Day 90 - I can't find Shakespeare's home anywhere?

Tomorrow I will be giving a lunchtime talk in London and we are invited to an evening Christmas Carols Charity event with Lady Jane Tanqueray of Alton Towers. So Angela and I are going to head into the big City today and stay two nights returning on Wednesday. Now when we did a hotel check with Marriott (the preferred hotel of the 2017-2018 SmithWalsh UK adventure), there was a promotion for their Moxy Hotel brand, so we went out on a limb and and booked it. The location was in Stratford, on the east side of London. You may be wondering, is that the Stratford of Shakespeare fame? Well it isn't, but I am sure there must be those who arrive in London, see Stratford on the tube map and off they go searching for the home of Shakespeare. Two tube stops away is Abbey Road station. But, fooled you again; it is not the Abbey Road of Beatle's fame. They can really play with the minds of tourists here...but I digress.

So we ventured out of the Stratford Station into a buzz of people making their way into the local environs and to the Westfield Stratford Shopping Centre. The Moxy hotel was fortunately only a couple of hundred yards away. Upon arriving, we had some difficulty finding the front desk as the entry took you into a club setting, but we soon realized that this concept hotel required one to go to the bar to check in. All around the hotel and in the room are adverts that promote the hotel as a place to party, party, party yet looking around the place we saw people who were over fifty, fifty, fifty. In any case, we got our upgrade and settled into our room on the top floor.

Stratford has been an industrial part of London since the mid 1800s, but its origin was as the crossing point of the Lea river which runs into the Thames. This crossing existed during Roman times as troops moved from Colchester on the east coast through to the eastern gate (Aldgate) of Londinium, or London as we know it today. The name was derived from Old English "Straet" for street and "ford" for crossing. Around 1110 A.D.,King Henry I had a wife named Matilda and the story goes that she fell while trying to 'ford' the river and demanded that a proper bridge be built. It was called the Bow Bridge and it lasted until the 1835 when it was demolished. Other bridges had been built to replace it.

As with many other areas of England, the Cistercian monks had built an abbey in Stratford around
1135 and called it the West Ham Abbey. At the time King Henry VIII had abolished it, the Abbey controlled approximately 1,500 acres or 610 hectares. That equates to a land value today of approximately $2 billion. At dissolution, the locals stripped out all of the stone from the abbey to use for building their own houses in the area. All that remains of the abbey are a stone carving with skulls that sits within the All Saints Church in nearby West Ham.

The industrial revolution changed the make up of the area from being agricultural to industrial. The Lea River and its link to the Thames (Royal Docks) made the area ideal for industrial development, and during the Victorian age chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies and processed food plants popped up. The River Lea marked the outer edge of the metropolitan London area at that time and regulations restricted noxious industries from operating within the metro area, so they simply were built on the east side of the Lea.

The area was heavily bombed during the Second World War and post-war de-industrialization hurt the area economically. When the Royal Docks closed in 1960, the area continued its decline, and when the 2012 Olympic Games were awarded to London in 2005 it was with the knowledge that these lands could be significantly re-developed. The Games were a great success and the area continues to be developed with multi-residential complexes and office spaces (more on that on Wednesday!).



So what did we do the first night? Well what else does one do in Stratford, London. Shopping, dinner and a flick at the cinema in the mall. Tonight's movie: Thor Ragnarok with Cate Blanchett as you never have seen her - worth the price of admission.

Ale of the Day: Howling Hops Pale Ale, Howling Hops Brewery, Hackney Wick, London.