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Canning Town is a town in the London Borough of Newham, East London, England, north of the Royal Victoria Dock. Its urbanisation was largely due to the creation of the dock. The area was part of the ancient parish and County Borough of West Ham. It forms part of the London E16 postcode district.
The area is undergoing significant regeneration , with the building of up to 10,000 new homes.
The area is thought to be named after the first Viceroy of India, Charles John Canning, who suppressed the Indian Rebellion of 1857 about the time the district expanded. The population increased rapidly after the North London Line was built from Stratford to North Woolwich, in 1846. This was built to carry coal and goods from the docks; and when the passenger station was first built it was known as Barking Road. Speculative builders constructed houses for the workers attracted by the new chemical industries established in the lower reaches of the River Lea, and for the nearby Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company and Tate & Lyle refinery.
The industries around the dock were often unhealthy and dangerous. As trade unions and political activists fought for better living conditions and the dock area became the centre of numerous movements with Will Thorne, James Keir Hardie and other later becoming leading figures in the Labour Party. Thorne and others worked and gave speeches at Canning Town Public Hall which had been built in 1894 as the population grew in the southern part of the borough.
Notable black people from Canning Town include footballers Fred Corbett, who played for Thames Ironworks F.C. and its successor team West Ham United; and Jack Leslie, who was called up to play for England, but then dropped without explanation, possibly due to racial prejudice.
The second black West Ham player, was another Canning Town man, John Charles. John Charles became the first black person to represent England at any level when he appeared for the Under 18s, scoring a goal in a 3-1 win over Israel.
John Charles younger brother Clive Charles also played for West Ham. In 1972 West Ham were the first top-flight team to field three Black players. Clive Charles and teammates Clyde Best and Ade Coker featured in a 3-1 home win over Tottenham Hotspur. Clive Charles would go on to manage the United States football team.
A further example of the area's long-standing multi-cultural nature is Indian-born doctor Chuni Lal Katial, who practised in Canning Town for several years from around 1929. Katial was an acquaintance of Mahatma Gandhi and invited him to meet Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous actors in the world, at his surgery in Beckton Road. Gandhi was staying at Kingsley Hall, in nearby Bromley-by-Bow, for the three-month duration of his talks with the UK government on the future of India. Katial, a noted health pioneer, later moved to the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury, in north London, where he became Britain's first south Asian Mayor.
The slum clearances and the devastation of World War II, destroying 85% of the housing stock, led to the preponderance of council estates that characterise the area today. Post-war housing schemes followed the urban planning principles of the garden city movement. As demand for housing grew the first high rise buildings were built in Canning Town in 1961. In 1968 part of Ronan Point, a 22-storey tower block in Newham, collapsed and most of the tall tower blocks built in the area in the early 1960s were eventually demolished or reduced in size.
Alfred Dickens highlighted the severe overcrowding suffered by many of the slum inhabitants as a result of landlord charging high rents and households relying on casual work.
The area is at the western end of the Thames Gateway zone and is currently undergoing a £2.7 billion regeneration project, which includes:
The Olympic Uniform Distribution and Accreditation Centre, which was located in Canning Town, was due to be demolished and replaced with a new industrial estate as part of the Olympic Legacy programme.
In May 2002, Canning Town South was the only ward in the Borough to return a non-Labour councillor. In 2006, residents elected three Christian Peoples Alliance candidates, one of whom was Alan Craig. In 2010, Labour gained all three seats and have held them with significant majorities since.
The Bridge House, a public house named for the 1887 Iron Bridge, was at 23 Barking Road – now demolished. The venue operated during the 1970s and 1980s and was host to The Police, Depeche Mode, Jeff Beck, Billy Bragg, Alexis Korner, Modern Romance, Sham 69, Lindisfarne, The Cockney Rejects, Iron Maiden, Remus Down Boulevard and many other notable acts.Terence Murphy The Bridge House, Canning Town: Memoires of a Legendary Rock and Roll Hangout (2007) A venue bearing the name The Bridge House 2 was opened in Bidder Street in more recent years.
Then in 1965 the area became part of the new London Borough of Newham in Greater London.
London Buses route 5, 69, 115, 147, 241, 300, 309, 323, 330, 474 and night routes N15, N550 and N551 all serve Canning Town at the bus station. Also, route 276 runs on the Canning Town section of Barking Road and serves Star Lane DLR station.
Slum housing
Victorian era
In 1857 Henry Morley published a detailed description of the area in Charles Dickens' Household Words entitled "Londoners over the Border", writing:
"...by the law there is one suburb on the border of the Essex marshes which is quite cut off from the comforts of the Metropolitan Buildings Act;-in fact, it lies just without its boundaries, and therefore is chosen as a place of refuge for offensive trade establishments turned out of the town, - those of oil boilers, gut spinners, varnish makers, printers ink makers and the like. Being cut off from the support of the Metropolitan Local Managing Act, this outskirt is free to possess new streets of houses without drains, roads, gas, or pavement."
