River Lea - Hackney Marshes

River Lea Navigation, River Lea and Aqueduct
The Lea, the Navigation and the Aqueduct all flow south

This page contains a substantial part of the Olympic park – it is proposed at this stage to ignore this, so the page reflects the area before this work started.


Post to the north Hackney Marshes
Post to the east Temple Mills

Ashenden Road

Tower Brewery. This belonged to an Albert Ward, and was acquired by Woodhead & Sons in 1910 which became part of Charringtons in 1965. However brewing seems to have stopped here in the 1920s
Tower works – this was a sack factory from the 1920s. The site is now housing
Pratt Owen and Co. electric motors and vacuum cleaners in 1926. Factory and showroom

Daubeney Road
Daubeney School. Built in 1884 as a simple one- and two-storied school in the style which the London School Board developed from the 1870s. It was closed during World War II and used as an air raid shelter and reopened in 1945.
Clapton Park Children’s Centre
172 Landmark Heights. 20 storey - 116 flat tower block. It dates from 1972 and was originally called Sudbury Court. During the 1990s the building was refurbished and renamed.
Daubeney Bridge. Sculpture 'Water Jugglers' by Peter Dunn. Etched, mirror polished, stainless steel and imaged glass.
Daubeney Fields. This is a park also known as Daubeney Green and Clapton Park. It includes a recently planted community orchard and 46 additional trees. Here is also a skate park and a BMX track. 

Eastway
This was Gainsborough Road and originally the road from Hackney to Temple Mills and an extension of Wick Lane – which ran down Kenworthy Road.
Gainsborough Road Bridge. This crosses the Lea Navigation and was previously Wick Lane Bridge.  Before it was built there was a foot bridge and ford and the scene of many accidents to horses
Terrace of 19th houses

Hackney Main Marsh
Area of marsh which came into public ownership in 1894 and trees were planted then and since. The majority of the area is laid out as football pitches
Friends Wood. Wood developed from 2000 and planted as demonstration woodland
Jubilee Wood. Wood developed from 2000 and planted as demonstration woodland
Crescent Wood, Wood developed from 2000
Dip. This is the site of old changing rooms. There is an associated line of plane trees
Yew Wood

Homerton High Street

Homerton Castle – this was an old house approximately opposite the end of Roding Road. Bought up and demolished by the hospital authorities along with a line of housing reaching to Kenworthy Road.
Hackney Hospital.   In 1750 a sick room was designated in the Hackney Union Workhouse. In the 1800s an infirmary built beside the workhouse and in 1875 an acute ward block was added. It passes to the London County Council in 1933 and then took over the workhouse and used its buildings. In the 1950s a maternity block was added Plus an Out-Patients building and a physiotherapy department. By the mid 1970s it was one of the largest general hospitals in London and the first hospital the country to train male nurses. From 1986 its services move to the new Homerton Hospital and it closed in 1995. The buildings have now been converted to housing and a mental health centre.
Hackney Workhouse. The first Poor House for the parish of St John, Hackney, was opened in 1728-29 in a house on north side of Homerton High Street.  In 1741 it was moved to the south side of the Street to a Tudor cottage where sheds were built to accommodate inmates. The parish bought the site in 1768. The workhouse was enlarged in 1775 and lager and new buildings were added. At the front of the workhouse facing the High Street was the Master's house and there was a stone-breaking yard. A new workhouse building was built in 1841 with Master's accommodation and a committee room. There was also a potato cellar, flax shop, weaving room, school rooms, and mortuary, a nursery, a laundry and a chapel. In 1848 when the Guardians bought the freehold of the site and carried out a major rebuilding scheme. In 1906, a new administrative block was built and Two infirmary pavilions were added west in 1908-10. In 1911, a lunatic block was added, and a four-storey nurses' home. In 1930, it passed to the control of the London County Council, becoming Hackney Hospital.

Homerton Road

The roadside is planted a hedgerow and balsam poplar
Mabley Green. This was originally part of hackney marsh but used for the National Projectile Factory in 1915 and turned into public open space in 1922. A large climbable boulder in the centre of the space installed in 2008 by John Frankland.
Wick Wood. Wood developed from 1995. The wood edge planting is ash and black poplars have also been planted.
Lesney Products and Co Ltd 1969 building. The firm was established in the post-war period with the production of Matchbox Toys. The Homerton Road factory produced other commercial die-castings. The company went into liquidation in 1982 but the Homerton Road plant continued to produce castings and plastic parts for electrical appliances. The tall building had large sign for 'Lesney Matchbox Toys' and was in a modernist style and inside a number of features survived - foundry, conveyor belts. Site redeveloped by Telford Homes as housing and artists’ studios.
Marshgate Bridge.

Kenworthy Road
This was previously called ‘Sydney Road’ and before that part of Wick Lane.  Kenworthy was a 19th local clergyman and historian.
Sidney Road Children's Cottage Homes.  Receiving Home. In 1898, the Hackney Board of Guardians began to acquire houses east of the workhouse building to use as children's homes. In 1905 they opened a home in Chipping Ongar and a house opposite Kemeys Road became the receiving house for these homes and to provide short-term accommodation.
Cardinal Pole School. This replaced Sidney Road Board school opened in 1882 on the site which was itself built on a meadow called Hilly Field. Cardinal Pole is a Roman Catholic Secondary School which originated from Shoreditch.   In 1964 it moved to a new building here. .
Kenworthy Road Health Centre

King’s Mead Estate
Built in 1936-8 to provide 1,000 flats for people from a clearance scheme in Bethnal Green.  It was partly built on the ex-National Projectile Factory site on land also used as a public recreation ground – and was a difficult building site on marshland.  It is made up of London County Council flats  in long rows of four-and five-storey blocks flanking a central axis. The estate was opened by the King and Queen in March of that year in 1939.

King’s Mead Way
Kingsmead Primary School

Old River Lea

Friends Bridge

Lee Conservancy Road
This road name dates from 1907
Hackney District Board, stone and waste depot. Used for bringing in coal used in council facilities and also used for tipping rubbish into barges.
Lesney’s Factory.   Matchbox diecast toys were made here in a factory opened in 1964 and closed in the early 1980s. Now housing on the site
Tar works - Dudbridge Green – with a relationship with Davey’s of Wallis Road.
Acme Wood Flooring Factory. Came here in 1895 from Vauxhall.  
G. Ellis & Co., timber merchants here until the 1920s
Durable House – Durable Asphalt Co. making asphalt flooring

Marsh Hill
Linzell Estate Forest Garden

Sources
Bird. History of the Port of London
Clarke. Benjamin Clarke, Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington
Clubplan web site
Clunn. Face of London
Daubeney School web site
GLC. Home Sweet Home
Grace’s Guide web site
London History. Hackney web site
Lost Hospitals of London web site
Matchbox history web site
Pevsner and Cherry. London North
Victoria County History. Essex
Workhouses web site

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