Some London streets are a shadow of their former selves. Gift Lane is one of these. You'll find it in the heart of West Ham - the medieval village rather than the football club - tucked off the main road between Stratford and Plaistow. All Saints' Church is 12th century, in part, with a battlemented tower and an embarrassment of historic monuments within, quite the local treasure. Gift Lane is the next road past the churchyard, before the bend in Church Street, and marked by a turreted pub on the corner. Once it ran 100 yards north to Portway, with almshouses and a smithy, but what remains is a stubby cul-de-sac terminating at a locked gate amid a council estate. [1897 map][2019 map]
The pub on the corner is The Angel, or was The Angel, rebuilt in its current form in 1910. The transformation to spiky Mock Tudor was overseen by landlord Harry Davies, dispensing Charrington Ales and Stouts to a thirsty working class populace. A ghost sign for Fine Old Douro Port (from three shillings a bottle) is still half-visible daubed across the side wall. The pub limped into the 21st century as a dubious gay bar, its windows blacked out, then closed for good and is now some kind of residential melange. Downstairs is boarded and graffitied, upstairs cracked and peeling, and the fading angel on the inn sign anything but heavenly.
The great thing about what's left of Gift Lane is that it's cobbled, the council never having had any need to upgrade this brief dead end. Look down and you could be staring at a road surface smeared with coaldust and manure from horses and carts, were it not for the double yellow lines now painted along each side. The northern half of Gift Lane, including ten terraced houses, fell foul of the postwar expansion of West Ham Primary School, which remarkably opened on this site in 1731. A lot of the surrounding area was also replaced by typically-Newham flats, for which read unexciting, and even the Roger Harriss Almshouses look like social housing. They're now Gift Lane's sole surviving residential presence.
In the few minutes I spent here I got to enjoy the liveliest on-street bust-up I've seen since moving to London. A man in a grubby grey anorak emerged from Gift Lane, which takes some doing, and unintentionally bumped into a woman emerging from a nearby flat. She screamed, then threw herself at him and yelled "Don't you come fucking fucking with us", deftly using her swear word as both adverb and verb. He stood and took the tirade on the chin, as if knowingly guilty. Her broadside continued. "And get your shit out of our house," she spat, before striding back indoors with head held high. He shuffled off swiftly, and the learner driver who'd been doing a three point turn alongside reapplied his foot to the pedal and attempted to manoeuvre away. Such is Gift Lane, still very much of the Present.
Carol Street NW1
This one shouldn't be called Carol Street - it started out as Caroline - but I'll take it all the same. We're in Camden Town, east of the tube station, close to where Camden Street crosses Camden Road. In 1800 this was Lower Meadow, if you can imagine such a pastoral scene ever existed in Tourist Central. The building revolution arrived courtesy of the Earl of Camden, the local landowner, who urbanised the fields on the east side of the high street and named the new roads after the people in his life. Pratt Street took his surname, Bayham Street his viscounty and Greenland Street, unexpectedly, the name of his architect. He also had two daughters, Georgiana and Caroline, and they were gifted one street each. [1895 map][1951 map][2019 map]
Caroline Street, now Carol, is the L-shaped one. Its Georgian terraces begin only after the back gardens on the main road end, and although they don't look vast they do go for a million apiece. Front gardens are tiny, but several residents have managed to cram in attractive floral displays as well as the necessary two bins. Number 4 used to be a pub, The Prince of Wales, but is now the Women+Health centre offering "affordable therapies" including reflexology, acupuncture and meditative relaxation. Men are allowed through the doors on Thursday and Friday evenings. The blue plaque out front isn't official but was added in memory of former director Boo Armstrong (1974-2012), and hell yes I can see why.
At the bend in the road Carol Street takes a light industrial turn, with a row of jagged-roofed units offering workshop space to perfumiers, mechanics and online advertisers. One of them, packshot.com, do those close-up shots of food that look so appetising on screen but might just be enhanced with glycerin or shaving foam. Nextdoor workmen are swarming over a hole in the ground that'll soon be an artist's home/studio, and regularly nipping out to the corner shop for supplies. That'll be Greenland News, on Greenland Road, whose fascia suggests they do Tobacco and Phone Cards, but whose window confirms progression to vaping and Lycamobile. Bollard fanciers will approve of the thick ribbed post rising from the pavement opposite.
And yet Carol Street shouldn't still be here, it should be open space. A postwar plan setting down minimum recreational acreage led to proposals to extend St Martin's Gardens nextdoor, the council rubberstamping demolition proposals in 1955, 1960 and 1972. They were eventually persuaded against by a local campaign group, who successfully argued that Regent's Park was near enough, and Carol Street duly survived. The Gardens are delightful enough in their original form, a landscaped former cemetery with higgledy gravestones and a Celtic cross - the perfect view for odd-numbered residents of Carol Street sat in their first floor conservatories or on second floor balconies. In dulce jubilo.
