The Little Chapel or Schoolhouse - PETITION

Due to absence of Flood Risk Report and Biodiversity Report the applcn has been WITHDRAWN and will not be determined at the planning cttee this evg.
More info in thread however.
Katy.


Dear friends,

It seems a great shame that this lovely little Grade II listed historic building on Lea Bridge Road beside the River Lea is under threat of being turned into yet more luxury housing (see below and link).

Originally built by St. James's Church as an outreach Chapel for the use of navvies and bargees (delicately referred to here by the politically-correct modern term of "boaters", preferred by today's boating community, rather than "bargees") along this stretch of the River Lea, the Old School-house was strategically sited next to the point at which the Hackney Cut (or "New Cut") diverges from the Old (tidal) River Lea.

The building later functioned on weekdays as a rudimentary schoolhouse, used by the children of bargees passing through or delivering to Ashpitel's "Paradise Dock", and presumably also catering for children in the tenement housing that had sprung up at the southern end of North Millfield around Lea Bridge Green, where there was a turnpike gate until 1881 and a couple of pubs (the Ship Aground and the Prince, now renamed the Princess, of Wales); a third pub - The Ferry House or the Horse & Groom, stood across the River Lea on the Essex side, at the point of the old "Roman" ford and ferry-crossing on the Porters' Way (or 'Blackmarsh' or 'Black' Path), and was notable for the boundary of the Walthamstow Slip within Leyton Parish running through it.

This is all part of the Clapton Conservation Area.
I have been trying for many years to get the Conservation Area extended to cover not only the former Middlesex Filter Beds (the heritage value of which which the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority, to whom Thames Water have leased the area, are currently severely damaging by digging up the original cobbled paths) but also the adjacent part of Waltham Forest as well - particularly the "Red House", also a listed building, the locally-listed octagonal weir-house, and the industrial sheds that formed part of the Essex Filter Beds site.  (I had also hoped to include the wharfage site at Essex Wharf, now unfortunately covered with hideous high-rise residential slab-buildings thanks to the Secretary of State's refusal to intervene in Waltham Forest's disgraceful decision .)

However, there unfortunately seems to be no administrative way of achieving this extension of the Conservation Area to Leyton.  Where existing Conservation Areas cross Ward or Borough boundaries (eg Wanstead, Shoreditch), this is because the boundaries have been altered since the Conservation Area was set up.

The Clapton Conservation Area Advisory Committee (composed of members of the Hackney Society, the Civic Society operating in Hackney, which has a very strong heritage interest) have worked with local people and with the Clapton Arts Trust to try to preserve the building and secure its use by the community as a small heritage centre and museum about the working life of the River Lea.

Both English Heritage and the National Lottery's Heritage Lottery Fund have promised money to help with the proposed community heritage use, but the project seems to have been plagued by a lack of local leadership, and this is coupled with the depredations of a succession of squatters, all of whom have contributed their share towards wrecking the building.  Its last use was commercial, and it has never been a residential property, so squatting it is still apparently legal.

Now a proposal has come before Hackney Council to convert the little chapel (or school-house) into flats.  This would preserve the building of course, but it would mean the loss of a potential community resource which to many of us locally is a very special place and for which we had had great plans.  Once the building becomes housing, it will be lost to the community as a site for our small waterways heritage museum.

There is a petition running at :
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-hackney-s-early-victorian-old-boaters-schoolhouse.
Please sign it online.
The petition will be delivered by hand (on paper) to Hackney Town Hall in the very near future.

If you would like to write in to register your disapproval of the proposals in more detail, please also write urgently togareth.barnett@hackney.gov.uk.

I have been particularly keen to see an exhibition there of the industrial heritage of the river, especially  the years when barges (the first narrowboat was apparently sighted on the river in 1966 or 1967!) took cargoes up and down the river between the upper reaches in Ware and Hertford and the Thames - or even further afield - some went as far as Felixstowe and Kent, apparently!

  Horses seem to have been introduced on the River Lea earlier than the first canals, and one horse was capable of moving up to 50 tons by water (compared with 2 tons on a drawn wagon or half a ton carried by a pack-horse), so there must have been quite a demand for farriers in the area as well and boats may have had to lay up for several hours while their nags were re-shod.  If anyone has any information on that I'd love to see it!  As some of you probably know, I am very interested in learning more about the Homerton farriers and blacksmiths!  Horses continued in use on the Lea well into the 1950s.

Katy A.