After a brief respite in outer London, my next B Road takes us straight back to Tower Hamlets. It links Stepney to the Bow Roundabout, which also makes it the closest any B Road has yet come to my house. That means this is really familiar territory, for me if not necessarily for you, so forgive me if I focus a bit more on some of the associated minutiae.
The B140 starts at a double mini-roundabout halfway down the B121 in the historic heart of Stepney, not that it looks at all ancient today. The youth centre on one side is barely ten years old whereas the green bulk of Stepney Green Mathematics and Computing College was squeezed out of the last dregs of New Labour's BSF budget, before which it had a vaguely normal name. I can't decide if the young adult I see exiting reception for a smoke is a member of staff or just a beardy sixth former. A few yards down is the first of ten zebra crossings on the B140, with the next three due long before we reach the canal.
We're following Ben Jonson Road, a street named after the playwright who wasn't quite Shakespeare, and here comes central Stepney's main parade of shops. One side looks very dated, inserted beneath postwar council flats, the other very much of this century behind a sheen of maroon brick. On the older side the window display at Veekay Images still invites you to bring in your home videos for transference to DVD, while the Around A Pound shop has just had a job lot of generic kitchen roll delivered which is blocking half the pavement. The new side has much more of a tax adviser/accountant/estate agent vibe, so much less shopping goes on over there.
Behind the bus stop a 200 year-old boundary stone has been given prominence, even though it's now in completely the wrong position, and some wildly optimistic benches have recently been added at an over-jaunty angle. The oldest shop here is probably Johnny Walls Bakery, a red-fronted throwback from an era when locals wanted "takeaway teas", pastries and sausage rolls. Today its front window display is all bread rolls and empty shelves, and the interior anything but enticing, but a dedicated clientele still appreciates its limited lunchtime options. For contrast I watch Lalbagh Halal Food Store getting its meat delivered, which involves three carcasses being piled into a shopping trolley and then pushed to the front door by holding onto a calf's legs rather than the handle.
The health centre on the corner of Harford Street was built on the site of Stepney Gasworks, as were several acres of flats behind. Some of the gasworks wall survives immediately before the canal, which'd be the Regents, which is where E1 becomes E3. Before we cross the waterway it's a good time to turn round and see the Gherkin lined up perfectly at the end of the road, its silhouette still perfectly visible from this angle (even if all the sky behind has been skyscrapered out). What you can't easily see is the Ragged SchoolMuseum looming over the towpath because it's sheathed under a serious amount of sheeting while the Lottery does it up.
The road now arcs through Mile End Park or, as it used to be known pre-extension, King George’s Field. The George in question was the Fifth, in whose honour many playing fields were opened nationwide, and it says a lot about the speed of the process that this one opened three monarchs later in 1952. For a sylvan moment we pass between football pitches and canalside greensward, then plunge under a railway viaduct where scrap metal, welding and rubber tyres break the spell somewhat. If I had a backyard selling BBQ chicken I probably wouldn't brand it Cabby's Jerk. The only takers at the Skate Park this morning look like they haven't been teenagers for years, but still launch off the top of the ramp with the aplomb of a beginner.
The bold New Brutalist building on the corner with Burdett Road is St Paul's, which some say is "the most significant parish church to be built in Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century". It's Grade II* listed, which isn't bad for a 1950s construction, and comprises two concentric brick boxes topped by an octagonal glass lantern, plus a rippled concrete porch. Normally it's an Open House treat but they've got the builders in at present so the main doors are wide open revealing a) the central altar b) scaffolding towers c) last week's hymn numbers. St Paul's Way is resolutely postwar all the way down, and mostly post-postwar, and even now unfinished. I see the coffee shop at the Community Centre has been refranchised yet again and goes by the name of Bow Brew, at least for now. If you're still counting, there've been four more zebra crossings.
