» There are houses because humans need shelter.
» There are roads so traffic can drive around.
» There are pavements so pedestrians can avoid traffic.
» It's not a jungle because we're not in the tropics.
But that's all a bit generic.
Why specifically does it look like this?
» There's a huge city here rather than agricultural land because London became the capital of Britain many centuries ago due to its strategic location on the Thames estuary facing mainland Europe.
» There's suitable building land here because the underlying geology is river deposits atop a layer of solid clay.
» There are houses here because they were built in 1925 prior to the introduction of the Green Belt.
» There are no fields here because they were built over to create the Becontreeestate.
» Becontree became housing thanks to section 41 of the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919 which stated that "where the London County Council are satisfied that there is situate within the area of a metropolitan borough land suitable for development for housing, the county council may submit a scheme for the approval of the Local Government Board for the development of such land to meet the needs of districts situate outside the area of such borough".
» The Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919 came into being because Christopher Addision was elected MP for Shoreditch in 1918, became Minister for Housing and pushed for much improved social housing because "you cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes".
» The estate got the go-ahead on 18 June 1919 because the London County Council's Standing Committee on the Housing of the Working Classes resolved to build 29,000 dwellings within 5 years, of which 24,000 were to be at Becontree which at the time was a vast undeveloped site with good rail connections.
Fair enough, but why specifically does it look like this?
Why is Hedgemans Road long and straight and precisely here?
» Hedgemans Road is one of the key spine roads added to the Becontree estate in the mid 1920s to support the growth of an emerging estate.
» At its eastern end Hedgemans Road followed an old footpath across the fields from Gale Street to a pub on Church Elm Lane, on a direct line to Dagenham village.
» It's a straight road because it runs close and parallel to a railway, which is straight.
» The railway is straight because in the 1880s the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway built a direct line east via Upminster as a shortcut to skip the previous estuarine route via Tilbury.
If the railway had been built on a different alignment, or Dagenham's 13th century church had been located somewhere slightly different, Hedgemans Road wouldn't quite go this way.
And why do the houses look like they do?
» The houses look like this because they were part of 'Dagenham section 6', the sixth neighbourhood to be developed on the Becontree Estate.
» Plans for 3- and 4-bed cottages in Section 6 were designed by the London County Council Architects department at County Hall and signed off by G. Topham Forrest, Chief Architect, on 11th February 1925.
» If I'd taken my photograph quarter of a mile further down the road the houses would have been in section 6a instead, approved on 10th November 1925, thus slightly younger and slightly different.
I know all that because I found a webpage showing the estate's original hand-drawn plans because the internet is brilliant.
» The original houses are still here because all Hitler's bombs landed elsewhere.
» There are a variety of porches because Margaret Thatcher introduced Right to Buy for council houses in 1980.
» There's a park here, slotted into a 60m gap in the long row of houses, because the Gores Brook passes under the road and even in the 1920s they knew not to build on a flood plain.
» There's a traffic island here because there's a park here because there's a river here.
» There are cars parked on the pavement because car parking wasn't a priority in the 1920s so the council have subsequently tarmacked over the original grass verges.
» There's a bus shelter because route 145 has been coming this way since 17th February 1937.
» There's a sign on the lamppost saying "Warning to buses - Low Trees" because a double decker got its roof sliced off half a mile up the road in 2024.
» There are lampposts because a previous local authority believed it was important for residents to be safe after dark.
» There are street signs high on the lampposts because that's a very 'Borough of Barking & Dagenham' thing.
Fundamentally...
» Hedgemans Road is habitable because the climate is maritime temperate.
» It's habitable because it lies above the current sea level (nine metres above, for now...)
» It's habitable because it's not covered with ice because the last Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago.
» It's habitable because world superpowers have never exploded a significant number of nuclear weapons in anger.
» It's habitable because our planet has a breathable atmosphere.
» It's habitable because life evolved 3¾ billion years ago.
» It's habitable because rocks coalesced around a metal core orbiting the Sun 4½ billion years ago.
And yes that's a bit specious, if entirely true.
But mainly Hedgemans Road is here because former fields beside a convenient railway line proved the ideal solution to rehousing London's poorest after WW1.
Have you ever stopped and wondered why somewhere looks like it does?
