East Ham - it is all sh*t!

A visit to the far reaches of the District line and the borough of New Ham an amalgam of East Ham and West Ham. I stuck to the East Ham side. And it really is horrible. I went into the vast Carnegie Library. The fiction section downstairs had a lot of books although mostly in foreign languages the information section upstairs was a vast barn with three, yes three shelves of books. Even in Barking I saw more books than that. There was nothing about the history of the borough, the topography or anything like that so I came away at a loss. The vast heritage of one of the county boroughs of Essex reduced to nothing. I made my way to the scrubby grassy park. The library promised me a tree trail – No 1. London Plane, No 2. London Plane etc. On the way to the park a stoned youth asked me where Newham College was. As it was obvious that it was opposite the library away from the direction he was going I pointed towards it and said “There it is”. He just kept walking away from it in some dope induced dream of his own. Why he would want to go there on a Saturday I could not understand.

The picture shows the public mortuary – I’d rather be in there than living in East Ham.

From Travels around London