His lecture, “From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics,” is part of the pan-Canadian NiCHE Speakers’ Series and the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series.

Click here to listen to the talk.

“From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics.” [part of the pan-Canadian NiCHE Speakers' Series]
With Dr. Jim Clifford.

The Lower Lea Valley, currently undergoing a massive redevelopment project in perpetration for the next Summer Olympics, underwent a number of equally remarkable transformations as London’s heavy industry migrated to the city’s eastern periphery in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this talk, Jim Clifford will explore some of the findings of his recently defended PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development and discuss some of the challenges this posed for redevelopment.

All talks will be held at the Mississauga Central Library, Classroom 3 on the second floor from 7:30-9 PM on the second Thursday in March, April, and May. The Central Library is located at 301 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W in Mississauga, near the Square One shopping centre and the Civic Centre. Importantly, it’s near the Square One GO Terminal and the Mississauga Transit central terminal.

An article in the Guardian, “Houseboaters being ‘socially cleansed’ from Olympics area,” suggests this process might be underway. House boaters are concerned that British Waterways are going to increase the mooring costs along canals in the Lower Lea:

British Waterways, which manages 2,200 miles of canals and rivers, has put forward changes to the mooring rules on the river Lea, in east London, that could increase the cost of living on the waterway from about £600 to £7,000 a year. Residents see the move as a deliberate attempt to drive them away. A draft note from British Waterways on 6 December 2010, seen by the Guardian, says: “The urgency … relates to the objective of reducing unauthorized mooring on the Lea navigation and adjacent waterways in time for the Olympics.”

My research showed links between environmental and social conditions dating back to the mid-1850s. Charles Dickens visited the place in 1857 and wrote an article about the polluted streams and the unhealthy people:

… we come to a row of houses built with their backs to a stagnant ditch. We turn aside to see the ditch, and find that it is a cesspool, so charged with corruption, that not a trace of vegetable matter grows on its surface – bubbling and seething with the constant rise of the foul products of decomposition, that the pool pours up into the air. The filth of each house passes through a short pipe straight into this ditch, and stays there. Upon its surface, to our great wonder, a few consumptive-looking ducks are swimming, very dirty; very much like the human dwellers in foul alleys…

The Lower Lea became increasingly polluted during the half century that followed, as its wetlands filled with gasworks, chemical and heavy engineering factories, and the low ground meant there was a regular problem with smoke pollution. As a result, the housing build among the factories, and on the flood plains in Canning Town, mostly drew socially marginalized people.

As industry experience a protracted decline in the 20th century, the environment remained contaminated and the social problems continued. Until the redevelopment, the Lower Lea Valley remained a undesirable, dirty and distressed location for many Londoners. The 2012 Olympics promised to solve these problems:

The Olympic Park will lie at the heart of the Lower Lea Valley, just four miles from Tower Bridge. Currently one of the capital’s most underdeveloped areas, the Lea Valley is an area of outstanding potential which will be transformed by the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. The Games legacy will transform this area into one of the largest urban parks created in Europe for more than 150 years, stretching 20 miles from the Hertfordshire countryside to the tidal estuary of the River Thames. A network of footpaths, cycleways and canal towpaths will link the communities on either side of the valley. Riverside housing, shops, restaurants and cafes will provide new amenities for the local community. New playing fields will sit alongside the world-class sport facilities that will be adapted for community use. The natural river system of the valley will be restored, canals would be dredged and waterways widened. Birdwatchers and ecologists will be able to enjoy three hectares of new wetland habitat. And the park will be planted with native species, including oak, ash, birch, hazel, holly, blackthorn and hawthorn, providing a home for wildlife in the middle of the city. The rehabilitation of the Lower Lea Valley lies at the heart of the Olympic legacy to east London, restoring an eco-system and revitalising an entire community. (“A valley reborn” 2012 Olympics Webpage circa 2006)

The problem I have with this vision is that I don’t know what will happen to the socially marginalized people who currently live in West Ham. Who will benefit from this transformation of the Lower Lea Valley – the current residents of the Lower Lea Valley or a “higher” class of people who can afforded to buy the new condos/flats and houses built in the cleaner landscape near the new parks? As the toxic legacy of the region’s industrial history is ploughed under, and the environmental conditions improve, Iain Sinclair and others worry that rising rents and demolitions will displace many of the people of West Ham and Hackney. The Guardian story suggests this process might be well underway. Sadly, I believe the poor people will be pushed aside, as they were from central London by warehouses and railroads in the nineteenth century, and by banking towers and loft apartments in Wapping and the Isle of Dogs in the 1990s. One of the main legacy of these games will likely be to again move the lower segments of society out of central London to the less desirable edges of the metropolis.

Abstract:
This dissertation examines the multifaceted connections between ecological change on the wetlands where the River Lea meets the Thames Estuary and the development of a young suburb on the edge of London. West Ham was a patchwork of heavy industry, rivers, slums, farmlands and low-lying marshes. The difficult environmental conditions of this wetland suburb provided compelling material for a study of the links between the environment and urban society and politics. West Ham was not a typical suburb: growth of industry and working-class housing outpaced growth of commuter residential communities. Nor was it much like London’s older industrial core, as pockets of the wetlands and farms remained undeveloped, distorting boundaries between the city and the receding countryside.  As industry transformed the wetlands, socially marginalized people in West Ham suffered alongside the natural environment from pollution and flooding.

