Four years after acquainting myself with the hinterland of Hackney Wick by attending it's illegal raves it became part of my daily routine. I got an agency job working in Stratford, doing six hour shifts renovating tube trains, and cycled from Homerton every morning at dawn. My route took me down Carpenter's Road, past the taxi hospitals and breaker's yards.
On the other side of the road was the area's biggest landmark: fridge mountain. Towering about 20ft into the air, a monument of domestic appliance waste, the biggest heap of fridges in Europe. The mountain was the first thing to go, as the Independent on Sunday reported:
"The Hackney fridge mountain is already gone. Can the cooking-fat recycling plants and the kebab-meat factories on Pudding Mill Lane ... be far behind?"
It's strange that what most of the population would consider an eyesore caused quite so much nostalgic reflection. A fridge is a fairly ugly object, but thousands of the things, their doors gaffer-taped closed, seemed to resonate with the area (though I'm fairly sure to the taxi-mechanics on the other side of the road, there was no such sentimentalism).
The Google Earth images of the area have since been updated and although they cannot possibly keep apace with the development currently underway, these two do provide a nice microcosm of what has been happening in the last nine months across the whole 1000 acre site.
1 comment:
"The Hackney fridge mountain is already gone. Can the cooking-fat recycling plants and the kebab-meat factories on Pudding Mill Lane ... be far behind?" Mark
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