Manor Park, East London
Where the ghost of Catherine Tylney still haunts!

Today I was astonished, and delighted, to spot a policemen on a bicycle between Manor Park and Forest Gate.  I've seen them in Central London, and nowhere else.  So it was even more surprising to learn from him that there are FIFTY bicycle cops in Newham.  Most of them are in the south of the borough, apparently.  Manor Park doesn't have any, (or maybe he said they have one).  I would like to see more cops-on-bikes in the Manor Park and Forest Gate Community Forum Zones.  I think they are effectively mobile, humanizing, and their visibile presence lends useful and necessary support to improving public and road safety for cyclists and pedestrians.  Especially on the Romford Road, where anything that helps to keep the tempers of car-driving commuters in check, would be of positive value to local quality of life.

Apparently the Manor Park Police team out of Little Ilford have their say in whether they have bicycle policemen or not.  I wonder what influence Newham Council or the Manor Park Community Forum have in these matters.

It is so strange, when you live in an area for so long, to suddenly look up and notice that something you used to see there, is now a vacant site.  The A-framed green-copper clad church on the Romford Road, which was Manor Park Methodist church.   Suddenly I noticed that it wasn't there any more.

I must have heard it on the news when it happened a year and a half ago, but I have absolutely no recollection of the burning down by arson of the Manor Park Methodist Church.    The article also mentions that "Some three or four years ago, the local Anglican Church was destroyed by fire, which was also attributed to arson".  Was this where the Froud Centre now stands?

It means that the three churches in the vicinity of Manor Park Broadway have all been burned down in the last decade.  The other one in recent years was the church at the corner of Manor Park and Durham Roads, next to a warehouse where the fire was started.  The church building there is now rebuilt and sports one of those evangelical labels, "Church of God UK", which I seem to remember having seen in North London, and to which I seem to recall some negative press.

3 churches all burned down in one locality, in the space of less than a decade?  Doesn't that inspire a bit of investigative journalism, or detective work?   Did someone have a grudge against the established Christian churches?  Have I missed some historical news of whether anybody was ever caught and sent to prison for these acts of arson?

There's a website over at Jiwire where you can search for WiFi Hotspots anywhere in the world, so I selected UK, typed in my postcode and asked for any hotspots within 0.5 miles. I didn't know whether to expect any results at all really, so I was surprised when up popped the Golden Fleece pub, much frequented by parents who want to get drunk while their toddlers run amok and by Sunday-League footballers. This pub has one lucrative competitive advantage - its location on the edge of the open space of Wansted Flats, an advantage which successive owners have spectacularly failed to live up to over the years. So now the Fleece is an internet hotspot, I find it hard to imagine the place frequented by single isolated laptop surfers. or do the wide boys who park their xr3i fuel injected darkened window hatchbacks outside all operate by email and IM these days? Well I haven't been in there for quite a while and it would be perfectly normal if everything has changed again. I don't think I have ever been served by the same bar person twice, even in the days when I might have gone to the Fleece as often as once a week. Something must be seriously wrong for the staff turnover to be so high, and if you ever manage to catch them on a day when they have somebody in the kitchen who knows how to cook then you are much luckier than I have ever been! After all this criticism, one thing that has improved in the last year or so, and that is the chance that they may have some good beer. In the old days it was Courage Directors, and not always in very good condition, after that it was Theakstons, which is not really my taste but more recently they advertise Adnams ( usually Broadside ) which catches my attention since Adnams Southwold Bitter is probably one of my alltime favourite beers, alongside one or two of the new Cornish brews. Now Gerry on his blog reports the Fleece serving Adnams Fishermans ale, so I shall have to make the effort to get along there sometime soon, taste the ale and see if I spot any NetStumblers.

Newham Council offers a Street Hotline, run by the Environment Department, to which you may raise complaints about street cleaning, etcetera.  It is on Extension 88000 on the main telephone of 020 8430 2000.

The street environment in Newham has improved gradually over the last 4 years.  It's better than what it used to be, and it is now imaginable that it may become as good as Redbridge's.

Unfortunately, I have encountered a "scam" which appears to operate within the Environment Department .  From my experience, there is one thing to beware when calling the Hotline.  Last year, it took nearly 10 weeks, during which I had to phone them four times, before our street was swept.     In total, our street had gone without a sweep for over 3 months. 

On each occasion, I was told that their computer records showed that my call had been dealt with by the Cleaning Department, and that the street had been swept.    When I asked how this could be, they offered to set up a new call reference, instead of using the original call.

This means that Newham Council gives the impression of successfully resolving X number of Street Hotline Calls, when in fact up to three quarters of those calls have been wrongly closed as "Successfully Completed".

I have so far this year had to contact the Street Hotline for two issues, only to find that this game still goes on.  But I have got wiser, and I have also come to understand that the deception can arise at several points along the chain of command.  For example, it could be the street cleaner, or his work team, or his manager, or the Cleaning Services Manager, or the Street Hotline Call Centre itself.  All these parties seem to tacitly collude in order to make their Performance Monitoring statistics appear virtuous and pure.

It is appalling, because I have been faced with outright lies (and audacious ones at that) on each occasion.  In the end, the jobs got done, although they took longer than necessary, but why should we be confronted with lies, to which we must retaliate with anger, in order to achieve an end result?
If Newham is the star council in the Labour councils of London, is this the reality that Tony Blair endorses?

