In micro-local news, it's 20 years today since the McDonald's drive-through beside the Bow Roundabout first opened. Join me for a 20-part celebration of its history, its evolving function and two decades of community impact. To whet your appetite, number 16 is "I live less than two minutes away but during the last 20 years I have never once been inside."
1) McDonald's first tried to build a drive-through beside the Bow Roundabout in 1995 on a site that had previously been "a factory and warehouse for processing peanuts". This is so long ago that the road alongside was still the A102(M), an urban motorway, not the A12 it is today. We'd like to build a single storey McDonald's drive-thru restaurant building with 32 car parking spaces and associated landscaping, they said, plus a couple of flagpoles to hoist the Union Jack and McDonald's Corporate flag. But they failed to secure acquisition of the site and so withdrew their application.
2) In 2000 they tried again. Local residents complained that the new restaurant would exacerbate the existing traffic congestion by the roundabout causing long tailbacks, high levels of pollution, additional traffic noise, detrimental litter build-up, increased disturbance on local estates, unwanted smells and all sorts of other nimby issues. Tower Hamlets council approved the application. The restaurant would be a major improvement to the existing appearance of the site, they said, so please go ahead and build it but you must also contribute to help fund the 'Bow Road Roundabout Gateway Improvement Scheme'. The final go-ahead was given in April 2001, but no such pedestrian crossing scheme ever materialised.
3) In September 2002 workmen finally turned up and levelled the site. Initially the only evidence of any construction taking place were a few basic foundations and a couple of workmen drinking tea. But by the end of November a whole new single-storey building had sprung up, filled with cling-wrapped plastic tables and encircled by a paved roadway. It became increasingly clear that not only would you be able to drive round the back and leave an order but you could also walk in from the pavement which meant I was about to have a burger restaurant on my doorstep.
4) The McDonald's drive-through by the Bow Roundabout opened on Monday 16th December 2002. I know this because I'd just started blogging at the time and considered this event worthy of a mention. Blogging was briefer in those days so I can cut and paste the entire post here.
McUpdate: A month ago there was a plot of wasteground at the bottom of my road beside the Bow Flyover. Three weeks ago a drive-in McDonalds suddenly sprang up on the site. Today they're serving burgers to the three customers who've noticed the restaurant has just opened. Oh, and potato wedges are back - in which case they may have a fourth customer very soon.
I did not go in and buy any potato wedges.
5) Within a month I had noticed an unfortunate side-effect.
I have the misfortune to live exactly one burger's distance away from our new McDonalds. The pavement outside my house is therefore now littered with Big Mac wrappers, squashed french fries and discarded brown paper bags. McDonalds have been community-minded and put litter bins outside their restaurant, except that nobody walking home has finished their burger by that point in their journey. The council have woken up and installed another new litter bin further up the road, but that's permanently full and most people walking home don't get that far while they're still eating. So please could someone stick a litter bin somewhere inbetween, like outside my house, just so that I don't have to walk round a spreading pool of strawberry milkshake every morning?
6) Fairly soon after the drive-through opened, Mam's Fish Bar at 163 Bow Road closed and reopened as a kebabbery selling spicy foods McDonald's didn't cater for. The last fish and chip shop hereabouts went down the grill route about 10 years ago and whilst I can't necessarily blame McDonald's for that, their spindly fries don't really cut it for a decent chippy tea.
7) In 2006 Crossrail realised they'd have to divert the Wick Lane Sewer before they could build their connecting tunnel linking Stratford to Whitechapel. This would necessitate building three new permanent access shafts close to the A12, one of which would have completely wiped out the Bow Roundabout McDonald's drive-through. Thankfully they found a better way to engineer things and the restaurant survived this serious existential crisis.
8) The McDonald's drive-through is one of the few places you can park a vehicle near my house, but not for very long which is one reason why my longer-distance friends with cars never come round to visit.
9) In 2009 McDonald's refurbished the restaurant and patio area and added a customer order display. In 2010 they installed an additional drive-through booth and added another customer order display. This is a high profile site and the number of drive-through customers has only ever increased.
