IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Alphabet Square, LONDON, E3 3RT

Modern houses where there used to be industrial premises. See Image for history of Hawgood Street.

This gated area of apartments is on the site where there used to be industrial buildings by the Limehouse Cut. See Image for history of Hawgood Street.

There are apartment blocks along Gale Street. Apart from this block on the corner, the north side of Hawgood Street is open to the grassy open space of Furze Green. See Image for history of Hawgood Street.

Up to the 1860s this area was industrial with pot ash manufacture. Hawgood, Eastward, Box, Furze and Gale Street were laid out and a July 1866 advertisement in London City Press shows the auction of the freehold ground-rents of 64 brick-built houses. A Hawgood Family website says the street was named after Robert Henry Hawgood, a sanitary engineer who worked installing the London sewer system. In Booth's Map of Poverty 1886-1903 the street is: "BLACK: Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal." - occupied by "The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink." Hawgood Street had 22 houses on the north side and industrial premises on the south side, between the street and the Limehouse Cut. This layout persisted to the 1940s - there was only minor bomb damage, one house destroyed and the rest repairable blast damage. Since the 2nd World War the area has been totally redeveloped. There is now housing between Hawgood Street and the canal. The area north of Hawgood Street has been cleared and become a green space, Furze Green; the short Eastward Street and Box Street which ran across from Furze Street to Gale Street no longer exist.

Modern houses where there used to be industrial premises. See Image for history of Hawgood Street.

The Limehouse Cut was built in 1770 to connect the River Lea to the Thames and so shorten the journey for vessels travelling from the River Lea to the Pool of London. It did this by cutting out several loops of the lower Lea and the Thames. In the 19th century it was so polluted that "no bargee who fell in had any chance of surviving his ducking in the filthy water". The Limehouse Cut was closed to pedestrians for many years but the towpath, as seen here, has been opened up in the last few years so that it is now possible to walk from Limehouse Basin to Three Mills via the new bridge under the Blackwall Tunnel approach road.

A solitary canoe paddles by the flats and houses on Broomfield Street, across the canal.

View from walkway by Invicta Close.

This short street runs from Hawgood Street to a walkway beside the Limehouse Cut.

From the 1860s to the 2nd World War this area was densely covered in small houses. Since then it has been totally redeveloped with a green space surrounded by apartments. The new financial district towers of Canary Wharf, seen mistily behind Hawgood Street, have changed the area even more.