Today's post is about Cooks Road E15, a brief grimy backstreet beside the River Lea.
Exit the Bow Roundabout heading for Stratford and it's the first road on the left. Cooks Road first appeared in the mid 18th century to provide access to the East LondonSoap Works (manufacturers of Cook's Primrose Soap), and further smelly businesses followed over subsequent decades. Today it's a road in transition, still stubbornly industrial at one end but engulfed by modern housing at the other. I've been walking it regularly over the last few weeks on my way to the Olympic Park.
At its entrance from Stratford High Street, stacks of flats already dominate. The block on the left used to be Bulman & Sons carpet warehouse, for many years a tyre-filled shell, now the 34 storey Sky View Tower. Its concierge sits at a tiny desk patiently waiting for parcels while buy-to-let investors count their pennies on the other side of the planet. The block on the right is eight years older and rather less showy. Cooks Road has been given quite a makeover inbetween, all smart paving and dropped kerbs as far as the bridge over the Bow Back River.
Beyond the bridge is the first development in the post-Olympic suburb of Pudding Mill, the godawfully-named Legacy Wharf. Opened a two years back, Bellway Homes describe it as "a striking development of contemporary apartments in a cosmopolitan waterside setting" whereas I'd call it a brick fortress amid backwater desolation. Residents should find the central green courtyard some small consolation when the existing view on all the other sides is obscured by further housing.
Stage 2 of Legacy Wharf is scheduled to replace the warehouses to the north, plus the unlikely head office of the Wanstead Welding Works who operated from here until 2013. Never the most forward-looking of companies, their displayed telephone number remains 01 534 7272. The site was sold off in 2015 for £5m, and has been increasingly barricaded, so I'm continually surprised that nobody's yet got round to knocking the place down. Meanwhile the small brick structure out front, belonging to Premier Pumps, remains for sale if you believe the message neatly painted on its padlocked front doors.
On the opposite side of the road, flanking the Lea towpath, old-style Cooks Road survives. A decrepit brick wall seals off the land behind and has been plastered with signs warning "Guard Dogs Are Randomly Let Loose On Site", not that this seems likely. The southernmost yard was until recently occupied by City Oils Ltd, refiners of used cooking oils, fats and greases, whose grubby silos added a certain olfactory tang to the local area. Management have since sold up and moved to Grays, so today the rear shed gapes open, surplus plastic containers linger amongst a sea of rubbish and the locked gates are supplemented by some very solid-looking concrete blocks.
Nextdoor's ancient warehouses appear similarly deserted but are in fact still used for storage, as was confirmed the other morning when the gates were unexpectedly opened and a big lorry reversed in to unload nothing especially valuable. It felt like a rare glimpse back into how things used to be across the Heron and Marshgate Lane industrial estates before the IOC intruded.
Naturally it won't last. These prime waterside plots are scheduled to be replaced by a residential quarter called Vulcan Wharf, including a whopping 33-storey tower and several densely-packed slanty-topped blocks. I went to the consultation event two years ago, but nothing's yet happened on the ground while the developers respond to issues the Mayor had over massing, noise and affordability. Potential buyers should pop down soon to see what a dump their bijou residence currently is.
The adjacent 2¼ acres are already razed flat because they were used by Crossrail during the construction of the Pudding Mill portal. They currently eke out a living as an expanse of rentable hardstanding, at least until such time as they're eventually required for housing. First thing every morning during the current crisis the gates are unlocked and I've watched an assortment of white vans drive in, suggesting that this is some kind of unofficial distribution muster point. Drivers hang around in lines while jobs are allocated, then head off and by lunchtime the empty space has been mysteriously locked up again.
Crossrail's one lasting legacy in Cooks Road is the Pudding Mill Substation, a cluster of knobbly silvery transformers installed by the National Grid. It's intended to power much of the central section of the purple line once services finally begin, which they might have by now had not this substation accidentallyexploded in November 2017 when it was first powered up. This delayed the start of dynamic track testing by four months, and added software woes then led to that embarrassing postponement announcement... which has only worsened since. It's amazing the damage one sheared-off cover plate can do.
The substation is securely fenced off, but through the slats I spotted a delightful nod to London past... two boundary stones moved from their original locations to the corner of the site. The dividing line between Middlesex and Essex used to zigzag just to the west of Cooks Road along the former line of the river, now very much dry land, until later rationalisation sensibly placed Tower Hamlets and Newham on either side of the Lea. One of the stones is inscribed 1820 MSB, which stands for St Mary Stratford [le] Bow, and the other WHP 1864, standing for West Ham Parish. Full marks to whoever restored these beauties and positioned them where they can just about be seen.
It's here by the railway that Cooks Road used to stop, dead, but more recently it was connected up to Barbers Road completing a link to Pudding Mill DLR. On the bend is a half-crossed-out sign that once belonged to Bolsons, the heraldic engravers, who've since relocated to West Horndon. Opposite is a warehouse once used by Dacca Caterers, whose logo still brightens the back wall despite the yard having been taken over by Regional Waste Recycling some time back.
Cooks Road remains bleak and quiet, hence ideal for social distancing. But its desolation can't last forever, so within the decade expect numerous blocks of flats to have been packed in along the remainder of both sides. Scrappy post-industrial land is no match for prime real estate, land-value-wise, as residents of the future Pudding Mill will one day discover.
