London Borough Challenge: Newham

I'm still working my way through the London boroughs trying to get photos in all of them. Going through the list and seeing which ones I haven't been to yet has been quite interesting. There are the obvious exceptions, those boroughs out in the suburbs (Redbridge, Merton, Croydon, Havering etc.) which I have to make a special effort to visit, but that wasn't a surprise. More surprising is that I don't seem to have been near any of the more central boroughs, like Hackney, Islington, Tower Hamlets or Kensington — at least, not with a camera. Of course, I have been to all of those places this year, and I've even taken a handful of photos. But I need to go back with camera in hand and take some photos that I actually want to include in the project.

That being said, I also want to go back to some of the other places as well. I took advantage of going to the MCM Expo the other week to take a few photos in Newham, on the walk between Canning Town station and the Excel Centre. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to charge my battery so I didn't get as many photos as I would have liked.

It was a pretty weird day, though. Not, as many people assume, because it was filled with people wearing outlandish outfits and teenage girls trying to hug everyone in sight, but because the Excel Centre seems to have no relation to the environment in which it is placed. Walking out of Canning Town station, the place feels pretty dismal. Along Silvertown Way it's mostly council estates which have an air of neglect, and everything seems grey and joyless. Some efforts have been made to inject colour into the environment, but you have to wonder if the person choosing the colour combinations was colour-blind, because who on earth would think that bile green and hot pink was a good combination? Although it certainly is eye-catching (it even looks almost appealing in my photo):

In fact, despite the greyness of the area, most of my pictures from my walk between the station and the Excel Centre are quite colourful, presumably because my eyes were busy seeking out anything that detracted from the grim atmosphere. Most of the walk looked like this, though:

There's a bizarrely brightly-painted anti-flooding substation as you reach the road that goes up to the Excel Centre, overlooked by some particularly ugly apartment blocks courtesy of new-build monopolisers, Barratt Homes. Even though this stretch is obviously better off than the council estates around the corner (because the housing is all privately-owned), I didn't find it any less grim and unwelcoming. It felt like there's still absolutely no sense of community there, even with the kids nursery and the corner shop.

These stark contrasts make it an interesting area, but not one I felt particularly comfortable in. Although one area has more money than the other, both areas still have an atmosphere of neglect. The area around the council estates feels like it's been neglected because it's been left on its own for a long time and it's too poor to care about, and the area around the Excel Centre and the Barratt apartments feels neglected because it's still too new and it feels too separate from the rest of the community that it overlooks. Maybe it'd feel different to me if any of the buildings were attractive, but they're all so ugly. There was a great opportunity to build something wonderful, and instead they just went for ugly glass boxes which look more like very boring office buildings than comfortable apartments. No one would ever make one of those their dream house, would they?

More pics here, with hopefully more to come if I manage to get back there.