Upton Park | >Re-PHOTO

Bow Back Rivers, Plaistow & Upton Park – 2007

Bow Back Rivers, Plaistow & Upton Park: March 8th is of course International Women’s Day, and most years I’ve found events related to that to photograph, though often the main events take place not on the day itself but on the closest Saturday. In 2007 March 8th was a Thursday and I did something completely different, taking a stroll around the various rivers and channels to the south and west of the Olympic site.

Many of the paths and roads I walked were soon to be closed for various works connected with the Olympics, including the building of a new lock. This was much heralded as being a part of making London 2012 green, with boasts that it would lead to a huge reduction in lorries taking spoil from the site out and bringing materials in to the area by barge. In fact I think it was only ever used for a few photo opportunities and the piece I wrote for My London Diary perhaps suggested the real driver behind its construction.

Another unnecessary aspect of the Olympic development was putting the power lines between Hackney and East Ham underground, perhaps also more driven by the desire by developers of the area, now with its many new tall blocks flats more attractive and profitable.

There was also a very half-hearted attempt to use the rivers and navigation as a means of access to the games, with a river-boat service. It was said to be a part of opening up the area as a major leisure attraction, but didn’t ever work and was soon abandoned.

After walking around the area I walked east along the Greenway – the elevated walkway over the Northern Outfall Sewer – to Upton Park, also affected by the Olympics, with West Ham abandoning their Boleyn ground and moving to the Olympic Stadium after the games. Close to their ground is Queen’s Market, which Newham Council had being trying to demolish and redevelop since 2004. It is still currently under threat as it doesn’t fit with their dreams of gentrification but remains as an important community resource.

*Channelsea Rvier and the island, with Abbey Creek to left*

My post on My London Diary contains a lot of background but doesn’t really describe the walk I made – the pictures tell that story, along with their captions. It is rather more fanciful than most of my posts. As usual I’ve tidied it up slightly, changing to normal capitalisation and making a few minor amendments.

Bow Back Rivers – Prescott Lock Site

*The tide flowing out fast from the Prescott Channel, officially opened in 1935*

If you are a water molecule starting in the River Lea at Leagrave on the outskirts of Luton, your route to its mouth on the Thames can be rather convoluted – even assuming you don’t get diverted on the way for drinking by Londoners. Below Hertford the river runs in concert with the Lee Navigation, part river, part canal, and examining a map you would soon be confused.

A *memorial on Three Mills Green marked the heroism of distillery workers who died trying to rescue a workmate in 1901. The sculpture ‘Helping Hands’ by Alec Peevers replaced an earlier large cross*

Since work by the Lee Conservancy Board and the West Ham Corporation started in 1931 and officially opened in 1935, the major flow of water in the southern area has been along the Flood Relief Channel (built in the 1970s following the 1947 floods) and the River Lea to Hackney Wick, and then along the Waterworks River, into the Three Mills Wall River and down the newly built Prescott Channel onward to Bow Creek and finally the Thames.

*James Dane established Dane & Co. making news, letterpress and lithographic inks in Sugar House Lane in 1853. Recently much production had moved to Stalybridge.*

All of these streams have been fully tidal since the Prescott Sluice was removed in the late 1950s (at the same time as most of the Channelsea River was culverted and filled in). Also tidal are the vestigial sections of the Channelsea River and Abbey Creek to the south of Stratford. So in your molecular progress, you might well spend some days being flushed north by tidal inflow from the Thames and then flowing south as the tide falls.

Flushed with you, at least on around 50 stormy days a year, might be some considerable sewage overflow from Abbey Mills sewage pumping station into Abbey Creek, lending its sweet smell to the banks of these streams in the Olympic area. Largely to avoid the delicate athletes (and spectators) being thus nasally assaulted a new lock and sluice is to be built on the Prescott Channel.

It remains to be seen whether the promises that the back rivers will actually carry the suggested 170,000 lorry loads in and out of the Olympic site will be met [of course it wasn’t], but it would certainly seem to be a useful development for the area longer term, opening up more of these waterways for leisure and possible commercial use. Currently there is a navigable loop on the Bow Back Rivers from the Lea Navigation, using St Thomas’s Creek, City Mill River and the Old River Lea, although this may well be restricted for the Olympics. [It was, for many years.]

*The Long Wall path took me back to where I had begun taking pictures on the Greenway*

The footpaths crossing the Prescott Channel bridge will be closed mid-March [2007] for around 18 months to allow the lock to be rebuilt, so I thought it a good time to take some pictures before the work begins.

Also in some of the pictures are a number of the sites which have been the subject of compulsory purchase to put the power lines between Hackney and East Ham underground for the Olympics. There are two lines, one going just north of the Greenway and curving down south through the Channelsea River.

More pictures beginning on the March 2007 My London Diary page

Plaistow and Upton Park

In October 2006 I photographed a march asking Newham Council to keep Queen’s Market in Upton Park. Although it is an exceedingly ugly ensemble, not helped by poor maintainence and an utterly depressing choice of colours, it is still a great local resource. The market is perhaps the most ethically diverse in London, and many rely on it as a great source of cheap fresh foods and other goods. As well as the market stalls there are many small shops around the side of the market.

