Forest Gate Freedom Walk

Peter Ashan began a series of Freedom Walks in east London in 2007, during the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. These walks aim to reveal the hidden history of the contribution of people of colour to the east end of London and the struggle against inequality. Below, we feature some aspects of his Freedom Walk of Forest Gate. 

Portrait of Peter in a mural in Wood Street, Walthamstowe

Full details of Peter’s other walks and work can be found in the footnote. 

  

Forest Gate Youth Zone, Woodford Road  

 

Tony Lee Fielding (1944-2006) was born in Jamaica and migrated to England in 1960 to be with his parents in Hackney. 

Forest Gate Youth Zone, where Tony Lee Fielding was a youth worker

He began a career as a youth worker with Waltham Forest Council in 1975. In the mid-1980s, he established Sing and Deliver, which provided opportunities in the performing arts, such as singing and street dance. These activities occurred in youth centres in Waltham Forest and further afield, such as Forest Gate Youth Zone.   

 

The programme included his Inner-College Vocal Search, which took place at various colleges in London.   

  

Eagle and Child Pub, Woodgrange Road  

  

Before it became a pub, The Eagle and Child, now the Woodgrange pharmacy, was a Pleasure Garden and Tea Room dating back to 1744. Venues like this were popular in England during the c18 to c19, where the wealthy could enjoy music, dancing, food, and drink, particularly tea, for a fee. 

Woodgrange Pharmacy, on the site of the Eagle and Child pub/Pleasure Garden and Tea Room

  

The British East India Company began importing tea from China in 1664. The prosperous preferred to add sugar to their tea. This became the main crop enslaved African labour was forced to grow in the Caribbean. Exploited Indian labour on tea plantations meanwhile grew the tea, in what became the British Empire in India.   

  

Portrait of Ranjit Singh 1780-1839, Woodgrange Road   

 

Ranjit Singh was the first Maharaja and founder of the Sikh Empire. The Artful Skecha painted his portrait on the side of a block of flats.  

 

When Ranjit Singh died in 1839 his empire was weakened by rivalry and the East India Company sought to exploit this internal weakness to expand its territory in India. His youngest son, Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh, 1838 to 1893, became, aged five, the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire in 1843, with his mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, ruling on his behalf.  

Portrait of Ranjit Singh on block of flats on Woodgrange Road

  

Two wars between the Sikh Empire and the East India Company (1845 -1846 and 1848- 1849) saw the East India Company victorious, and they renamed the area the North West Frontier Province (of India). 

   

Duleep Singh was exiled to Britain at 15 and befriended by Queen Victoria, who became godmother to several of his children, three of whom he had when married to Bamba Muller (1864 to 1887). Bamba’s mother, from Ethiopia, and her father, from Germany, were suffragettes. 

 

Two of their daughters were socially significant activists in their own right.   

Princess Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh (1871-1942) has been called by the Holocaust Memorial Trust the “Indian Schindler” for her role, when living in Germany, in helping several Jewish people to escape from the Nazi’s, to safety in Britain.   

Princess Sofia Alexandra Duleep Singh (1876-1948) was a particularly well-known suffragette activist in the Women’s Social and Political Union.  

  

Durning Hall Community Centre, Earlham Grove 

   

Newham Monitoring Project (NMP-1980-2016) used Durning Hall for meetings and fundraising events. I remember attending at least one NMP party there, with a female DJ playing music reflecting the diversity of east London, such as Bhangra, Funk, and High Life. 

Newham Recorder reporting the murder of Akhtar Ali Baig

  

NMP brought the diverse communities of east London- White, Black and Asian - together to challenge racism. It was formed in 1980, as part of the Asian Youth Movement after the racist murder of Akhtar Ali Baig as he left East Ham Station. 

   

One of its founders was Gulshun Rehman, who also founded The Newham Asian Women’s Project. (see here and here for further details of the NMP) 

  

Hazel Goldman, Earlham Grove 

  

Among the many diverse communities who have made Newham their home is the Jewish community, escaping anti-Semitism in Europe. Hazel Goldman’s family has lived in Britain since the 1880s. Her grandfather Shmula Peprzhik, upon arriving in England in 1913, had his name anglicised to Harry Goldman. 

