Plaistow, Essex
Historical Description
Plaistow, a village, two chapelries, and a ward in the municipal borough of West Ham, Essex, 1½ mile SSE of Stratford, and 6½ miles E by N of St Paul's, London. Plaistow is within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Courts and Metropolitan Police, and is in the Eastern Metropolitan postal district. It is a thickly-populated and busy place, and has a population of 58,030. The G.E.R. has a station here on the branch line to North Woolwich, and there is a station on the London, Tilbury, and Southend railway. The chapelry of St Mary was formed in 1846 from the mother parish of West Ham, and has a population of 21,393. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of St Albans; net value, £270 with residence. The church, erected in 1830, and enlarged and improved in 1890, is a small building of brick in the Gothic style. The ecclesiastical parish of St Andrew was formed in 1871 from the parish of St Mary, Plaistow. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of St Albans; gross value, £292 with residence, in the gift of the Bishop of St Albans. The church is a large building of stone in the Early English style. Other places of worship are a Reformed Episcopal church' and Baptist, Congregational, Primitive Methodist, United Free Methodist, Wesleyan, and Plymouth Brethren chapels. There are a large police station, a smallpox and fever hospital, and a cemetery of 43 acres with two mortuary chapels. The ward contains the Victoria Docks and Silvertown, and consists to some extent of marsh.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
Ancient County | Essex | |
Civil parish | West Ham | |
Hundred | Becontree | |
Poor Law union | West Ham |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Plaistow from the following:
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Essex is available to browse.
The Essex pages from the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 is online.
Maps
Online maps of Plaistow are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following newspapers covering Essex online: