
