On a sunny afternoon last December, I found Yoda on the River Lea trapped in a sea of duckweed, a green sludge just down river from the Bow Flyover. He assured me that the weed ‘harmful to people is not, but beauty spoiled here it is’.
Darren Jones, a Canal & River Trust waterway supervisor remarked in an old issue of CRT News that ‘Removing it is a painstaking job for the team because the pieces are tiny and they move as the boat makes its way through the water. It’s like trying to mow a moving lawn. With the weather like it is, no sooner have we cleaned a section, than a new lot has floated in, but we’re confident of getting rid of the majority before it gets any worse.” (CRT News 17 July 2015) That was two years ago.
I spoke with Yoda on the subject and he felt the we needed a new approach to an increasing problem. ‘You must unlearn what you have learned’ he said and pointed me toward new research by Dutch Scientists funded by the Welcome Trust, to explore the potential of this weed as a super food to rival Soy. It is thought to be around 43% protein and to be rich in vitamins.
However, a spokeswoman for the Trust has said: “Don’t eat it, don’t fish it out of your canal, not the garden pond. Not from anywhere.We don’t know if it’s safe, we’re still doing the studies. We also don’t know if humans can digest it, so until we have the evidence – don’t eat it.” Yoda also added that the water in which it grows ‘of the Source it is not'(actually he could have said force) and that pollutants contaminate its stream.
Cynthia was thrown out of home when her ‘mum’ had a clear out. “I don’t know what I had done wrong. Suddenly I was cast away with a mattress, a new mop from the kitchen that had never been used and all sorts of other things. But I’m worried about my friend Ted over there. He nearly drowned, but a kind samaritan put him on the wall”. Ted told a similar story. He feels we live in a city of neglect and waste and that this canalised river is its refuse channel. Shoved into a bin bag, he’d been taken out after dark and heard someone say ‘just chuck ‘im in’t cut.’ He floated all night in the airtight bag and then somehow found himself on the barge with Cynthia.. “I don’t know what will happen to me now” he told me, hopelessly exhausted and slumped against the graffitied concrete wall. This was on January 28th. When I returned this week to see how they were doing, both had drifted on…
‘I sunk as low as it’s possible to go’ – Cynthia‘I heard a voice say just chuck ‘im in’t cut’ -Ted
This wharf off Hancock Road is in constant use by the river authorities who dredge an unending collection of flotsam and jetsam from the surrounding waterways. The wide path here is also a favourite spot for Graffiti artists to contribute to their own wall of fame.
The City Mill river separates London Aquatics Centre from the West Ham United Stadium. I peered at its fractured reflection through thin sheets of ice, as I tried to steady the camera and ponder the wintry scene. My dad remembers a big freeze when the Thames partially froze over in 1947, and the photos below of Limehouse Reach and the entrance to Deptford Creek from February 1895 are visual testament to the kind of weather conditions I can only recall as a child in 1963. Meteorologists and historians think the last time London’s rivers completely froze over was in 1814. There was a frost fair on the Thames in its honour, that began on February 1st and lasted five days.Will such intemperate conditions become less or more likely with global warming?
During the “Frost Fair” in 1814, oxen were grilled, drinks were consumed, dancing ensued and an elephant marched beside Blackfriars Bridge across the frozen Thames River. The river froze over at least 23 times from 1309 to 1814. The river was frozen solid enough to hold a “Frost Fair” five times, counting the one in 1814. When the Thames River froze over, this affected the livelihood of the watermen and lightermen who moved people and goods. To compensate for lost earnings, they organized the fairs, charging the renters and traders for ice access.
The canalised waterways of the Bow Back Rivers meet a tidal Bow Creek at the 2012 Three Mills Lock and older Bow Lock. The freshwater river is a different place to the slightly brackish tidal channel, but both provide a habitat for the common reed. Both creek and river have poor water quality. Ten percent of homes hereabouts have plumbing connecting toilets directly to the river. Storm drains and sewer pipes are also often interconnected and in heavy rain can result in an overflow of human waste into the river. The charity Thames 21 have launched a ‘Love the Lea’ campaign to draw attention to the impact of this on the local riverine environment. It is clear that this pollution impacts animal and plant life and discourages people from enjoying the river. Phosphates in laundry soap add the essential element phosphorus to the river, which in large amounts can lead to the explosive growth of algae, thereby outcompeting other plants in the river system. Thames 21 have set out to fix these broken rivers in different ways, including a programme of reed bed creation and maintenance that has been in operation for at least seventeen years (I first encountered their planting activity on Bow Creek in 2001). The reeds help remove pollution, they provide habitats that increase biodiversity and they are beautiful to see. Currently local people are being asked to vote on where they would like new reedbeds to be planted at http://www.thames21.org.uk/reedbeds-in-the-lea-navigation/ and http://www.thames21.org.uk/reedbed-vote/
Ian Stamford, Senior Coach for The Leaside Trust (after doing safety work with Thames 21 volunteers) is reattaching a protective boom to the river bank after removing rubbish from the reed bed it encloses, beside Bow River Village. January 29th 2017
Huge tilt hammers and Naysmith’s Steam Hammer were in operation as early as 1854 at Mare and Company’s Iron Ship Building Works on Bow Creek that was the precursor of the Thames Iron Works on the same site. A large local employer, it gave birth to the Thames Iron Works Football club in the 1890s that later became West Ham United, whose nickname The Hammers, is evocative of these steely origins.
