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Canning Town is an area of East London, England. It is part of the London Borough of Newham and is situated in the area of the former London docks on the north side of the River Thames. It is the location of Rathbone Market. Despite being a neighbour to many Dockland developments, Canning Town remains in the top 5 per cent most deprived areas in the UK with local people suffering from poor health, low education and poverty. The London ExCel Exhibition centre is also nearby.
Prior to the 19th century, the district was largely marshland, and accessible only by boat, or a toll bridge. In 1809, an Act of Parliament was passed for the construction of the Barking Road between the East India Docks and Barking. A five span iron bridge was constructed in 1810 to carry the road across the River Lee at Bow Creek. This bridge was damaged by a collision with a collier in March 1887 and replaced by the LCC in 1896. This bridge was in turn replaced in 1934,[1] at a site to the north and today's concrete flyover begun in smaller form in the 1960s, but successively modified to incorporate new road layouts for the upgraded A13 road and a feeder to the Limehouse Link tunnel, avoiding the Blackwall Tunnel. The abutments of the old iron bridge have now been utilised for the Jubilee footbridge, linking the area to Leamouth, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, on the western bank of the Lee.
Originally known as Hallsville, the area is thought to be named for the first Viceroy of India, Charles John Canning, who suppressed the Indian Mutiny about the time the district expanded. The population increased rapidly after the North London Line was built from Stratford to North Woolwich, in 1846. This was built to carry coal and goods from the docks; and when the passenger station was first built it was known as Barking Road.[2] Speculative builders constructed houses for the workers attracted by the new chemical industries established in the lower reaches of the River Lee, and for the nearby Thames Ironworks and Tate & Lyle refinery.[3] The opening of the Royal Victoria Dock accelerated the development of the area.[1] The casual nature of employment meant poverty and squalid living conditions for many residents, and by the 1930s the County Borough of West Ham commenced slum clearances.[3]
In 1857 Charles Dickens wrote about the area:
"Canning Town is the child of the Victoria Docks. The condition of this place and of its neighbour prevents the steadier class of mechanics from residing in it. They go from their work to Stratford or to Plaistow. Many select such a dwelling place because they arte already debased below the point of enmity to filth; poorer labourers live there, because they cannot afford to go farther, and there become debased. The Dock Company is surely, to a very great extent, answerable for the condition of the town they are creating. Not a few of the houses in it are built by poor and ignorant men who have saved a few hundred pounds, and are deluded by the prospect of a fatally cheap building investment."[4]
The slum clearances and the devastation of World War II, destroying 85% of the housing stock, lead to the preponderance of council estates that characterise the area today.[3] From the late 19th century, a large African mariner community was established in Canning Town as a result of new shipping links to the Caribbean and West Africa.[5]
On the 21 June 1898, The Albion, a Royal Navy cruiser was to be launched sideways from the Thames Ironworks, on Bow Creek. Schools were given the day off, and thousands attended the launch. About 200 people thought to get a good view by climbing on to an adjacent temporary slipway, where a Japanese warship was being built. The launch caused a tremendous backwash that threw the people on the slipway into the water. Their cries for help were drowned by the cheers for the Duke and Duchess of York, and 38 lives were lost.[6] The event was commemorated by the poet, William McGonagall, and the Royal Humane Society issued 26 Bronze Medals to men who had leapt into the river to try to save the victims.
In 1907, the Royal Acquarium in Westminster was dismantled and brought to Canning Town. It was re-erected as the Imperial Palace Music Hall.[7] The music hall was destroyed by fire in 1931, and replaced by a cinema.
