Those living in this vibrant enclave between the River Lea, Regent’s Canal and Victoria Park are putting on a two-day ‘people’s festival’ in April to show why they love it so much.
It wasn’t always so neat and fresh. The district — famous for its Roman Road Market and the Regent’s and Hertford Cut canals — used to be littered with industry, workers living cheek-by-jowl next to factories and depots in the timber, engineering and garment trades.
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One of those people now drawn to it is author and community activist Carolyn Clark, originally from west London, who moved to Shoreditch in 1974 and then onto Old Ford where she has laid down roots with husband Jim.
“There is more to Old Ford than meets the eye,” she tells you. “This festival is about the history of where we live and the threads which connect the past with the present, with its layers like a jigsaw.”
Carolyn Clark, author of Tales of Old Ford and Bow (Image: Carolyn Clark)
Carolyn, 73, former co-ordinator at Crisis homeless charity in Whitechapel, is author of several books on the East End, especially its canals.
Her latest is Tales from Old Ford and Bow being launched at the ‘Geezers’ festival on the weekend of April 26 and 27.
Its back cover shows one of the people she interviewed, pensioner Elsie Hobart, who was born in a house in Zealand Road where she lived all her life. It was snapped in 1960 outside her house.
“I interviewed 60 people for the book,” Carolyn recalls. “It covers all life in Bow and Old Ford and the amount of industry that used to exist in living memory.”
Her book also has a map of what Bow and Old Ford were like back in the day, created by cartography artist Jane Smith — with nostalgic images like the 677 trolleybus that ran along Grove Road in the 1950s, the old Coborn Road station on the Great Eastern main line that closed in 1946 and Victoria Park lido demolished in 1990.
The area is also famous for the world’s first fish and chips, said to have been invented at Joseph Malin’s fried fish shop at 560 Old Ford Road in 1860.
Carolyn came across a larger-than-life character over the years, former Tower Hamlets councillor Ray Gibson, an East End stalwart who lived in Bow all his life and who started the famous Geezers Club in 2007 to keep pensioners active.
The festival is being staged by the Geezers Club in memory of Ray, who died in November aged 89.
One of his campaigns being featured at the free festival was his fight to save East End pubs that had once been community hubs. The retired lorry driver got a £2,000 Lottery grant in 2014 to research the vanishing boozers, a sort of ‘big pub crawl’ on the sad demise of East End watering holes that have dried up.
“I blame breweries and investment companies,” Ray told the East London Advertiser at the time. “They sold off pubs and didn’t care about the social value.”
His own local, the Needle Gun in Roman Road, became a City View hotel, much to his dismay.
The festival has pub games like ‘shove ha’penny’, art workshops, Pearlie kings and queens, cockney music and a pop-up museum telling the tale of the people of Bow and Old Ford.
Geezers club chair Eddie Snooks said: “We find a local thirst for knowledge for Old Ford. People want to know the stories to bring history to life.”
‘Tales from Old Ford and Bow’ will run April 26 from 1pm to 5pm and April 27 noon to 5pm at Mile End Park Ecology Pavilion in Grove Road — appropriately next to the Regent’s Canal.
