Place Name
A reference to the nearby River Beam, which is a continuation of the River Rom flowing through the south of the borough. In fact the river took its name from the medieval wooden footbridge first referred to as le Beme sometime at the start of the 13thCentury, and in 1299 as the Dagenham Beam, as in the Old English word bēam, meaning a beam of wood or tree trunk. It was to take more than half a millennia before the river was named after the bridge, in what is known as a back formation. Anciently, the river had been called le Markediche in the 13thCentury and Markedyke in 1301, meaning the boundary ditch, because it marked the boundary between Barking and Dagenham.