Helen Goldman (photo: Forest Mag)

  

The family moved to Forest Gate in the 1950s and were members of the Earlham Grove Synagogue (consecrated in 1911—demolished in 2004—see here for further details). It was the first in Essex and the largest in Newham. 

   

Hazel attended Chelsea School of Art and worked for Freeform Arts Trust, leading its Community Design and Technical Services Department and has continued to work within community arts ever since. From 1984 to 2002 she was an Executive Member of Pepetual Beauty Carnival Association in Stoke Newington, leading its design team, as well as supporting the development of the first accredited courses in art and design, through carnival arts at a UK college. 

  

Her work can be seen in the Forest Gate Community Garden on Earlham Grove.   

  

Newham Black Performing and Visual Arts Workshop (NBP&VAW) MacDonalds drive-in Romford Road 

   

The N.B. P & V. A. W. was founded in 1980 by Tony Cheeseman, who became its first Development Worker.  His co-founders were Pearla Boyce, Harian Henry, Peter Mavunga and Nathalie Pierre. Benjamin Zephaniah was the organisation’s patron.  

Tony Cheeseman

 

Its workshop tutors included Hakim Adi: History; Rosette Bushell-Adi: Dance; Sandra Agard: Poetry; Joe Blackman: Creative Writing and Colin Paddy: Sculpture. 

   

One of its aims was to give African Caribbean youth opportunities to learn about and develop their skills in the arts. Its original headquarters was above a bicycle shop at 324 to 326 Romford Road. It is now Forest Gate MacDonalds.  

MacDonald's, Romford Road, site of NBP&VAW

  

Workshops were organized in drawing, painting, creative writing, spoken word poetry, singing, dance, and Black history.  

 

From 1986 to 1989, they collaborated with the Newham African Caribbean Centre on 627 to 633 Barking Road, now known as the Barking Road Community Resource Centre.   

    

Clapton Community FC, Disraeli Road   

 

Walter Daniel John Tull was born 28^h April 1888 in Folkestone and died on 25^h March 1918 near Favreuil Pas-de-Calais Aged 29. He was a professional football player and officer in the British army. His father was Daniel Tull, an African Caribbean, born in Barbados and his mother Alice Elizabeth Palmer, white English, born in Kent. Walter was soon orphaned and faced and overcame many adversities, including racism, throughout his life to become an inspiration for justice and equality.   

Walter Tull

 

He played football for amateur club Clapton at the Old Spotted Dog Ground from 1908 to 1909 and was in the team that won the FA Amateur Cup, the London County Amateur Cup, and the London Senior Cup. The club is proud of the part he played in its history and will soon name the passage behind the ground Walter Tull Way. There will also be an information panel with a QR code erected on the ground, directing visitors to more information about him. 

  

From 1909 to 1911, he played for Tottenham Hotspur in the 1st Division of the FA Football League, making him one of the first Black outfield football players to appear in the league. From 1911 to 1914, he played 111 games for Northampton Town in the Southern League, which the legendary Herbert Chapman then managed. In 1917, he signed up to play for the Glasgow Rangers, becoming their first Black player. 

  

He joined the British Army in 1914, becoming the first Black officer to lead white troops into battle, rising in the ranks to become a 2nd Lieutenant, and died in battle.   

  

  

West Ham Park 

    

The park owes its existence to the perseverance of Dr Gustav Pagenstecher (1829-1916).  He was born in Westphalia Germany to a Franco/Caribbean mother and his wealthy German father, who died when Gustav was 5 years old.  

Gustav Pagenstecher (1896)

 

Gustav was home-educated. It is believed he left Germany in 1852 for England to avoid military service.  In England, he worked as a tutor for a family in Norfolk, and later became a tutor for MP Sir Edward Buxton’s family. He joined Buxton in visiting Ham House (the site of what was to become West Ham Park) in 1860 to meet Buxton’s Gurney relations. He was also Buxton’s secretary in Parliament. 

  

In the 1870s, John Gurney, owner of the Ham House estate, was keen to sell it, as the family was in financial difficulties due to the collapse of their bank. John Gurney asked Gustav for help selling the estate. He persuaded Gurney to consider turning the estate into a public park.  

