http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/30/stratford-london-2012-olympics

The Guardian published another article on the Olympic transformation taking place in West Ham.  Anna Kessel is impressed by the changes in the landscape and she looks forward to the time when the Lea is transformed into a more pleasant river.  Interestingly enough, she is not the first person to bemoan the condition of the Lower Lea and its back rivers that flow through the 2012 Olympic site.  In 1844, decades before the height of the industrial boom in West Ham, James Thorne, in his book Rambles by Rivers, talks about the Lower Lea and despoiled industrial condition:

But by this time our river has ceased to be either picturesque or interesting: lime-kilns, calico-printing, and distilleries are the most prominent objects along its banks; and however useful these may be, they are not agreeable to either nose or eye.

This quote is similar to Anne vision of the Lea from today:

Running through the middle of it all is the much-maligned river Lee, a polluted waterway that dutifully shoulders the burden of being a Londoner. Somehow it still manages to provide a home for waterfowl and wildlife despite the shopping trolleys and stolen mopeds that are regularly thrown into its flow. Right now it appears as sorry as ever, its banks strewn with sand and equipment. Its surface reflects back the desolate industrial expanse. Soon, though, it will be restored to its former glory, the mounds of earth smoothed down and carpeted over with emerald-green turf, dotted with trees.

Her hope that the Lea will soon be restored to its former glory, even if this landscape has no history as a highly landscaped well drained Olympic park, also has a long tradition.  William Morris wrote News From Nowhere in 1890 looking forward to a future when the Lea’s wetland returned to their “natural glory”:

…Beyond that the houses are scattered wide about the meadows there, which are very beautiful, especially when you get on to the lovely river Lea (where old Isaak Walton used to fish, you know) about the places called Stratford and Old Ford, names which of course you will not have heard of, though the Romans were busy there once upon a time.

… Past the Docks eastward and landward it is all flat pasture, once marsh, except for a few gardens, and there are very few permanent dwellings there: scarcely anything but a few sheds, and cots for the men who come to look after the great herds of cattle pasturing there. But however, what with the beasts and the men, and the scattered red-tiled roofs and the big hayricks, it does not make a bad holiday to get a quiet pony and ride about there on a sunny afternoon of autumn, and look over the river and the craft passing up and down, and on to Shooter’s Hill and the Kentish uplands, and then turn round to the wide green sea of the Essex marshland, with the great domed line of the sky, and the sun shining down in one flood of peaceful light over the long distance. There is a place called Canning’s Town, and further out, Silvertown, where the pleasant meadows are at their pleasantest: doubtless they were once slums, and wretched enough.

None of the comments are intended to critique this article too much, as I’m very happy to see the growing interest in West Ham and the Lower Lea.  I just hope the reporters get past the glamour of the Olympic developments and venture out to see the condition of the rest of West Ham.  I would also like them to pay more attention to the history of this space and the many attempts in the past to remake and clean up the Lower Lea.

Leo Hickman’s article on the current condition of the river Lea shows how little has changed since the suburban and industrial expansion into its wetlands and river valley in the nineteenth century.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/09/river-lee-polluted-source

Sadly, the problems identified in this article are not new.   The pollution of the Lea gained national attention a number of times in
the second half of the nineteenth century.  In 1855, Alfred Dickens, Charles’ brother, investigated the growth of West Ham in the Lower Lea’s wetlands and found many of the homes built for workers at the Victoria docks and new industry in Stratford dumped their sewage into marsh drainage ditched connected to the Lea’s back rivers. Charles published a newspaper article on the terrible conditions of the Lea’s transforming wetlands in 1857:  http://apps.newham.gov.uk/History_canningtown/cdickens.htm.  In 1866 Cholera hit London and killed a disproportionate amount of people in East London who’s water came from the Lea.  Two investigations, including a Royal Commission on River Pollution, examined the condition of the Lea and found a growing problem of sewage flowing into the same river people drank from.  Unfortunately, the science of pollution and disease remained inconclusive and many people continued to believe sewage became safely oxidized so long as it flowed through running water for a few miles.  As a result, the new body created to manage the river and prevent pollution, the Lee Conservancy Board, did not have enough power to force the growing suburbs along the Lea to build an intercepting sewage drain.  In 1884 a hot summer and drought brought the river’s pollution to national attention once again.  One of a series of letters published in the Times in August of that year proclaimed: “The river is now as black as ink.  The Stench emitted causes everyone to sicken who inhales it” (Thos. Francis, The Times, Aug 21, 1884).  The public uproar led to an extensive investigation by a parliamentary committee.  Joseph Bazalgette proposed a compressive new sewage system to drain the growing suburbs in the Lea Valley.  In the end only a partial solution was implemented, against the famous engineer’s public protests, which allowed Tottenham to divert the summer sewage into the London network.  At the end of the century, while East London suffered months of intermittent water supply caused by another drought and an inefficient monopoly controlled water system, Stratford had the added problem of heightened levels of sewage in the Channelsea River.  This back river flowed past some of Stratford’s residential neighborhoods and many important factories. Leyton’s and Walthamstow’s population had grown significantly in recent decades resulting in a growing tide of sewage flowing through Stratford.  With all of the river water diverted for drinking and transportation, there was nothing left to flush this pollution through the town.  These four examples demonstrate how a river once famous for its fishing and fishermen – Izaak Walton - became one of the “ulitimate sinks” for urban and suburban development to dump its sewage and industrial waste.  It does not seem like the we have learned enough lessons from this long history of pollution.

