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Looking back on the Bow Backs


The recent reopening of City Mill Lock after 40 years has brought back memories for Ed Fox, head of communications for British Waterways. Here he recalls his first visit to the Bow Back Rivers a decade ago and re-visits some of the pictures he commissioned in 2002 from ex-Guardian photographer Roger Bamber.

I first visited the Bow Back Rivers ten years ago. To say the area was a little run down would be like saying Nick Griffin is a little unpopular.

It felt like a war zone.

Twenty minutes or so from central London, the area was a post-apocalyptic no-man's-land of toxic rivers, smashed up warehouses, slag-heaps of jetsam, burnt-out cars and a ziggurat of abandoned fridges that no-one knew what to do with. Furtive Dickensian characters - steel-eyed Bill Sykeses complete with dogs, and troops of raggedy Artful Dodgers with their trousers torn and toes bursting through their shoes - would appear from nowhere and disappear through broken fences.

And wherever you went there were the rivers. Amazing rivers with evocative names – Pudding Mill, Channelsea, Three Mills Wall, Waterworks – that conjured up a world of industry and energy and stories lost. Rivers stuffed to the gills with herons and kingfishers and the national collection of invasive species. Rivers that had defied the Luftwaffe and remained intact and solid 70 years after the then Transport Secretary, The Rt Hon Hore-Belisha (of Belisha Beacon fame) had opened them to a fanfare of hopes and ambitions that were never realised, but never quite forgotten.

BW and local partners had tried for years to restore the rivers but had always come up against official indifference, insuperable planning issues and the euphemistically described ‘bad neighbour industries’.

The arrival of the Channel Rail Link at nearby Stratford, and the wave of optimism that followed the canal restorations at the turn of the Millennium made us hope that things might change. But it was the decision to host the Olympics slap bang in the middle of the Lower Lea Valley which made change inevitable.

Years of blood, sweat and tears

It did not however make the restoration of the rivers (and especially their restoration for navigation) inevitable. Winning that argument took a lot of people years of blood, sweat and tears. The whole story would probably fill a book one day, but working on it gave me some of my most rewarding experiences working for BW: How we terrified (...and convinced) hundreds of MPs, planners, environmentalists, engineers and architects on white-knuckle RIB trips in all weathers. How we uncovered London’s biggest unexploded WW2 bomb and closed down half of London’s rail network in the process. How we rescued remnants of the Euston Arch from the bottom of the river. The day we saved a narrowboater (and his cat) from sinking (...but didn’t get a customer service award!). Meeting Tony Blair and John Prescott and countless other politicians. The wrecked clinker-built boat ‘Voodoo Chile’ at ‘Stratford Yacht Club’. The fruity – and unmentionable – graffiti. And most of all the battles and victories in getting support and funding to restore one of the most extraordinary networks of urban rivers in the country.

I know lots of people are fed up of hearing about the Olympics – how much they will cost, their impact on lottery funding, or just the fact that they are in London. But for me, personally, it has been a real privilege to have witnessed, and played a small part in, the historic transformation of a truly fascinating corner of the waterways.

The photos displayed here were all taken by Roger Bamber

View more of the evocatove photos taken by Roger Bamber in 2002

Last updated: 22/10/2010

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