 

Gustav identified the Corporation of London as the potential owners and managers of the park, and found other wealthy donors willing to contribute to the cost of creating a public park. 

  

He was the deputy chairman of the Parks Committee until 1916 and wrote the first history of the Park. From 1886, he lived in Cedar Cottage at 206 The Portway, adjacent to the park. 

  

He regularly returned to Germany during summers and in 1914 returned to England to find that he was expected to report daily to West Ham Police Station as an alien. He was caught up in the anti-German policies of the British Government during World War One. 

   

The way he was treated during this period is said to have contributed to his death two years later. There is very little information about him in the park, apart from a small plaque in the Pagenstecher Winter Garden opened in May 2015. (See here and here for more details on Pagenstcher and the Park) 

 

Footnote. Peter’s original Freedom Walks were of Leyton, Leytonstone, and Walthamstow. He then added walks around Ridley Road, Hackney, Green Street and Newham (which we hope to feature soon), and Battersea. In 2023, he added walks in Chingford North and Chingford Mount. 

 

Peter has also produced a book, Freedom Walk: The roots of diversity in Waltham Forest, to support his work. You can obtain this from him at the email address below. 

 

Peter welcomes enquiries from local community groups interested in him providing a Freedom Walk for them, at: peter.ashan.pa@gmail.com  

 

 

Woodgrange Road developments

What, a century ago, was Forest Gate’s thriving shopping centre (see here) and here) on Woodgrange Road, is planned to be host to over 300 new or refurbed flats on four different sites. We’ve reported on some of these developments before, but now – five years later – we bring the latest on the status of Warden’s Reach (the old Barry’s block), Durning Hall, the Methodist church and Donald Hunter House.

Recently there has been, or soon will be, significant changes in the ownership and status of each development, but relatively little concrete evidence of real progress in providing new homes for people, in all but one of them.

Warden’s Reach (39a-49a Woodgrange Road)

This project has been considerably delayed since planning permission for it was first granted in 2017 (see here) to developers, London Ironworks, who planned the site as a private, commercial development. Originally scheduled for construction in 2018-2019, it is, four years on, only now nearing completion.

Having gained planning permission, London Ironworks sold it on to Gateway Housing Association for an unidentified sum. Gateway made some changes to the proposal reflecting its new status as a social housing project, and then sold it on to Latimer Homes – another social housing provider - and part of the Clarion Group, the country’s largest owner of “affordable homes”. Clarion has a history stretching back to the 19^th century, when its founder, William Sutton, bequeathed what would be £230m in today’s terms for the construction of “affordable homes”.

The nearly-completed Warden’s Reach comprises of two blocks, Holly House and Epping House, which between them consist of 78 flats – a mix of one-bed, two-bed and three-bed units. They are mainly of the shared-ownership model, the purchase of which is largely restricted to first time buyers with relatively modest incomes.

Typically, purchasers will “buy” 25% of the value of a flats and “rent” the other 75%, with an option to purchase a larger share, over time, as their income allows. This could mean initially finding a deposit of 5% of the total price, borrowing 20% on a mortgage and paying rent for the other 75%.

Warden's Reach - nearing completion

Although branded as “affordable”, prices are not cheap. The full price of one-bed flats is between £364k-£372k, of two-bed apartments from £480k - £632k and for the three-bed accommodation, £665k.

It would cost £158k, up-front, to secure the initial 25% purchase of a typical £632k 2-bed flat. The monthly outgoings would then likely be £2,050, consisting: £950 mortgage repayment, £850 rent (for the 75% not purchased) and £250 service charges.

The flats are being sold via a pop-up estates office on Woodgrange Road, facing Sebert Road. According to the Warden’s Reach website about a third of the flats were sold within the first two months of them becoming available for sale.

The ground floor of Warden’s Reach is for retail and Latimer has recently sought a purchaser of it, for around £5m. The company has already secured a 30-year lease with supermarket chain Lidl for the greater part of it, with a shorter lease to Costa, for a coffee shop and a very short lease to a local retail beauty outlet. The retail units are expected to be up and running by April this year.

