Insight
Mixed-Use
London's Factory Town
Exploring Fish Island's Past and Present
Foreword
Matchbox cars, the world’s first plastic and the word ‘petrol’ were all born in Hackney Wick. We take a look at the manufacturing past of the Wick’s southernmost reach, Fish Island.
Fish Island was uninhabited marshland for millennia before the industrialists arrived here in the 18th Century. The first factory was a silk mill established in the sleepy hamlet of Hackney Wick in about 1787. But it was to be another 100 years before the area was in full industrial bloom, a condition bought about by the arrival of the Hertford Union Canal in 1830 and the railway in 1851.
The area became a centre of oil and tar processing, which in turn attracted industries including printing and dry cleaning. Fish Island also provided London’s burgeoning retail scene with an array of novelties, delights and conveniences including die-cast toy cars, chocolates, sweeties and waterproof clothing.
Hackney Wick and Fish Island’s boom years came to an end during Britain’s industrial decline in the 1960s, when it turned from a vibrant and populous place of production to a venue for waste disposal and recycling, storage and distribution. Factories, pubs, schools and streets emptied, and vast warehouses were thrown up as distribution centres for products made outside the UK. But as one door closed, another opened, and in the 1980s the area’s relative affordability began to attract artists and designers. Over the next 30 years, Hackney Wick became one of Europe’s most densely populated creative areas. In 2009 over 600 creative businesses were counted here, including fashion and jewellery designers, photographers, graphic designers, musicians, film-makers and fine artists. Many of the original industrial buildings are now entirely given over to artists’ and rehearsal studios, exhibition and performance spaces, and bars, while vibrant street art provides a new graphic overlay on some of the original buildings.
Explore past and present uses of Fish Island's historic buildings with our interactive map.
SMEED ROAD
In the late 1880s, the first factory to be built on Fish Island was Bernard Birnbaum’s Wick Lane Rubber Works, on Smeed Road. Balls of raw rubber were delivered here by boat, processed and then applied to fabric at the adjacent four-storey waterproof clothing factory. This building is now thought to be England’s only surviving 19th Century rubber works.
Since the 1980s most of the 14 buildings making up the Rubber Works have become artist workspaces, including Bridget Riley Studios. One of its residents is Daniel Heath, a British award-winning independent wallpaper, textile and surface designer renowned for his illustrative and engaging designs.
DACE ROAD
In the 1930s, Percy Dalton opened his Famous Peanut Company at the Old Ford Works on Dace Road, using The Gatehouse from the neighbouring Britannia Works as an office. The company remained at 60 Dace Road until 2005, when it relocated to Suffolk.
Today, the former peanut factory houses creative businesses including Hey Big Man, a branding agency and web design company founded in 2013 by Mark Bennett and Josh Tinsley.
STOUR ROAD
In 1902, John Broadwood & Sons – today the oldest piano manufacturer in the world – moved to its new factory on Stour Road, featuring state-of-the-art machinery and methods. When it was turned over to aircraft manufacture in WWI, the factory’s stock of piano wire was redeployed to hold biplanes together. The surviving section features the Carlton chimney at its western end, which was once the factory’ saw mill.
Roofing felt manufacturer Vulcanite was also at Stour Road from 1898, the building remodelled in the 1950s for printing machine and press manufacturer Frank F Pershke.
ROACH ROAD
Stour Space is an exhibition, performance and studio space and bar that shows and produces art and design, as well as promoting innovative creative enterprises. It has a focus on the local neighbourhood, the economy and sustainable regeneration, leading it to be listed as a valuable public venue in the local area by Tower Hamlets Council.
SWAN WHARF
Swan Wharf was built in 1906-12 for a haulage company. Today, it is home to Fish Island Labs, a joint venture by The Barbican and workspace innovators The Trampery that supports technology and creative start-ups. The Trampery is also to be the sole tenant at Peabody’s Fish Island Village, running studios and workspaces across the ground floor of the entire development.
THE LONDON STADIUM
The Olympics came to London in 2012, and today the area is cheek-by-jowl with the London Stadium and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The area falls into the realm of the London Legacy Development Committee, which is committed to granting planning permission to new developments that respect the area’s industrial heritage and that serve its contemporary function as a major European centre of creativity and enterprise.
CARLTON CHIMNEY
Another Fish Island landmark is the Carlton chimney on Roach Road, a circular red brick stack with blue brick cornice built in 1900 for and by the builders J Chessum & Sons, as part of their yard at Crown Wharf.
FISH ISLAND
In the 19th Century, the Hertford Union Canal and railway helped Hackney Wick and Fish Island to thrive, becoming a centre for processing crude oil and coal tar. The waterways almost moated the area just south of Hackney Wick, inviting local people to refer to this newly defined piece of land as 'the Island'.
In the 1860s, the Imperial Gas Light & Coke Company bought a 30-acre plot on the Island. The intention to build a vast new gas works changed following the purchase, and in 1876 a factory town was planned here instead. Gridded streets of terraced houses and factories were named after freshwater fish – including Bream Street and Dace, Roach and Smeed roads, and the area’s nickname evolved into 'Fish Island'.
BUILDING STYLE
The local architectural vernacular includes robust stock-brick buildings with contrasting brick detailing, segmental arches, and large, metal-framed windows and pitched, flat and hipped roofs, as well as the saw-tooth roof of Queen’s Yard.
WHITE POST LANE
Fish Island is a place of firsts and innovations: in the 1890s, resident oil distiller Carless, Capel & Leonard coined the name ‘petrol’. A plaque at the corner of Wallis Road and White Post Lane announces that here in 1866, the world’s first synthetic plastic was manufactured. It was called Parkesine, after its inventor Alexander Parkes.
DACE ROAD
Britannia Works were built in 1898-99 for the Britannia Folding Box Company, a New York-based firm of milliners who were also printers and lithographers.
Today, Britannia Works houses the London Centre for Book Arts, an artist-run, open-access studio where people can print and bind books. It was founded in 2012 by artists Simon Goode and Ira Yonemura to provide resources for artists, designers and makers, as well as to run education programmes for the community.
FISH ISLAND VILLAGE
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