Beckton Alps, 1989

East London once had a ski slope built on the waste from making town gas. The name was Beckton Alps, an old local joke promoted into civic branding, and the whole arrangement sounds invented until the dates and photographs begin to line up. Skiers in bright late-1980s clothes took a tow up a grey artificial hill near the A13. Princess Diana came to open it. Beneath the matting sat the chemical residue of the Victorian city.

Beckton Gas Works began operating in 1870 and grew across roughly 500 acres. Coal arrived, gas and useful by-products left, while ash and contaminated material accumulated in spoil heaps. The remaining Alp rises about 35 metres, according to the University of Edinburgh's Reimagining Waste Landscapes project. It is a modest mountain, but London does not require much altitude before a heap starts behaving like geography.

The dry slope opened in the late 1980s and lasted until 2001. Former Newham councillor Jack Hart filmed skiers there on Super 8, footage later preserved by Newham Archives and partly digitised through a BFI project. The grain of that film suits the place. Beckton Alps already belonged to the category of things that looked like memories while they were still open.

Beckton Alps turned industrial waste into leisure without ever making the waste disappear. The slope borrowed the language of escape, while the hill beneath it remained an account of how London had been heated, lit, poisoned, landscaped, and sold another future.

There is a familiar Docklands confidence in the conversion. A contaminated heap becomes recreation; recreation will become regeneration; regeneration will eventually become an investment prospect. None of those uses is wholly false. People really did ski there, and I doubt the pleasure was diminished by the strange foundation. Still, the sequence makes the site feel less renewed than repeatedly renamed.

The nearby gas industry has already left London with absences large enough to shape the skyline. I wrote about that in Grey Lungs Over Town, where gasholders survive as frames, luxury geometry, or remembered landmarks. Beckton is the opposite form of industrial afterlife. The structure vanished, but its waste acquired contour, vegetation, a ski lift, fencing, and a road junction that still carries the name.

After the slope closed, plans for an indoor centre using real snow stalled. That unrealised replacement is almost too perfect: a refrigerated winter promised on top of poisoned ground, itself left by the fuel system that made modern London possible. Instead, the fenced hill became scrub and habitat. The Edinburgh project notes that parts of the western slopes gained nature conservation status. Toxicity restricted development and helped preserve the place. Damage became a crude form of protection.

I am wary of making dereliction sound noble. A hazardous site is not improved by being picturesque, and the romance of waste usually belongs to somebody who does not have to live beside it. Yet Beckton Alps resists the tidier story in which regeneration cleans the slate. A few miles east, Barking Riverside has the atmosphere of infrastructure waiting for ordinary life to catch up. The Alp has ordinary life growing over infrastructure's bill.

The Londonist history describes a clay cap over the contaminated heap. That detail stays with me more than the royal visit. A cap is neither erasure nor cure. It is an agreement with the ground: stay there, hold still, let something else happen on top. For thirteen years, the something else was skiing.

Sources:

The Beckton Alp — University of Edinburgh

The Beckton Alps — In the Jungle of Cities

When Londoners Went Skiing on a Toxic Spoil-Heap — Londonist

Footage Emerges of Beckton Alps Ski Slope — Newham Recorder