At Large in Leyton – A Walk Around The East London Manor 1989-1994

On Monday November 28th, 1994, the police riot squad arrived to evacuate Claremont Road in the so-called “autonomous republic” of “Wanstonia”. The protest against the demolition of housing to make way for the M11 Link Road was lost. Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton said “the Department of Transport’s pig-headed approach to the M11 link road has been a shambles, and a costly one at that”,  and described the police presence as “a miniature equivalent of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.” City planners one loved the idea of motorways going through London. And this one road opened to traffic in 1999.

 

 

Peter Marshall was in Leyton, down in the Lower Lea Valley and around 6 miles to north east of Charing Cross in the late 1980s and 1990s. He took pictures of the activists who set up home in the area that includes New Spitalfields Market, Leyton Orient Football Club, and part of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. With roots in Roman Britain and noted in the Domesday Book (a record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of King William the Conqueror), Leyton is where the band Iron Maiden formed and Harry Beck (1902–1974), creator of the London Underground Map, was born, and the self-declared ‘World Fuhrer’ was once voted into power.

 

M11 Link Campaign, Claremont Rd, Leyton, Waltham Forest, 1994

M11 Link Campaign, Claremont Rd, Leyton, Waltham Forest, 1994

 

Previously Leyton in the 1960s.