London

By now the Victorian terraces have all but disappeared to be replaced by ’30s Tudorbethan semis. Indeed, the urban topography here looks identical to corresponding Zone 4 areas of west and north London; in stark contrast to the overwhelmingly white suburbs of most of suburban east London, this part of the A12 in Ilford has a multiracial demographic comparable with places like Harrow or Wembley, with a similar mix of Jews, Sikhs, Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans and East Europeans. Feature continues

Route 66 passes the concrete arches of Newbury Park station – an ugly modernist late-’40s design that, astonishingly, won a design award at the 1951 Festival of Britain – and speeds up as you cross the Moby Dick roundabout and the giant council estates to the north of Dagenham before entering a semi-rural stretch of green-belt land around Aldborough Hatch and Chadwell Heath.

Suddenly the modernist office blocks and state-of-the-art shopping malls tell you that you’re in Romford, the old market town that was once the gentrified, middle-class Elysium for all upwardly mobile cockneys. You’re greeted by the pedestrianised hell that is the town centre – one of five separate shopping centres within the Romford ring road – and one densely packed with brewery-chain boozers.

Romford’s huge concentration of pubs – many of them dating back more than five centuries – stand as a marked contrast to nearby Ilford, which was built in the early 1900s to encourage a quiet suburban idyll for the City’s clerks and skilled workers (speculators actually refused to allow the construction of any pubs). If Ilford’s town-planners tried – and failed – to reinvent a new, abstemious and clean-living London from scratch, Romford has succeeded in recreating its own authentic East End. Outside Romford High Street’s Pie And Mash Shop – itself a spectral vestige of cockney migration – you’ll find a loud, belching, riotous mini East End filled on Friday and Saturday nights with vomiting girls in stilettoes and brawling boys in white shirts, rendering the 66 bus out of Romford something of a no-go zone on Saturday nights. Dickens would be proud.