Manor Park boasts a Lithuanian delicatessen, named Vilnius, after the capital of that country.  I haven't tried any of its merchandise yet, but I've been into it, and if you're a connoiseur of food, it looks like they've got some pretty special things.  It is at 672 Romford Road, which is on the right hand side when travelling from Manor Park towards Ilford, just after the big TJR Bathroom and  Plumbing supplies place.  It is right next to a Russian shop with a sign in Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet, which might look foreign to you, but actually just spells out Russian for G A S T R O N O M.


It's quite hard to find pork products in Manor Park, unless you go to the Tesco Express, but if you catch the train to Goodmayes, turning right as you come out of Goodmayes station, you will come across a new tiny Polish delicatessen.  They do some lovely meats, and their cured bacon is to-die-for.  It does not require cooking and can be eaten like ham.

Hardware stores are hard to find in Manor Park nowadays.  Hayter's which was a marvellous old-fashioned General Hardware store, closed down last year when the owner retired after having worked there for 50 years.    There are two other small general builder's merchants, but what they seem to stock seems to be unpredictable and limited.   In Seven Kings, not far from the train station, is a General Hardware store of the same type as was Hayter's.  It is known as Creed's, and you can even buy Knotting Solution, which is something not stocked at Wickes, and over-priced at Homebase.

In Manor Park, there are no more shops that do glass cut-to-size.   Anderson's, which used to be on the Katherine Road, closed down.    There appears to be nowhere else now between South East Ham and Walthamstow.  This is a result of the legislated requirement for double-glazing if Windows are changed.  Also the Yellow Pages shows a wealth of businesses plying for Emergency glazing (repairs made necessary as a result of break-ins), so you can imagine that this is where all the money has gone.

So if you need Glass cut-to-size, I highly recommend Essex Glass, which is on Chadwell Heath High Road, not far from the Chadwell Heath Train station.  Their service is excellent and friendly.  Wouldn't it be nice if we had shops like this in Manor Park?

Floodmap

The news that global warming is accelerating out of control coincided with the release of the Environment Agency's floodmap. This is the one which Insurance companies have been using. So, it looks like Manor Park may survive on a peninsula, from which we will be able to row across East Ham all the way to Shooters' Hill.

The Meeting has now been set for 7pm on the 13th October 2004 at the Greenhill Centre, 464 High St North, E12.

The meeting is open to the public.  There will be elections for the Chair and the steering group positions, for which nominations are already closed.  Residents of the Manor Park area who attend the meeting will be allowed to vote. 

Just spotted for the fifth time in ten days, a streetwalker about 5' 9", slim with straight skinny legs.  She has tufty short hair which is 80% bleached blond, very fair skinned, probably in her late twenties, and probably East European.

Today at 5.15pm she was hovering at the 101 Bus Stop on Forest Drive, wearing knee high cheap leather boots and a short denim skirt.

She first caught my attention ten days ago.   I spotted her running down Capel Road, looking dirty, unkempt, and afraid.  She kept looking back over her shoulder as though she was trying to run away from somebody.  She was such a fright that I thought she must have just got off the boat.  Her clothes looked like they hadn't been washed for days.  She was wearing a mini skirt that was a very pale salmon, and was so short that it looked like a rubber band.

The next day I caught her hanging around Forest Drive, and she even flashed me a hooker's smile when I walked past her.  Her clothes still hadn't been washed.

A few days later I spotted her in the same clothes, but this time they were washed, and she looked a bit spruced up too.

Yesterday, she was clearly open for business, strutting up the road from Manor Park Station to the City of London Cemetery, looking quite confident.

And today, she looks like she's a pro.

I stopped at some police constables on High Street North and asked them what could be done about it.  One said he thought he knew the girl I was describing.  He said we could alert them and they would ask her to move on.  What about any other kind of social institution that might have an outreach for such women?  Nope, it's all up to the Police, again. 

Where are the Priests, the Vicars, the Social Workers?

Update: 30th September.  At 6.35 pm , spotted her working at the junction of Whitta Road and Capel Road



And Who are the customers?

Walking past this pub on Friday night, after midnight, I was smothered by the biggest gust of top quality cannabis smoke that I have ever encountered.  On this particular evening this pub was guarded by a bouncer, its interior was widely visible from the street and scarcely 25% full, but with a very narrow range in clientele.

This ugly pub, which is on the north-west corner of the Romford Road junction with Forest Gate, is a Seventies architectural carbuncle that gives passing car traffic a very bad impression of the neighbourhood.  It's notoriety reached me well over a decade ago.

East Ham was featured in Newsnight on BBC2 last week with an eye-opening report into the PLAB doctors, as they are known.  

What is PLAB?  It is the Professional Linguistic Assessment Board.

What is a PLAB doctor?  A junior doctor qualified in (usually) India, who has been "lured" to East Ham to attend the PLAB course, with the belief that once they have passed it, they would have an easy time getting a job in the NHS.

What is the problem?  The NHS wants to recruit Consultants and Specialists from overseas.  They don't have much use for junior doctors who need further training and experience.  These PLAB doctors then linger in England, their funds exhausted, their morale depleted. 

Meanwhile, the fellow in East Ham who is making money by running the PLAB courses for these hopefuls, also runs several Boarding Houses maintained at decrepit standards, and soaks money from his prey also by this method.

So now there's an explanation why when you go through East Ham, there are so many lost-looking down and outs.