Environmental and Digital Historian
My book West Ham and the River Lea is now out in paperback for $32.95 (Canadian). I am launching the paperback with two events in April. This first in Saskatoon on the 11th and the second in Stratford (West Ham) on the 25th.
Thanks to everyone who came on the walking tour yesterday. It was amazing to see so much interest in the Lea Valley. It was a lot of fun to enjoy a great walk and to share some of the history of this area.
Again we are sorry we did not have a handout for most of you, but we had no idea so many people would show up! Please visit the Lea Valley Drift website for more information about walking in the Lea Valley and look for information on a walk north of Hackney Wick in the near future.
Here are a few more links for places we visited or that might be interesting:
Cody Dock, House Mill, Abbey Mills Pumping Station, a online history of West Ham, and a new history of East London.
Beyond the Olympic Park – the Lower Lea Valley from Hackney Wick to Leamouth
I’ve teamed up with Ralph Ward, a former regeneration advisory for the Olympics and Thames Gateway, to organize a walking tour of the Lea Valley on September 22 during the Open House London weekend. Between my study of the environmental and social history of the Lower Lea Valley and West Ham through to the early twentieth century and Ralph’s wealth of knowledge derived from working in the region during its recent transformation, we’ll provide a broad overview of the the Lower Lea’s history. If you read my recent post on the history of the region, you’ll see that I believe the history needs to be taken into account as a part of the Olympic legacy.
Reposed from ActiveHistory.ca:
A reminder to our readers that you are all invited to the second lecture in the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series, co-hosted with ActiveHistory.ca. The second talk will be on Thursday, April 14th at 7:30PM in Classroom 3 at the Mississauga Central Library (see below the cut for directions).
“From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics.” [part of the pan-Canadian NiCHE Speakers’ Series]
With Dr. Jim Clifford.
The Lower Lea Valley, currently undergoing a massive redevelopment project in perpetration for the next Summer Olympics, underwent a number of equally remarkable transformations as London’s heavy industry migrated to the city’s eastern periphery in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this talk, Jim Clifford will explore some of the findings of his recently defended PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development and discuss some of the challenges this posed for redevelopment.