Dagenham Brook - Low Hall
Dagenham Brook
The Dagenham Brook flows south east/south west through the area
The Great Eastern Railway from Liverpool Street to Chingford
The rail line running north from Clapton Station continues to run north westwards
Post to the west Coppermills
Post to the south Lea Bridge Road
Post to the north Walthamstow
Post to the east Hoe Street
Acacia Road
1 Farm Cottages. This house was for the chief engine room attendant at the sewage works
Blackhorse Road
Baptist Church, Brick church by K. Francis Clarke. The Church was founded in 1898 in a "The Tin Tabernacle" and the current church was built in 1932.
Our Lady of the Rosary and St Patrick. Brick Roman Catholic church built in 1908 by Benedict Williamson.
Methodist church. This once stood on the corner of Tenby Road and there in the 1950s. The building is said to have been later used as a basket ware firm
Brunel Road
Barncroft Primary School. Opened in 1997
Brunner Road
This was originally called South Grove. It was the site of an iron mission room in 1881, and also of the headquarters of the Walthamstow speedway. An industrial estate was set up here by the local authority in 1964
The Central Station pub was previously The Artful and before that was called the Prince of Wales, Now closed anyway.
Crusader manufacture of typewriter supplies from 1968 but founded locally in 1914
Buxton Road
50 this once seems to have been a pub
Dominion Cinema. This was built on the site of the Prince’s Pavilion which fronted onto the High Street. The Dominion was developed by a syndicate of local businessmen and opened in 1930 with Douglas having been designed by Frederick E. Bromige as his first solo work as an architect. It showed many of the features he used in later work - a cement stucco facade, with zig-zag details and a spacious, auditorium with plasterwork and effects lighting. It has a Wurlitzer 3Manual/10Ranks organ. It was taken over by Associated British Cinemas (ABC) in 1931 and in 1958 it became a venue for wrestling for a few months but re-opened as a cinema again in until 1961. It was converted into a Mecca Bingo Club, but closed in 1996. The building remains boarded up and unused.
Chewton Road
On the Warner Estate – named for Chewton Magna part of Courtney Warner’s Somerset Constituency
Cockerell Road
The road crosses the Dagenham Brook. On one side it is in a concrete channel alongside water tanks. On the other it flows through a narrow belt of woodland.
Coppermill Lane
7-11 Library – set up on a temporary library in 1963 in old shops. It is now a community run space following closure of the library
Warner’s Flats. Early 20th examples of what would now be called "maisonettes'.
Edinburgh Road
Walthamstow Queens Road Station. Opened in 1894 it lies between Leyton Midland Road and Blackhorse Road. It was originally a Midland Railway Company Station called "Walthamstow" and was renamed in 1968. Its name is misleading as the station is on Edinburgh Road, not Queens Road.
Essex Road
St.James’ Park. The park is named, like St. James Street from the local the parish of St James's. In 1906 the grounds were laid out by the unemployed, under local distress relief schemes from part of adjoining Low Hall farm. The park opened in 1910. There is a drinking fountain with a little trough for the dogs
Exmouth Road
Edinburgh Primary School. Buildings from 1907. Now disused. Edinburgh junior school was opened by the local authority as a junior council school. It was reorganized in 1929 for senior girls, and in 1946 for mixed juniors
Gosport Road
49 The Ringwood Castle. This pub opened in 1891 as the Lord Randolph Churchill, and was renamed the Ringwood Castle a year later. It was a Truman’s pub, acquired by Greene King in 2001. It was closed in 2009 and demolished in 2011.
High Street
This was once Marsh Street – leading to the Walthamstow Marshes
Walthamstow Market began in 1885, and occupies most of the street. It said to be a mile long, but is actually one kilometre.
2 Embassy Snooker and Social Club. An Art Deco shop of 1935, built as a Montague Burton’s store in their house style. Faced in white faience, with windows to frames with Egyptian detail. It had billiard hall and social facilities above
Parade of shops and flats built by Warners in the 1890s
The Prince’s Pavilion Cinematograph Theatre opened in 1909. The entrance was down a passage next to a timber yard. It was re-built in 1912, and closed in 1930. It was demolished apart from one wall and The Dominion Cinema in Buxton Road was built on the site
63 Cock Tavern. With cock plaque high above the door on the corner. There was a pub on the site from at least the 18th.
82-84 Walthamstow Working Men’s Club. Originally called St. James's club, it was founded in by Sir Henry Solly 1862 in Marsh Street. Later a new hall was built in the High Street with shops for letting in front. In 1909, Walthamstow Syndicalists met there. The club secretary from the 1890s until 1950 was Barker and famous in anarchist circles.
Tiled advertisement for a butchers shop on the Mission Grove corner. This says the butchers shop was established in 1890 and shows a picture of a bullock
Salvation Army Citadel
26 Manzie’s pie shop
Leucha Road
Called after Courtney Warner’s wife, Lady Leucha Diana Maude. It is a street of terraced houses designed by John Dunn from 1895 for the Warner estate.
