Its remote location earned it the nickname 'the Island' in the late 18th century, when canals and railways first encouraged industry to move in. The 'Fish' part came later from the names of the streets, which included Dace, Bream and Roach. Before WW2 quite a lot of people lived here, but heavy bomb damage saw housing cleared away in favour of predominantly industrial usage. [1895 map][1949 map]
The precise boundaries of modern day Fish Island are debatable, but let's say it runs from the Hertford Union Canal to the Greenway, with the A12 and river Lea to either side.
Here's my attempt to survey what's gone, what's going and what's likely to survive.
The brown zones are flats completed before the Olympics.
The red zones are flats completed in the last couple of years.
The orange zones are flats under construction.
The yellow zones are cleared and vacant, awaiting development.
The green line marks the edge of the Fish Island Conservation Area.
The pace of redevelopment has been much faster in Fish Island than Hackney Wick, aided by there being fewer people around to notice. The area's also a lot more cut off, with very limited road access and a minimum of footbridges to nowhere terribly important. When the sales brochure for the latest development describes Fish Island as "at the heart of the action" and "well connected to the heart of the city", it is unashamedly lying.
That latest development is Fish Island Village, where "Village" is another shameless marketing fabrication. Its six acre site borders the Hertford Union Canal and was formerly Neptune Wharf, home to a Scottish and Newcastle brewery distribution depot. In its time it's also been a timber depot, paintworks, abattoir and store for pre-cast concrete panels, but FIV's marketing collateral is strangely silent about these. 600 flats are planned, most of them already built and occupied, but construction continues apace at the western end of the site where a new primary school is also earmarked.
The ground floor of many of the new blocks has been given over to low rent studio space for artists and designers, courtesy of The Trampery. A few small units facing Roach Road are occupied, mostly with fashion-related start-ups, while the larger spaces further back remain echoingly empty. Until these communal caverns can be occupied, which the current situation will only delay, the activation of Fish Island Village at street level just isn't happening.
Until this week I hadn't walked through the heart of the new development, and I was struck by how dense and dark it felt. Wyke Road has become a canyon shielded by seven-storey brick, the walkways between residential blocks have a blankly utilitarian vibe, and sunbathing canalside isn't going to be an option until rather late in the day. I have actually been inside one of the blocks for Open House, shown round by one of the architects, and was impressed by the sense of space and interior finish. Very little of that style pervades the exterior, however, and the development's slogan Enhancing Not Replacing is nothing but weasel words.
The prime site at the junction of canal and river was taken years ago by the Omega Works, a rare jigsaw piece already in place when the Olympic decision was made. Newly squeezed-in further along the waterfront is Legacy House, its gated driveway covering the site of one of the original hipster cafes. Thankfully Stour Space nextdoor survives, the lynchpin of Fish Island's cultural offering, although currently very closed. But DOH are still serving up chai, brioche and veg boxes from a hatch round the bend, while the CheeseTruck's very-local owners have an abundance of small-producer cheese and charcuterie they'd be delighted to deliver.
Monier Road is destined to be the spine road of the new Fish Island. It used to head nowhere much but now lines up with a gap where a new bridge is waiting to be winched in, creating a vehicular connection to the Olympic Park. For now it's quiet enough to stand in the middle of the street and snap a photo with a wall of flats on one side and nothing much on the other. Almost every old building on the narrow strip between Monier Road and Beachy Road - marked yellow on my map - has been flattened, and the only one that's left has a notice on the door giving a demolition date. This time 148 flats are planned, with Taylor Wimpey promising an "articulated saw-tooth plan" and "deliberately irregular massing", as the old Fish Island sequentially dissolves away.
Yay, the next block between Beachy Road and Stour Road remains all present and correct. This includes an empty piano factory, a furniture workshop and perhaps most importantly an outpost of the Truman Brewery. It's not the original Truman's, it's the Black Eagle Brewery trading under the name, but they are currently selling cold pints (weekdays only) should you be local enough to pop in. Hang on while I Google the address to see what planning applications have been submitted... ah, dammit, 1908m² of commercial space plus 330 student rooms were approved by the Mayor in February this year. Fish Island's dominoes continue to fall.
Thankfully most of the Island's southern strip, bordering the Greenway, lies within a protected Tower Hamlets conservation area so should be safe. Here we find old blocks like the Algha Works, Swan Wharf, Britannia Works and Percy Dalton's Peanut Factory, each occupied for many years by artists' studios and the generally creative. It's such a compact cluster that you can spin around 360° at the junction of Dace Road and Smeed Road and it looks like very little has changed. This is the weatherworn aesthetic architects in other parts of Fish Island are attempting to emulate, if unsuccessfully.