[There was] then an online petition at the government web site urging the prime minister to “to ensure that strategic street markets such as queen’s market, upton park are given proper protection against the combined threat of negligent local authorities and predatory property developers. as part of this we seek an open and transparent consultation process.”

We go down to our local market a couple of times most weeks. The fruit and veg is much cheaper than in the supermarket, and it is fresh and not wrapped in 7 layers of plastic. We’d hate to see it go, and can see why the people who shop at don’t want their market replaced with yet another supermarket, and less small shops and stalls.

But Queen’s Market could do with doing up, perhaps replacing the roof, new stalls, a rethinking of some of the central space in the development which is a kind of wasteland where guys sit with cans to make it a more pleasant and family-friendly space. It could be a real centre for Upton Park, perhaps with more shops, cafés with outdoor seating and some kind of performance area and perhaps a playground. I’d get rid of the pub too, or at least give it a complete makeover.

March 2007 My London Diary page

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Stratford to Upton Park – December 2024

Stratford to Upton Park: On Wednesday 4th December I walked with two friends from Stratford Station to the site of the former West Ham football ground at Upton Park.

Though really it wasn’t the football connection that interested us, but the fantastic late Victorian pub on the corner close the the ground which we had seen some pictures that prompted this fairly short walk, one of occasional strolls we meet to take in London which always end in a pub.

Having photographed London since the 1970s I’d been down all the streets we walked along before at various times, in early years on my own. And much of our route I’d walked down with groups of protesters more recently, protesting over housing with Focus E15 and marching from Stratford to protest at the DSEI arms fair.

We met outside Stratford Station and walked through the indoor market to Stratford Broadway where I stopped to take a couple of pictures. On the Broadway we stood by the obelisk erected by fellow parishioners and friends in 1861 to Quaker banker and philanthropist Samuel Gurney (1786-1856). Gurney came from a Norwich banking family and made a hugely successful career in banking in the City of London. But his later years were largely occupied with a wide range of philanthropic causes, including penal reform, the abolition of slavery, support for Liberia, education, the Irish famine, peace with France and more.

In East London he was responsible for the first hospital for workers injured in dock accidents in Poplar and St Paul’s Stratford, founded as a mission by him in 1853. While Gurney is long forgotten, his sister who he worked with on prison reform, Elizabeth Fry, remains famous.

We crossed the Broadway and continued down West Hame Lane, past the housing association building where I photographed Focus E15 Mothers partying against their eviction in January 2014 at the star of their long campaign for “Housing for All” and on towards Church Street.

All Saints West Ham Church was Grade I listed in 1984 and has been a place of Christian worship since around 1130 though it was rebuilt in Early English style later in that century and has had various additions since, with its interior very much altered in Victorian times by George Dyson and George Gilbert Scott. In !857 Lord Grimthorpe added a clock to the tower whose mechanism was the model for Big Ben.

We walked around the churchyard – the church like most in urban areas was locked, though I visited it on Open House Day some years ago – and then went to visit The Angel pub a little way down the street.

There had been an Angel pub here probably since the 16th or 17th century in a old unspectacular timberframed building but it was rebuilt in its present half-timbered fantasy form by its landlord in 1910. Closed and boarded up in 2003 it re-opened shortly after as The Angel Cabaret & Dance Bar, described as a “Trashy run-down Stratford gay dance bar” whose license was revoked in 2010. Plans to turn it into a church were dropped around 2014 and the building is now empty and in a very poor state, with an application in October this year for a possession order.

We continued on down West Ham Lane, looking down from the bridge at Plaistow Station to Willow Cottage, the grade II listed former lodge to the demolished The Willows, dating from 1836. This is one of only four listed buildings in Plaistow North Ward, along with a library and two public houses, neither still open as pubs.

But one older unlisted public house remains in business and was well worth a visit. The Black Lion was certainly there in 1742, and though it was largely rebuilt in 1875 still seems ancient.

By then my colleagues were flagging and it was approaching twilight. Two buses took us to the junction of Green Street and Barking Road where we admired the outside of the Boleyn Public House, built in 1899-1900 by W G Shoebridge and H W Rising. A huge and remarkable pub with fine etched glass and internal furnishings, though it was still closed when we arrived.

That gave us time to photograph the bronze memorial celebrating the 1966 World Cup victory with Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and Ray Wilson, and to walk up to the pathetic Boleyn Ground Memorial Garden on Shipbuilding Way, a circular patch of bare grass and a small playground area. There didn’t seem to be anything to record the history of the site. Back in Augest 2015 I’d photographed local campaigners calling for West Ham’s Boleyn ground to be developed for some of the 24,000 on Newham’s housing list rather than as 838 luxury apartments with no social housing. The site has no real social housing but includes 25% of so-called “affordable housing“.

