Cancel Culture Comes to Newham
At one level it is simply a joke.
At a second level it is a foolish exercise of the lazy minded.
At a third, it is a pernicious attempt by which to curry political support by jumping on the BLM bandwagon.
You chose which description fits.
As our readers are doubtless aware, the Boundary Commission have finally reported. Newham has grown in population and this will be reflected in the addition of several new council wards and six new councillors.
One of these wards will be at the nexus of Stratford, Leytonstone and Forest Gate, an area that you might refer to as Maryland. The area around Maryland Station. The area where Maryland School is. The home of Maryland Street and Maryland Road and the Maryland Community Group. Place names that the mayor has been happy to live with for decades and which the Boundary Commission has sought to use for the new ward.
But sensing an opportunity to repair some of the damage done in alienating her Black council colleagues, Mayor Fiaz has raised an objection.
Richard Lee, the great, great, great, great grandfather of General Robert E Lee, yep, that one, the Civil War general, was a merchant and tobacco farmer. And slave owner (we presume).
Lee, who hailed from Ilford, was in the Americas between 1658-63. Most of his business interests were in Virginia but he had some in neighbouring Maryland. It is this that gives rise to the suggestion that he named his new house in Stratford after a place he did business in, in America. (This is the theme of the Hidden London entry for Maryland and is included in the Wikipedia entry.)
Maryland first appears as a small cluster of houses around 1692. This is John Oliver’s Map of 1696 marking Maryland Point.
The Lee connection is not the universal opinion however. The Recorder notes Prof Ged Martin on the etymology of name, Maryland.
Readers will recall that until the mid-1960s, Newham was two Essex county boroughs (East and West Ham). The history and linguistic influences on what is now Newham have much in sympathy with Essex. Kelvedon, Hockley and Shenfield in Essex all have Marylands and all on parish boundaries. There is a Maryland Junction near Basildon. None of these have any connection with an Ilford tobacco planter.
Prof Martin suggests that the origin of the name lies not over the water, but in the Old English nouns meare and mearc both meaning boundary and referred to the boundary between West Ham and Wanstead parishes, probably dating in time to Byrc Meare meaning Birch Boundary, in 958 AD, (CE if you are a PC anal retentive). This is over 600 years before Mr Lee went to America to make his fortune.
So have a look at the references and make up your own mind.
But now we come back up to date. With the passage of time, names and the sense of identity they invest adapt. The residents of the Maryland area no more champion slavery than they use Old-English nomenclature to delineate boundaries. Maryland in Newham today is about a thriving multi-cultural community of people who run businesses, places of worship, shops and sports clubs. A place where real people have their homes. THIS is Maryland.
The members of the Maryland Community Group recently discussed and voted on the name. By an overwhelming majority they wanted to keep the name.
Mayor Fiaz seems blind and deaf to this. So much for listening to residents. Or rather, ity seems that she will listen to them when they agree with her.
It’s more important to posture for her colleagues. An exercise in political opportunism that may yet come back to bite her.
STOP PRESS
Various news outlets reported on the weekend of 28-29 November that Newham councillors were prevailing upon TfL to change the name of Maryland Station. Losing no chance to hitch his name to a political bandwagon for a bit of virtue signalling, Cllr Tony McAlmont is widely quoted calling for a change of name.
Strange how this has suddenly become an issue, when for decades the name had never offended anyone. The current brouhaha suggests the merest hint of political opportunism.
Opportunism: “the art, policy, or practice of taking advantage of opportunities or circumstances often with little regard for principles or consequences”