The development of railways [1839] and docks [1855] in the parish of West Ham corresponded with significant industrial development in the mix of wetlands and rural landscapes on London’s suburban fringe in the mid-nineteenth century.  That being said, the Lower Lea and the parish of West Ham had some industrial development centuries earlier.  Along side the early industry, human transformation of the physical landscape began with marsh reclamation for agriculture, which also started centuries before the suburban and industrial boom in the second half of the nineteenth century.  To fully understand the landscape transformation of the nineteenth century we need to better understand the long history of human labour that transformed the wetlands of the Lower Lea until the early nineteenth century.

To accomplish this goal, I’ve been doing some work to map the early industrial transformation on the Lea, before the heavy industry began to arrive in the mid-19th century.   I found that the Lower Lea was a site of industry at the time of the Norman Invasion of England and the Domesday Book.  Millers on the Lower Lea used the tides to grind grain and other products.  These mills remained in place during the early nineteenth century and at least the Three Mills remained operational through to the twentieth century.  This long continuity of industry in the parish of West Ham foreshadowed the massive industrial growth in the second half of the nineteenth century.  New industries, such as Calico Printing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then the chemical and animal rendering industries of the nineteenth centuries started near the old mill sites, before spreading along the banks of the Stratford Back Rivers.  The GIS map below provides an estimate of the industrial footprint near Stratford High Street in 1810.

I am working on a paper about the transformation of the Lower Lea River (including the Bow Back Rivers and Bow Creek) into an industrial river network, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.  As I write the paper I will be creating some GIS maps of the area from that I will post on this blog.  I’ve included the abstract for this paper below.  Here is a very early map of the rivers I’m researching.

Early GIS map of back rivers

The River Lea, London’s second river, passes through the city’s northern and eastern suburbs before it flows into the Thames Estuary, through the industrial landscape of West Ham.  During the second half of the nineteenth century, industrial growth transformed the lower reaches of the Lea into a collection of industrial streams.   At the same time, the Lea shaped the economic development and built environment of the new suburbs developing along its banks and in its wetlands.

The history of the Lower River Lea and West Ham provide an interesting comparison to those studying much larger rivers in Europe or North America.  The small size of the river and its rapid transformation and integration with the suburban landscape, provide a unique scale to examine the process and consequences of industrialization.

The Lea and its wetlands covered a large section of West Ham, as it divided into half a dozen streams, locally known as the Stratford Back Rivers, in the northwest of the suburb, before reconnecting into one riverbed at Three Mills Island. The abundance of tidal back rivers, along with jurisdictional independence from London’s building regulations, facilitated the development of the industrial economy on the marshlands of the lower Lea.   The vast majority of the factories relied on the back rivers to carry cheap coal and other raw materials, so the wandering streams determined the layout of the industrial district. Like the factories, much of the residential growth took place on the wetlands of the Lea.  The significant suburban growth within wetlands and even within the river itself, created a unique hybrid suburb landscape, where factories were intermixed with impoverished clusters of homes, farms and allotment gardens, and patches of surviving marshlands.

Unlike the standard narrative of suburban growth, workers and factories populated the Lower Lea Valley, not middle class families looking to escape the unpleasant inner city.  Upstream from West Ham, the Lea supported a variety of suburban development, including small pockets of industry and new working class commuter suburbs. During this time, engineers remade much of the Lea’s beds into canals, water companies diverted much of the river to supply growing population and the suburbs used the river to dispose of the resulting sewage.  The ensuing overuse of the Lea created crisis after crisis during the rapid growth of Outer London in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The paper will focus on the patchwork landscape the Lea created in West Ham, and the hybrid and degraded industrial river, suburbanization created out of the Lea.  My research relies on a wide range of engineering, municipal and parliamentary records, local and national newspapers, and a detailed GIS database that tracks the changing suburban landscape from 1867 to 1915.  I will try and post a few updates as I write this paper along with some maps of the Lea during the  transformation  from rural wetlands to a suburban industrial landscape.

