If you've ever found yourself in South Ockendon you may have wondered about the naming of the streets. Because there's something very alphabetical about it.
There are two Ockendons, one in London and one in Essex. North Ockendon is a tiny village with an early medieval church and is famously the only London settlement to lie beyond the M25. South Ockendon lies just across the border in Thurrock and also started out as a tiny village with an early medieval church, hence the cluster of cottages around the green by the pub. But it's grown massively since, on both sides of the railway, to the extent that South Ockendon now has a population of 22,000 while North Ockendon barely gets to four figures.
What transformed South Ockendon was the creation of a massive London County Council overspill estate. They bought land on the Belhus estate in the 1930s intent on putting some of Capability Brown's landscaping to better use, and after WW2 set about the construction of a 400 acre council estate. It'd be a proper neighbourhood with shops, schools and places of worship, these being the days when churches of all denominations were still an integral part of any new development. I worried that young Elizabeth II had been dragged out here to open All Saints Church in December 1952, but then I read the plaque more carefully and thankfully only Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's Lieutenant of Essex turned up.
This is no rigid grid, the streets instead meandering appealingly in curves and loops and cul-de-sacs. Houses are generally 2- or 3-bed semis, or terraces you'd describe as semis if only they hadn't been pushed together, any of which would have been a proper step-up for those escaping from the East End. Numerous patches of mown grass have been provided, plus a park in the middle which retains a smidgeon of ancient woodland, while the remains of Belhus Park provide an easy-to-reach sprawling recreational space. South Ockendon's still very much a working class community, indeed Thurrock had one of the highest Leave votes in the country, and these days only marginally less homogenous than it originally was.
The heart of the 'town' was Derwent Parade, a broad pedestrianprecinct of half-decent shops tucked under two long banks of flats. Its anchor store was a Woolworths, now occupied by a Nisa supermarket, plus functioning banks, a non-halal butcher and a non-Greggs bakery. A couple of pubs were strategically placed at opposite corners. Around this retail block the town planners placed a library, a sorting office, a surgery, a telephone exchange and a police station, ticking all the public service boxes of the early 50s. And the roads to either side of Derwent Parade were called Derry Avenue, Darenth Lane and Daiglen Drive, suggesting someone somewhere had an obsession with the letter D. But it went much deeper than that.
Head west from the shops and you might follow Deveron Gardens to Dunkellin Way, or alternatively pass Dawley Green, Dalroy Close and Dene Path. But head north and it might be Elan Road, Erriff Drive and Eskley Gardens, while east might take you via Afton Drive and Ashdon Close to Araglen Avenue. There's got to be a pattern to this, I thought, so I knocked up this map to show the initial letters of the streets on the estate. Some of the roads are quite long so I've used the initial letter more than once, notably along Broxburn Drive and Daiglen Drove, but elsewhere it's mostly a one-to-one correspondence.
The As and Bs appear mostly down the eastern side, close to the railway, while the Cs are further south and the Ds are generally in the centre. Then the Es are to the north, the Fs to the southwest and the remaining letters mostly to the west. It's very clustered, but the patterns not as uniform as I'd perhaps been expecting. By my reckoning the centre of the system is the crossroads at the end of Derwent Parade (where the 'e' of South Ockendon is on the map) which is where A bumps into B bumps into C bumps into D. This is also where the most anomalous streets are, a one-off set of cul-de-sacs called Avon Green, Brook Green, Cam Green, Dart Green, Eden Green and Galey Green. I'm not sure where the F went.
Also the lettered sectors, if that's what they are, aren't especially equal in size. Lots of streets begin with A whereas the Bs are far fewer in number with Broxburn Drive the only significant thoroughfare. Also by the time we get to G and H the numbers of streets have dropped considerably, almost as if they were an afterthought, although in fact they were added at the same time as the rest of the estate. Also, really nigglingly, a single example of an I exists on the very edge of the built-up area, a brief dead end called Irvine Gardens. You might assume further streets were once planned, but the woodland beyond Irvine Gardens contains Capability Brown's Long Water and they were never going to desecrate that (other than driving the M25 straight through the middle).
Also these are some very odd names. Some are towns, some are rivers and a fair few are Irish or Scottish in derivation, but some appear to be made-up words. Type Eskley into a search engine and it only brings up this street in South Ockendon, nothing else. Arcany is the same, ditto Avontar, ditto Gatehope. I can imagine whoever named the streets poring over maps of Galway or the Scottish lowlands and saying "ooh, that looks good", then topping up their choices with imaginary concoctions to get the job finished before teatime. In reality, of course, whatever the original planners had in mind isn't possible to second guess.
The rationales for the newer chunks of South Ockendon, however, are clear as day. The houses in the photo above were built on the site of afactory where Ford made performance versions of their production vehicles in the 1970s, hence Anglia Way, Torino Way, Sunliner Way, Falcon Way and Fairmount Drive. Across the railway five streets of angular pre-fabricated concrete houses are named Rosemary Close, Larkspur Close, Viola Close, Celandine Close and Mayflower Close, aka the 'Flowers Estate'. And across the main road on the site of the former mental hospital are at least 20 streets named after trees - always a safe-but-boring nominative choice.
If nothing else my trip to South Ockendon in search of a full alphabetical sequence of streets got me to experience the community as it is. The frizz-haired woman on a mobility scooter with two tiny dogs in her front basket. The pensioner's home over-adorned with flags, gnomes and respectful military tributes. The bare-chested weed-smoking cyclist taking an agitated break on the railway bridge. The end terrace with a winged fibreglass demon glaring down from its porch. The ball-chested man emerging from Smokers Paradise with four pints of milk. The parents of two young children leaning over a wobbly garden fence to make friends with two excitable German Shepherds. Such are the foibles of almost London, barely Essex, from A to I if not A to Z.