This dissertation, by placing environmental change, and the interconnections between social and ecological degradation at its centre, demonstrates the importance of the environment in shaping urban, social, and political history.  Droughts, disease, and floods highlighted the dysfunctional environmental conditions in this wetland suburb.  The deteriorating condition of the Lower Lea contributed to economic problems and to the end of industrial growth.  These conditions caused both the public and the electorate in West Ham to increasingly demand action from the borough council to ensure the water supply, improve housing conditions and health, and to protect the low-lying districts from floods.  Crisis after crisis caused by the suburb’s location on the wetland edge of Greater London demonstrated that the population of West Ham could not rely on private interests to protect the public good.  These particular environmental conditions, along with the connected social distress, contributed to the rise of Labour and socialist politics in the suburb and to a more general transition from liberalism to social democracy in West Ham.  The public demanded stable environmental and economic conditions, and they increasingly turned to government and its experts, instead of private enterprise and market forces, to solve the many problems facing this industrial wetland suburb.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The River Lea and the Thames in West Ham: the River’s roles in shaping industrialization on the eastern edge of nineteenth-century London
3. Suburbanization in the Urban Periphery and the Rural Fringe: West Ham’s Hybrid Landscape
4. The Politics of a Water Crisis in West Ham, 1898
5. Environment and Health in West Ham, 1890-1914
6. Remaking the Bow Back Rivers: environmental and social intervention to decrease flooding and unemployment in West Ham, 1888-1909
7. Conclusion

Below are a number of sample photos from West Ham.

West Ham 1945

Stratford 1945

Bromley Gasworks 1945

Canning Town 1945

Silvertown 1945

” THE final jigsaw piece in post war city planners’ ambitions to link London’s green belt with the Thames will be realised in time for the 2012 Olympics, nearly 70 years after its initial inception.

The London Thames Gateway Development Corporation has given the green light to build the backbone for a new urban park in east London, linking the Olympic Park at Stratford with the Thames at the East India Dock Basin.”

Read the whole story at the East London Advertiser

Having walked around both sides of the mouth of the Lea and along the whole length of the Lea from the Limehouse Cut to Waltham Abbey, I’m pretty happy to see planning approval for the final link of pathways along this stretch of Bow Creek.  I hope they find a way to maintain and highlight some of the industrial heritage alongside river.  I’m a big fan of the wetlands created out of the East India Dock basin and I hope this kind of hybrid of renationalisation and industrial heritage can work in other spaces along this new corridor of parkland.

Birds eye view of Thames Ironworks (Newham Story)

Two years ago I published a photo essay entitled “The Urban Periphery and the Rural Fringe : West Ham’s Hybrid Landscape” in a special environmental history issue of Left History (Spring/Summer 2008).  The issue is now online and I’ve uploaded the PDF of my essay here.  To see a lot more historical photos of West Ham take a look at the Newham Story website.

Podcast 31: Environmental History of the 2012 Olympic site: the Lower River Lea

Here is Jan Oosthoek’s introduction to his interview with me:

Former industrial sites worldwide are constantly reinvented and redeveloped reflecting changes in economies and societies over time. Nowhere else in Europe is regeneration of a former industrial site more spectacular than the 2012 Olympic site on the banks of the River Lea in West Ham, East London. The creation of the Olympic park promises the rehabilitation of the Lower Lea Valley by restoring its eco-system and revitalising the community of the area.

But the Lower River Lea has a long history, going as far back as the 11th century, of industrial development and associated environmental degeneration. Jim Clifford, a doctoral student at York University in Toronto, talks in this episode of the podcast about the environmental and social history of West Ham and the Lower Lea River. He highlights that there have been attempts in the earlier 20th century to improve the Lea River’s environmental and social conditions but that the high expectations of these schemes were not always met.

Find other podcasts in this series by Jan Oosthoek here.

The recent past

The future

Promotional literature for the 2012 Olympic games promises to transform the environmental and social conditions in the Lower Lea Valley: “The natural river system of the valley will be restored, canals would be dredged and waterways widened… The rehabilitation of the Lower Lea Valley lies at the heart of the Olympic legacy to east London, restoring an eco-system and revitalising an entire community.”[1] This, however, is not the first time the Bow Back Rivers have been the focus of a major public works project with the goals of improving social and environmental conditions in West Ham.  Half a century of rapid industrial and suburban growth left the tidal Back Rivers of the Lower Lea in rough condition by the end of the nineteenth century.  The polluted and silted streams decreased the rivers utility for transportation, threatened public health, and increased the threat of flooding.

In 1908, three years after West Ham drew national attention for its high levels of unemployment, the borough engineer saw an opportunity to solve two problems with one project.  The unemployment crisis during the winter of 1905 forced the Local Government Board to increase its intervention in the labour market by funding make work projects. The borough engineer saw this as an opportunity to finally address the long standing problem of the degraded Back Rivers.  Unfortunately for the rivers, and the people who worked and lived near them, negotiations between West Ham and the Lee Conservancy Board [LCB] broke down in January 1909, as neither body wanted to assume liability for managing the project.  As a result, the Back Rivers remained a problem, until the aftermath of a major flood in 1928, and the economic collapse of 1929 finally allowed West Ham and the LCB to work together and re-make the Back Rivers through a major public works project.  As the Olympic development “re-naturalises” the concrete banks of the City Mill and Waterworks rivers it is worthwhile remembering that these canals embody the history of a public works project intended to revitalise the economy and environment in West Ham during the early twentieth century.

I will be in London at the Centre for Metropolitan History giving a talk on this topic on Wednesday the 24 February at 4:30 pm. Pollard Room, First Floor, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E