If Cable Street raised your expectations then best drop them because this one's a dull walk. I've even walked it twice in the hope of spotting something notable but pretty much drawn a blank. Historywise there is a murderous cleric, so that's something, but one particular street corner will be doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
The B127 really shouldn't be a B Road, at least by national standards. It's a short cut through an estate at the southern end of Victoria Park, half of it one-way only. One end's by Cambridge Heath station, the other's where Old Ford Road crosses the Regent's Canal. What were they thinking?
I'm starting at the busy crossroads on Cambridge Heath Road opposite the railway viaduct. The B127 is the narrowest and least used arm but normally has a stream of vehicles queueing to get out. 200 years ago this was Russia Lane, one of Bethnal Green's quieter sideroads, and the first terrace looks to be of that vintage. Its motley properties were once all shops but have since been converted to residential use with a certain lack of finesse. The minimalist coffee shop on the corner used to be the White Horse pub but has since swapped Whitbread Pale Ale for house espresso. The ex-pub opposite offers no clues across its jet black exterior but is in fact a former strip club called Metropolis which opens every Saturday night for a bop and a jiggle. Its official address however places it on the A107 rather than the B127 so it doesn't count.
Our road's now called Bishops Way and has been since at least the 1940s, so the two signs high up on the wall saying 'Formerly Bishops Road' must be at least 70 years old. Not much else along here is. The huge warehouse housing Bestway Cash & Carry exhibits strong 1980s vibes. Bethnal Student Academy offers English Language teaching in classrooms beneath microsized collective accommodation. Bishops Way Community Centre looks like somewhere you'd once have gone to play table tennis and now leads a new life as a mosque. The only shop on the B127 is a faded Nisa convenience store, except damn even that's officially on a sidestreet so doesn't count either. The telephone number of the dishevelled phone box outside Ponsonby House is (020) 8980 1067, and yes I am getting somewhat desperate for things to write about.
Here comes the posh bit. A splendid terrace of three-storey Victorian villas occupies the last block of Bishops Way, complete with sash windows, little steps up to the front door and chimneypots Mary Poppins could have flown past. The end that got bombed has been rebuilt in sympathetic but insufficiently identical style. By contrast the southern side of the road was less fortunate so is now mostly school playground or blocks of flats with external walkways. It's approximately here that the B127 becomes one-way only (in the opposite direction). This may explain why workmen are currently broadening the pavement to provide a curve suitable only for cyclists, and also the recent appearance of two metal benches more suitable for an unstaffed railway station than a conservation area. For those who like to know which bus routes we're following, sorry, the ubiquitous 309 just misses.
We've reached the interesting street corner, a six-way junction and the focal point of the entire estate. In Tudor times it was the site of the country home of the Bishops of London, the most infamous of whom was Edmund Bonner. Queen Mary charged him to persecute anti-Catholic heretics and he did a frighteningly good job, but Elizabeth I subsequently slung him in prison where he died ten years later. His former palace survived until 1655 and the cluster of buildings that replaced it became known as Bonner Hall. In 1820 the Regents Canal sliced across the estate, very close by, and in 1840 everything to the east of the canal was transformed into Victoria Park. The remainder became an upmarket housing development, one side of which we've just traversed, and the connection across the canal earned the name Bonner Hall Bridge.
Parkgoers still flood across the cast iron bridge, most with bikes, dogs or running shoes. As they funnel through the piazza they entirely ignore the canalside benches optimistically provided down steps to either side, the parkside vista being much more pleasant. Alas all the nicest streets round here are just off the B127, including the one that currently has a heavy fall of cherry blossom across the pavement. I can however mention the former City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Chest whose triangular plot marginally abuts our road. It served as a key cardiac outpost until 2015 and would be 300 flats by now had developers not underestimated the rumpus moving a mulberry tree would cause. Legend says Bishop Bonner grew it, although if it were that ancient it'd be the East End's oldest tree.
And so to Sewardstone Road, the road that tracks the non-towpath side of the Regents Canal. It would've been attractive before it was bombed but is now council houses in a multiplicity of styles, some pretending to be Georgian on the cheap, others blocked as tall as parkside development allows. It's rare to find an independent school in Tower Hamlets but Gatehouse School is one such, having scarpered here from Smithfield in the 1970s. I doubt George Lansbury would be impressed to find the site of his youthful education taken over by an establishment that currently charges £13000 a year in fees (plus £7 extra for breakfast). The road descends gently to a final T-junction beside The Cricketers pub, now The Cricketers apartments, as you should remember from the B118 because we've been here before.
And if you found any of the B127 interesting then trust me, it's all in the research because it wasn't in the walk.
Numerically the next six B Roads were all in the City of London but no longer exist. One was bombed out of existence, one was upgraded to an A Road and the rest were declassified in the 1990s when the Ring Of Steel was introduced. Here are the extinct half dozen I no longer need to write about.
• B128Gresham Street (0.3 miles): This ancient street runs parallel to Cheapside and passes the Guildhall along the way. It linked the A1 to the A501 in a liverytastic way, and beats the B127 into a cocked hat.
• B129Fore Street/Red Cross Street (0.3 miles): The Blitz removed almost every building on these streets bar St Giles Church, in an area since entirely redeveloped as the Barbican estate. Some of Fore Street remains but Red Cross Street is now mostly lake, piazza and world-renowned auditorium.
• B130Old Broad Street (0.3 miles): Heaven knows why the backroad from Liverpool Street station to Threadneedle Street needed to be a B Road but that's what 1920s planners decided. Admittedly Broad Street station was a thing back then, but still no.
• B131Lombard Street (0.2 miles): Other roads which radiated from the Mansion House, now Bank junction, were the A3, A10, A11 and A40. I guess someone thought this minor exit needed its own B Road designation lest it felt left out.
• B132Lower Thames Street → Upper Thames Street (1.2 miles): This got lucky when the City decided to turn it into a major road - part dual carriageway, part tunnel - to connect Blackfriars to the Tower of London. Today it's the A3211 so a much higher number but a more significant letter.
• B133Arthur Street → Monument Street (0.2 miles): This was a brief curve off the B132, climbing from Upper Thames Street then crossing the line of London Bridge, passing the foot of the Monument and descending to Lower Thames Street. It's undriveable today.
B Road numbers sometimes get recycled but these six never have. They could be donated to much longer roads in the north of England as part of a levelling-up process, as befits their numerical significance, but best not give any politicians ideas. At least the B134 survives and is somewhere you'll actually have heard of, indeed may have eaten a curry on, so that'll be bloggage to look forward to.