Donald Hunter House

This is the eight-storey pink-clad building at the foot of Woodgrange Road, above the library and Iceland store. Following WW2 bomb damage to the area, the Post Office constructed an office block in 1958, Telephone House, as a sub-regional headquarters of their then telephony arm. Following restructuring and privatisation of the telephone service - rebranded BT - the building became surplus to requirements and was sold off in 1999. We have previously featured this property here.

The old Telephone House

It was bought by Peabody Unite plc (a joint venture between the Peabody Housing Association and the Unite Group, providers of key worker and student accommodation) to provide accommodation for upto 256 key workers (mainly hospital and education staff), and renamed Donald Hunter House, after a local well-known doctor.

The accommodation was poor, cramped, expensive and inconvenient for hospital staff getting to work, so they sought other more suitable and often less expensive accommodationthe elsewhere. As a result, it was under-occupied. In 2014 Newham council was subject to two court judgements. One accepted the fact that the building was unsuitable for children,  because of its lack of communual play facilities. The other forced the council to introduce a variation in designated usage, to effectively permit the property to house economically inactive homeless families!

The accommodation was subsequently purchased by an off-shore company, Guernsey-based Stratos Holdings for £15.7m.  As an off-shore entity, it is unlikely to pay UK taxes on its earnings. Stratos is,  in turn, owned by a huge Luxembourg-based company which specialises is property acquisition, the ownership of which is also “off-shored”, to avoid tax liability.

That Luxembourg company - Grand City Properties S.A. – is one of the largest residential property companies in Europe, with over £11bn in assets and profits in excess of £600m in 2021 alone. The founder of this is Yakir Gubay, who has a net worth of £3.7bn, and according to Forbes, is the world’s 785^th richest man.

Stratos sub-let Donald Hunter House to Omega lettings, itself a subsidiary of a company called Tando, a commercial company which specialises in supplying accommodation to local authorities in which to house homeless families, at some profit to themselves. 

Donald Hunter house, above the library and Iceland

Because of a quirk in funding arrangements, Tower Hamlets council is able to pay more rent to the landlords for this type of accommodation than Newham, so Omega let the property to them, with Newham having to pick up the social care and education costs of its Tower Hamlets homeless residents.

Omega charged local councils upto £70 per night to house families there in totally unsuitable accommodation. Despite this, hosting councils (Newham in this case) have fewer rights to clamp down on unhealthy and environmentally unsound conditions in properties like Donald Hunter House than they do in regular private or socially rented accommodation. Children are forced to live in properties with broken lifts and stairwells hosting drug use and other anti-social behaviour and there is little the local authority can do to impose improvement orders on the owners/managers.

Following Grenfell in 2017 Donald Hunter House was identified as a vulnerable building and remained so, untreated, for a further two years.

Donald Hunter House, unsurprisingly, gained a poor reputation, and attracted adverse press attention, for having inadequate and cramped facilities, sub-standard maintenance and poor public hygiene (vermin and flea infestation etc.).

In an  effort to address all of these unsatisfactory conditions, Newham Council purchased the property in June 2023 for £31m - twice the price Stratos paid less than a decade earlier. Stratos incurred no Capital Gains Tax liability (a saving of over £3m), because of its off-shore status. Newham’s purchase, however, gives it the ability to house its own rather than Tower Hamlets’ homeless families in the block, for the future.

Newham has subsequently committed £1.4m to address some of its most pressing needs (damaged windows and roof etc) and improve the lot of its residents. This expenditure is not sufficient to enable a full refurbishment of the block, that may await the outcome of the council’s consideration of potential longer-term full redevelopment proposals, but should ensure more satisfactory accommodation for the families living within it.

The homeless families living in Donald Hunter House are often targetted for public absue as scroungers etc, while its long term owners (Stratos/Grand City) and site managers (Omega/Tando) have  provided sub-standard accommodation and remain largely hidden behind a complex web of ownership, to extract millions in tax-free profit from the public purse.

Donald Hunter House is not unique in Britain, it is symptomatic of a wider issue. Local authorities in the UK spent £1.7billion on temporary accommodation in 2021. The profiteering within the sector by firms like Omega/Tando/Stratos/Grand City is a direct consequence of the contraction of social housing in the country over the last four decades.

