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Abandoned railways, History, London, Musings, Photography, Picture of the day, Railways, Railways History
The pair of us are having a local but active day here at Bigland Towers. Dawn’s been busy baking, experimenting with some cake and cookie recipies whilst I’ve been occupied in the office. I had a phone call on Friday afternoon that’s completely changed my plans for next week as it involves some commissions and COP26 so trips to Scotland beckon. Meanwhile, I’ve some articles to pen before I do, which means the week ahead’s going to be hectic.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve been trying to keep up the momentum on scanning old slides, which leads to today’s little picture story.
The latest batch of slides were taken in 1994 when I was working as a Housing Officer in Bow, East London. Having left my previous housing job in nearby Poplar (where I lived) to spend a year travelling solo in SE Asia I applied for a job with Bow neighbourhood, was accepted and offered a position as Housing Officer on the Lefevre Estate. The name sounded far better than the reality. The Estate consisted of a series of brutalist 1970s deck access maisonettes linked together by walkways. Our office, located on the estate, wasn’t much better. Even so, I really enjoyed working there. Ehen I accepted the job I’d been told that the estate was due to be transferred to a new Government quango called a Housing Action Trust (HAT), one of only 5 in the country. This would manage the complete redevelopment of the estate and 2 others adjacent. I had the option of staying with the council and being transferred to another job, or being TUPE’d across to the HAT when it was established. Being adventurous and liking what the embryonic HAT Management team told me about what to expect and the opportunities to broaden my skill that would be on offer, I decided to sign up.
This meant that I stayed on the HAT estates for the rest of my Housing career. A decision I never regretted although I’d no idea at that time what my future career looked like. I could write a book about those times, but that’s not the purpose of this blog. Instead, I’m going to talk about something else – the railways of the East End and the changing face of London.
Our office on Lefevre Walk backed onto what had been a scrapyard, but before that it had been a railway. The North London Railway. It had been a Southerly branch from what’s still the North London Line (now the Overground) running through Old Ford, Poplar and Bow down to the London docks. I moved to East London in 1986 so never knew this line when it was open as it had closed a couple of years before. In those last days it had been a freight only line although I could still see the remains of some of the old stations like Bow Rd which had all closed in 1944.
Sadly, I never researched the route by getting books on the NLR. Nowadays it’s so easy just to look stuff up on the internet, but not in 1994. So, whilst I knew that the old scrapyard outside my office window had been an old railway goods yard I never knew at the time there’d been an old railway station there too. In some ways that’s not too surprising. The area looked completely different as in the 1970s an urban motorway (the A102M) had cut a swathe through the old factories on homes in the Lea Valley. Here’s some of the pictures I took in 1994, then I’ll link to something that shows you how it used to look. To say you wouldn’t recognise it now is an understatement. I don’t recognise the 1950s photos. Today, if you visited the area, you wouldn’t recognise it from my 1994 pictures either!
(to be continued tomorrow as I’ve lots more pictures to add and stories to tell)…