Describing the slum housing conditions and its effect on the health of local residents, Morley wrote:
"Rows of small houses, which may have cost for their construction eighty pounds a piece, are built designedly and systematically with their backs to the marsh ditches; ...to or three yards of clay pipe "drain" each house into the open cess pool under its back windows, when it does not happen that the house is built as to overhang it... In winter time every block becomes now and then an island, and you may hear a sick man, in an upper room, complain of water trickling down over his bed. Then the flood cleans the ditches, lifting all their filth into itself, and spreading it over the land. No wonder that the stench of the marsh in Hallsville and Canning Town of nights, is horrible. A fetid mist covers the ground... the parish surgeon... was himself for a time invalided by fever, upon which ague followed. , of course, is one of the most prevalent diseases of the district; fever abounds. When an epidemic comes into the place, it becomes serious in its form, and stays for months. Disease comes upon human bodies saturated with the influences of such air as is breathed day and night, as a spark upon touchwood. A case or two of small pox caused, in spite of vaccination, an epidemic of confluent small pox, which remained three or four months upon the spot."
Morley also describes efforts to improve the housing conditions in the area:
"Two years ago, when application was made by more than a tenth of the rate payers of the parish of West Ham for an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the district, with a view to bringing it under the conditions of the Public Health Act, Mr Alfred Dickens was the civil engineer sent by the general Board of Health as an inspector. His report and the evidence at his inquiry is before us as we write, and it dwells very much upon the state of Canning Town and Hallsville. We learn from this report that the area of the ditches in the parish amounted to not less than one hundred and fifty acres, according to a surveyors book upwards of thirty five years old, and that area has been increased by side cuttings at the railway and new cuttings of open sewer. Disease had cost the parish six hundred pounds in the year previous to the inquiry. There was then, of course, as now, no drainage or paving in Canning Town; the roads in winter were impassable; but the inhabitants were paying (for what they did not get) an eighteen penny rate under the Commissioners Act, not for works done in accordance with it, but "for the expenses of the act". Also, although the parish did not take charge of their roads, they were paying a highway rate for the parishioners elsewhere. One horrible detail in Mr Dickens report has, happily, to be omitted from our sketch. Two years ago, there was in Hallsville and Canning Town no water supply. Good water is now laid on. In all other respects, the old offences against civilised life cleave to the district. The local Board of Health which the inhabitants of the parish sought and obtained, whatever it may have done for Stratford, seems to have done nothing for Hallsville, unless it be considered something to indulge it with an odd pinch of deodorising powder."
20th century
The 1890 Housing Act made the local council responsible for providing decent accommodation, and in the 1890s some of the first council houses were built in Bethell Avenue. However, many of the terraced houses built during the late 19th century were little more than slums and cleared by the council in the 1930s. The council replaced the terraces with the first high-rise blocks.
21st Century
According to Newham London Borough Council, Canning Town and Custom House are among the five per cent most deprived areas in the UK. Residents suffer from poor health, low education and poverty. 17 per cent of the working age population have a limiting long-term illness, 17.5 per cent claim income support and 49.7 per cent of 16- to 74-year-olds have no formal qualifications.
Regeneration project
The consultation and governance mechanism of the currently ongoing regeneration project is underpinning by a partnership between councillors, residents, local businesses and other "partners". According to Newham council:
"The views of residents and businesses is central to the development and delivery of the regeneration initiative and developers will be expected to continue with extensive community consultation and engagement as part of their remit."
Newham council is currently attempting to encourage "re-interpretations" of London's established street and housing forms. The council has identified terraced housing as such housing form, stating that it "continues to have enduring popularity with all types of residents including families and children".
Politics and local government
The area falls within the West Ham and Beckton constituency. The local Member of Parliament is James Asser from Labour. Canning Town Town North and Canning Town South wards are in the London Borough of Newham.
2022 local election
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Culture
Thames Ironworks F.C., the works team of the nearby Ironworks, went on to become West Ham United F.C. after turning professional.
Administrative History
The area was part of the ancient parish of West Ham, in the hundred of Becontree in Essex. It became part of the new County Borough of West Ham in 1900 (The parish and the County Borough had near identical boundaries).
Education
Transport
Canning Town station is served by the Jubilee line and the DLR with services to Bank, Tower Gateway, Stratford International, Beckton and Woolwich Arsenal. Also, Star Lane DLR Station serves the area, with services to Stratford International and Woolwich Arsenal.
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