(We would like to thank Lea Sitkin, a local resident and Social Scientist at Westminster University, for help with this section of the article. If anyone wishes to reach out and talk about temporary accommodation, she would be pleased to hear from you. She can be reached via L.Sitkin@westminster.ac.uk or via X (Twitter): @LeaMarikeSitkin)

Woodgrange Methodist church

This blog reported on the redevelopment proposals for the now-derelict church here, in March 20218. The original church was built on the site towards the end of the nineteenth century, but was destroyed by bombing during World War 11 (see here). It was subsequently rebuilt in the 1950’s but later faced a large turnover in membership with differing demands from the congregation for the buildings – to become less formal and more multi-purpose. 

The church before the hoardings went up

The Methodists, at a local and national level, began discussions over a decade ago on plans to redevelop the facility. They quickly concluded that the only way to pay for the modern multi-purpose, flexible church building they wanted would be to reduce the footprint of the church itself and build flats on the rest of the site. As we reported in 2018, Pigeon Investment Management – a Suffolk based company established in 2008 - agreed to develop the site and appointed Alaistair Watson of Broadchurch Asset Management to undertake local consultations for their proposals.

Pigeon established a subsidiary company, which later became Pigeon (Forest Gate) Ltd. This currently has two directors, William Stanton one of the founding directors of the parent company, who is a director of 33 other companies, some within the group and others not and Andrew Boyce, who appears to hold 50% of the shares in the Forest Gate company, He is not a member of the main Pigeon board, but is, however, a director of 32 other active companies.

Watson of Broadchurch, as we noted in 2018, was an unconvincing and poor advocate for both Pigeon and the proposed development. He told us that planning permission would be granted within 2-3 months and construction would take upto 18 months, meaning that the new flats and church would be open for business in early 2020! Four years on, we are waiting for the first brick to be removed from the old building.

Companies House records show that Watson has been associated with 45 companies over recent years; 18 have been dissolved, he has resigned from a futher 23 and is only currently active in the remaining four.

The Methodists’ and Pigeon’s proposed redevelopment sought to relocate the church building to the Osborne Road end of the site and build around 33 flats on a block reaching six stories high, at the Claremont Road side of it.

How the developers saw the site, post construction

The church itself was to feature a high spire, which would accommodatethe relocated Grade 2 listed Peter Peri statue of the “The Preacher” which currently adorns the wall of the existing church.

There was a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing between the developers and council over the proposals – extending to in excess of 150 documents - before planning permission was eventually granted in July 2020. This substantially agreed to the original proposals, but reducing the number of flats to be built to 31 and ensuring that there was a wider range of sizes of flats on the development.

The abandoned church has subsequently attracted squatters, anti-social behaviour and has been affected by at least two fires. In an effort to reduce this activity, hoardings have been placed around it for the last three years.

And they have not been productive years, as far as the site has been concerned,

We spoke to William Straton, the main Pigeon director associated with the Methodist church project. He told us that Pigeon pulled out of the deal about 18 months ago, because the numbers ceased to stack up for them. He said that the original deal was tight, in affordability terms, and that subsequent price rises in building material costs and interest rates had made it an unattractive project for them. He also indicated that the Methodist church had been difficult to deal with and that the project was one that with hindsight he regretted his involvement with. 

A CGI view from on high

Pigeon (Forest Gate) Ltd remains an active company and he is still its main director. It is, however, sitting on considerable losses incurred during the planning process for the Methodist church. The intention is to use this company as a vehicle to manage another, profit- making deal, change its name and offset those accrued profits against the Woodgrange Road losses. This is all perfectly lawful.

The approval for the planning application for the site expired in July 2023 and the planning department has confirmed there has been no new application for the site, nor a request to grant an extension for the original approval. All of which means that a new set of proposals will need to be submitted to permit any development on the site at all. That could be a lengthy process, given the requirement to undertake local public consultation for any new plans.

Meanwhile, Broadchurch, the company that undertook the first consulation, was liquidated in December 2023 at the request of its creditors, among which is HMRC, which was owed in excess of £100,000 by the company. 

We spoke with the Methodist church at its London District level and its has a new property manager who was able to confirm that there are currently no plans for the site, in terms of its immediate development. The church at local, regional and national level will “soon” be undertaking discussions to help determine its future.