Low Hall Lane
Site of Low Hall Manor House, built in about 1344 with a square 14th moat. This was a hall house with service wing and a kitchen range. It was later extended and a gatehouse built which adjoined the bridge. This medieval house was dismantled in the 17th and replaced by a timber-framed farmhouse which was destroyed by a V1 in 1944. The farm buildings were outside the moat and there was a warren and fish-ponds which were probably medieval. The Dagenham Brook probably supplied water for the moat.
Walthamstow bought the Low Hall Manor site from the Bosanquet family in 1877 to site a sewage works there. The site became the local authority used for a number of generally smelly works. Farming continued on the site for many subsequent years on fields not yet in use for local authority purposes.
Sewage Works. Until the 19th Walthamstow sewage drained into ditches or the Dagenham brook and thus ran through Leyton to the Lea. These ditches caused offence and so were bricked over but there were constant complaints and legal action from Leyton. In 1875 the Dagenham Commissioners of Sewers, the Lee Conservancy, and the Leyton Local Board, secured an injunction to stop Walthamstow putting sewage into the Dagenham brook – and thus Walthamstow Local board Bought built a sewage works here. The works was enlarged in 1885 to take sewage from Hale End. Leyton continued to threaten legal proceedings and the Low Hall works was again modified. In 1925 the London County Council agreed to let them join their system – apart from storm water. The sewage pump house is a brick building containing two Hayward Tyler steam pumps to move the effluent. The pump pit was filled in during the 1970s and is currently being excavated. In 1896 the Marshall C class steam engines, boilers, and plant equipment were also added. The engines provided the power to other machines. Originally fuelled by coal, the steam plant was converted in the early 1900s to work from burning domestic refuse. In the 1970s electrically powered pumps were installed.
Tramway – a line marked as a tramway’ ran from the sewage works south west to meet Great Eastern Railway sidings north of Lea Bridge Station. On site was a small locomotive shed and locomotive
Refuse and sludge destructor built here in 1904 following the start of domestic refuse collection in 1874 under contract. This produced steam for engines which pumped the sewage
Swimming bath opened here in 1899 using a disused sewage tank
Hospital opened here for isolation patients in 1893, after Plaistow and Highgate hospitals refused to accept any more Walthamstow patients. A municipal smallpox hospital was opened here in 1929 and closed in 1940 after bomb damage
Pump Engine project. A museum project has taken over many of the older buildings of the Low Hall Depot. The pump house has what are believed to be the only surviving pair of "C" class horizontal steam engines built by the Lincolnshire firm of William Marshall Sons & Co. When the pump house became redundant in the 1970s, an industrial museum was conceived and it is run by the Trust, supported by Volunteers and the Friends of the Museum.
Low Hall Nursery School. This has been a nursery school since 1929 and developed into a Children’s Centre in 2006.
Markhouse Common
The common was also called Markdown or Broomfield and lay east of Markhouse Lane. The allotments were opened here in 1840 as part of enclosure award for the labouring poor while much of the land went to property developers.
Markhouse Road
Previously known as Markhouse Lane.
2 Essex Brewery Tap. This was the brewery tap which was originally on the other side of the road. After the brewery closed the pub was acquired by Charrington’s. Through the 1990s it had a variety of names - Wild Rover, The Tap, Fat Sid’s, Fuse, New Angel and finally Fallen Angel. It became an music venue, then other use, and is to be converted into housing
Ansar Gardens – on the site of Markhouse Road schools. The street walls of the school remain. Markhouse Road board school opened in 1891 but burnt down in 1906 and reopened in 1908.It became a secondary school in 1946. The infants school closed in 1966
South Grove Free Presbyterian Church. The church dates from the early 1990s with a small group set up in south London which bought the South Grove Gospel Hall in 2000. The gospel hall itself had originated as a mission of Trinity Congregational church and was taken over in 1925 by Brethren who bought the building in 1933. The building is however more modern than that.
131-133 The Common Gate. This pub is now a hotel
Kelmscott School. The school is in 1960s building, with new buildings added in 2008 plus the leisure centre.
Lighthouse Church. This is a Methodist church built in 1893 – and it has a tower with a revolving SOS signal. It was donated by Bullard King, a steamer captain for the Bullard Line of steamers. It was reopened in 1979 with a first-floor worship area. It has a circular turret-stair with steep slated spire to lantern and is not a lighthouse for lost mariners but lost souls.
Mission Grove
Clock House is the former mansion which replaced the Black House. It was restored in 2000 but has had many alterations. It is a Regency villa of built, unusually for the area, of white Suffolk brick. It was built in 1813 for an earlier Thomas Warner and became the Warner family home. It was used briefly as the District Supply Store for six shops in the area run by Warners. Later it was a baker owned by the London Co-operative Society. It is now flats.
