Lyn
"We loved Silvertown. I mean it was a little island if you like, it was everybody knew everybody, they had been together as families you know through generations from south Canning Town to Barnwood Court and down to Silvertown so it was a very tight knit community and you know, when newcomers came in there was also a tightknit community at that point too you know, but they were welcomed in."
Lyn grew up in Silvertown before becoming involved in politics, here she talks about her families experience in the Silvertown Explosion.
"My family I think I can trace my family back to 1902, the early 1900s census in Canning Town. In the 1880s they were in Bow, my Family, my mother’s side of the family has been in the area forever, mum talked to me about the match women’s strike and she told me a version which didn’t really accord with the accepted scriptures of the time she told me it was the women who fought and she didn’t even know who Annie Besant was and she had no idea who the Fabians were but she talked to be about how those women had fought and about how awful the conditions were, in the factory at Bryant and may and it was clear to me that mums version, A if you look at Louisa Raw's descriptions now, mum’s version’s the right version. But she would have had that as an oral history through probably the female light, my grandad was a firebrand socialist who fought Mosely."
She was involved in the 'The People's Plan for the Royal Docks', a paper opposing the construction of London City Airport in the 80s.
"Yeah so when i…so when I was at college I was president of my students union and id just finished doing that year and I come home and mum said that she really wanted me to go to a community meeting with her about the airport and, and I said I’m not going to be opposing this I really think that we have to get behind progress, this is going to mean an awful lot of good things for the area’ and my mum said ‘I don’t give a damn what you think, I just want you to come with me.’ And so we’ll go then, so we went on down to Kennard street and there was these blokes in suits at the front of this meeting and they were lying to people and I could tell that they were lying and they didn’t care that they were lying and they didn’t even care to hide the fact that they were lying to the people that was in front of them and I found it a really disgusting, disagreeable place to be, and I changed my mind right at that moment that I was not going to be supporting this airport, I was going to be campaigning against it and I got involved in the peoples plan centre,
so it was the communities of the docklands all joined up together to write what they wanted to be a plan for the area, interviewed people about what they’d like to see and the idea was, instead of having an airport there we could have incubator units for small media enterprises, there could be houses, there could be a school, there could be a park, there was so much space that you know there that would be taken up with this airport, that wouldn’t it be better to have these other things instead."
