For my tenth B Road I'm in southeast Hackney on the approach to the Olympic Park (which is a B Road-free zone so this is as close as we'll get). It's an unusually green B Road, at least for London, and will take us past a big rock, a famous football field and a really famous toy factory.
The B112 used to start in Clapton, near the Baths, so was once double the length. If only it still started there I could have told you all about the East End's only National Trust property and the delights of Homerton High Street, but it doesn't so I can't. Instead its western end has been taken over by the A102, the very same road which passes through the Blackwall Tunnel and which was briefly upgraded to motorway standard inbetween. Here in Homerton the A102 suddenly turns right down Kenworthy Road on its way to Hackney Wick, leaving the B112 to continue ahead down Marsh Hill.
Marsh Hill is an actual hill - relatively steep for Hackney but absolutely peanuts in the grand scheme of things. It's had this name for centuries, being the hill that slopes down from Homerton towards Hackney Marshes. Today it's lined by flats, one side being the Linzell estate and the other being the Herbert Butler estate, the latter named after a former Hackney MP. In 2019 local tenants helped create a "pollution-busting garden" by the T-junction which involved planting a hedgerow and trailing ivy up railings to create "a natural contamination barrier", not that I suspect it's even marginally effective.
The road sign at the top of the hill (alerting drivers to the existence of a low bridge) contains the chunkiest black road graphic I've ever seen. Those driving down instead should pay careful attention if the LED display lights up with a frowning "20 Slow Down" message, because a proper speed camera is located a few yards further on which could be a very expensive flash.
At the foot of Marsh Hill is a parade of shops with a buzzy bistro at one end and a 'Convenient Store' at the other. Residents who wish to purchase a dazzling assortment of plastic containers in a variety of sizes and colours are well catered for. The Ikizler Discount Store scores an impressive own goal by spelling Confectionery correctly on its shopfront and incorrectly as Confectionary on the awning immediately underneath. I'd say it's a bit late in the season to be promoting Iced Coffee in your Beer Garden, but patrons of La Mela may be hardier souls than me.
Those 30 acres of grass on the right are Mabley Green, originally part of Hackney Marshes until it was sequestered during WW1 to build a munitions plant. The National Projectile Factory churned out vast numbers of six inch shell casings, cast in furnaces so hot the building had to be open-sided to aid ventilation. After the war the site became playing fields and today it's "an exciting landscaped park" with a few earth mounds in the middle surrounding a single big rock. This 60 tonne chunk of granite arrived from Cornwall in 2008 and is meant for the youthful sport of bouldering (as is its partner in Shoreditch Park back on the B102).
On the other side of Homerton Road it's flats almost all the way - huge behemoth blocks which form the skeleton of the Kingsmead estate. This too used to be Hackney Marshes, at least before the 1930s, because the Victorians sensibly didn't extend their terraced streets down into the floodable bit. Planners later added the Wally Foster Community Centre, a charmless building which doubles up as the local church and still displays a very 1970s version of the Hackney borough logo above its front door. For those who like to know which bus route we're following, both the 308 and W15 run end-to-end.
Homerton Road then runs directly along the southern edge of Hackney Marshes. For most of the week this is the haunt of multiple-dog walkers but on Sunday mornings the football teams descend and life and death matches play out across more than 80 pitches. The weathered steel changingrooms which opened in one corner in 2012 were a huge step up from the original shed. Hackney council hope you haven't spotted their works depot tucked in behind, nor the Travellers' cul-de-sac beside that. The bus lanes along this stretch of road only operate a few hours a day but vehicles rarely dare enter outside these times in case human error triggers a humungous fine anyway.
Nobody lives on the other side of the road because that's Wick Woodland. This 20 acre triangle was planted 25 years ago to mitigate the despoliation caused by carving the A12 dual carriageway through Hackney Wick and has grown up to become a lush resource, indeed the only decent swathe of woodland in this part of East London. Step down from the pavement onto the parallel woody track and you can pretty much guarantee meeting nobody whatsoever all the way down to the end of the road. The B112 terminates at a massive junction by Temple Mills Bridge where the larger A106 meets the dominant A12, and look there's the Velodrome because this is borderline Olympic territory, and that was a lot to have covered in not quite a mile.
