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8 THE COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FOR TOWER HAMLETS PRODUCED BY YOUR COUNCIL This month Graham Barker takes a springtime stroll through the historic parks and streets of Bethnal Green and beyond. Photos by Mike Askew. Set off with a spring in your step

SPRING can be an inspiring time to Continue through Ion Square Gardens, get out and about, with flowers, glimpsing Columbia Road as you reach green shoots, buds and blossom Hackney Road. breaking through. This walking You now detour briefly out of the bor- route takes in some East End high- ough. To the left of Hackney City Farm (8) lights including parks, canals, histo- enter Haggerston Park, once the Imperial ry and art. Gas Works. Tuilerie Street alongside marks We start this month’s walk at Bethnal the French tile makers who had kilns here. Green Tube station. St John’s Church (1) At the tennis courts, join the Woodland towers above you, with its elegant win- Walk as it skirts initially by the farm and dows and golden weather vane. It was then left uphill and around the BMX track. designed in 1825 by Bank of England archi- On reaching Goldsmith’s Row, turn left – tect Sir John Soane and holds a command- beware of enthusiastic cyclists – cross to ing position. the Albion pub and continue on over the Cross at the lights in front of the church, Regent’s Canal hump-backed bridge. and there, behind Paradise Gardens, sits Ahead is Broadway Market (9), full of inter- Paradise Row, cobbled and narrow. The cel- esting independent shops, cafés and pubs. ebrated bare-knuckle fighter Mendoza the The Saturday farmers’ market here offers Jew lived at No 3 (2) and wrote The Art of breads, olives, cheeses and other tasty Boxing here. treatS. Continue along Bethnal Green Road, By the Sir Walter Scott step down to join under the railway bridge and cross to the the canal and follow the towpath past gas- bow-fronted former police station – now holders and under two bridges. Go through home to Providence Row Housing Canal Gate into Victoria Park as it opens Association. out on your left, and follow the road run- Head alongside it, and bend right with St John on Bethnal Green Church is ning parallel with the canal. (Note: until Ainsley Street to reach Wilmot Street. The topped by a golden weather vane, the end of April part of the towpath is flats here, five storeys high and running visible from afar closed for essential repairs. If you find it the full length of the street, were built closed, follow the diversion shown on the between 1869-75 by the Improved Industrial red-windowed warehouse and leave by a boards, along Andrews Road, Vyner Street Dwellings Company, led by social housing side gate, or walk along Derbyshire Street if and Sewardstone Street, which brings you pioneer Sir Sydney Waterlow. you prefer. Then go up Hague Street and at to the main Victoria Park gates.) Take the turning by Nos 121-125 into Bethnal Green Road turn left, past the The impetus for Victoria Park was the Weavers Fields. After the colourful adven- wood panelled café of E Pellicci (5), the anti- Registrar General’s observation in 1839 that ture playground, the green opens out. Head dote to chain coffee shops. “A park in the East End would probably to the Weaving Identities steel sculpture (3) By the Marquis of Cornwallis, cross and diminish the annual deaths by several of sporting figures, one above the other – head along Squirries Street. Head to the thousands... and add several years to the “If we see further today and tomorrow, it is cluster of poplar trees and you’ll see the lives of the entire population.” because we stand on the shoulders of yes- ornate Queen Adelaide Dispensary (6), After a 30,000-strong petition to Queen terday’s seers” explains the plaque. The fig- originally built to cope with a cholera epi- Victoria, land was secured and Victoria ures dance around a swirl of lustrous metal demic. Park opened in 1850, with tree-lined ribbons, echoes of 17th century Spitalfields Beside it, adorning the working men’s avenues and lakes landscaped by James silks. club, is Banksy’s flower painter (7) – sadly Pennethorne. Red-brick Oxford House (4) sits north of defaced, yet still remarkable. Beside Bonner Hall Bridge sit the two the park. It was the first university ‘settle- Cross Gosset Street and curve left white Dogs of Alcibiades (10) – or they will ment’, a place for students to work with through Nelson Gardens. Cross at the zebra once they return from restoration. disadvantaged communities. These days crossing and then head between two small Enter the next section of park and take you can attend yoga, samba or sewing greens and right along Durant Street, part the left-hand tarmac path. The West Lake classes, or art exhibitions here. of the Jesus Hospital Estate, designed in the appears on your right. Aim for the glass- Veer diagonally over the grass towards a 1860s as ‘breakfast-parlour houses’. domed Pavilion Café (11), a place to watch the coots, geese, ducks and swans, with the School (13), dressed in blue uniforms. agriculture and the arts. First built as a fountain beyond. There are loos here too. At Old Ford Road, turn right and towards temporary museum in South Kensington Continue around the lake, and back to the end you’ll come to a cluster of the old- after the Great Exhibition, it earned the the bridge, and leave through the main est buildings in Bethnal Green, many from nickname the ‘Brompton Boilers’. It was gates. the 1750s. York Hall (14) comes next, opened relocated and re-opened here in 1872 and Stroll down Approach Road, past the in 1929 by the Duke and Duchess of York now houses the UK’s national collection of London Chest Hospital (12) – built in the and incorporating a swimming pool, gym, children’s games and toys. Entry is free and 1850s to care for TB patients – and over a health spa and boxing hall. you might visit the museum café at the mini-roundabout. Look out for two children Cross to the V&A Museum of Childhood end of your walk, before finishing back at inset into the façade of Raine’s Foundation (15), with its decorative panels depicting Bethnal Green tube.

Number 3 Paradise Row was home to Daniel Mendoza The canal-side walk passes by some imaginative graffiti

Gas holders near Broadway Market dominate the skyline The woodland walk through Haggerston Park