The club is embedded in local culture and I found evidence abounding on my walks along the Bow Back Rivers that make an island of the new West Ham stadium site, and around creek side streets down river.
In the 1990s, a local man called Peter Steele, did much to remind local people of this connection when as ‘shop steward of a forgotten workforce’, he lobbied for the memorial that was made on the entrance walls to canning Town Underground Station.
Forlorn Blanket, Bidder Street, E16Memorial on railings of Tower Hamlets Municipal Service Depot, Silvocea Way E14
Illustrated London News October 28th 1854. Interior of Mare and Co’s Iron Ship Building Works on Bow CreekLaunch of Duncan 1901 Thames Iron Works, Bow Creek
West Ham United Stadium bounded by the Bow Back Rivers in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park image ref. #COYIpic.twitter.com/GbhZbNnJdZ
Looking out over the A13 Bridge toward the site of the old Essex Wharf, where Sankey and Son distributed building supplies by horse and cart around east London in the 1920s according to my old postcard of the same scene.
City Island is being built on the site of London’s lost village, that until the 1930s was isolated in a peninsula of the meandering Bow Creek. No Public transport approached along the forbidding looking thoroughfare of Leamouth Road, flanked on both sides by the high stone walls of the adjacent dock premises. The community lived along Orchard Place and the terraces of West Street and Duke Street leading to the creek side. They were served by their own Primary School and public house.
Most of the houses had been destroyed by the out break of the Second World War, under slum clearance orders and the inhabitants, for their own well being, moved on. In 1932 Bow creek Primary school had 160 children on the roll; 100 of the pupils bore the name Lammin, the rest were largely of the names Jeffries and Scanlan. Not many came and went without prior business there and when the great Victorian social reformer Charles Booth visited in 1900 to interview local workers and employers for his extensive survey of London’s poor he was necessarily accompanied by a policeman.
The attached maps and images indicate the arrival and dispersal of people of the past 150 years, that has ebbed and flowed around this once muddy mound, like the the tide of the creek that surrounds it. And now new owners and tenants are arriving as extensive reconstruction builds the new City Island, joined to Canning Town in the north by a bright red footbridge to carry the new residents to jobs in the city and the shops at Stratford on the DLR.
It still feels like a soul less place, with brand new 14 storey towers around spare looking landscaping barely taken root. The old primary school long demolished, replaced by the Royal Ballet School, the Public House by a contemporary cafe and bar. A story in the Evening Standard last week reported that prices began around 400k for a studio apartment with a top price around 800k for a two bedroom flat. I do hope the new model works and we should not lament what it replaces on this peninsula.
The large pictorial hoardings at the end of Orchard Place paint a glamorous picture of life here, that is at odds with the rest of E14. The recycled paper and scrap merchants on Bidder Street, Stephenson Street and Wharf Street are still thriving concerns along an urban fringe being pushed steadily eastward by what we used to call gentrification. I hope work and homes for the less well off will survive here and proper provision made for those who still sleep out under the concrete supports of the A13.
When I was here in 2001, the whole of this site was part of Pura Foods, whose factory announced itself on a regular basis with an invisible fog of fatty odours. Walking through the heart of the new development last week, I was sure I caught a whiff of it still, as I walked along the new central avenue of an aptly named Hope Street.
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1916
Bow Creek Junior School on Orchard Place, had 160 children on the roll in 1932: 100 pupils bore the surname Lammin, the rest were largely of the names Jeffries and Scanlan. ref. Henry Wilks
I led a walk with with eight local people and three small dogs from Bow Arts Trust on Bow Road to the exhibition Everything comes from the Egg at Trinity Buoy Wharf on Saturday January 28th. This was a leisurely journey in very cold weather, passed in shared conversation, reflection and the companionable silence of contemplation of the everyday scene.
A short diversion from the riverside path above Three Mile Locks, took us to view the seven gas holders at Bromley by Bow from Twelve Trees Crescent. Have we lost the pride and care for detail the Victorians lavished on such utilitarian structures? The lower levels of each have sturdy Doric steel columns referencing classical Greek architecture, their upper, heavenward, tiers sport a lighter Ionian style.