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Main article: Household Words |
In 1857 Charles Dickens published a detailed description of the area in Household Words entitled "Londoners over the Border", writing:
"...by the law there is one suburb on the border of the Essex marshes which is quite cut off from the comforts of the Metropolitan Buildings Act;-in fact, it lies just without its boundaries, and therefore is chosen as a place of refuge for offensive trade establishments turned out of the town, - those of oil boilers, gut spinners, varnish makers, printers ink makers and the like. Being cut off from the support of the Metropolitan Local managing Act, this outskirt is free to possess new streets of houses without drains, roads, gas, or pavement."[4]
Describing the slum housing conditions and its effect on the health of local residents, Dickens wrote:
"Rows of small houses, which may have cost for their construction eighty pounds a piece, are built designedly and systematically with their backs to the marsh ditches; which, with one exception, are all stopped up at their outlet; and in many parts of their course also, if there were an outlet, or if it couldbe said that that they had any course at all, to or three yards of clay pipe “drain” each house into the open cess pool under its back windows, when it does not happen that the house is built as to overhang it. We feel a qualm in calling houses built when they are laid out as band-boxes upon the soil. In winter time every block becomes now and then an island, and you may hear a sick man, in an upper room, complain of water trickling down over his bed. Then the flood cleans the ditches, lifting all their filth into itself, and spreading it over the land. No wonder that the stench of the marsh in Hallsville and Canning Town of nights, is horrible. A fetid mist covers the ground... the parish surgeon... was himself for a time invalided by fever, upon which ague followed. Ague, of course, is on of the most prevalent diseases of the district; fever abounds. When an epidemic comes into the place, it becomes serious in its form, and stays for months. Diseases comes upon human bodies saturated with the influences of such air as this breathed day and night, as a spark upon touchwood. A case or two of small pox caused, in spite of vaccination, an epidemic of confluent small pox, which remained three or four months upon the spot."[4]
Dickens also describes efforts to improve the housing conditions in the area:
"Two years ago, when application was made by more than a tenth of the rate payers of the parish of West Ham for an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the district, with a view to bringing it under the conditions of the Public Health Act, Mr Alfred Dickens was the civil engineer sent by the general Board of Health as an inspector. His report and the evidence at his inquiry is before us as we write, and it dwells very much upon the state of Canning Town and Hallsville. We learn from this report that the area of the ditches in the parish amounted to not less than one hundred and fifty acres, according to a surveyors book upwards of thirty five years old, and that area has been increased by side cuttings at the railway and new cuttings of open sewer. Disease had cost the parish six hundred pounds in the year previous to the inquiry. There was then, of course, as now, no drainage or paving in Canning Town; the roads in winter were impassable; but the inhabitants were paying (for what they did not get) an eighteen penny rate under the Commissioners Act, not for works done in accordance with it, but “for the expenses of the act”. Also, although the parish did not take charge of their roads, they were paying a highway rate for the parishioners elsewhere. One horrible detail in Mr Dickens report has, happily, to be omitted from our sketch. Two years ago, there was in Hallsville and Canning Town no water supply. Good water is now laid on. In all other respects, the old offences against civilised life cleave to the district. The local Board of Health which the inhabitants of the parish sought and obtained, whatever it may have done for Stratford, seems to have done nothing for Hallsville, unless it be considered something to indulge it with an odd pinch of deodorising powder."[4]
Alfred Dickens highlighted the severe overcrowding suffered by many of the slum inhabitants as a result of landlord charging high rents and households relying on casual work. [8]
The area is at the western end of the Thames Gateway zone and is currently undergoing a £1.7 billion regeneration project, which includes:
For many years, there has been considerable economic deprivation in the area. In the 2000 Index of Multiple Deprivation, Ordnance Ward, which covered most of the Canning Town area, was the most deprived ward in Greater London, and the second most deprived in the South of England, after an area of Great Yarmouth.
Most of the district falls within the Parliamentary constituency of Poplar and Canning Town, confusingly a small part of north-eastern Canning Town falls within the boundary of the West Ham constituency.
In May 2006, voters in the Ward of Canning Town South returned three members of the Christian Peoples Alliance as their elected Councillors. This is highly unusual in what is regarded as the rock-solid Labour borough of Newham.
The football team of the Thames Ironworks went on to become West Ham United F.C..
The Bridge House, a public house named for the 1887 Iron Bridge, was at 23 Barking Road – now demolished. The venue operated during the 1970s and 1980s and was host to The Police, Jeff Beck, Billy Bragg, Alexis Korner, Sham 69, Lindisfarne and many other notable acts.[9] Recently, a new venue bearing the name The Bridge House2 has opened in Bidder Street.[10] Also on Barking Road, the former public house "The Royal Oak" (now an estate agent) had a boxing ring on the first floor. Amongst others, the boxer Frank Bruno trained there.