Mick Hartley

They say that history's around every corner in London, but still, this was a surprise:

It could hardly be a less auspicious place: on Gillender Street, an isolated and forgotten dead-end, cut off by the pounding traffic of the Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach Road, like some oxbow lake:

That's an old LCC Fire Station there, just behind on the right – a handsome Edwardian building cut adrift from its old life. 

And here, in this little alley, with litter and old tyres, are all these pages of photographs of the area: Bow and Bromley-by-Bow, from the 1920s and 30s, before it all disappeared in the Blitz and the post-war reconstruction – and the dual-carriageway A12 that cut the area in half, leaving the eastern side here stranded:

I've no idea how long they've been there – or who put them up. Maybe they came from the old Poplar Library just down the road: another fine piece of Edwardian civic optimism left stranded here by the side of the motorway, and now part of the Leaside Business Centre, in the Poplar Riverside development:

In the future Poplar Riverside is set to become a high density, mixed-use area containing a fine-grain mix of apartments and live/work units truly integrated with business premises and community uses. This will be a place that stimulates the growth of a progressive high-tech business community, with a network of links to the adjacent existing and developing technology industries but with its roots set firmly in the local community.

A fine-grain mix, eh? You can't argue with that.

In the meantime someone's taken the trouble to paste all these old photos up. They won't last long, of course, open to the elements like that. A quixotic gesture: paper memories in the face of progress.