The abutments of the old iron bridge have now been utilised for the Jubilee footbridge, linking the area to Leamouth, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, on the western bank of the Lea.

The area is thought to be named after the first Viceroy of India, Charles John Canning, who suppressed the Indian Mutiny about the time the district expanded.

[4] Speculative builders constructed houses for the workers attracted by the new chemical industries established in the lower reaches of the River Lea, and for the nearby Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company and Tate & Lyle refinery.

Not a few of the houses in it are built by poor and ignorant men who have saved a few hundred pounds, and are deluded by the prospect of a fatally cheap building investment.

As trade unions and political activists fought for better living conditions and the dock area became the centre of numerous movements with Will Thorne, James Keir Hardie and other later becoming leading figures in the Labour Party.

[6] Thorne and others worked and gave speeches at Canning Town Public Hall which had been built in 1894 as the population grew in the southern part of the borough.

From the late 19th century, a large African mariner community was established in Canning Town as a result of new shipping links to the Caribbean and West Africa.

[9] The area around Crown Street (formerly located just north of the Royal Victoria Dock, but destroyed in the Blitz) was known as Draughtboard Alley due its ethnic mix.

and its successor team West Ham United; and Jack Leslie, who was called up to play for England, but then dropped without explanation, possibly due to racial prejudice.

A further example of the area's long-standing multi-cultural nature is Indian-born doctor Chuni Lal Katial, who practised in Canning Town for several years from around 1929.

Katial was an acquaintance of Mahatma Gandhi and invited him to meet Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous actors in the world, at his surgery in Beckton Road.

[16] Katial, a noted health pioneer, later moved to the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury, in north London, where he became Britain's first south Asian Mayor.

Canning Town was heavily hit by the bombings in World War II and West Ham Council's plan to rebuild the area focused on a reduction of the population, transferring industry and the building of new housing such as the Keir Hardie Estate, which included schools and welfare services.

[17] The slum clearances and the devastation of World War II, destroying 85% of the housing stock, led to the preponderance of council estates that characterise the area today.

[6] In 1857 Henry Morley published a detailed description of the area in Charles Dickens' Household Words entitled "Londoners over the Border", writing: "...by the law there is one suburb on the border of the Essex marshes which is quite cut off from the comforts of the Metropolitan Buildings Act;-in fact, it lies just without its boundaries, and therefore is chosen as a place of refuge for offensive trade establishments turned out of the town, - those of oil boilers, gut spinners, varnish makers, printers ink makers and the like.

Being cut off from the support of the Metropolitan Local Managing Act, this outskirt is free to possess new streets of houses without drains, roads, gas, or pavement.

The local Board of Health which the inhabitants of the parish sought and obtained, whatever it may have done for Stratford, seems to have done nothing for Hallsville, unless it be considered something to indulge it with an odd pinch of deodorising powder.

"[7] Alfred Dickens highlighted the severe overcrowding suffered by many of the slum inhabitants as a result of landlord charging high rents and households relying on casual work.

[19] According to Newham London Borough Council, Canning Town and Custom House are among the five per cent most deprived areas in the UK.

The venue operated during the 1970s and 1980s and was host to The Police, Depeche Mode, Jeff Beck, Billy Bragg, Alexis Korner, Modern Romance, Sham 69, Lindisfarne, The Cockney Rejects, Iron Maiden, Remus Down Boulevard and many other notable acts.