In the mid nineteenth century, the heyday of exploiting the East of London for the benefit of the West, Gas Light and Coke Company bought 218 hectares (540 acres) of low-lying marshland in Newham and in 1868 began construction of what would be Europe’s largest gasworks.
To celebrate the building of the works, the whole area around the site, just to the west of Barking Creek and close to the new Victoria Dock which had opened in 1855 (and the Albert Dock in 1880), was named after Simon Adams Beck, the Governor of the Company.
Over the years, the Beckton works continued to grow, with new plant and machinery being added all the time. When fully developed, the works covered an area greater than the City of London. Beckton continued making coal gas into the late 1960s when the discovery of natural reserves in the North Sea meant that manufactured gas became uneconomical, and in 1967 the works were finally closed.
British Gas had an operational office on the site until the early 1990s, during which time they oversaw the use of the derelict gasworks by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick for the Saigon scenes in Full Metal Jacket. (In the scene where the Viet Cong girl brutally dies, she is lying on the coke-spoil of the Beckton plant.)
In 1989, with the waste removed or remediated, a dry ski slope was opened by the Princess of Wales, but in 1993 a small landslip occurred on one of the two slopes, promising more trouble ahead, and in 2001 it was closed.
There were initially plans to replace the outdoor dry slope with an indoor real snow slope, and after that plan collapsed, a hotel and casino scheme, which also came to naught. Currently, the site sits derelict once again, with the Borough currently accepting proposals for further development of the site.
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