One of the belisha beacons is being tweaked by two workmen, one on his knees and the other up a stepladder with a screwdriver. I watch aghast as he unscrews half of the orange ball and drops it into a cardboard box, revealing that the globe is in fact two hemispheres bolted together... for this is how the LED version works. That's an illusion entirely shattered. I've not yet walked a mile but the chunky white building on the left is my second massive BSF school and the multi-coloured stack on the right my second mega-medical centre. The Church of the Holy Name and Our Lady of the Sacred Heart could probably do with a shorter name, and holds masses in Vietnamese on thứ hai, thứ ba and thứ bảy. For those who like to know which bus routes we're following it's been the 309 until now, was also the 339 for the first three paragraphs and will be the 323 for the next three.
Until the mid 1800s this whole area was Bow Common, a name which survived even after the whole lot was swallowed by housing, and the sweet rural track ahead was originally Bromley Lane. It's now Devons Road and almost entirely flats... and boasts one of the least enticing Nisa supermarkets you will never enter. Alcoholics should note that the Earl of Devon stopped serving pints in the 1980s, while The Angel of Bow dispenses craft beers, 'lovely food' and Maldon oysters so might be too up itself for E3. Much more target audience is fried food outlet The Munch Plug (seriously, what were they thinking?) with its menu of buffalo wings, naga doners and wagyu burgers.
It's taken nine paragraphs but we have finally reached the first house on the B140, assuming it counts because it's no longer All Hallows Rectory. These days the church engages with the community by means of its Ahaba cafe, where Drink of the Week is a Green Smoothie comprising avo, apple, broccoli and spinach. The interior of Davis For Tyres looks seriously flammable. The Fish Bar, which is sandwiched between two betting shops, has long since transitioned to kebabs. Tower Hamlets council really don't want any pesky pedestrians nipping across their double mini-roundabout so have surrounded it with sturdy metal barriers. And yes, that's the hot cross bunpub just over there...
The Widow's Son remembers a sailor in the Napoleonic Wars who told his mother he'd be home for Easter so she saved a hot cross bun for him but never he returned, and the pub on the site of her cottage has hung a bun above the bar every Good Friday since. Expect to hear that story in full across all local media in a fortnight's time. The old pub's recently been surrounded by a major housing development and has daytime competition from two unmemorable coffee shops. This is the point where Devons Road DLR station intrudes, outside which is that pelican crossing where TfL have been trialling pedestrian priority. After I blogged last month about how it wasn't working I received an anonymous comment from 'your friendly neighbourhood traffic engineer' saying "You may want to check these lights again and see if they're working correctly now", and indeed the whole beeping trial has been switched off.
The B140 now does something bloody stupid, it turns left. It ought to follow Devas Street straight ahead to a bespoke junction with the A12, like all the traffic does, but that link didn't exist at time of classification so the B Road remains on its original alignment (n.b. in fact it ran just to the left of Prospect Park along a road that's since been cul-de-sac-ed, and sorry I realise I'm speaking to a very local audience here). Devons Road drops noticeably to duck under the District line and then enters the world of Poplar HARCA, my local housing collective. It should then continue up Stroudley Walk to Bow Road, like it used to, but can't because that was pedestrianised many years ago and seriously, why don't B Road classifications ever get updated?
Instead the B140 turns right onto properly minor Bruce Road, there being no other way through, then left onto St Leonards Street. Along the way are today's first proper houses that aren't flats (Jessies Cottage is dated 1865, Isaiah Cottage 1866 and Priscilla Cottage 1867), a blue plaque to Mahatma Gandhi, a Health Centre opened by Cherie Booth, the site of a Jacobean royal hunting lodge, a demolished church's memorialgateway and all sorts of places I've blogged to death over the last 20 years because I live just around the corner. To add insult to injury the last ten metres of the B140 are one-way so you can only exit onto the A12, not enter from it, so all this going round the houses has been semi-pointless. I doubt that 'your friendly neighbourhood traffic engineer' can fix this but someone should, assuming B Roads are supposed to have any coherent function whatsoever.
Update: Maybe they have. The National Street Gazetteer shows Devas Street as a B Road, suggesting the final link now goes straight on, although the underlying Ordnance Survey map still shows the B140 wiggling through the backstreets of Bromley-by-Bow.
