East and West Ham Past

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East Ham, in London's East End, had only 18 houses and 43 inhabitants in the 14th century and it had not changed much five centuries later, when in the 1850s the railway came. Farmers and market gardeners grew crops for the 'distant' London market, their houses scattered thinly from Wanstead Flats in the north to just south of the Turnpike Road. Beyond that, bird-haunted marshes stretched all the way form the venerable parish church down to the River Thames, a wilderness of ditches and flood plain. A phenomenal transformation came in the second half of the 19th century as the demands of Britain's growing industries and population led to the use of low-cost land on the marshes for factories and, later, to a house-building boom, as people escaped from the over-crowded city on the railway and came to work in the local industries and trades. This book vividly illustrates the rapid changes in the area, over the last 150 years.