Fifth anniversary round up - past and future

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the E7-NowAndThen blog, during which time we have published a little over 200 articles, on a ratio of about 1:2 - Now:Then. This article is a brief review of the past, with some pointers to the future direction of the blog.

First, the stats. The site has had just short of half a million visitors and now attracts an average of well over 400 hits a day. The complementary twitter account @E7_NowAndThen has a little under 1700 followers and is happy to re-tweet anything interesting about E7.

The articles receiving most hits, unsurprisingly, are those that have been live longest. The most popular tend to be about the "Now" rather than the "Then", and at the pleasure seeking end of the scale of topics covered.

The five year top five hits have been:

Forest Gate good (and not so good) pub guide, past and present (2013) - here

Forest Tavern in good pub guides

Forest Gate pub guide (2014) - here

Upper Cut Club, part 1 - the rise (2013) - here

Billy Walker's Upper Cut club

Fires guts famous gym (2013) - here

Kenny Johnson and the Lotus Club (2014) - here

Kenny Johnson's Lotus Club

The most visited post published over the last twelve months have been:

Criminal Landlords of Forest Gate, named and shamed - here

Bryan Forbes recalls his local origins - here

Bryan Forbes goes back to school in Forest Gate

Redevelopment plans for Woodgrange Road Methodist church - here

Woodgrange Methodist church,
redevelopment proposals

Dames Road disaster - here

Survivor's tale - Forest Gate Industrial school - here.

The Criminal Landlords post received the fastest hit rate in the shortest period of time on the blog  - racking up over 2,000 hits in its first week live.

Some of our most successful, and satisfying, posts (particularly the Dames Road disaster and Survivor's tale, above) have been when we have been contacted by witnesses or descendants of participants of significant events and have been able to shed a new light on an older story, and added to the depth of understanding and authenticity of local events of historic importance.

Charles Hipkins, survivor of the Forest
 Gate Industrial school fire,
1890 - what he did next

Similarly, over the last couple of years, we have been able to produce ground-breaking biographies of a number of local people -  adding to our, and other historians', understanding of them as individuals - by pulling material, some very local, together in ways never previously done. So, we have added to the appreciation of a number of  people normally confined to footnotes in more general histories.

We are particularly pleased to have been able to achieve this with Frank FitzGerald, Irish patriot and father of one of the country's recent taoiseachs (Garret) - see here, anarchist and some-time William Morris associate, Charles Mowbray - see here. These were largely put together by local historian, @Flatshistorian, Mark Gorman. Most recently our biography/timeline on local suffragette, Minnie Baldock, did precisely this as well (see here).

Charles Mowbray and Minnie Baldock

For the future, we will be looking to build on some of these historic successes.

So - next week's post will continue the survivor's tale tradition, by telling the story of one of the witnesses of the bombing of the Princess Alice, in 1941 - the still very much alive John Muskett.

We are now working in collaboration with outside bodies, contributing to, and delivering, larger and more ambitious projects.

The first of these is a film, to which we have contributed, Archibald Cameron Corbett, the man and the houses, about the developer behind the Woodgrange Estate and the Forest Gate clock/horse trough, outside the railway station.  This fascinating hour-long, professionally produced, film will be showing at the Gate library on Woodgrange Road on Thursday 26 April, at 8pm - free of charge. To ensure entry, please book in advance. (see poster, below)

Archibald Corbett film - the Gate
Thurs 26 April 8pm - free!

Another collaboration project is with the family of William Edward Wright. He was a prominent Forest Gate-based photographer working in the latter years of Victoria's reign and throughout Edward V11's.  He had eight studio branches in total, including two in Forest Gate.  

We will be publishing a blog about the man in a few weeks, and hope to put on an exhibition about the man and his works, in co-operation with his family, later in the year, in Forest Gate and elsewhere, . This follows the collaboration we had last year with Paul Romaine, in putting on his exhibition on The Upper Cut, as part of Newham's Heritage Week.  See here for subsequent post on this blog.

 Wright, the photographer - blog and possible exhibition pending!

We have written extensively about bike building and pleasure in Forest Gate at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries (here, here and here). We are working with Boneshaker magazine to publish  lengthy, and to them and us an important, article on this significant industry and leisure activity locally - later in the summer.

Boneshaker - to feature cycling in Forest
Gate at turn on 19th/20th centuries

Layers of London is a lottery-funded history initiative sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research at University College, London. 

Theirs is a three year project which aims to display London history via a digitised map foundation, so that visitors can - by clicking on a pointer on the modern map - access the history of that spot and events that took place in or around it. It will also be possible to see how the immediate area has changed over time, by examining different era maps of the locality and "drilling" though them. 

Our features on local street histories (e.g Capel, Sebert Dames, Woodford Roads and Earlham Grove), written by local historian, Peter Williams, will be particularly valuable for this initiative.

We will be contributing to this project and by the time it is officially launched in June it will be possible to access over 100 aspects of Forest Gate history on it.

Layers of London - web pages under
construction - should have over 100
Forest Gate entries, when launched in June

As far as the "Now" aspect of the website is concerned, we will continue to cover major planning and development activities affecting Forest Gate, and offer the opportunities for people to engage in a discussion on the proposal. A good example of this would be our article on the development plans for 39 -49 Woodgrange Road (see here), which has had almost 4,000 hits and attracted over 40 comments in the two years since it was first posted.

