NEW TOWN JOINS LONDON

Evening Star, Issue 20687, 9 January 1931, Page 1

NEW TOWN JOINS LONDON

100,000 INHABITANTS A new town has stretched out its hands and touched London. Dagenham, which ten years ago was an Essex village, isolated in the flat marsh and pasture stretching toward Tilbury, has become London's newest suburb, unu is growing faster than any other. Ten years ago the parish of Dagenham had a population of 5,000 inhabitants scattered over flat wastes and river banks in straggling cottages and farms. To-day it lias a population ot nearly'loo,ooo, and grows almost irom hour to hour. Since 1920 25,000 new homes have been built there. Dagenham, which began as a working man’s town, has become a perlcct democratic suburb. Its wide streets, long-gabled houses, prim little gardens, and pavements bright with busy shops iiavo an air of cheerful prosperity. Iwo cinemas and seven churches have appeared. Trains run to the city and omni buses to Piccadilly, for Dagenham, like every sclf-rcspccting suburb, is a settlement of homes only; its inhabitants do their work elsewhere. Between tho tiled roofs and neat gardens one occasionally lias a glimpse of the grey river Hats that the tidy young suburb "has not yet overlaid. But they will disappear; already a great motor factory is rising on tho river hank, and the builders’ hammers tap all day on new houses and in new streets.