What song does the place sing? A heritage walk through Canning Town
What does it really mean to see things ‘through the lens of place’, as Lisa Jandy, MP for Wigan put it in a recent New Economics Foundation podcast? There’s lots of talk about place-based approaches (see for example the just-published historical review from Lankelly Chase and IVAR), but when you’re new to a place, how do you start to get under its skin? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot as I’ve recently started a new placement with Community Link in Canning Town. My role is all about helping the charity reposition its iconic 19th century home on the Barking Road as a community hub for the 21st century; learning about the community and the place it serves is key to this mission. So I was lucky to be able to take part in a heritage walk organised by the London Borough of Newham last week as part of its first ‘Heritage Week’.
I learned a huge amount on the walk, much of which I can’t cover here (for example about housing policy and design over the last 150 years). So this is a personal reflection on the three points that most resonated with me, looking through my own peculiar lens as a historian and environmental systems-thinker (amongst other things) on my own journey of change.
What does the soil say? A bioregional perspective
Stepping off the tube in Canning Town few people will immediately be struck by the quality of its natural environment. The area around the tube is dominated by high-rise, anonymous new-builds with fast moving traffic cutting between a perpetual building site and the flyover. And yet… there is another side to this story, and the walk pushed me to relocate Canning Town within its natural environment, or ‘bioregion’. Our guide began by explaining how all the land currently being developed is built on marshland, reclaimed from the Thames in the late 1880s for industrial purposes. So the high rises rise from the swamp, and some of the paths through large housing estates perhaps echo the passages that would always have criss-crossed the marsh. Once, at least, nature memorably reclaimed its rights; Canning Town was flooded in the floods of 1953 (a date forever etched in the minds of flood risk policy-makers) that ultimately led to the construction of the Thames Barrier. Indeed, the public hall that is now home to Community Links briefly sheltered affected families. The irony of the Thames Barrier is that even as the risk grows greater, the populations it protects have become ever more oblivious to the sea and its power. The whole language of the area bears witness to this disconnection; few now refer to the area as ‘Tidal basin’, and only in the postcode — E16, in between E15 for Stratford and E17 for Walthamstow — is there the ghost of a memory.
To me this matters because if we are to have any hope of addressing our present environmental crisis we need first to reconnect with nature as and where we find it, to understand the natural systems of which we are a part and the strains we are placing on them. To locate ourselves on the edge of the sea, only narrowly holding it back, also re-makes the connection between climate change — and climate risk — and social justice. Just as in 1953 those most at risk, whether from rising sea levels, toxic air or the public health crisis exacerbated by lack of access to safe accessible green space are always the most vulnerable, and their empowerment is at the heart of Community Links’ mission.
A history of social action — and responsible business
Canning Town might be a relatively ‘new’ part of the city, but the history of social action concentrated in a few square kilometres is extraordinary. It was here that the modern trade union movement found its voice in Britain, with landmark battles fought (and won) in a very short period in the late 1880s for match workers, dock workers and gas workers. The workers in Canning Town and Silvertown were often in in the most menial and hardest of jobs, and were often women; here — more than perhaps anywhere — the struggle for workers’ rights was also a women’s struggle.
Not all the local employers had to be pushed by direct action into responsible practice however, and the walk also highlighted the lead shown by the Thames Ironworks (1838–1912) in valuing its workers; the huge ship-building yard became one of the first places to voluntarily introduce an 8-hour day in the 1890s, and also sponsored a football team (West Ham) whose legacy in the area has long outlived the closure of the yard.
The walk also took us past any numerous settlements and missions, such as the site of the Plaistow and Victoria Docks and the Mansfield mission. I was reminded of Tom Rippin’s recent argument that there is much we can learn from the drive and commitment of our Victorian forebears in social action (even as we might wish to temper some of the paternalistic tendancies). One of the participants on the walk was a more direct inheritor of that tradition, from Newham’s partnership of churches for social action; when I asked why he’d come he gave one of the most memorable and coherent accounts of place-based working I’ve yet heard (“you need to ask what does the soil say? What song does the place sing?”). I’ve drawn on his words in this post.
Hidden histories of diversity and empowerment
Finally, the history of Canning Town is also a lesson in how histories have been erased or overlooked; when we uncover them we uncover a much richer and more complex story of place, which teaches us all to be wary of simplistic narratives. Canning Town is often thought of and described as a predominantly white working class area, but that is a very selective post-war view. Its proximity to the docks made it home to a very diverse population, from Germans and Italians in the early 20th century, to West Indians and ‘Lascars’ (sailors, mostly from South Asia). By the 1921 census there were 1000 Indians in Canning Town alone and, by the 1930s, the largest black community in London (Compas research paper, 2008).
There is another invisible history that I think of almost every day in Canning Town. In the building where I am working there is a plaque to commemorate a speech that Will Thorne gave in 1889 to a crowd on the site that not only paved the way for the creation of the Gas Workers’ Union (now the GMB) but also demonstrated the need for a new public hall to serve the growing demand. Will Thorne was illiterate until his early thirties, the consequence of entering the industrial labour market aged only six. I often wonder what he would make of the ongoing need for services such as benefits and legal advice that Community Links provides on the site now, in particular for people who struggle to fill in the often tortuous forms on their own. There is much work still to be done.
His story is rightly celebrated. But throughout this period Will Thorne was educated, mentored and supported by the tireless Eleanor Marx, the unsung hero of Canning Town, who was there on the frontline and in the shadows supporting strikers and activists. Since reading Rachel Holme’s inspirational biography the youngest daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx has been one of my all-time heroes. There are many many different contexts in which to admire her, but in Canning Town it is her work as an enabler that inspires me the most. At her funeral Will Thorne ‘expressed his gratitude for the way she had tutored him, giving him the education of which he had been deprived, empowering another rather than making a mark herself’ (source). Tapping away at a keyboard beneath the ornate roof that perhaps (or perhaps not, who knows?) once resonated to the sound of her speeches — or even her raucous laughter — trekking back west in the dark on my bike (a luxury to which Eleanor did not have access; she made the journey on foot, day after day), it’s an honour to work, however fleetingly, in her shadow.
