Early Industrial Development on the Lower River Lea
The development of railways [1839] and docks [1855] in the parish of West Ham corresponded with significant industrial development in the mix of wetlands and rural landscapes on London’s suburban fringe in the mid-nineteenth century. That being said, the Lower Lea and the parish of West Ham had some industrial development centuries earlier. Along side the early industry, human transformation of the physical landscape began with marsh reclamation for agriculture, which also started centuries before the suburban and industrial boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. To fully understand the landscape transformation of the nineteenth century we need to better understand the long history of human labour that transformed the wetlands of the Lower Lea through to the early nineteenth century.
To accomplish this goal, I’ve been doing some work to map the early industrial transformation on the Lea, before the heavy industry began to arrive in the mid-19th century. I found that the Lower Lea was a site of industry at the time of the Norman Invasion of England and the Domesday Book. Millers on the Lower Lea used the tides to grind grain and other products. These mills remained in place during the early nineteenth century and at least the Three Mills remained operational through to the twentieth century. This long continuity of industry in the parish of West Ham foreshadowed the massive industrial growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. New industries, such as Calico Printing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then the chemical and animal rendering industries of the nineteenth centuries started near the old mill sites, before spreading along the banks of the Stratford Back Rivers. The GIS map below provides a conservative estimate of the industrial footprint near Stratford High Street in 1810 .