This could clearly take some while; there then may be the disposal and sale of the site outright, or the appointment of developers to come up with new proposals for a new scheme, which in turn would need planning permission and a construction period.

So – we are looking at a likely minimum of five years before anything approaching a solution can be delivered for this eyesore. All highly undesirable for local residents, who will have suffered a Methodist shaped blot on the Forest Gate landscape for upto 15 years.

Durning Hall

Durning Hall is run by the Aston Mansfield charity, which has been in Newham for over 130 years, catering mainly for the needs of families and children. We have covered the history of Durning Hall on this site before (see here). The Hall and associated buildings are yet another post-war Forest Gate development in desperate need of replacement or renewal. Its website says that “without significant work, the site is financially unsustainable.” 

Durning Hall - financially unsustainable

The trustees of the charity hope that its redevelopment (running from the corner of Earlham Grove to, but not including, the Post Office delivery office, and along Woodgrange Road to, but not including, the Co-op) will mean that the charity can continue to work in Newham, providing resources to help it to support children, young people and families within the borough. As with the Methodist site, the theory is that the income raised by the residential development will pay for the not-for-profit work they wish to continue.

Following extensive consultations by Durning Hall, both before and during the pandemic, Newham council has granted planning permission for revised proposals for the site’s redevelopment. Durning Hall’s website states that they wish to “redevelop the site in partnership with an organisation with development expertise” and hope to appoint such a company by April this year. The expectation is that once started, the construction work will take at least three years.

There are indications that planning blight for the footprint of the site has already kicked in. Just this week, Malchem the chemists' was forced to vacate its premises and move 150 yards further south on Woodgrange Road, because Durning Hall would not grant them a lease extension. Whether the now vacant shop stays boarded up or becomes host to pop up shops remains to be seen, but the writing is on the wall and no building within the perimeter of the scheme is likely to experience a facelift until construction work commences. 

It is to be hoped that Durning Hall apply greater due diligence and find more suitable partners than the Methodist church has, to date, for its Woodgrange Road building, or completion could be a long way off. The charity is at least more realistic in providing times scales for construction and completion of the project.

 

Tired looking shops on Woodgrange Road - to go!

The proposals are to construct 78 high quality homes, including 27 (35%) “affordable” ones – though no indicative prices for any have yet been supplied. They also include provision for community facilities, incorporating a “Youth Enterprise Pop-up Space” a creative children’s playspace and four shops on Woodgrange Road, to replace those eight that will be demolished.

Although the Co-op and delivery office are not included in the plans, Newham has already designated those sites for re-development. It seems possible that once Lidl has opened 100 metres away, the Co-op will struggle to remain viable, which could will trigger a sell on of the the shop for further development. The delivery office has already been earmarked for sale and redevelopment by the Post Office – a company in desperate need to raise money to pay the costs of its scandalous treatment of sub-postmasters.

CGI view of how the development will look from Woodgrange Road

The extensive consultations around Durning Hall’s original accommodation proposals resulted in some modifications to them, which laid the basis for the planning consent granted. Originally Durning Hall wanted a 12-storey building on the site. That has been scaled back to a 10-storey, maximum, building on Woodgrange Road, gradually reducing to six storeys on Earlham Grove.

The view from Earlham Grove

The 78 homes will consist: 4 studio flats, 23 one-bed flats, 35 two-bed flats and 16 3-bed units. There will be a communual courtyard and a designated play area for 5 – 11 year olds. The development, consistent with council conditions, will be car-free, except for 3 disabled parking bays. There will, however, be a significant amount of cycle parking space.

There is no indication, at this stage, of the likely costs of the new flats that will be built.

Conclusion

The fate of some of these developments over the last decade has been almost a metaphor for the state of the country over the period. An essential need for all people has been hijacked by a combination of absentee greedy tax avoiding speculators and incompetent or ill-suited developers, fiddling and delaying in the pursuit of gain to the detriment of the local public realm and basic human requirements. It is to be hoped that the same fate does not befall the Durning Hall site.

Racism in Forest Gate in the 1970s and 1980s Part 1 - the scene is set, as the attacks begin

The demonstrations outside Forest Gate police station in June 2017 protesting about the death of Edson da Costa, following police action, brought back memories of similar demonstrations over thirty years ago.

