I'm really happy to be working in geography and mapping, because the people in this community, you guys, are among the most optimistic and hopeful in the entire technical sphere, and we're focused on understanding our world. And I'm really passionate about taking those technologies and applying them towards Positive Change. And sometimes passions can become obsessions, and that's what this talk is about .. my obsession with an a really strange building and the kind of lessons I think Where 2.0 can take away from it.

My friends moved into a building called Weaver House and it immediately struck me as the most fascinating spot in London. It's an ex-council house situated off Brick Lane in East London. This is a pretty cool area to live in, some similarities to maybe the Mission District in San Francisco. But where Weaver House is situated is just bizarre .. there's no other buildings within 300 meters or so, in the Center of London, and it's wedged between the Great Eastern Railway and the East London Underground line. .. and that yellow star is going to mark Weaver House in every slide, for orientation.

Behind Weaver House there's a farm for city kids to see goats and sheep with their own eyes, and when my wife and I stay up there in Weaver House, we get woken up by roosters in the morning. Just across the way is this strange house on stilts, which is featured in movies, music videos, and all over flickr.

Since it's such a wild and open area, it attracts wildlife. There's foxes all over London, but particularly a lot here, and we see them often and can hear their cries in the middle of the night .. which are horrible, something between a dog barking and a baby crying.

Down the block, winos build fires in a classic steel drum, and burn just about anything. And they're pretty friendly.

There's loads of artists around .. this is Lottie, she lives in Weaver House too, and here she is Staging an Intervention by walking atop a construction fence outside Weaver House .. with a drop to the right of about 50 feet onto the East London Line.

And the view from Weaver House is awesome. It's an uniterrupted panorama of the City of London, a view containing incredible wealth.


So a very interesting place viscerally. But looking around and hanging out there, clearly "something" was going on. There was a lot of activity in the rail yards, and nearby Shoreditch Tube Station had just closed. So I was curious, and I did what I'd naturally do if I wanted to find out what was going on right around me .. I went back to my room, in another town and got online.

My keywords of "Weaver House" and "Pedley Street" (the street address of Weaver House) hit loads of stuff. The local goverment website had all sorts of planning documents. Once I had made my way through badly scanned maps and and odd parcel identifier scheme, the City Fringe Area Action Plan promised great stuff for the area around Weaver House .. the railyards were due to be converted to parkland and a wildlife restoration project initiated, nice stuff.

But then looking through the planning applications register by postcode, which has scanned copies of every piece of correspondance on every application, I found this item granting permission to demolish bridges in a Conservation Area, on Pedley Street and surrounding streets, where Weaver House is situated.

Now this really confused me, cause I hadn't see any bridges there. I loaded up Google Maps and tried to figure out what they were talking about.

And I realized these bridges were at street level, over the East London Line. This was really weird because these provide the only access to Weaver House, there's no road going to the right. So maybe a problem.

More searching turned up a weblog for a Local Councillar Louise Alexander, great to see that kind of engangement from a politician. But what she described was pretty awful .. "trains will be in the back garden of Weaver House" .. that's why the bridges would be demolished.

What she's talking about are Two constructions projects .. the Extension of the East London Line into an Overground route, and the Crossrail project. Crossrail would run from Heathrow to the Olympic Village, and would be the largest construction project Ever in the UK. This and a bunch of other projects would result in the famous London Tube Map not being so famously comprehensible any longer.

Searching on East London Line and Weaver House, I found letters to Parliament. Felix Frixou, who, by judgement of public inquiry, “lives at the worst affected property along the entire ELLX (East London Line Extension) route.” would at the end of construction lasting 2.5 years, live with a “full live train service running 3.5 meters from his bedroom windows”. He simply asks Parliament for costs to relocate. I also found out that all letters to Parliament end with this prayer to the House, which seems entirely appropriate.

I checked out the Crossrail document database, and struck gold. There were "Baseline noise and vibration reports", "Environmental Statements", "Construction Planning Reports", "Technical Notes". 

And this wonderful image. That building in the center in front of the giant hole, in loving 3D, is Weaver House. That is the main excavation site for the Crossrail project. It would run for over a year, 24 hours a day, transporting material on that purple and white conveyer belt to a site 3 km away. “Tenants would face great discomfort and disconvinience” they said. My friends were panicking over the new home in a construction site. And in all appearances, Crossrail simply imagined Weaver House falling into that hole. Without any power of eminent domain, they simply barreled ahead, filing environmental impact reports, monitoring noise, and ignoring the impending terrible freaking experience for the people living there .. without really adequately informing anyone about it.

