Nether World 1

2005
Video: 15 minutes 46 seconds

Nether World I is an urban tour along the A102/A12 Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach, London, with three Project Managers from the Leaside Regeneration Company.

The East End of London has always existed as a separate and distinct identity. The geographic area of Tower Hamlets in east London rests upon a separate strip of gravel, one of the Flood Plain gravels that were created at the time of the last glacial eruption some 15,000 years ago. Inhabited for 2000 years, the history of Tower Hamlets goes back to the Roman invasion of 43AD.

Much of the borough was originally marshland but as London expanded and the pressure for development intensified, the land was gradually drained and reclaimed. A cluster of small communities was established, known locally as the hamlets around the Tower.

Its development continues….

Bromley-by-Bow, which features in the first volume of the Survey of London, is an ancient parish in the borough of Tower Hamlets. It came about in the eleventh century with the founding of a Benedictine nunnery in the desolate marshlands east of the River Lea. Its name derives from the meadows that were full of brambles, and was once a rural village with a pond and village green.

The area was a mixture of farming and market gardening with industries along the River Lea. All that changed in the middle of the 19th century, when numerous of streets were laid out, and modern Bromley was born.

Replacing the former Brunswick Road with its parade of shops and services, the A102/A12 motorway (Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach), brings traffic into London and across the Thames. Completed in 1971, and cutting through Bromley-by-Bow, the A102/A12 sees an estimated 50,000-100,000 commuters travelling through it every day.

In a competition to name the noisiest road in Britain carried out by the UK Noise Association in 2003, the Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach (A102/A12) was voted joint third