HISTORY: From sleepy village to upwardly mobile (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

HISTORY: From sleepy village to upwardly mobile

2:34pm Monday 27th June 2011 in Local History

Chingford was a collection of sleepy villages among farmland before the railway transformed area. JOE CURTIS looks at how a new station ushered in a new area of social mobility.

The pleasant sights of spring flowers, evergreens and flag-toting schoolchildren, swinging their legs while sat atop farmers’ wagons, might not be the typical images that come to mind when you hear the phrase ‘industrial revolution’.

But these were the scenes that greeted Queen Victoria when she arrived at Chingford Railway Station in Station Road to meet the town’s residents on a sunny Saturday in May, 1882.

Her Royal Highness’s first stop on a tour of Epping Forest, she witnessed the four-year-old railway station in all its pomp and finery - freshly re-painted and decorated with a triumphal arch at its exit bearing the words: ‘The Forest Welcomes the Queen’.

The station was to welcome many more to come as Chingford, then by most accounts a collection of sleepy villages typical of a bygone era, experienced its own industrialisation brought about by new transport links.

The new and improved railway station replaced one at Larkshall Road as a main route in and out of London.

Boasting a cheap and faster service to Liverpool Street, the line changed the nature of the town as the population rapidly grew.

In 1891 there were 44 trains running Monday to Saturday between 6.55am and 10.55am.

David Young, 84, president of Chingford Historical Society, said: “People who used to live in Bethnal Green moved out to Chingford because they could get cheap day returns on the railway.”

“As the population grew, more and more trains were put on and there was more and more usage given to the train service.”

Compared to an average rise of 100 residents per decade, the number of people living in Chingford grew by 1,350 in the ten years to 1891, and rocketed to 22,076 by 1931.

The sheer number of people necessitated change in the landscape, as occupations changed and developers strived to meet an ever greater demand for housing.

Mr Young said: “They used to have a smithy (blacksmith) in Station Road. There was an old police station and it was a poor village life - people lived on the crops and animals they grew themselves.

“Once people were starting to live here and work over in Liverpool Street they became clerks and there were higher social classes.”

“It was beginning to get a quite affluent and desirable place to live.”

This new social mobility proved to be the downfall of the old upper class.

As the traditional elite died and housing developers looked for precious real estate to build upon, their country homes were demolished to make space for swathes of new buildings to house the newcomers.

The village schoolchildren who were dazzled by the Queen and her royal procession that sunny Saturday would probably have died wealthy pensioners after witnessing the transformation of Chingford.