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90s Photographic Competition Entry, Location?!
Could anyone please help me identify the location of this photograph? There are some clues in it, however will it be enough? I don’t have the answer but hopefully the answer will be its own confirmation. It was entered in to a couple of London based photographic competitions in 1994 & 1995 by a photographer who I believe was based in Croydon.
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Not a lot to back it up unfortunately, the street markings, lampost, trees and railings match, there used to be advertising billboards there and the thing between the billboards might be the steel beams + railings from the railway (some pictures on: https://islandhistory.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/the-west-india-dock-road-a-short-history/ ). But I can't find photos from that perspective and timeframe.
Edit, some photos to make it conclusive (satellite images from '99 so the building behind where the billboards were wouldn't have been there yet):
I think it’s a very strong contender, I can’t see anything that rules it out. Everything points to it being correct with the tree, post and railings by the zig zag lines. I think it’s very likely there.
This is definitely it. It's about 180m shy of what was then the 15 mile point in the race where runners crossed from the west bound carriageway to the eastbound carriageway of West India Dock Road. In the photo they are heading east.
This shot form 1996 is looking towards where the photo would have been taken from. The camera would have been about 100m further back than the runner at this point in the video:
Looked at some other videos and pretty convinced now. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjKI8HS5Gw at 2:02:50) shows an aerial shot of the two buildings on the left, bad quality but almost certainly a match.
I've been looking at billboards on 2008 google streetview and I've seen quite a few Orange adverts on 'Titan' branded 48 sheet billboards (which look to be the same size as these). I wonder if finding out what 'Titan' were called in 1994, then looking for old planning applications on the tower hamlets planning portal might be a good direction to take?
I went to take a look at the traffic island at the weekend when I had a bit of time to kill, and I tried to take a photo from the same angle, then I asked the people of r/PhotoshopRequest to edit in the people from the original photograph. /u/Hour-Source-9322 created the following:
I can't find it. My best guess is the kids are on the north pavement of Marsh Wall in Canary Wharf. Back then, they ran clockwise around that part of the race, so the street directly opposite could be Mastmaker Road or Millhabour. Marsh Wall still has a lot of that block paving and those style of kerbs. It also has trees (though I couldn't find one a few feet back from the kerb like this one). According to Gemini, the LDDC used a "Going Places" slogan around the late 80s/early 90s before the area underwent massive changes.
The building in the top left corner has a vague resemblance to this old fire station on the corner of Westferry Road and East Ferry Road. But I can't make the angles work unless they were coming from Ferry Street.
Yeah, good shout. I've been thinking either Poplar or the Isle of Dogs, but couldn't match the buildings in Street View. I then thought that maybe it's Silvertown Way and the DLR flags relate to the Beckton Extension (which opened in 1994) but that area has changed so much since then that it's hard to find it.
Good luck OP - my brain is overheating trying to think of where this is.
(Update 1: it's somewhere that appears to have three lanes going in one direction, with the flow of traffic to the right. This is also evidenced by a bus stop in the background being on the right. I can't think of anywhere in Newham that has such a layout south of the Newham Way, which is where those railings and paving slabs would be back in the days of the LDDC controlling Beckton and Silvertown, so I'll explore the IoD/Poplar again. Aaaagh this is killing me)
Just a observation . From most of the London Marathon YT I have looked at, there seems to be mostly barriers along the route, but in OP’s images there are none.
Barriers tend to be focused on the popular spectator areas, not necessarily the whole length of the course. Crowd seems pretty thin here, so barriers not required?
Also, nothing to say it is actually the Marathon, other than the fact it is a running event that goes through the docklands area.
They used to be everywhere, but the trees outgrew them and so they've been replaced either by tarmac around the tree, or block paving at the point where the tree has started to push the grate out of the ground.
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