Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ from the various establishments at Silvertown meant that even by Victorian standards the water along this stretch was disgustingly foul. Even those who could swim were overcome by the effluent around them: barely anyone stood a chance. The exact number of casualties isn’t known, but nearly everyone on board drowned: at a conservative estimate 550 lost their lives. If any good came out of the Princess Alice disaster it was an acceptance that the section of the Thames east of the City was far too busy, and this tragedy on a notoriously congested and dangerous stretch of river helped to rubber-stamp the construction of the Albert Dock on the marshland east of the Victoria Dock, about half a mile north-east of Silvertown.

      It was the 1880 opening of the Albert Dock, immediately adjacent to the Victoria Dock, that sealed Silvertown’s unique character, for as soon as the sluices opened and the water gushed in to the giant expanse of the new dock, Silvertown became an island and its people became islanders. Opened on 24 June, the Albert Dock – one and three-quarter miles long and nearly 500 feet wide – contrived with its sister to cut Silvertown off completely from the rest of the country. You could no longer leave Silvertown without crossing water. You still can’t.

Chapter Nine

      In barely thirty years a bare patch of marshy land known only to a few shepherds and cattlemen had become a thriving industrial heartland and the focus of the empire’s international trade. In their squalid little cottages on marshy land beneath the high-tide level the people who had flocked here, the industrial poor from across Britain, the Irishmen who had helped to dig the docks, the eastern Europeans fleeing persecution, were isolated, psychologically and physically, hemmed in on all sides by filthy, stinking water and living on a soggy island that squelched underfoot, while myriad smells and stenches filled their lungs from the chimneys and outflows. Curious green and yellow smogs settled over them, seeping through cracked window panes and around ill-fitting door frames into every home, so there was no escape from the relentless choking industry of Silvertown.

      And the noise. The constant noise. The clanking of machinery, the hissing of pressurised steam, the whistling of trains, the factory hooters and sirens parping and screeching, the bells of the ships on the river, the thunderous roar of their foghorns, the inescapable, constant industrial tinnitus that never stopped, not even at night, because Silvertown was never, ever quiet. The furnaces raged, the boilers steamed, the people snaked along the muddy streets, passing in and out of the gates, feeding the monstrous, noisy, hungry beast with a never-ending stream of labour, while away from the factories and works and plants and muck and grease and soot they tried to make lives for themselves, tried to claim a piece of the oozing, damp land as their own, even if it was just two rooms lined with mildewed wallpaper and a couple of flames attempting to flicker in the grate above a few dusty pebbles of coal.

      This was the lot of the Silvertonian as the nineteenth century ended. On Constance Street they came out of their houses straight onto the muddy street. When they looked one way, across the railway line, they saw the clanking premises and belching chimneys of the rubber works, the Tate sugar refinery and Keiller’s jam factory. When they looked the other way, across a patch of scrubland, there was the high dock wall and beyond it the cranes working the holds, dipping and rising, cranking and lifting; occasionally they’d see a giant ship easing into the dock, bright-coloured funnels against the blackened brickwork and smoky air. If they looked up they could usually see the sky but sometimes they could just see the yellowing smog and the smoke belching from the chimneys, pinning them in, sealing them further from the rest of the world, compressing their island, reminding them that their place was as a tiny cog in the giant, flame-fuelled, smoke-belching monster machine of Silvertown.

      The speed of industrial growth outstripped everything, from basic sanitary amenities to ensuring safe workplaces, which meant that disease, injury and death were a constant threat and frequent reality. Two months before the Albert Dock had opened the Burt, Boulton & Hayward premises blew up. An enormous still containing 2,000 gallons of oil exploded: according to witnesses the reinforced steel roof of the still bulged like a balloon before it breached, and the explosion was heard for miles around. The blaze was so intense that fire crews came from as far afield as Rotherhithe and Southwark to assist. Crowds of onlookers gathered on the other side of the river at Woolwich and Charlton for what must have been a spectacular conflagration. As the Essex Newsman pointed out in its coverage, ‘creosote, tar, pitch, naphtha, benzoline etc rendered the place peculiarly liable to an accident’.

      Eleven men died as a result of the explosion, of whom ‘in some cases little more than charred bones remained’.

      Fires and explosions were commonplace: there would be a ‘crump’ from somewhere along the riverside and hundreds of wives going about their business at home would freeze, wondering if this time it would be their husband or son not coming home, their task to be shown into a room above the Graving Dock Tavern or the Railway Hotel to be presented with a charred, mangled husk of a human being contorted into a terrifying mass of limbs, the smell of burnt flesh and death lingering in the nostrils long, long after they’d left the room.

      As the nineteenth century entered its smoky twilight, the London Daily News summed up Silvertown.

      ‘Silvertown has not any beauty that one can desire in it,’ it said in 1891. ‘Great works are springing up and though their proprietors and their managers and clerks know better than to take up their abode in the neighbourhood, the workpeople are settling there and in their interests it should be known that the condition of the wasteland and the rude tracks that are called roads are a disgrace to civilisation.’

      Far from the glamorous sound of its name, then, Silvertown at the turn of the twentieth century was a place of muddy tracks, dank and fetid housing, belching chimneys, stagnant ditches and air so thick with fumes and gases you could taste it (when James Keiller opened his jam factory a stone’s throw from Tate’s sugar refinery the very air in Constance Street could feasibly have rotted your teeth). Close by, the river and docks ran with human excrement and toxic industrial effluent, enclosing Silvertown within a ring of stinking water that could kill just by brief immersion.

      This wasn’t just a slum, then. This was the worst of the slums, a place fraught with physical danger, from intoxication by air or water, from explosions and fire, from disease lurking in the dank puddles and ditches, from the trains that went to and fro carrying people and cargo with little in the way of safety regulations.

      So who were the people of Silvertown? Who were the thousands that created a burgeoning population from nothing? As the London Daily News pointed out, they weren’t the factory owners, the managers and the clerks. They made their homes far from the smells and the noise. Silvertown people were in general the poor, the displaced and the desperate. Occasionally they were the persecuted. These were rootless people, driven to where the work was, however unpalatable, however dangerous. Here was a place without a history where they could be a person without a history. Retreating to the island to escape creditors, spouses, a broken heart, family tragedy or the law, they found security behind their dock and river moat. Silvertown was a blank canvas, a chance to make a life and invent a life, a place of secrets.

Chapter Ten

      Constance Street was about as well-to-do as Silvertown got. Having been one of the first streets in the area, located close to the Silver’s works and the station and with the Railway Hotel at the end of the street, it was almost inevitable that Constance Street would be at the very heart of the community. The houses were well built for the area, and their bay windows made them easily adaptable as shops. Hence the street soon began to attract tradespeople, people with aspirations, as well as the urban working class. The census returns for 1911 show a street that mixed residential properties and commercial ones and gives a fascinating insight into the heart of a working-class community СКАЧАТЬ