I was walking through the outskirts of Chadwell Heath last weekend when I stumbled upon this very old road sign.
It's a pre-Worboys No Through Road sign, so it must be at least 58 years old. It would originally have had a red warning triangle on top but presumably that was removed at some point. I didn't see any similarly old signs on the adjacent cul-de-sacs. You don't see many pre-Worboys signs around London but obviously they do exist.
Also the road is called Whalebone Avenue, which is unusual. It's not much of an avenue, just 20 council-ish houses along a dead end leading to the back of a secondary school, but it's even less full-on whaling territory.
Whalebone Avenue bears off Whalebone Grove which itself bears off Whalebone Lane, and these are the only Whalebone-related residential streets anywhere in Greater London. Also Whalebone Avenue may only be 100m long and Whalebone Grove more like 300m, but Whalebone Lane stretches for three miles which is a significant thoroughfare, indeed it's so long it's been divided into Whalebone Lane North and Whalebone Lane South for manageability purposes. What's with all the Whalebones?
Well.
It's all to do with a pair of cetacean jawbones that once formed an arch beside the main road nearby. That road is the main road to Essex, a former Roman road, and the location was an octagonal tollhouse that existed here in the 18th century. If you wanted to ride from Ilford to Romford you'd come this way and pay the Middlesex and Essex Turnpike Trust for their efforts. The source of the jawbones is less certain but it's generally agreed they came from a whale stranded on the Thames, or washed up at Dagenham Breach, perhaps following a storm in 1658, perhaps 1685, perhaps later. Daniel Defoe wrote that the whale had been 28 feet long but he may just have been repeating an old fisherwives tale.
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The tollgate stood at what's now thecrossroads at the eastern end of Chadwell Heath High Road. The fact there's a pub on the corner called The Tollgate is a massive clue, although it's not particularly old, more a mass market grill with onion rings and Sky Sports. The village of ChadwellHeath originally lay half a mile to the west. This area would have been open countryside, so a tollhouse with massive whalebones was always going to give its name to the country lane that crossed the main road here. Hence Whalebone Lane North which heads north to Mark's Gate and Whalebone Lane South which stretches south to Beacontree Heath.
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After the tollhouse was demolished the whalebones remained in the vicinity, ending up outside a house a short distance to the east where they flanked the front gate. This Jacobean property naturally became known as WhaleboneHouse. It no longer stands because a German bomb wiped it out in April 1941, but thankfully the whalebones had moved on by then. If you know where the Full Gospel Church of God is, tucked between Albany Road and Gordon Road, that's roughly where Whalebone House was. It's very close to what used to be Whalebone Library, since renamed Robert Jeyes Library (which now contains the Whalebone Community Hub).
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Other Whalebones in the area included a Whalebone Farm (long since suburbanised) and a Whalebone Bridge (which Crossrail still ducks under). Then of course there's the Moby Dick pub, now a Toby Carvery, which was built to serve passing traffic where the A12 arterial crosses Whalebone Lane North. Opposite that is Moby Golf, a themed 18 hole minigolf course set around a lagoon with a whaling ship and an 8 foot waterfall, where one of the holes invites you to putt your ball into the mouth of a huge fibreglass whale. The nearest bus stop, naturally, is Whalebone Lane North.
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You can see the whalebones today, or what's left of them, at Valence House Museum in Dagenham where a special gallery was named after them. And all of this outburst of blubbery nomenclature - Lane, Grove, Avenue, House, Farm, Bridge, Library, Hub, Gallery and double Moby Dick - is because a whale washed up somewhere on the Thames some time ago and ended up with its jaws on a tollhouse.
