Barking and Dagenham is an oddly-shaped borough with a narrow two-mile protuberance up north, which is where Marks Gate is. All was open countryside until the 1920s when Eastern Avenue carved through, the same A12 that also destroyed the flat calm in Gants Hill, Little Heath and Aldborough Hatch. A large council estate followed in the 1950s, this the undistinguished warren I'm about to spend several paragraphs walking round, though thankfully with occasional flashes of history within. If you've ever driven through you may know the Moby Dick Carvery and the minigolf with the open-jawed whale, although both of those are on the Chadwell Heath side of the dual carriageway and thus out of bounds for today's post.
Let's start way back. In medieval times all that was here was a moated manor called Marks, named because it was built by the de Merk family in the 14th century. This sat on the edge of Hainault Forest beside one of the few official entrances to the hunting grounds, which duly became known as Marks Gate. In Tudor times one of its owners was Francis Bacon, though there's no evidence he ever stayed here, and later it was taken over by the Mildmay family (whose lands did indeed include the Islington estate where an HIV hospital would one day give its name to an Overground line). Alas the manor house was demolished in 1808 and only its hipped-roofed barn survives amid the scrappy environs of Warren Farm, just north of the Moby Dick crossroads, where unkempt used cars are now the going concern. They also run the Bonzer Car Boot Sale every Thursday and have done since 1994, although this will never be "the best midweek car boot sale in Essex" for obvious geographic reasons.
The main road north through Marks Gate is Whalebone Lane, previously blogged, but so named because a pair of cetacean jawbones once formed an arch beside a tollgate down in Chadwell Heath. My favourite leftover lurks in a roadside hedgerow just north of Warren Farm, a pair of squat boundary markers that once marked the edge of the Liberty of Havering. Both are inscribed Marks Stone and the taller additionally Sept 1642, which is impressively old, and these were the final thing I blogged as part of my random jamjar project. Alas the undergrowth has thickened since 2012 and the Marks Stones are now much harder to find, also the earthen field boundary behind has been replaced by fierce spikes labelled 'Warning - Quicksand danger of death', but if you start your hunt beside by a sapling planted in the pavement you might be able to force your way through.
Other things to see up Whalebone Lane
• Chadwell Heath Cemetery, laid out in the early 1930s by Dagenham Urban District whose insignia appears on the entrance gates. The central chapel is early Modernist and Grade II listed, also very slim, also "the centrepiece to a highly idiosyncratic cemetery landscape" of yew trees, fountains and orbital avenues.
• Warren Nursery and Farm Shop, which turned out not to be as large as the plethora of signs outside suggested, but they did have a fine range of bedding plants and were doing a roaring trade in gas bottles. If the Five Sisters van is in residence, a cheeseburger meal is only £7 and tea and coffee are just £1.20.
• A grim footpath leading through rubbish-strewn woodland to a questionably-blocked stile into reclaimed land that used to be gravel pits, should you fancy risking a walk out to the WW2 gun emplacements. Don't come to Marks Gate for the countryside.
• The McDonald's drive-in where the tallest windmill in Essex used to stand. It was a six-storey octagonal smock mill used to grind corn, but last used in the 1890s and dismantled in 1919 after becoming increasingly derelict.
• The non-descript T-junction where the entrance to Hainault Forest used to be, also a few cottages that were once the heart of the hamlet of Marks Gate, all now backed onto by businesses selling pallets, fences, used tyres, gas cylinders and white vans.
• A cul-de-sac of 13 detached eco-homes built before the developer went bust, the new owner now desperately seeking retrospective planning permission, there always being a hint of the Wild West on the Havering fringes.
When Dagenham built their council estate they chose instead to centre it along Rose Lane, a byroad leading to two farms, both now fully swallowed. Up some streets they built houses but a lot of the stock is short three-storey blocks of flats, a fairly decent attempt at densification for the Fifties. A lot of folk got a small balcony ideal for the airing of laundry, although even today shirts and rugs are still left out to dry downstairs on communal lines. The horriblest accommodation must be the pebbledash blocks at the top end of Padnall Road which have all the allure of an army barracks and look out onto a central expanse of dog-squat grass and concrete, inexplicably unimproved. David Essex spent much of his teens living on Padnall Road, his family having moved out from Canning Town for a greener life, hopefully in one of the less miserable homes further down.
A newsreel filmed during the creation of the estate shows a hall-like church with what looks like a small lighthouse on top. St Mark's was however recently demolished and replaced by a ground floor worship space with three floors of flats on top. If it's the 5th Sunday of the month, Reverend Alexandra gets the morning off. The newsreel also allows me to compare the shopping parade then and now, so the London Co-Operative Society is still a Co-op and the Chemist is still a pharmacy, but the Butchery is now a halal mostly-chicken takeaway. Nail bars, accountants and tropical fish were not part of the original retail offering.
The draped-flag contingent is very prominent on the estate, although it's hard to say how much of this is normal and how much is World Cup related. Football-focused residents must feel particularly hard-done-by at present because Marks Gate has somehow lost both of its pubs. The Crooked Billet at Padnalls Corner closed in 2011 and has been replaced by a run of eight mews cottages, definitely out of place amid all the postwar ordinariness, and The Harrow at Roselane Gate shut for lockdown in 2020 and has never reopened. A lot of small green spaces interleave the street pattern but the only decent kickabout space is Tantony Green, a large central playing field that's twice been upgraded with public money and finally looks decent.
The most recent dramatic change is a row of very moderncouncil homes squeezed into a long thin gap alongside the A12. The site was formerly open space as a buffer between the original estate and a dual carriageway, but needs must and if you build your modular housing properly you can minimise any acoustic issues. About 60 flats and narrow townhouses have been squished in so far, with a few hundred more due if phase 2 ever gets off the ground. The project also includes a jaggedy-roofed energy centre to boost its eco credentials and an underused community centre that can't even attract an evangelical church on a Sunday. The best part is the linear lake at the far end which was originally ornamental water in the grounds of Padnall Hall, where ducks, butterflies and a dipping platform have been given precedence over B&D housing targets.
The most atypical offering in Marks Gate is right up north where the 62 bus terminates, as I'll be explaining in my birthday blogpost next year. Two branded globes overlook the roundabout and between them is an access road that passes down a palm tree avenue bordered by astroturf. This is The City Pavilion, a "modern luxury venue" built in the late 1990s that's essentially a very expensive shed. Its central atrium drips with ostentatious decor, its banqueting rooms are ideally suited to extravagant weddings and its restaurants cater primarily to Pan-Asian tastes. I doubt many folk from Marks Gate drop in, it's more a hospitality magnet for subcontinental TOWIE types, but the 34-lane bowling alley is perhaps on the more affordable shortlist.
And across the street is the edge of an utterly vast arable expanse, at least a dozen fields strong, which has somehow managed never to be developed. Stand on the edge and you can see all the way to the City, also fields of wheat, corn and nothing much, almost like the prairie came to East London. I've argued before that this farm would make an excellent site for 20,000 homes, certainly less contentious than Crews Hill, if lacking decent transport links being some way from any station. Here no roads encroach upon an area greater than a square mile and just one remote public footpath, which I suspect is used only for the there-and-back exercising of dogs. I wandered out to the first hedgerow and mused on how Marks Gate could have been three times the size, and maybe still could be, given this is exactly how the existing estate used to look.