Mission Grove School. This was originally two separate schools and is now one school in three buildings on the same site. The West Wing – which is modern - The Nursery and the South Wing which is the original school. Mission Grove Primary School was designed by H. Prosser, architect for the Walthamstow School Board who opened it in 1906 for girls and infants. In 1932 reorganized for mixed juniors. In the Second World War it was partly used by the Ministry of Food. The Infant and Nursery School was built in 1979 by Michael Foster of TFP.
Queens Road
Kelmscott Leisure Centre. Pool, sports etc run by Greenwich Leisure Ltd. Dating from 2008
Queens Road Community Centre. Built 2004 by: Greenhill Jenner architects. Basically a Sure Start centre with a nursery, a crèche and after school club. There is a drop-in Clinic, Municipal Hall, IT and Adult Learning Centre
Walthamstow Cemetery. Opened Walthamstow Burial Board in 1870 who had bought the land for £5,000. Coach house, inquest room, etc. only one wretchedly neat mausoleum. There are lodges, gates and two small Gothic chapels by R.C. Sutton.
Walthamstow Coroner’s Court. Coroner’s court built in 1989 outside the cemetery gate. It has a new hall an office area and associated storeroom, toilets, etc.
Edinburgh Primary School moved here in 2011. Plus new adult centre
Ringwood Road
South Grove Primary School
South Access Road
The Dagenham Brook is straight and therefore probably man-made. It is however very old. As a drainage channel maintained for centuries by the Commission of Sewers for the Levels of Havering and Dagenham. Crosses the road
South Grove
Pillar box from 1879
Toilet block shut since 2007
Alpha Business Centre
St.James’s Street
St. James Street Station. Built in 1870 it lies between Walthamstow Central and Clapton station. It was built by the Great Eastern railway with the original single track branch to Shern Hall Street. In 1873 it was given a double line and a down platform following pressure from customers and in 1875 a waiting room was built. In 1890 a second ticket office was installed at a new entrance on the up side and this remained in use until 1967 having had reduced opening hours since 1939. The station was rebuilt again in 1974 with glass and plastic and aluminum.
Rail bridge. The road dips under the bridge to allow for clearance of the roof top equipment on trams.
Signal Box. This was at the west end of the down platform with 18 levers in a Dutton Trigger frame, It was closed in 1938
Walthamstow Brewery. The steam powered brewery was built by Brunel’s brother in law, William Hawes, in the late 1850s. The Essex Brewery Co. Ltd. was formed in 1871 to buy it but it was actually bough by Collier Bros., who called it the Essex Brewery, and ran it until 1922. It was then sold to Tollemache Breweries Ltd. Brewing ended in 1972 and the buildings have been demolished.
72 Alfred English horse drawn funerals
74-76 Equal Chance poker club
St.James. The church was built in 1842 on a site given by the vicar of St.Mary's and S. R. Bosanquet. It was demolished and rebuilt in 1902 by J. E. K. and J. P. Cutts using many items from the old church. It became the parish church of St. James the Greater, from 1904. It was closed in 1960 and demolished.
St.James Health Centre, built on the site of the demolished church
St.James Church Hall. This had originally been St. James's National School built in 1842 on the north side of the church. When the school was replaced in 1874m it became the church hall. It was demolished in 1902.
63 Coach and Horses. Closed in 2007. In 1695 this was the Cocke & Oake but was called Coach & Horses by 1841, and was a Truman’s pub. It was leased to the Smith Garrett Brewery of Bow, and later Whitbread’s. In the 19th there was a cricket ground alongside. In 1995 it was passed to Scottish & Newcastle Brewery.
25 Abbey Dental Practice. This was the St James Electric Theatre Opened in 1911. The name changed to Super Cinema in 1919. In 1932 it became the Regent Cinema. It closed in 1939. Next to the station it is said there were problems of judder as trains went by.
Station Road
34 Turkish Association. This was the Lord Harlington. Long closed pub
Tenby Road
Until 1908 this was Telby Road.
Sources
Allinson and Thornton. Guide to London's Contemporary ArchitectureArchipelago of Truth web site
CAMRA. City and East London Beer Guide
Cinema Theatre Association Newsletter
Cinema Treasures web site
Closed pubs web site
Connor. Liverpool Street to Chingford
Coppermills walk leaflet
Dead pubs web site
East of London. Old and New. 1900-1991
Field. London Place Names,
Greewich Leisure Ltd web site
Headley & Meulenkamp. Follies
Leucha Conservation area leaflet,
London Footprints web site
London’s Industrial Archaeology 5
London Railway Record
Pevsner. Essex
Plummer. Courtney Warner and the Warner Estate
The Marshall. Newsletter
Vestiges Newsletter
Victoria County History Essex
Walthamstow Conservation leaflet,
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