10) In 2017 the drive-through started offering home delivery. I was particularly nonplussed when they poked a flyer through my door advertising this new service, given that I could walk down there and buy a Quarter Pounder and be back home within five minutes so why on earth would I want to pay extra for someone to deliver it for me. I could see the logic in them delivering this flyer a bit further away from the restaurant because many people are intrinsically lazy and/or cash-rich, but mine went straight in the recycling. A downside of this new focus on delivery has been that the congregation of moped riders don't usually drive out of the main entrance but instead nip out onto the pavement and weave round passing pedestrians or head the wrong way up the adjacent cycle lane.
11) The McDonald's drive-through (and some flats by Bromley-by-Bow station) are the only buildings west of the A12 which fall under the jurisdiction of the London Legacy Development Corporation, because for some reason its planning boundary bends outwards to encompass the entire Bow Interchange. I'm therefore surprised nobody's ever proposed to demolish the drive-through site and replace it with a towering block of flats, which is exactly what happened with the 34-storey Capital Towers on the other site of the roundabout. Maybe one day.
12) During 2020's lockdown kerfuffle the drive-through closed at 7pm on Monday 23rd March and reopened at 11am on Friday 5th June with a limited menu offering no vegetarian options, no McWraps, no McSpecials and no breakfast items. It eventually switched back to 24-hour opening, which is useful if you ever fancy a Filet-o-Fish after speeding through the Blackwall Tunnel at two in the morning.
13) Earlier this year McDonald's revamped the restaurant again, with Bow acting as a pilot for their "Convenience for the Future" programme. This involved removing most of the seats and adding a special courier collection room where delivery drivers could pick up their orders. The direction of travel is increasingly away from customers walking in through the front door and very much towards the product heading out of the site in a car or on the back of a moped. Orders for collection now flash up on a little screen beside the 'deliveries only' door, a bit like you used to see at Argos, and I'm always amazed when I walk past at breakfast time to see quite how many local people are starting the day with a McDonald's delivery.
14) Since May the ability to walk up to the counter and swap a pound coin for a cheeseburger has also been removed. Now you get to push buttons on a big screen and wave your bank card so that all the minimum wage muppet at the counter has to do is hand over your order. You could argue that this is an efficient use of time and resources, or you could argue it simply allows McDonald's to employ fewer staff while you do all the financial work for them and that in fact the new muppet is you.
15) The Bow Flyover drive-through is the only McDonald's restaurant in the E3 postcode. The nearest other McDonald's are in Stratford (×2), Canning Town (×2), Bethnal Green and Shadwell.
16) I live less than two minutes away, but during the last 20 years I have never once been inside.
17) I'm not claiming sainthood here. I like a good burger and I've been into several other McDonald's over the last 20 years. But I have never once been into my local because I thought that might be the thin end of the wedge. You drop in once for a hot apple pie and then next time it's a Quarter Pounder Meal and then it becomes a regular snack or a staple dinner and before you know where you are you've gone up a waist size and your veins are swimming in claggy fat.
18) OK, there was that time when BestMateFromWork came round to watch some DVDs and insisted on walking down to the drive-through and returning with a burger-based meal. He'd come round once before and I'd made him my special mince-based dinner, and he decided there and then that I would never cook for him again hence the trip to McDonald's. But I didn't go myself and he insisted on paying so I've never given the drive-through my custom.
19) I see they're doing festive mincemeat and custard pies at the moment and those sound lovely, but I will not be offering Ronald McDonald any money for one, be that here in E3 or elsewhere.
20) The McDonald's Bow Roundabout drive-through celebrated its 20th birthday with the usual curl of cars snaking round the back queueing for steaming brown paper takeaways, the usual departing vehicles blocking the cycle superhighway while trying to push into the traffic on Bow Road and the usual slew of moped drivers chilling outside while waiting for some nearby resident to get the munchies. It performs a useful function locally and even more so for those passing up the A12, so likely won't be disappearing any time soon. But I have no intention of going inside for the next 20 years either, however the takeaway business continues to evolve.
