I've joined the Creekmouth Preservation Society and I am proud to be member number 53! but why have I joined? because I am interested in the lives of those who have gone before me - they way they lived, worked, their social lives and customs etc.
Creekmouth, until the floods of 1953, was a small community on the Thames Estuary -The village was built, just below the riverbank, in the 1850s by Mr John Bennett Lawes, primarily for the workers of his factory, Lawes Chemical and Fertiliser Company, although many of the tenants worked on the river as lightermen and watermen.
There were 50 cottages built in two rows with a ‘backways’ between them other than 1 pub (The Crooked Billett) and school building now occupied by a company - there is no evidence that village ever existed and yet when the Princess Alice sank and over 800 people lost their lives it was the villagers of Creekmouth that rowed out and brought the dead and living back to shore but other than a plaque by Barking Barrier no-one would know that.
Everyone, however, is aware of the Thames Gateway and in a nearby location near to where Creekmouth once stood there is going to be built a new estate - Barking Riverside - consisting 10,800 dwellings over the next 20 years. History is not boring or irrelevant but allows us to be aware of how we have arrived to where we are today. SO PLEASE join up with your local history society and don't let your precedessors be forgotten - learn from them.
www.creekmouth.net
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