13 Facts About Beckton

Beckton is named after Simon Adams Beck, the governor of the Gas Light and Coke Company when work building Beckton Gas Works began in November 1868.

Beckton was within the London Docklands Development Corporation area from 1981 to 1995.

In more recent times, industry has left the area, leaving huge areas of brownfield land, and Beckton has been redeveloped as part of the Docklands project.

Beckton absorbed the localities of Cyprus and Winsor Park, which was built in the 1870s to house gasworks employees.

North Beckton, bordering the northern end of Woolwich Manor Way, was mostly built up in the late 1980s with a network of short streets, even shorter cul-de-sacs and dinky homes, many built as part of social housing schemes.

Related searches

Beckton is at the western end of the London Riverside redevelopment zone of the Thames Gateway.

Beckton is served by many Transport for London bus services connecting it with areas including Barking, Beckton Triangle Retail Park, Canning Town, Central London, Chadwell Heath, Dagenham, East Ham, Gallions Reach Shopping Park, Ilford, London City Airport, Manor Park, North Woolwich, Royal Albert, Stratford and Wanstead.

Beckton is a London Buses bus station in the neighbourhood of Beckton, east London.

Beckton was used as a location in Michael Radford's 1984 feature film adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—the Gasworks served as the setting for Orwell's "Proletarian Zones".

Andrew Birkin's 1990 film of Ian McEwan's novel, The Cement Garden, was filmed in Beckton and starred Charlotte Gainsbourg, who could often be seen shopping in the aisles of ASDA.

Beckton celebrated making a "B" sign with his hands to commemorate Beckton.

On 14 May 2010 Beckton was the location of a terrorist attack on local Member of Parliament Stephen Timms.

Beckton was approached by 21-year-old Islamist Roshonara Choudhry during his constituency surgery at the Beckton Globe library and stabbed twice in an attempted assassination.