In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

34 •2 THe river Lea in WesT HaM a river's role in shaping industrialization on the eastern edge of nineteenth-Century London jiM Clifford Greater london grew from a little over one million to about eight million people during the nineteenth century. This massive population growth transformed the city’s relationship with the natural environment and placed increasing pressure on the city’s hinterlands. One of the most significant examples was the reengineering of local rivers and streams to supply water, facilitate transportation, and carry away wastes. In The Thames Embankment , Dale Porter explores the complex history of London’s relationship with the Thames, as new bridges transformed the river’s flow and sewage degraded the water quality. He examines the huge engineering project of the 1860s that “solved” these problems by embanking the river in central London and diverting sewage to the edge of the metropolis.1 On a smaller scale, the expanding urban landscape buried numerous tributaries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Fleet, Westbourne, Tyburn, and Effra Rivers and Hackney Brook. In contrast, the river Lea, a larger tributary of the Thames, remained above ground and played an essential role in shaping suburban development on the eastern and northeastern periphery of Greater London.2 While urban growth helped to transform the Thames of central London into a revered marvel of civil engineering, the Lea remained a working river, peripheral and unpleasant, but essential in shaping Greater London’s new industrial heartland on the eastern edge of the metropolis. During the nineteenth century, the Lower Lea River helped to create West Ham, the largest manufacturing suburb in Outer London, as its multiple streams provided a readymade transportation network. By the century’s end the conflicting uses of the Lea had diminished the river’s capacity to support industrial development. Most importantly, river pollution and sedimentation tHe river lea in west Ham 35 had made transportation increasingly difficult. As a result, the river had begun to obstruct and complicate the industrialization it had once facilitated. During the second half of the nineteenth century Outer London grew significantly faster than inner London. The core-periphery relationships in the city changed, as the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) absorbed the older suburbs in 1855 creating inner London, and new communities grew beyond London’s redefined borders collectively forming Outer London. In the east of London, the river Lea formed the jurisdictional limit of the MBW. The wetlands of the Lea industrialized as factories migrated from the city center in search of cheaper land, improved transportation, less regulation, and more space.3 During the 1880s, West Ham’s local board of health incorporated as a country borough (figure 2.1), independent from the MBW and its successor , the London County Council (LCC).4 The autonomy of West Ham, however, remained limited and a person walking from the East End into West Ham at the turn of the twentieth century would not have noticed an abrupt transition; the suburb was in many ways a continuation of East London. Location mattered in the development of Greater London. West Ham was a “river suburb,” bounded by the multiple streams of the Lower Lea in the west and the Thames in the south. The Lower Lea flowed through alluvial wetlands and branches into a delta-like collection of nine streams, called the Stratford Back Rivers, as it entered the Thames Estuary six kilometers east of the Tower of London.5 The location of West Ham in relation to London, the Thames Estuary, and the Lower Lea together created a favorable economic region with several environmental advantages that drew hundreds of factories and over a quarter million people to the suburb during the nineteenth century. Many of the same factors that enabled industrialization in this location contributed to the emergence of significant environmental problems. The flow of the Thames and Lea Rivers along with the expansion of sewage systems and the prevailing winds placed the suburb at the receiving end of much of Greater London’s growing surge of water and air pollution.6 The Lower Lea and the local population shared a long history of transforming the landscape of the marshlands in West Ham Parish. The Lea flooded and carried silt down to the marshes, where people built tidal mills, dikes, and drained wetlands, for many centuries before the massive suburban transformation of the river and landscape in the nineteenth century.7 The growth of coal-fuelled industry vastly increased the scale of...

Share