Waiting outside for the Boleyn to open we met a long-term Hammers fan and customer of the Boleyn. The pub closed in 2020 for refurbishment and has been restored lovingly to “something like its former impressive Victorian glory. Various skilled workers employing traditional methods have been sourced to reinstate Victorian cut glass, lay marble and tiled floors and recreate the wooden screens that divide up the 7 bars which include the Saloon Bar, Public Bars and the much sought after ‘Carriage Bar’ and ‘Ladies Bars’…”

As they say “The Boleyn Tavern conjures up the look of a grand Victorian Gin Palace and is truly a sight to behold.” And we spent some time comfortably doing so.

See more pictures from this short walk here.

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NHS and Housing Marches in East London, 2014

NHS and Housing Marches in East London, 2014

Save our Surgeries on NHS 66th Birthday – Whitechapel

The National Health Service came into operation in the UK on 5th July 1948, established by a Labour government despite considerable opposition from the Conservative Party and some doctors’ organisations. In most recent years there have been protests marking the anniversary against the increasing privatisation of the system, large parts of which have now moved away from being provided by the NHS itself to being provided by private companies, motivated by profits rather than public service.

The opposition to Aneurin Bevan’s plans in the 1940s led to a number of compromises, but the NHS was launched with three basic principles – to meet the needs of everyone, to be free at the point of delivery, and to be based on clinical need rather than the ability to pay. Although those principles remain, there are some respects in which they are not entirely met.

Prescription charges – currently £9.35 per item – were introduced in England in 1952, removed from 1965-8 but then re-introduced, remaining free for under-16s and over 60s, with some other exceptions. And we pay too for NHS dentistry, and many people find it impossible to get dental treatment under the NHS as no practice in their area will take them on.

Access to GPs and other services at surgeries around the country is also much more difficult for many, and it can be difficult or impossible to get an appointment in a timely fashion. Many services dealing with relatively minor medical issues are no longer available, and people have either to pay for them or continue to suffer. Some of these problems have been exacerbated by the take-over of many surgeries by healthcare companies as a part of the creeping privatisation of the NHS.

Twenty years ago, when I had a hospital stay of several weeks, hospitals have been forced to put some essential services – such as cleaning – out to tender, resulting in two of the three hospitals I was in being in filthy conditions.

In 2014, cuts in funding were threatening the closure of surgeries in Tower Hamlets as they failed to pay for the extra needs faced in inner-city areas. Local hospitals were also threatened, particularly because of the huge debts from PFI contracts for the building an management of new hospitals. The deals with the private sector made under New Labour have left the NHS with impossible levels of debt – and the companies involved with high profits, continuing in some cases for another 20 or 30 years.

After a short rally with speakers including the local mayor and MP as well as health campaigners including local GPs, there was a march by several hundreds to a larger rally in Hackney. But I left the marchers shortly after it passed Whitechapel Station.

Save our Surgeries on NHS 66th Birthday

Focus E15 March for Decent Housing – East Ham

Earlier I had been to photograph a march through East Ham and Upton Park in a protest over the terrible state of housing in England, and in London in particular. The event had been organised by Focus E15 Mums with the support of Fight Racism Fight Imperialism, but included many other protest groups from Hackney, from Brent and from South London on the march as well as groups including BARAC, TUSC and others.

They included a number of groups who had stood up and fought for their own housing against councils lacking in principles and compassion who had suggested they might move to privately rented accommodation in Birmingham, Hastings, Wales or further afield, but who had stood their ground and made some progress like the Focus E15 Mothers.

Many London councils are still involved with developers in demolishing social housing and replacing it with houses and flats mainly for high market rents or sale, with some “affordable” properties at rates few can afford, and with much lower numbers than before at social rents. Many former residents are forced to move to outer areas of London in what campaigners call ‘social cleansing’.

Families that councils are under a statutory duty to find homes for are often housed in single rooms or flats, sometimes infected by insects or with terrible damp, often far from their jobs or schools. Councils are under huge pressure and funding cuts sometimes make it impossible for them to find suitable properties, though often there are empty properties which could be used, particularly on estates such as the Caarpenters Estate in Stratford which Newham had been emptying since around 2004 in the hope of redeveloping.

Government policies and subsidies for housing have largely been a way of subsiding private landlords, and we need national and local governments – as I worte ” determined to act for the benefit of ordinary people, making a real attempt to build much more social housing, removing the huge subsidies currently given to private landlords through housing benefit, legislating to provide fair contracts for private tenants and give them decent security – and criminalising unfair evictions.” Housing really is a national emergency and needs emergency measaures.

Much of what is currently being built in London is sold to overseas buyers as investments and often left empty as its owners profit from the rapid rises in property values in London. We need to make this either illegal or to impose heavy duties on overseas owners including increased council taxes on empty properties.

The march attracted considerable attention on the streets of East London, and as I note several motorists stopped to put money in the collection buckets – something I’ve never seen happen before. I left the march as it reached East Ham Station to go to the NHS event.

Focus E15 March for Decent Housing