But redevelopment continues to encroach right up to the conservation area boundary. Forman and Son's yard is being comprehensively residentialised as Lock No 19, an L&Q project delivering 170 canalside flats. At the other end of Dace Road HG Construction are in the early stages of erecting 144 flats in five jarring cuboidal blocks, and on the opposite side of the Greenway Taylor Wimpey have nearly finished 175 more as part of something they've inexplicably christened Aspext. Any unprotected industrial site is fair game, it seems, as Fish Island's yards and warehouses slowly sink beneath a tidal wave of highrise boxes.
Hackney Wick was once known for its edgy creative vibe, a neighbourhood of studios and warehouses where things got done but hardly anybody lived. Times are changing.
This is The Wallis, a new residential development on the corner of Wallis Road and Berkshire Road. It's famous as the site of the factory where the world's first synthetic plastic - Parkesine - was developed. It's going to be flats with a Sainsbury's underneath.
To be fair, the warehouse the developers knocked down was thrown up in the 1950s, whereas Parkesine was invented in the 1860s, so nothing of significant heritage value was lost. To be further fair, the four buildings that do survive from the original Parkesine Works are being retained and restored and hemmed into a yard round the back. But all that passers-by will see is a modern brick apartment building looking like any other modern brick apartment building, and that's pretty much how Hackney Wick is going.
Only one building at the Wallis Road crossroads will survive, a 1920s social centre for local workers, but on the other three corners everything will be modern flats. Further along Wallis Road expect further apartment blocks replacing every building that isn't an 'individual heritage asset', which is most of them. Telford Homes are well underway building Stone Studios, a dense wodge of 110 flats "ideal for investors", while planning applications are already in to replace the variety of warehouses on the northern side. The Olympic effect is very real round here, just somewhat delayed.
I've been for a walk around Hackney Wick to try to survey what's gone, what's going and what's likely to survive.
The red zones are 21st century flats, already complete.
The orange zones are flats under construction (The Wallis is the top one).
The yellow zones are cleared and vacant, awaiting development.
Pink shows where development will, or may, take place.
The largest red zone is also the most recent. It's The Bagel Factory, like so many developments named after the building destroyed to create it. Five years ago gorgeous smells still wafted across the area from Mr Bagels, two years ago construction was well underway, and today 140 households are enjoying German-engineered kitchens with a 'renovated warehouse' feel. It's not a bad development of its type but a tad monolithic, and with concierge desks that look far too luxurious for anything here to be affordable.
Across White Post Lane is a long thin parcel of contaminated land surrounded by a ten foot high brick wall - one of the yellow zones on my map. This is the site of the Hope Chemical Works, importers of American crude oil and at one time the UK's main crude petroleum distillery. In 1893 the owners coined the word 'petrol' to describe their main product, which is one heck of a linguistic claim to fame. But since 1971 the site's been empty, and its unbroken wall is increasingly a canvas for some of Hackney Wick's famous graffiti. I'm amazed to see that what's planned here is a 240-room hotel comprising two six-storey blocks linked by a skybridge, plus workspace and foodiespace at ground level. The 150 year-old wall will not survive, summarily dismissed as "a non-designated heritage asset".
The other yellow zone on my map, between Trego Road and the Hertford Union Canal, is enormous. Formerly it was the McGrath waste transfer station, a smelly business few will have been sad to see the back of, and one day it'll be a Galliard Homes development called Wickside. Another 500 homes are pencilled in across seven acres, plus a linear canalside strip amusingly called a park. But redevelopment is moving at a glacial pace, and at present the site is littered with piles of rubble, the occasional mothballed warehouse and a noisy guard dog in the back of a van surprised that anyone's walked anywhere near.
Not everything's disappearing. Lion Works' eclectic warehouse cluster will survive, the Eton Mission boathouse is secure and the shell of the Lord Napier pub remains a centrepiece. But for the time being Hackney Wick is very much a chequerboard mix of old and new. Walk some streets and an air of dereliction still pervades, walk others and you could be in the middle of an estate agent's brochure.
Yesterday I watched one young couple pose for a professional photographer in front of sun-drenched graffiti, while on the other side of the wall a driver manhandled a mattress out of his van into a crumbling warehouse. Incomers waited patiently for a latte from the pop-up hipster joint by the station, while mechanics from the vehicle bodyworks on Chapman Road were content with another cuppa outside Mapps caff. The cramped grocery store on Wallis Road still sells own brand comestibles to members of the studio collective nextdoor, whereas three of the shops in Felstead Street are called Béton Brut, Vinyl Pimp and Frankenbike, suggesting the gentrification battle is already over.
We need new places to live, and Hackney Wick has the potential to furnish thousands more. But with every block redeveloped and every wall demolished, any reason to make a special visit ebbs away. The developers taking advantage of Hackney Wick's edgy vibe are inexorably destroying it, like moths nibbling at a favourite blanket.
