Maryland Station
The most neglected train station east of the Tower after Emerson Park (where all the station name signboards on the platform vanished under mysterious circumstances and haven't been replaced. Apparently nobody told Hornchurch that World War II is over). The advent of Crossrail will change things for the better, but until then it carries on it's ramshackle way.
Too ghetto for ticket machines, apparently. For those of us with Oyster cards, the readers in the background will now let you travel on PAYG. For everyone else (and, indeed, oyster card holders who fancy a 95% discount), 5p goes into the permit to travel machine. Not that I endorse withholding revenue from such an exemplary rail operator. 'hem.
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Uploaded on Jan 3, 2010
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Leytonstone Road, E15
Welcome to Newham. Even if you miss the sign, you can tell you're here because half the streetlamps are at crooked angles.
On the face of things the majority of London's urban sprawl, be it composed of older inner-city areas cobbled together or suburban developments that run into one another, is fairly subtle in it's contiguousness. Boroughs run into one another on the turn of a street corner or the crossing of a railway bridge, but little really changes from one to the another by simply crossing a border - the street lighting may look different, the bins a different colour, victorian houses may gradually give way to semis and 1930s council estates may give way to 1960s examples, a welcome sign may give it away on a main road, but it is rarely abrupt. Most of London's boroughs contain the contrasts within themselves - compare the Brent of Queens Park and Harlesden to that of North Wembley and Sudbury, and the proximate pockets of wealth and deprivation in each.
Newham, in this respect as well as many others, is of a different order to most other areas of London - it is more or less it's own island, and a relatively consistent one, cut off from surrounding areas by the Thames to the south, the lower Lea valley to the west, the River Roding and elevated North Circular to the east and the bottom reaches of Epping Forest to the north. Cross-border passages over many of these are scarce (four road crossings towards Central London to the west, three to the east) to nonexistent (no road crossings at all over the Thames, save for the Woolwich Ferry). Most approaches to Newham, either by rail or road, mean crossing some sort of uninhabited industrial landscape, green expanse or tunnel before hitting the dense mass of estates and terraces that make up the borough, invariably with a bit of a bump - if ducking under the North Circular from Ilford to Manor Park is to make a jump from suburbia to scruffy pseudo-outer-inner London purgatory, the approach from Poplar to Canning Town is at best a marginal improvement, but somehow a bleaker introduction. Here, where Leytonstone Road crosses the border with Waltham Forest, is one of the few upholders of the general rule in the Newham exception, as part of the 3/4-mile wide strip of Victorian terraces that link up southern Leyton and South Leytonstone to Stratford and Forest Gate. They're quite similar environments.
Historically, Newham has proven uniformly and stubbornly resistant to gentrification. In the 1990s, on old-money measures it leapfrogged with Hackney as the most deprived borough in the country - now, out of 354 it is 6th from the bottom, beaten in London only by Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The speculation around Stratford in the run up to 2012 is one issue to be considered, but the regeneration getting under way in Canning Town and Custom House is, even though less discussed, almost as substantial in itself and constitutes a lot more residential demolition and rebuilding than the infill and industrial site clearances around Stratford - huge swathes of the area are disappearing already. The changes to the social fabric that will result there are less predictable, but ones that I'll watch with interest.
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Uploaded on Jan 3, 2010
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Silvertown
Albert Road / disused North Woolwich Line / Factory Road / Tate & Lyle
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Uploaded on Jan 3, 2010
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