No pictures from the archives this week, mainly because I’ve misplaced the box full of photographs. Instead, here is a rather poor shot of the fire in Stratford earlier today.
As seen from about two miles away at Mile End about an hour after it started.
High Road follows the path of an old Roman road from Colchester in Essex to London and is one of the oldest in the UK. It has been in use for at least two thousand years. The junction is where Whalebone Lane South and North meet the High Road. The areas of fields and allotments along side the roads are all houses and shop now. The pond visible on the left of the image is now covered by industrial areas along Selina’s Lane.
Lately, I spend much of my working day the cleanroom, well , either of two cleanrooms.
Room-A is a pretty basic cap and gown type affair – the room isn’t really clean (class 100,000 to 10,000 depending on how often used; more usually high than low), the kit is really there to control access (limited kit = limited number of users) to the room and provide nominal clean standards. Room-B, on the other hand, is a bit more serious; usually class 1000, sometimes approaching class 100 after a few weeks of no use, you need to get properly kitted up to enter this room.
Yesterday I found myself in the changing room for room B with a camera, so here is a self portrait showing me about to start work.
Elegance this Wednesday is yards of blue nylon and nitrile. Or something.
Continuing from last week’s theme of the construction of Dagenham, we move to the area around Dagenham parish church and see how it changes over a period of ten years.
This first image shows the Leys Field and Church Elm Lane as they were c.1950. Leys in an old name for this area, dated to at least the mid 1600s from archive documents.
Snaking down the photograph to the right of the church is the Wantz stream, not culverted until later in the 1960s and at this point still prone to summer flooding. In the early 1950s there were plans to develop the Leys field into another large park similar to Central Park or Parsloes.
Just ten years later (c.1960) and the need for housing has lead to development of the portion of Leys field close to the church. The ambitious park plans of the 1950s have found fruit in the form of Old Dagenham park, constructed from the remainder of the Leys, and just outside the field of view of the second photograph.
By mid 1921, the construction of the Becontree Estate and the enlargement of Dagenham was gathering pace. The photograph below shows an aerial view of the west of the estate looking north to Chadwell Heath. The two prominent roads running parallel to the bottom of the photograph and diagonally to the right are Longbridge Road and Beacontree Avenue respectively.
In the middle distance some of the housing is beginning to take shape, although large areas of land are still open fields. It took a further ten years before some of the more recognisable features of Dagenham were constructed. The second photograph has the Heathway running diagonally down, left to right. Just visible before the great sweep of Downing Road, and towards the top of the photo is a partially constructed Heathway Hill. Heathway station still being a year or so away from opening at this point.
Another random dip into the past next week…
