Place Name
The road leading to the nearby station of the same name. The conventional story has it that Manor Park was taken from the nearby manor house, literally called the Manor House, which was built in 1820 and on which the area was developed. Hence when the station opened in 1872 it made sense to adopt the local name. Professor Ged Martin goes further in the explanation saying that the name originated from a pompous petition of 1871 to the Great Eastern Railway from residents of Little Ilford, a hamlet across the River Roding from Ilford proper. Promising to ‘use your Railway if favourable facilities were offered’, the signatories explained they were important people with ‘business transactions which call them frequently to and from London’. Existing stops at Forest Gate and Ilford were inconvenient. The owners of plots near the proposed station ‘would deal liberally with you for the sake thereof’.” However, he continues the clinching argument appeared to have been the opening of the City of London Cemetery, which with 140 burials every week, its funeral trade would be a source of large and progressive traffic to the said Station. However because calling it Little Ilford would cause confusion they named it after the former Manor, a local mansion called Manor House. Hence the invented name, Manor Park.