This is the first of a two part post recalling those times, often through the eyes of participants, or contemporary observers. We are almost wholly indebted to a long out-of-print booklet: Newham - the Forging of a Black Community for the contents of these articles.  Full details of the publication can be found in the footnote.

A re-telling of these events from a generation ago makes for grim reading today. Some of the locations referred to in the story below now have different uses - indeed, the old Forest Gate police station, itself, is long gone - but the events surrounding them were truly dreadful, and barely credible thirty years later.

One or two of Newham's elder statesmen today emerge from this re-telling with considerable credit, notably former councillor Conor McCauley and current GLA member Unmesh Desai. They were pioneers for a better, anti-racist, borough, often swimming against the tide of considerable establishment bigotry and prejudice.

Unmesh Desia in 1980 - sporting
a very Che Guevara look

Unmesh Desai - today. In the 1970's
and 80's a leading figure in local fight
against racism in Newham

By way of background. According to the 1981 census 27% of Newham residents then lived in a household headed by someone of "New Commonwealth" background - about half of whom were Asian and a quarter Afro-Caribbean. The figure had been less than 1% in 1951.

The Asian community was largely concentrated around East Ham and Upton Park, while Afro-Caribbean residents mainly centred in, or around, Forest Gate.

The attractions of these areas to newcomers were, as ever, the presence of low skilled jobs and cheap, private sector, rented accommodation.

Work could be found in places like Ford's in Dagenham, some of the factories in the south of the borough, dependent on imports brought in through the still active local docks (such as Canning Town's Tate and Lyle) and the factories in and around the Lea Valley - subsequently closed to make way for the Olympic Park.

Newham Council in the 1970's and 80's operated a blatantly racist housing allocations policy. In 1975, for example, Cllr Bill Watts - sometime Housing chair - openly admitted that the Council had changed its housing allocation policy (via the points system) to avoid housing Asian families.

Bill Watts, one-time Newham
Labour deputy leader, admitted
to fixing the housing points
allocation system to
discriminate against Asian families

Largely excluded from council housing estates that dominated the south of the borough, newcomers drifted into often over-crowded private sector accommodation in the older Victorian properties that dominated the north of Newham - in places like Forest Gate.

Attempts by immigrant groups to establish houses of worship, temples, mosques and Gudwaras were often frustrated by hostile "host" communities and closed down by Newham Council for reasons of overcrowding, or a failure to gain planning permission.

Durning Hall - has a proud record of being
 one of few places to welcome black and Asian
 organisations, to organise against
racism during the 1970's

Hindus, at least, were offered a welcoming home in Durning Hall in the 1970's. The Hall's management committee extended their hospitality to hosting meetings of the Indian Association of East London, which attempted to organise demonstrations and petitions to MPs against the 1971 Immigration Act - when other bodies had refused them permission to rent their premises.

Above and below, two reports from Newham Recorder in the same edition, 1 April 1971. Top: vicar of St Barnabas church in Little Ilford claiming people who objected to them selling the premises to a Sikh organisation were doing so for racist reasons.  Below: report claiming Newham North East Conservative club refused membership to an applicant on the grounds that he was Asian

Undeterred by the local bigotry (above)
local anti-racists march against the
Immigration Bill, in April 1971, following
organisation meeting in Durning Hall
 (see above)

Durning Hall's hospitality, however, was the exception. Just a mile away, in February 1972, the landlord of the now-closed Three Rabbits pub in Manor Park (see photo, below) was referred to the then Race Relations Board for practicing a "colour bar".

Former Three Rabbits pub operated
a colour bar in the 1970's

Racial violence was never far away. In April 1971 a flaming plastic bottle was thrown through the front door window of a house in Forest Gate, where 10 Afro-Caribbean people lived. Forty minutes later, petrol was poured through the letter box of an Asian family in Manor Park.

Jerry Westall, The Community Relations Officer at Newham International Community (NIC) - the forerunner of what was to become the Community Relations Council - condemned the incidents and said they were the work of the (fascist) National Front.

