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West Ham

West Ham is a district in East London, located just over six miles east of Charing Cross.

West Ham was an administrative unit, with largely consistent boundaries, from the 12th century to the formation of the London Borough of Newham in 1965. The area was originally a manor in the county of Essex, then an ancient parish and ultimately a county borough.

A settlement is first recorded as Hamme in an Anglo-Saxon charter of 958 and then in the 1086 Domesday Book as Hame. The name means ’a dry area of land between rivers or marshland’, referring to the location of the settlement within boundaries formed by the rivers Lea, Thames and Roding and their marshes. The earliest recorded use of West Ham, as distinct from East Ham, is in 1186 as Westhamma.

The boundary between West and East Ham was the now lost Hamfrith Waste and Hamfrith Wood in the north (then the southernmost parts of Epping Forest). There was a small natural harbour known as Ham Creek.

West Ham underwent rapid growth from 1844 following the Metropolitan Building Act which restricted dangerous and noxious industries from operating in the metropolitan area, the eastern boundary of which was the River Lea. Many of these activities were relocated to the other side of the river and to West Ham.

West Ham became one of Victorian Britain’s major manufacturing centres for pharmaceuticals, chemicals and processed foods but many workers lived in slum conditions close to where they worked, leading to periodic outbreaks of contagious diseases and severe poverty.

The presence of the nearby Royal Docks, the Stratford railway zone and other high value targets made the Borough of West Ham one of the areas of London worst effected by bombing during the Second World War with officially 1186 civilians killed.

West Ham station is a London Underground, Docklands Light Railway and National Rail interchange station. It opened in 1901 by the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway on the route from Fenchurch Street to Barking. In the late 1990s, the station was rebuilt and significantly expanded as part of the Jubilee Line Extension, fully opening in 1999.

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