Four lucky residents from the east London borough of Newham can now call themselves true amateur local historians after winning prizes in a council-sponsored history competition designed to test local historical knowledge.
The locals were among several winners of the Newham Past and Present competition, which aimed to increase awareness of the historical places and stories of the borough, which was once part of Essex county and was created in 1965 after a programme of extensive local government reorganisation. The competition took place at the Mayor‘s Newham Show weekend last month (July 2015), reports the council publication The Newham Mag this past weekend. In the competition, residents were asked to identify locations from around Newham’s eight Community Neighbourhood Areas by looking at an archive of photographs taken of them over the past fifty years since Newham came into existence.
The winners who achieved the highest scores in the history competition were Syed Ilyas Mizan, Miriam Jelinkova, Jim McLucas and Adele Flore. They all were gifted £50 worth of shopping vouchers to be spent at the borough’s showpiece Westfield mall in Stratford City. The prizes were presented by Cllr. Ken Clark, who is the cabinet member for building communities and public affairs, regeneration and planning. The award ceremony took place at East Ham Library in Barking Road, East Ham.
Speaking at the event to honour the ‘history buffs’, Clark said “Newham has had so much to celebrate over the past 50 years and residents who entered the heritage competition showed how they really know our borough, the people, and the places in it”.
Newham is renowned for its ethnically diverse and multicultural communities, ancient churches and pubs and Victorian architecture and has a large number of monuments and war memorials, including the Rhubarb and ArcelorMittal Orbit, the Samuel Gurney Memorial, the borough’s Town Hall and Stratford’s Olympic Stadium, soon to be the home of local football team West Ham.
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