Somewhere out there in the indeterminate east, near the Wanstead marshes, it was just shaking itself out of its traditional condition as a sleepy Essex village and receiving the dubious benefits of strip development along the main road from London to the North Sea packet-boats which docked at Harwich. Fifteen years earlier, at about the time when William Hitchcock, master greengrocer, was setting up his wholesale and retail fruiterers business in a modest London stock-brick shop with living quarters above at 517 the High Road, the area seems to have been noted mainly as the most convenient point to alight from the train for East Londoners on pleasure bent in the woody wilderness of Epping Forest. The maps show open spaces all round—Epping Forest, Wanstead Park, Leyton Flats, the Great Shrubbage—and, slightly less alluring, Bethnal Green Workhouse Schools, a large infant orphan asylum, and the new City of London Cemetery, placed there no doubt because land was still readily available before the tide of lower-income housing covered it all in brick and mortar, and the area still offered fresh country air to the orphans and workhouse children from London’s teeming East End.