Newham Recorder, reporting Jerry
Westall's suspension from work

He was promptly suspended from his post by the Community Relations Commission and criticised by the chair of the NIC (a Labour councillor) for making "irresponsible statements detrimental to race relations" and a report he had compiled into right wing extremism in Newham was suppressed.

Education proved another arena for racist tensions. Nationally, the government had decreed that 'no one school should have more than 30% of immigrants'. Because of the racial profile of parts of Newham, this meant that black and Asian students were almost being bussed around the borough, in order to comply. Black children were the prime victims. In October 1973 Newham's Director of Education reported that of the 200 children who had not been allocated school places, "137 were immigrants".

A 1971 survey by the East London West Indian Association found that 15% of black children in the borough were being placed in ESN schools.

Newham's attempts to deal with the discrimination were clumsy. In 1972 it sponsored John Freeman, head of Earlham Primary school, to go on a fact-finding mission to the Caribbean to find an explanation for his observation that "Asiatic people have a higher IQ than West Indians".

382 Katherine Road, today - what was the
hq of the anti-racist Newham Monitoring
Project in the 1980's

In the late 1970's, two schools in the south of Newham, Letharby (now Brampton) and Pretoria (now Eastlea) gained notoriety  for "Paki-bashing" and "Nigger-bashing", and many incidents of racist violence were recorded.

The National Front (NF) recruited locally in workplaces and among football clubs. It boasted that at West Ham it had its largest newspaper sales. An NF member, who recruited outside Upton Park told Skin - a London Weekend Television programme:

We used to buy the kids a few drinks, wind them up and send them off to smash up a Paki's home. We just sat back. They did it all for us.

Local black activist, Kenny Pryce - see the second article in this series for his family's experiences - recalled:

A white kid at school took me to see West Ham one Saturday. It was a nightmare. There was a black player, Clyde Best, and there were so many songs about him, and people chanting "you're a dirty black bastard" and throwing bananas. I didn't watch the match, because I was so busy watching what was going on around me.

In the May 1974 local elections the NF polled 29% of the vote in Hudson ward and 25% in Canning Town - both in the south of the borough. In the general election, six months later, 5,000 Newham residents voted NF - the highest of any borough in the country.

The council was slow to respond. It was a closed, self-interested, body. In an article that may sound familiar to observers of Newham council's recent past, the London Journal, in May 1978 found decision making in Newham to be highly centralised, with little policy discussion and committee meetings held in private, with few public meetings. The article concluded:

The leading members felt, trustee-like, that having been elected, they had a mandate to rule as they judged best, and they brokered no challenge to their authority.

Racism was prevalent among many of the old guard in the Labour leadership.

One up-and-coming change agent was the then young Cllr Conor McCauley. In 1991 he described the atmosphere of the late 1970's within the old Labour establishment:

During one council meeting, (Cllr) Bert Taylor shouted up at Asians sitting in the public gallery 'Well, you can fuck off, back to Pakistan where you came from'. And at a local Labour party ward meeting a former mayor of Newham (and a magistrate) started talking about 'the coons', how they smelt, how he couldn't stand the smell of their cooking and how, if he had his own way, he would send them back to where they came from.

Recently retired ex-councillor Conor
McCauley remembers the bad old days of
a racist Newham Council

A young Asian community activist played a significant role in raising black and Asian consciousness at the time - and in organising resistance to the prevailing racist orthodoxies.

It was the present Newham Greater London Assembly Cllr, Unmesh Desai, of the Newham Monitoring Project. The role of that organisation - and others - in leading the anti-racist fight-back will be considered in the second article in this feature.

Here Unmesh is, providing the Newham context for which the anti-racist resistance was activated in the 1980's.

There were decaying dock areas with communities alienated from and neglected by the local council, but very proud of their working class heritage. As they saw the docks closing around them and the rise of middle class areas, many of them moved out to Essex, and beyond.

Those who remained were resentful, and inward looking: they came to believe, that despite all the evidence, that the council was bending over backwards for all the 'newcomers', who also happened to be black.

Footnote This post has been largely based on the publication: Newham - the Forging of a Black Community, published by the Newham Monitoring Project and the Campaign Against Racism and fascism, in 1991. It is sadly out of print, though second hand copies occasionally become available.