Tag: walk guide

Canning Town & West Silvertown – 2007. Part 1

Canning Town & West Silvertown: Recently I published here a few pictures from a walk in this area in 2006. On 23 June 2007 I led a group visit around the area for London Arts Cafe, LAC, an organisation that ceased to exist a few years later, then devoted to “viewing, expressing and discovering all forms of urban art“.

Although the LAC has long been wound up, I had been responsible for its website, and decided to leave it online – with a clear message that the organisation no longer existed – as a historical record which still contained much interesting material – including the backgrounds of notes that I wrote for the walk I led around the area in June 2007.

As I wrote on My London Diary in 2007, “there was much to look at, including public art, relics of the docks and the new developments that make this one of the largest of current regeneration areas.”

You can still read the ‘Canning Town Walk (June 2007)’ in full on the LAC web site, beginning here and split into ten sections, each with its own page. You are welcome to print it out and follow it for your own walk around what is still a very interesting area of London, though you will note some changes. Here I’ll include the few pictures from these pages, mainly taken on 21 June on my final planning trip for the walk a few days later with a few others, mainly from the same era.

Bow Creek from Canning Town Station DLR platform

It’s a walk that like many I made in the area was based around the Docklands Light Railway which had made transport to the area much simpler. The area has changed in many ways since 2007, not always as I expected, but I think the walk is still a good guide to the area.

Canning Town Walk (June 2007)

1 Introduction

The walk starts at the top of the stairs leading up from Canning Town Station to the Bus Station.

The DLR runs south, to Beckton and North Woolwich (now to Woolwich Arsenal). At left is the tunnel entrance for the Jubilee Line

You can read this on your way to Canning Town Transport Interchange, served by various bus routes, the Jubilee Line and the Docklands Light Railway (DLR.)

DLR platforms and buses in the bus station at Canning Town

Canning Town is in the London Borough of Newham. The latest census showed the population of Newham to be 61% non-white – the highest proportion for any British borough. 41% of the population are under 24 – the highest figure in England and Wales. It has the second highest proportion in the country of three ethnic groups, Asians, Bangladeshis and Black Africans.

Dockside cranes – the Royal Docks closed to commercial traffic in 1981.

Unemployment in Newham is 6.7%, higher than any London borough other than Hackney. Youth unemployment is particularly high, as is the number of unemployed single parents. Canning Town has in the past been one of the most deprived areas of the borough on most social measures.

Demolition at Pura Foods on Bow Creek in September 2006. Bow Creek runs around three sides of the site

Canning Town has Bow Creek – the lower reaches of the River Lea – at its western edge. The Lea is the traditional border between civilisation (Middlesex) and Essex and when the London Building Act of 1844 proscribed noxious industries from London, a more over the river found a laxer regime.

Demolition of Pura Foods, a noxious edible oils works, was almost complete in 2007

The 1840s were also the age of rail building, and the railway companies saw the potential of this riverside area, known as the Plaistow levels, several miles of empty marsh between Bow and Barking Creeks. One of them bought up the area at a knock-down price, and started making plans for docks that their railway could service.

Tate & Lyle originally built two competing sugar works; later the two businesses joined.

The first major industry to move onto a riverside location was C J Mare’s shipbuilding firm in 1846, soon followed by a glass factory owned by the brothers Howard. In 1852, S W Silver & Co, the Cornhill outfitters, set up a factory on the Thames to make rubber coated garments (an idea they borrowed from a Mr Charles Mackintosh.)

More detail about the Thames Ironworks in the Part 2 of my June 2007 Canning Town walk document which will be a later post.

One of the best-known businesses in the area was the ship-builders Thames Ironworks who were founded to take over Mare’s several sites in the area in 1857. They were the last of the London shipbuilders, specialising in their later years in building warships and mail steamers. The company finally closed in 1912-3, but the football club set up by managing director and philanthropist Arnold Hills for its workers in 1895 had changed its name in 1900 to West Ham United.

Last week I was pleased to attend the opening of a heritage pavilion, the Boat House, at Cody Dock on Bow Creek, which uses the fully restored Frederick Kitchen lifeboat as its roof. This is thought to have been the last craft completed by the Thames Ironworks in 1913.

More detail about the Thames Ironworks in the next part of my June 2007 Canning Town walk document.

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GLIAS 50

Last Wednesday evening I went on a short walk with members of GLIAS, the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, from City Hall to Rotherhithe, one of a number of events marking 50 years of the society.

I’ve been a member of GLIAS for much of that time, first coming across it in 1977 when I visited Kew Bridge Engines, ostensibly for the benefit of my one-year-old son, and picking up a leaflet about it there. I’m not sure whether I joined it then, or after a second visit, when we took a party of slightly older boys on an outing for one of his birthdays.

Later that same son wrote a web site for me 20 years ago as a birthday present, London’s Industrial Heritage, a rather more professional site than my own various offerings, on which the black and white pictures here can be found, along with a couple of hundred others, dating from 1973-1986. Its a nice design which creates the site from templates, a database file and of course the images using a batch file which runs a Perl script, but in some respects it is now a little dated. Back then, 550 pixels seemed a sensible size for web images.

Although I have an interest in industrial archaelogy, I lack to engineering knowledge to be a true GLIAS member, and my one real attempt at site recording as a part of the organisation was frustrating. But then I’m not always very impressed by the standards of photography in many of their communications. ‘Record photography’ is sometimes used as a perjorative term, but the best record phography has a power and resonance that is undeniable, for example some of the work of Walker Evans.

St Saviour’s Creek, 2014. We walked around its landward end this week

Our walk the other night was a reprise of one made earlier by two leading GLIAS member back in the 1970s and published in a GLIAS walk leaflet. One is now longer with us, but Professor David Perrett, now Chairman and Vice-President was there to lead us. These published walks, sent free to members also sold well for a few pence at a number of tourist sites in the area. They prompted me to produce a similar leaflet, partly as an example for a desk-top publishing course I was then teaching, on West Bermondsey
in 1992, in part based on a walk led by Tim Smith for the GLIAS Recording Group :

“a downloadable illustrated leaflet for a walk that concentrates on the industrial archaeology of the former leather area of Bermondsey in South East London. I wrote this in 1992 largely to show how simple, cheap and easy it was to produce such things with Pagemaker and a laser printer. I sold around five hundred copies over the next five years, gave some to the church in Bermondsey St to sell, and gave away many more, before deciding to put it on the web rather than bother to print any more. Although the area has changed considerably, it it still an interesting walk to follow. “

The area has changed even more since I wrote this, but you can still download and follow the walk and find much of what was there in 1992.

West Bermondsey walk leaflet (PDF)

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