The conservative newspaper, the West Ham Guardian, roundly criticised the East London Waterworks Company (ELWC) for putting dividends before people after it was announced on August 22 of 1898 that West Ham, along with much of East London, was going to face another period of intermittent water supply.  The bundle of correspondence kept by the company, together with the local newspapers, make it clear that the majority of the public did not accept that the record low rain fall during the preceding year was the cause of the shortage.   Instead the public blamed the monopoly control of the ELWC for not investing the necessary capital to increase the water supply.  The population of West Ham had grown by over two hundred thousand people in the past two decades, but there was little reflection on the possibility that the urban growth east of London was overtaxing the capacity of the already strained water supply provided by the Lea.  Instead it was seen as another example of the wealthy failing to meet their obligations to the less fortunate.  In West Ham the anger that developed as a result of the water famine help unite the electorate behind a socialist led Labour Group in November 1898 elections, resulting in the first labour majority on a municipal council in Britain.  This paper will examine the politics of the 1898 water famine within the context of West Ham.

This map shows the patchwork of land uses in West Ham at the end of the nineteenth century.

West Ham was located east of London on the Essex side of the River Lea that formed the eastern border of London. The Lea was an important part of West Ham from the very beginnings of industrial growth in the area. Tidal mills harnessed the river for power and calico and silk printers relied on the purity of the water for their work. The river was also source of drinking water and used for sewage disposal. During the mid-nineteenth century chemical factories, a large railway engineering works and a shipbuilding works were built along the banks of the Lea and its back rivers in West Ham. These many uses of the river also started to come into conflict with each other. Pollution in the river forced the calico and silk printers to leave West Ham. Sewage in the water supply was identified as the main cause of the 1866 Cholera epidemic in East London. The diversion of too much water for drinking disrupted the other uses of the Lea, causing sewage and other wastes to collect in the otherwise drying river beds and disrupting the barge traffic that industry relied on to supply raw materials. The Lea was also a threat to the growing borough of West Ham as the suburb was mostly built on land below the natural high water mark of both the Lea and the Thames. The relationship between the industrial suburb of West Ham and the river Lea is the central topic of my dissertation. My second chapter, that I have now begun researching, looks at the water famines of 1895, 1896 and 1898 when the East London Waterworks Company restricted the water supply by turning off the flow of water to East London and eastern suburbs like West Ham for between 18 and 20 hours a day. I will post another blog entry focusing on these famines in a few weeks when I’ve done more of the research.

Author Sherwell described London in 1901 as “a great, hungry sea, which flows on and on, filling up every creek, and then overspreads its borders, flooding the plains beyond” (Quoted in Roy Porter, London: A Social History). West Ham was one of these “flood plains”, beyond London’s borders, that was filled with urban growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was an atypical suburb; an early example of industrial migration from the urban core to the periphery, where manufacturing, not commuter bedroom communities, was the raison d’être for suburban growth. West Ham was the sixth largest city in England and Wales, but with the enormous shadow cast by the Metropolis, it was unclear whether the Borough was apart from or a part of London. The industrial landscape was a polluted landscape. Chemical factories, gasworks, sugar refineries, the Thames Ironworks shipbuilding yard, and the Great Eastern Railway works burnt a lot of coal, as did many of the households in the Borough. Yet West Ham was not an entirely urban-industrial landscape even at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1893-4 Ordinance Survey Maps list four farms (one of which was located beside the Bromley Gasworks and the other three in the east of the Borough on the Plaistow Marsh). In 1915 there were numerous allotment gardens that established an urban agriculture presence in West Ham at the height of industrial and residential growth. These sites of agriculture, along with the parks, recreation grounds, graveyards, undeveloped lands and open marshes coexisted with factories, commercial high streets, slums and better off suburb communities. The messy overlap between the city and the country is one of the reasons West Ham is so interesting. It was a hybrid landscape, an unplanned garden city, often under a cloud of smoke and noxious fumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, moving between factories, homes and gardens: people living in both the city and the country and in neither. West Ham was a borderland, a landscape of exposure, a tormented but not defeated rural environment. It was a riverine landscape (flood plains and marshlands), transformed by humans into an industrial one, but always threatened with the chance that the River Lea would reclaim its territory, at least for a moment.