Bygone East Ham

East Ham had only 18 houses and 43 inhabitants in the 14th century and it had not changed much five centuries later, when the railway came in the 1850s. Farmers and market gardeners grew crops for the 'distant' London market, their houses scattered thinly from Wanstead Flats in the north to just south of the Turnpike Road. Beyond that, bird-haunted marshes stretched all the way down to the Thames, a wilderness of ditches and flood plain. A phenomenal transformation came in the second half of the 19th century as the demands of Britain's growing industries and population led to the use of low-cost land on the marshes for factories and, later, to a house-building boom, as people escaped from the over-crowded city on the railway and came to work in the local industries and trades. Fortunately, the camera was on hand to record these amazingly rapid changes in vivid, unusual images which have survived, to be skilfully used by the author to add great impact to his narrative account of East Ham's past. His story of the rise of East Ham from an area of fields and marshes to become, in less than fifty years, a County Borough by 1914, is graphically illustrated in this book, which will fascinate all who know the place. It also adds greatly to our understanding of the making of the present environment.