Well apparently some people did hear about it and they weren't having it. Councillar Alexander later reported that over 1000 local people attended a planning meeting and let them know how they felt.
 
And the Mayor of London announced that the excavation site would be moved. Apparently  .. none of the Crossrail planning documents had been updated. But I think good news for at least one of the construction projects.

Yet one of the projects, the East London Line Extension, is on.

And Pedley Street has been closed.

And my friends received official word two days ago .. in really errie timing, the bridge has been demolished today.

Figuring all this out wasn't nearly as easy as this sequence of slides. There information has been conflicting, out of time sequence, difficult to position geographically, and with at least 5 different authorities involved, no one really takes responsibility.


So I was still curious, and decided to try another question and information strategy. I wanted to know how Weaver House ended up in such a strange spot.

I was inspired by a talk Gavin Bell gave at BarCamp London called "Time History and the Internet" .. He had the amazing revelation that most information actually isn't on the internet, especially anything from before 1997.

I went to this place, the Tower Hamlets Archives. The archivists there rule over Google. I'd ask a question, they'd politely go to just the right spot in the stacks and piles, and bring back answers.

I read through four years of Bethnal Green Council Housing Committe Minutes. All written in impeccable long hand. They spent years and put great care into planning Weaver House.

Real social housing was a brand new thing at that time. In this area people lived in tenements like these, or if worse off in workhouses and almshouses. Though these days, these buildings, which once housed a dozen families, no go for about a million pounds for a single occupant.

Weaver House would be different. The council was socialist, even naming another London housing development "Lenin House" .. though they had to hire someone just to put the sign up outside that building after the builders refused to on moral principles.

Weaver House was built to the highest standard .. with electricity, running water, tiling in the bathroom. Over 250 families applied and were interviewed directly by the committee. Including a husband and wife with 6 boys and 2 girls who had been living in a single room. And they weren't unusual.

This is the photo of the opening of Weaver House, the unveiling of a commerative stone. It only exists because someone on the committee thought to suggest a picture being taken. Artifacts and what survives to become history sometimes seems pretty arbitrary. Obviously they were proud of Weaver House.

This is what social housing looked like 30 years after. No one is particularly proud of it.

And this is that plaque at Weaver House today .. it's history has been occluded, fenced in and forgotten.



On another visit to the archives, I asked if they had any maps. Oh they did!

This first map from 1790 shows the location of Weaver House in farmers fields, just on the edge of a rapidly expanding London.

And these series of maps, these are foldable pocket maps for getting around london, with map squares pasted onto fabric ..  show 50 years of development in the area. This reveals that the spot were Weaver House sits was the last to be built on in the area, and if you look an elevation profile, it's the lowest part of the neighborhood. Historically this has been marshland, difficult to build on, and in the middle of a 19th century city, everything flowed downhill and collected in spots like this .. an open sewer.

Another thing, Weaver House sits right on the edge of a grid square, which meant double the work for me, every scanned map here involed scanning two sheets. So on the edge in a lot of ways.

In 1862, the Great Eastern Railway barrelled through with no regard for anything in its path.

And in 1872, the Ordnance Survey I believe completed its first complete survey of all the UK.

This is the Booth Poverty Map. The idea was reveal the poverty right in the middle of London at a time England was ruling an Empire. Each block is color coded along social economic status, with red being middle class and black being "poor and vicious". The block Weaver Hous is on is black.

A similar map was produced plotting the percentage of Jews living in the area, with blue being Jewish. The segregation is clear along the border with the railway, and Weaver House is right on the edge of the division.

This is thematic map showing schools and churches, and pubs shown by the circles. You have to remember there wasn't much to do for the poor to entertain themselves, so they drank.

And just to show the preoccupation of mappers haven't changed, all those small pint glasses are pubs collected in OpenStreetMap.

By 1907, the East London Line barrelled through, and a bunch of streets were renamed.

And here's the first map of Weaver House, in it's glory day.

The blitz destroyed much of the surrounding area. They tried to account for every bombed dropped .. but even 2 weeks ago a live bomb from WW2 was discovered nearby, and the neighborhood evacuated.

Post-War, slum clearance gave Weaver House it's isolated spot, with those largish squares the sites of temporary portable housing.