Facts about Leamouth
Leamouth History
Orchard Place was the name of its manor house on the spit; this had become an eponymous public house from 1800–60. When the docks were constructed, the area became isolated, with the only access via the dock road, from Poplar. Residents were engaged at the glassworks, the iron and engineering works, or the Samuda Brothers, Orchard House Yard and Thames Iron Works shipyards.
When the Thames Plate Glass Works closed in 1874, many of the hands – who had migrated to the area from Tyneside and St Helens in the 1840s – followed the glassworks to New Albany, Indiana. To house the workers, there were about 100 small two-storied cottages – built from the 1820s and condemned in 1935.
General Info
Leamouth is a mixed-use development and historically a wharf in the Port of London in Blackwall. It lies on the west side of the confluence of the Bow Creek stretch of the Lea, and the River Thames. The neighbourhood consists of two small peninsulas, separated from the rest of Poplar by both the river and the remaining part of the East India Docks and became more seen as part of Canning Town.
Its northern peninsula lies in a hairpin meander and is named Goodluck Hope after one of the adjacent reaches of the Lea, while the other is known as Orchard Place. The area was long referred to locally as Bog Island, due to its inaccessibility and propensity to flood. However the building of the Thames Barrier and the artificial raising of the more vulnerable riverside land. Meaning the nickname refers to a now much-reduced threat.