Archie’s parents who I met on Three Mills Green a few days ago told me they were looking forward to seeing the site opened as a tourist destination, but I’d hate to see the loss of the comprehensively rusty patination which marks time and place so well, on these circular temples to the gods of heat and light.
Directly across the road, we entered through trees and shrubs to a war memorial for workers of The Gaslight & Coke Company. The customary bronze tablets, bearing the names of those who gave their lives in two world wars, are guarded by a tall stately lamp, a sentinel permanently lit to their memory. As one of our group of walkers pointed out, it was of course a gas light.
A few feet away, the scene is watched over by a life sized statue to Sir Corbett Woodall who was governor of the company from 1906-16. In his hand are a pair of spectacles, so unobserved at night, he can step from his pedestal to read the lists of the dead in the light of his lamp.
I walked down the steps from the Newham Road section of the A13 Bow Creek Crossing. Tucked away under the bridge on a bare concrete compound behind high steel fencing was a small white caravan, that Brian calls Home. It is a step up from living in a sleeping bag under the bridge itself, which for two years had been his only option. He tells me the TV show Panorama came to visit, bought the van for him and somehow had it delivered to the site so he could live in relative safety.
“I am camerad up Steve. I’ve got CCTV down the path in both directions 24 hours a day” he told me, pointing out the security provided for any walkers passing through. I told him my own home in the Egg was probably not dissimilar to his own tiny caravan and he invited me in to have a look. He saw me glance at a boarded up window, and explained his ex girlfriend smashed it, when breaking in to steal all his stuff to buy drugs. “It’s tough down here” he told me more than once. He gets his water from the scrap merchant opposite, and his only heat from a one ring ‘Jamie Oliver’ propane stove. “I have no gas now though mate. I have to go all the way to Manor Park for it, and it’s £20 for four” I know these canisters do not last long and Brian confirmed that each one would burn for just two hours. I suspect that not much cooking goes on and that this is the only source of heating to add to the duvet and blankets on the bed. In a confined space these things generate a lot of moisture. “That’s why I like to keep the door open, because there’s so much damp and mould” (Not to mention the harm from carbon monoxide). It was bitterly cold too.
We spoke about where the Egg came from in Exbury and he told me he used to live relatively near by in Swayling. This name has its roots in the Old English swætheling, that means ‘misty stream’ and I thought again of the tidal stream of Bow Creek, on his current doorstep.
“Its dangerous here. My friend had his head chopped off with a sword under the blue bridge.” I did wonder if I was hearing a ‘story’, but checking online that night I saw that Vaidas Sakalauskas was murdered just where Brian said, on November 25th last year. According to the Newham Recorder he was found by a woman on her way to work at 7.25am when she spotted a floating body in a sleeping bag. Vaidas was only 21 and had apparently offered to share his ‘safe’ nightly refuge under the footbridge with fellow homeless Lithuanian Saulius Urbanavicius, who killed Vaidas in his sleep. He went off the next day with the lads blood still on his trousers and sold on the meagre possessions he had stolen. “They found the sword in the Creek” said Brian, but the newspapers reported blunt trauma force to the head and drowning. A vicious urban memory.
In May last year, almost six months before the murder, The Newham Recorder ran another story about four people taking shelter under the A13. They were sleeping high up on a ledge carrying electric cables that can be seen in the photos below by David Johnson. Perhaps Vaidas was one of them?
The Bow Creek Ecology Park was pieced together from overgrown derelict coal wharves after the London Docklands Railway used it as a high level route out of Canning Town to Poplar that opened in the mid 1990s and neatly bisects the park, as the map shows.
I walked from the exit to Canning Town Station near the northern end of the red footbridge linking the BCEP to the new housing Development of City Island which it faces to the east, across the acute meander of the waterway. I had planned a circular route, back across the tracks to my start point over a newish looking silver footbridge, but I had to retrace my steps when I saw its padlocked gate.
Stephen was trying to use the bridge too, but could not say if its being locked was the usual state of affairs on this route, and I resolved to ring Newham Council to enquire about yet another impossible pedestrian route along the waterways between here and Stratford.
Stephen told me I should relax and allow Jesus to show me the way, and gave me a card advocating the ministry of Pastor Stephen. Altogether too many Stephens, I thought as we bid each other good day.
I visited here four times over a two week period and the only other people I met were a couple of teenagers out doing a school project and a ranger who kept to his car with his windows wound up and the heater on. It’s a strange mixture of the somewhat worn (murals, and signage) alongside evidence of recent tree cutting and mowing along the maintained paths. With an abundance of steel railings too, this curtails any sense of wilderness or the ability to explore. The tip of the peninsula is fenced off completely and there is very limited access to the waterside itself.
A territorial Robin kept me company on one occasion, and a pair of coot and mallard had made a home in the reed beds against a constant background rap performed by the DLR, construction vehicles on City Island and the regular crescendo of jet engines from aircraft using the nearby City Airport.
