A volunteer-restored dock on a river that industry poisoned, and they got the fish back
Cody Dock Bar holds a 4.8 from six reviews, which is not a rating.
But the place it sits in is one of the more remarkable things in East London.
The Lea was poisoned
Comprehensively, and for a very long time.
Because the lower Lea valley was where London put the industries nobody wanted near them.
Chemical works. Dye works. Tanneries. Varnish. Bone boilers. Match factories.
Trades that stank, and that poured what they did not want straight into the water.
Which was deliberate
Because the noxious trades were pushed east – out of the City, and downwind, and downstream, into the districts where the poorest people lived.
Which is not a conspiracy. It is rent, and it is planning, and it is the fact that nobody with any power lived there.
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and eighty-one articles.
The unpleasant thing goes where the objection is quietest.
And the dock was a ruin
Silted up. Derelict. Full of decades of rubbish – tyres, motorbikes, shopping trolleys, and the accumulated waste of an industrial river.
And volunteers dug it out
Which is the story.
Because Cody Dock was restored, very substantially, by hand, by volunteers, over years – clearing the silt, hauling out the rubbish, rebuilding the walls.
Not by a developer. Not by a grant-funded agency with a masterplan.
By people who turned up at weekends.
And the fish came back
Which is the thing that matters.
Because a river that has been stopped being poisoned will, given time, recover – and the Lea now has fish in it, and birds, and the water quality is vastly better than it was.
The Thames itself was declared biologically dead in the 1950s. And there are now seals in it, and porpoises, and over a hundred species of fish.
It came back because people stopped putting things in it.
That is the entire mechanism. There is nothing clever about it.
Verdict
Six reviews. Not a rating.
Go, be the seventh, and look at the water.
And Cody is Buffalo Bill
Which is the best fact on this river, and it is very nearly true.
The dock is named after the Cody family who had works nearby – and the popular local story attaches it to Samuel Franklin Cody, the showman and aviation pioneer, who was an extraordinary figure and who flew the first powered aeroplane in Britain.
And he was not Buffalo Bill, and he was not related to him – he had adopted the name and the look and the beard, deliberately, because it sold tickets.
The Prat has looked, and the connection between the man and the dock is not established.
The tellable version wins. Even on a scrap of restored industrial waterway in Canning Town.
And the real Cody is the better story anyway – a showman who built kites big enough to lift a man, sold the idea to the War Office, and then flew the first aeroplane in Britain.
He died in a crash in 1913. Enormous crowds came to the funeral.
I am a Lagos-born poet and satirical journalist navigating West London’s contradictions. I survived lions at six, taught English by Irish nuns, now wielding words as weapons against absurdity. Illegal in London but undeniable. I write often for https://bohiney.com/author/junglepussy/.
As a young child, I was mostly influenced by the television show Moesha, starring singer and actress Brandy. Growing up, I would see Brandy on Moesha and see her keeping in her cornrows and her braids, but still flourish in her art and music, looking fly. I loved Moesha as a child, but now I take away something more special from it. Just because you’re a black girl, it doesn’t mean you need to only care about hair and makeup. Brandy cared about books, culture and where she was going — you can do both.
