Place Name
First recorded as Upney in 1456 this was a reference to a patch of dry land amid the marshes, which to all intents and purposes would have been an island. The lane appears on the 1777 map from Chapman and Andre between Ilford and Barking marshes via Eastbury manor. At first the name Upney appears to have applied to an area east of the lane, rather than a specific street. It wasn’t until about a century later that it was also applied to the street. With the exception of a new hospital for infectious diseases the area remained largely undeveloped until the inter-war period when most of its housing was built as part of the council’s slum clearance programme. The hospital site was extended in the early 20thCentury, and in 1932, the same year that Upney railway station opened, a second isolation hospital (later a maternity pavilion) opened. Both hospitals joined the NHS in 1948 under the name of Barking Hospital. Today the site is that of the Barking Community Hospital, which was opened in July 2013, the rest of the original site having been sold in 1999 for housing.
