For my next unsung suburb I've been to a swallowed hamlet in Newham. Plashet used to be home to someone important enough to have appeared on a banknote and is now a mesh of Victorian terraces with a nice park and a dead library. If there were a stop on the District line between Upton Park and East Ham they could call it Plashet, but there isn't and the name's almost been lost. It's also not quite where modern maps put it because the original crossroads we seek is here.
This is the junction of Plashet Grove and Katharine Road, one named after the hamlet and the other after the banknote icon's daughter. There used to be a large comfortable manor house on the far side, now there's a minimart and a currency exchange. There used to be a farm on the right-hand side, now there's a halal butcher and a pharmacy. There used to be a pub called The Green Man in the foreground, now there's a modern block of flats (quite unusual for the neighbourhood). And there used to be an open field on the left, now a hairdresser, a chicken takeaway and a manufacturer of zips and trimmings. A lot of inner Newham looks like this - terraced streets intermittently mixed with lowly commercial units - it's just that this nucleus used to be a hamlet in a clearing in a wood called Plashet.
The famous occupant of Plashet House was Elizabeth Fry, the pioneering prison reformer. Her crusade began in 1813 when she visited Newgate Prison and was horrified by the cruel and insanitary conditions, especially for women and children. She fought for welfare rather than harsh punishment and for rehabilitation rather than transportation. Founding the British Ladies' Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners in 1821 was only the start, with later successes including education for inmates' children and the introduction of prison inspectors to oversee national standards. Wider humanitarian concerns drove her to push for the ending of slavery in the colonies and help for the homeless, with Prime Ministers and even Queen Victoria taking note of what she said. Elizabeth lived at Plashet House from 1809 to 1829, then moved up the road to The Cedars in what's now West Ham Park, finally returning to the area in 2002 on the back of many a £5 note.
Plashet House was demolished in the 1880s to make way for housing, her former carriage drive essentially becoming St Stephen's Road. In place of her back garden we now find Wortley Road, a typical street of three dozen terraced houses and front gardens only just large enough for two bins. It's one-way because once you've parked on both sides there's not much room left in the middle. A special zone at the southern end provides somewhere to leave mopeds, ideal for offspring who've become delivery drivers. Bay windows are the norm, either in pebbledash or in brick. Only five of the houses at the top end have names (from Goodrest to Gordon House), all the plaques on the remainder having been left blank. A peculiarity of the local area is that you often see a front door open, perhaps someone hoovering the hall, having a smoke or heading off somewhere, possibly because Newham's houses have more than the national average number of occupants.
Elizabeth's standing in society was because she'd married into a family of Quaker bankers and a wider confectionery dynasty. Her husband was Joseph Fry, nephew of the more famous Joseph Fry who founded the chocolate factory that became JS Fry & Sons. Elizabeth alas died two decades before Fry's Chocolate Cream was invented. In an extraordinary coincidence Plashet was also the base for an entirely different sweet company, this being Trebor, which was founded by four sugar-boilers from East London in 1906. One of the quartet was indeed called Robert, but the backwards name actually derived from the builder of a terrace on Shrewsbury Road where they opened their first factory. Full history here. By 1938 the success of Refreshers and Extra Strong Mints had helped the small corner plot to grow into a 580,000 square foot factory along Katherine Road. It's still there and still looks fabulous.
The Luftwaffe scored a direct hit in 1944 but management got production back up and running in a week. More crucially they ran out of space to expand so opened separate Trebor factories in Ilford, Chesterfield and later Colchester, with the Plashet site filling its last bag of sweets in 1983. The Trebor brand was later swallowed by Cadbury's, which intriguingly was the same ultimate destination as Fry's but via a different takeover route. The building inevitably became flats but proper designer ones, as you can see here because one's just been put up for sale, the apartment described as "characterised by industrial proportions". I don't know why they decided to brand the development as 'Bridgepoint Lofts' but the Trebor name lives on in glorious green throwback tiles on the exterior.
Katherine Road was originally Plashet Lane and was named after Elizabeth Fry's daughter who lived in a cottage down the road. She turned out to be the historian of the family, writing a comprehensive treatise on the districts of West Ham and East Ham, but embarrassingly her name was Katharine so the Victorian developers got the spelling wrong. Plashet Cottage was originally sited on a bend just south of the railway, now inevitably another standard terrace, incongruously facing a shop that makes a living acquiring scrap non-ferrous metals. Katherine Road originally had a lot more shops, these since either residentialised or ceded to low level entrepreneurial services like property management, washing machine repairs and shuttered workshops. Meanwhile the site of the village pond is now occupied by the lowliest of community centres because there's virtually nothing of old Plashet left. Just the park.
Plashet Park is all that remains of Wood House Farm, but only in that nobody built any houses on it. It opened in 1891 and was designed by the district surveyor, clearly demonstrating how much useful variety he could cram into an 18 acre rectangle. The park has several recreational zones including sports lawns and an ornamental garden, all divided by avenues of trees ideal for shady rest or perambulation. The bowling green has been a going concern since 1911, whereas the bandstand's been dismantled and a proper playground built alongside, which is probably the correct modern priority. From 1964 to 2000 there was even a petting zoo along the northern perimeter whose butterfly house was opened by a very young Chris Packham. Alas that's since been replaced by a very tame border called the Wildlife Walk where all I saw was a swoosh of yellow grass and some shrivelled weeds, but also a single butterfly so perhaps the legacy lingers. In a part of Newham generally devoid of parks, Plashet's a winner.
In the corner of the park is a marvellous redbrick building with a clock-bearing cupola. This was the Passmore Edwards Public Library, one of several the Victorian philanthropist funded across London, opened in 1899 to give residents of East Ham somewhere to read and study. I bet they felt proud to go in. In 1993 a modern replacement library on Green Street meant it was no longer needed for books so the council instead decided to use the building as Newham's Register Office. Ceremonies were later shifted to the Town Hall after which the ex-library became an arts centre, but only for three years because Applecart Arts went bust and the council are still seeking a new tenant. They describe it as an 'Exciting Opportunity to Lease a Cultural and Community Space in Plashet', but might as well have said 'This Listed Building is a Financial Millstone' because the doors remain firmly locked, sadly.
Perhaps the most extraordinary structure on Plashet Grove is the curving walkway that snakes across the street at the eastern end. It's called the Unity Bridge and links the two halves of Plashet Academy, the south side originally East Ham Grammar School for Girls and the north side Plashet County Secondary Modern School for Girls. After the two schools amalgamated in 1972 a lot of time was spent crossing the road, so when the bridge opened in 2000 not only did it make life safer but also prevented the girls from sneaking off to the shops. Most people would call this area East Ham rather than Plashet but 200 years ago it was known as North End, an entirely separate settlement, because yet again the opening of a station has distorted local geography. Plashet proper is more Katherine Road where Fry and Trebor hung out, where now Azeem Enterprises meets Halal Meat Corner.
