Green Street Culture Trail — Sahra Hersi Studio

Newham Council

Green Street Culture Trail

2020

♥ Client: Newham Council
♥ Year: 2020
♥ Location: London

Green Street Culture Trail is a walking route along one of London's most intensely used high streets, linking eighteen sites across the Green Street area of Newham. It starts from a simple question about where culture actually happens on a street like this one. Green Street has no museum, no theatre and no concert hall, and yet it holds one of the richest stretches of public life in the city, carried instead by its market, its shops, its places of worship and the buildings people gather in.

The trail takes that everyday infrastructure as its subject. It moves through Queen's Market, Green Street Library, Green Street Mosque, Our Lady of Compassion Church, the East Shopping Centre, Katherine Road Community Centre, Newham Bookshop, the Boleyn Tavern, Barclay Hall, the Nissen Hut and Hamara Ghar, naming a bakery, a bookshop, a library and a market as cultural sites on equal terms.

Not every stop is still standing. Boleyn Castle, James Sinclair Point and the Boleyn Ground, home to West Ham United until 2016, are marked in the same way as the buildings that remain, because the stories attached to them are still in circulation on the street. A trail that only visited what is still standing would describe a much thinner place. Here, demolition is treated as part of the record rather than the end of it, and the route asks to be walked with both the present street and its missing parts in view.

Queen's market

The Boleyn Tavern

Boleyn Castle

Newham Bookshop

Original West Ham Stadium

Our Lady of Compassion Church

James Sinclair Point

Hamara Ghar

Upton Park Station

Green street Library.

East Shopping Centre

Percy Ingle

Green street Mosque

Barclay Hall

Katherine Road Community Center

The Nissen Hut

Index