We will also dig out E7 angles on Newham-wide, or national surveys and statistics - often being able to throw up major talking points - as our regular food hygiene surveys and recent surveys of crooked landlords and lettings agencies have.

We are always open to receiving contributory posts, or suggestions of areas to research and publish - subject to legal and decency considerations.

Thank you for supporting this blog over the last five years. We hope you can join us in looking forward to the next five!

On reflection

This marks the first anniversary of the establishment of this blog, so a bit of reflection and a progress report is called for.

We've published 50 posts, on a wide range of ... well, Forest Gate-related issues, past and present, to date.

We are upto an average of 200 -250 hits per day on the site, which given the relatively small geographic area of its focus and the fairly eclectic nature of the content, isn't bad.

We've established a complementary Twitter account (@E7_NowAndThen) which now has in excess of 380 followers.  This is used largely to announce new postings on this blog, and many of the Tweets are retweeted and favourited - many with generous comments - which is satisfying.

Although we always invite comments, suggestions, recollections, additions, corrections to Blogs posted,;we've had relatively little feedback, which is slightly disappointing.  All comments submitted are subject to being overseen by a moderator before being published. The ONLY ones which are screened out are attempts by (often dodgy) commercial organisations to hijack the site for their own purposes, or responses which are potentially unlawful, or abusive (very few).

Below is a list of the hyperlinks to the eight most viewed posts, together with photos representative of the article.

Upper Cut Part 1

First week's bill at the
Upper Cut - magic!

Christmas Day in the Forest Gate Workhouse


The Forest Gate Industrial School, later maternity
hospital and now flats - scene of description
of Christmas day in the Workhouse

Forest Gate good (and not so good) pub guide



Forest Gate Hotel - part of the local pub trail

Rise and decline of local Jewish community


The old West Ham synagogue, Forest Lane

Fire guts famous gym  This was the first blog


Arnie and Wag, outside Bennett's gym
(now, sadly in tatters) on Romford Road, c 1966

Booming Woodgrange Road



Saturday markets at the junction of Woodgrange
and Sebert Roads, early signs of the
Woodgrange Road boom

Spotted Dog, still under threat Another very early posting


An undated woodcut of the Old Spotted Dog

Food hygiene in Woodgrange Road



A long-established local eaterie,
featured in the food hygiene story

24-hour Forest Gate gourmet trail One of the most recent posts, which has had a relatively huge hit rate in its short time on the site



CoffeE7 - the beginnings of the Forest Gate gourmet
trail and still less than 18 months old

The titles of the posts are fairly self-explanatory, and eating, drinking and being merry seem to provoke most interest! Also, not surprisingly, older posts get quite high hit rates, because they have been around longest and so have had more opportunities to be viewed.

To reinforce the popularity of the eat drink and be merry point, the least viewed posts (by a long way!) are the two on Forest Gate's local cemeteries, and their inhabitants.  Clearly, not much merriment there, but we think they are interesting!

Perhaps surprisingly the local good schools guide, with summaries of the Ofsted and other inspection reports of all local schools bombed a bit, in terms of viewership. 

Our small number of posts on Clapton FC (Walter Tull, the club history etc) haven't attracted too much attention.  I guess the club isn't huge and they have their own sites etc - but the are local, and having their best season for years - so give them watch - on line, but more importantly in the flesh, while the good times are here (as I, do elsewhere, unfortunately). 

As regular visitors will know, we've produced a monthly update on who featured at the Upper Cut Club 47 years ago, each month.  This has provoked a wildly varying range of  numbers of viewers, which it is difficult to understand, other than because of the popularity of the acts performing.  The two biggest sets of interest have been over the Jimi Hendrix gigs and the Stax tour with Otis Redding, Sam and Dave etc that we featured recently. We have a couple of interesting photos to update these with.

The first is a poster of the first Jimi Hendrix gig (Purple Haze, written while waiting to go on stage), on Boxing Day 1966.  The Emporium, next to CoffeE7  is selling a limited number of these, in frames (all repro, of course), a photo is reproduced below, for aficionados.


Jimi plays the Upper Cut,
after writing Purple Haze

For real geeks, we are delight to post a photo of the (rather undistinguished looking) complimentary tickets for the Stax tour, previously mentioned.  These were sent to us by attendee Brain Lovegrove.  Thanks, Brian.



Ticket to ride - or at least see the Stax tour,
with Otis, half price!

We did rather wonder how much material there would be around for further interesting(ish) posts for the future, but the options and opportunities just keep growing - almost exponentially.  So, there's a good couple of years of weekly posts left before repetition, deviation or hesitation kicks in.

Additionally, we'll try and Tweet a couple of photos, from the archives, each week from now, as nudges to view older pieces and to bring the photos to the attention to new audiences, perhaps.

Finally, some interim thanks.  It's been great fun, and an opportunity to meet up and discuss all kinds of weird stuff with lots of interesting people.  We welcome all of this. Many thanks to the authors, whose books we've plundered for information - and we don't object if we are the subject of the same (though a touch of acknowledgement would be welcome).

A very special thanks however must go to the over-worked staff at Newham Archives, whom we drive mad on a regular basis - particularly to Jenni, now back from a period of absence.

Enough of the introspection.  Proper stuff and service will resume next week!