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

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СКАЧАТЬ industry, but the centre of a cheerful, wholesome influence; and this is, happily and honourably, becoming true now-a-days of many a tall chimney in our land of factories’.

      Yet not everyone was swayed by the PR of progress. As the Chelmsford Chronicle reported in June 1859, three months after the initial glowing report of a workers’ utopia above, ‘the system of sewerage now in course of formation by the West Ham Board of Health will, when completed, materially improve the sanitary state of Plaistow Marsh, which during the winter or rainy seasons, from the amount of mortality among the inhabitants, exhibits evidence of its insalubrity’.

      Silvertown was far from a sun-kissed utopia of industry in which the benevolent industrialist walked arm-in-arm with the healthy, ruddy-cheeked labourer through leafy streets breathing air thick with the scent of lavender and apple-blossom. Dickens himself visited the area and noted how the reclaimed land was some seven feet below the Thames’s high-tide level, going on to describe basic houses of four rooms containing several families with no drainage or amenities that were ‘mere bandboxes placed on the ground’. The streets, which were unsurfaced tracks, were little more than a series of deep puddles of brown mud where the local doctor, he continued, ‘is drawn to wearing sea boots and the clergyman loses his shoes through neglecting to take a similar precaution. The national school is a wooden lean-to where the mistress, when it rains, conducts the lessons from beneath an umbrella to protect herself from the leaking roof.’

      That clergyman, a Rev. H. Douglas, was deeply troubled by the poverty of the area and had written about it in a letter to The Times published on Christmas Day 1859.

      ‘The district is occupied chiefly by works for transforming the refuse of slaughterhouses into manure and for the manufacture of vitriol and creosote,’ he wrote. ‘The habitable areas consist of islands of liquid filth, surrounded by stagnant dikes … Poverty alternates with fever. Every gust of prosperity brings an influx of strangers to the neighbourhood; every succeeding stagnation overwhelms the district with destitution. At the time of writing the cry for food and fire is frightful. Amongst other distressing cases of illness three whole families are down with fever and on one day recently no less than seven accidents occurred.’

      Perhaps cowed by these reports, in 1863, as Silver’s waterproofing business really began to take off, the expanding company began to invest a little more in creating its own community. The architect S.S. Toulon completed St Mark’s Church to a design that divided opinion: Pevsner described Toulon’s church as being ‘as horrid as only he can be and yet of a pathetic self-assertion in its surroundings’. The church was flanked closely to the north by the new North Woolwich Railway, re-routed around ‘The Vic’ because its initial, pre-dock route interfered with both shipping and the railway timetable. The design of St Mark’s may not have pleased everyone but the church would go on to establish itself at the heart of the Silvertown community. Its Normanesque steeple, as imposing as it was curiously squat, would become a familiar landmark to locals and those arriving in Silvertown by train, even as it became surrounded in the following years by a forest of belching chimneys and gas and oil holders.

      A year after the consecration of the church, three more streets appeared immediately opposite the Silver works. Andrew Street and Constance Street jutted north into marshy fields, while Drew Road bisected them both from east to west. The houses in these streets were a step up from the basic workers’ cottages nearby: they had, according to a report at the time, ‘bay windows, well-lighted stairs and a grate as well as a copper in the washhouse’. Some had been constructed as shops and commercial premises too.

      At the southern end of Constance Street stood the Railway Tavern, an imposing, sturdy public house which had opened in 1855 under the tenancy of William Owston, while opposite was constructed Silvertown Station, opened in 1863, the same year as Constance Street, meaning that, barely a decade since humanity arrived in the region, Silvertown had a name, a church, a pub and a railway station: the four basic tenets of a community were in place. All Silvertown needed now was a population.

Chapter Eight

      From all over, they came. The entry for Constance Street in the 1871 census recorded inhabitants who hailed from Warwickshire, Norfolk, Scotland, Wiltshire, Ireland, Dorset, Somerset and Devon. They were wire makers, cordwainers, machinists, shoemakers, telegraph engineers, waterproofers, boiler makers, coat makers, dressmakers, telegraph instrument makers, iron ship platers, dockers and stokers. These were the Silvertown pioneers, people like Stanfield Sutcliffe at No. 1, a wire drawer from Halifax, and his neighbour James Press, a Gloucestershire-born carpenter and his son John, a clerk at the telegraph works. Across the road from them were Joseph Taylor and his family, a shipwright from up the river in Rotherhithe, and his neighbour, James Parsons, a boiler stoker from Trowbridge in Wiltshire. All would have trudged through the muddy puddles of the unmade road to the Railway Tavern, its dark wooden fittings and brass fixtures reverberating with accents from just about every part of Britain. Across the road the trains would pass with the shriek of a whistle while the hisses, bangs and clanks of the india rubber works provided a constant backdrop to life in Silvertown where at night there were still mysterious flashes of light and strange noises on the marsh – but now their provenance was progress.

      It was not generally a pleasant place to be, however. Silvertown’s remoteness made it difficult to keep order, the surrounding marshes and frequent fogs providing locals with little protection from those with malice in mind. And there were plenty of them, it seems.

      ‘In those days when the neighbourhood was full of disorderly characters, the policeman conspicuously absent, and the houses few and far between, it required some courage to walk the ill-lighted roads after dark,’ wrote Arthur Crouch, secretary of the Gutta Percha company, in a history of the area published at the turn of the twentieth century. Louisa Boyd, the sister of the first vicar of St Mark’s, would help her brother minister to the fledgeling community but made sure to carry a loaded revolver with her when walking the streets after dark.

      In 1875 Dickens’s All the Year Round magazine had visited Silvertown, calling it ‘the dubious region between half-fluid and almost solid water’, and while marvelling at the scale and variety of production at the rubber works the writer also noted ‘near at hand, useful but odiferous gasworks, a shabby railway station’ and that ‘out of a chaos of mud and slime have sprung near lines of cottages, a grim hostelry called The Railway Hotel, huge wharves and the seven acres of now solid ground which form the cause and explanation of the whole curious development’.

      The writer ends by noting how Silvertown is ‘perhaps the gloomiest and most uncomfortable spot in London on a chilly winter evening’.

      Despite this less-than-glowing endorsement of the place, a couple of years later arrived the product for which Silvertown would arguably become best known: sugar.

      When Henry Tate had in 1877 relocated from Liverpool to Silvertown to produce his revolutionary sugar cubes on the site of the old Campbell Johnstone shipyard next door to the Silver’s complex, he was followed four years later from Greenock in the west of Scotland by Abram Lyle & Co, another sugar-based operation producing golden syrup. Although the two men never met, in 1921 the two firms would combine to create Tate & Lyle, the largest sugar refinery in the world, a business whose black-tipped chimneys and towering works dominate Silvertown even today.

      A year after Tate’s arrival, one of Britain’s worst ever maritime disasters washed up on its shores. On the evening of 3 September 1878 the Princess Alice, a pleasure steamer, was returning from Rosherville in Kent with some 700 Londoners who’d enjoyed a warm late summer’s day out by the estuary, when it was rammed by a huge, ancient collier barge, the Bywell Castle, and sank within four minutes. Everyone aboard the Princess Alice ended up in the water; very few came out alive. The raw sewage pouring into the river from the outflow СКАЧАТЬ