This is Tower Hamlets Road in Walthamstow, a good three miles from Tower Hamlets.
It's a residential street, plainly of Victorian origin. It lies just northeast of the town centre and leads off Hoe Street. It's flat at one end and slopes down sharply at the other. It's narrow, so one-way, and quiet and speedbumped so you can usually walk down the middle without fear of being mown down. And the adjacent streets are called Browns Road, Milton Road and Byron Road so there appears to be no obvious reason for it to be named after part of the East End.
Most of the houses are terraced, but not in a terribly similar manner. Three neighbours halfway down the street have got together and painted their frontages in lightly contrasting pastel colours. The further down you go the more Thirties it looks, but all squashed together rather than proper semis. Gardens are generally large enough for bins and a strip of well-tended shrubbery, and only a handful of lucky residents get the chance to off-street-park. Delivering a wad of pizza leaflets doesn't look like it would be a onerous task here. And yet in the middle of all this is one really smart detached gabled villa, almost entirely shielded by trees and bushes, and with the name Green Leaf Villa just visible on a faded plate. It's not just the streetname that's a little bit odd.
The building of most significance in Tower Hamlets Road is Walthamstow Trades Hall (or T AM OW TR DES A L as the decrepit lettering above the entrance has it). There's been a hall here since 1920, originally for union men only, with the current replacement building due to celebrate its 50th anniversary later this year. It's no looker, a functional brick lump with a forest of mobile phone masts on the roof and even a faded W Youngers Free House sign extant on the Hoe-facing side. But inside looks lush, in a full-on beige 70s throwback style, I suspect still with the whiff of cigarettes embedded in the chair leather. The membership get to enjoy a cheap bar, karaoke, quiz nights and other cheery assemblages, plus a series of Edinburgh comedy previews the like of which your average community centre can only dream of.
It turns out there's a jolly good reason why this is called Tower Hamlets Road which is that this small patch of E17 is known locally as Tower Hamlet. Look on the right map, generally anoldone, and there it is plain as day. The backstory begins in the 1840s just after the first railway arrived and speculative land societies started to purchase the fields around Walthamstow. Among their number were the National, St Pancras and District, City of London and Tower Hamlets societies, and the houses they built were chiefly targeted at Londoners keen to move out of town. The Tower Hamlets society developed what was then the northernmost chunk of land, just beyond Milton Road, with plots costing £7 apiece. This independent beginning helps explain the one-off Regency villa I spotted earlier, and the fact that Hoe Street used to be called Greenleaf Lane helps explain its name.
The central street was naturally called Tower Hamlet Road, being a road in Tower Hamlet, but sometime in the first half of the 20th century it gained an S to become Tower Hamlets Road instead. This conveniently matched the ancient name for the districts east of the Tower of London, the Tower Hamlets, but the tweak still came well in advance of the creation of the borough of the same name. Hurrah though, because it'd be a shame if my home borough didn't have a single London street to share its name.
The most common borough street name is Richmond Something, of which there are over 40 in the capital, boosted somewhat by Richmond also being the name of a town/castle in Yorkshire. These things are hard to count accurately, but the boroughs filling up the rest of the Same Name Top Five are Camden, Kingston, Harrow and Sutton. The blander or the more historic the name, the wider its usage.
Sometimes the name is only seen within the borough in question, for example Wandsworth and Islington. Sometimes the name is only found outside the borough, for example Hackney and Redbridge. Sometimes the name is only found on a new arterial road, such as Newham, or is most common on roads leading to the main town, for example Barnet and Croydon. Sometimes the name is a lot less popular than you'd expect it to be, such as the rarely-referenced Southwark and Greenwich. But every borough with a one word name has at least one road named after it somewhere in the capital, as does two-word Tower Hamlets.
Again it's firmly residential, again it runs north/south but this time it contains just over 100 homes not just under. It's top-and-tailed by West Ham Cemetery and the mainline railway, and feels very much hemmed in inbetween. Once upon a time Tower Hamlets Road would have been fully lined by run-of-the-mill terraces, and much of it still is, but a significant portion has since been replaced by a ridiculous variety of subsequent styles. Blame austerity for the pebbledash frontages, blame the war for the flats at the top end and blame the 1980s for the bricky garaged stuff in the middle. Estate agents, one suspects, prefer to focus on interiors rather than the street.
A varied population lives here these days, from the few who still dangle a Union Jack outside the window to subcontinental families and European arrivals. A large part of the southern end of the street is now taken up by two schools, Odessa Infants and St James' Primary, both of these filling in a former bombsite which used to be more terraces. Back in Victorian times the big local establishment was Forest Gate Industrial, a Quaker boarding school on the other side of the street, which subsequently morphed into a workhouse, an asylum and eventually a maternity hospital. In the 1990s most of that site was repurposed as Forest Lane Park, a much needed local patch of green... but that's only accessible down an alleyway because it seems all the interest in Tower Hamlets Road is just off it, not down it.
I can't see any logic in the names within the original grid of roads, other than a neighbouring clump featuring Waterloo, Wellington and Odessa. What drove the 1860s developers to call this Tower Hamlets Road is not recorded, at least not anywhere obvious, but it is another Tower Hamlets thoroughfare and that'll do for me.
The only other two-word London borough is Waltham Forest and there are no London streets called Waltham Forest anything. Meanwhile six London boroughs officially have a three word name and none of these have streets named after them. There is no Barking and Dagenham Road, City of London Street, Hammersmith and Fulham Gardens, Kensington and Chelsea Mews, Kingston upon Thames Drive nor Richmond Upon Thames Avenue, that would be silly. Kingston and Richmond obviously only pass same-name muster if you lop off their official endings (in which case yes, as previously mentioned, there are plenty).
The longest-named borough to have a street of the same name in the London A-Z index is therefore Tower Hamlets, an authority which has only existed since 1965... which somehow, inexplicably, has two.
