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When I was in London last month, I took the train to Maryland.
No, not that Maryland. I went to the English Maryland, which some people think was named after the American Maryland but which probably wasn’t.
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I’ve been going to London for years but until recently, I’d never even heard of Maryland. The East London neighbourhood — er, neighborhood — has been around since the late 17th century. But it wasn’t until the new Elizabeth Line subway route opened last year that it registered with me. There’s an Elizabeth Line Tube station called Maryland, which struck me as about as incongruous as a station on the Red Line called Piccadilly Circus.
I asked Nick Monopoli to be my tour guide in Maryland. Nick, 41, founded a Facebook page called the Maryland Community Group. Its 1,700 members share information about their neighborhood: Know a good plasterer? How’s your broadband? Be aware a random man’s been ringing doorbells at 2 a.m.
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“We do litter picks and jumble sales,” Nick tells me. “We had a party for the Queen’s jubilee.”
Nick’s an accounts manager for a telecom company. He and his partner, Martin Smith, live just a short walk from the train station that the Brits pronounce “Merryland.”
“People used to call it ‘Scaryland,’” Nick says of the neighborhood.
That was back when Maryland had a reputation for crime, public drunkenness, litter and other forms of antisocial behavior. The infrastructure work that transformed East London for the 2012 Olympic Summer Games helped Maryland, but a neighborhood is only as good as the residents who take an interest in it.
Those are people like Nick. He’s never been to the real Maryland (if I may call it that), but on the morning we meet he’s wearing a tie-dyed “Ocean City, Maryland” T-shirt that he picked up at a vintage clothing shop in trendy Hackney Wick, London.
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Maryland is not exactly trendy.
“A barber, a coffee shop, a fish monger, a bakery — that’s what people want,” Nick says.
For many residents, the community’s appeal is more affordable housing, though nothing in London is exactly cheap. Rents start at around 1,500 pounds a month (roughly $1,900); houses sell for between 350,000 pounds and 800,000 pounds, depending on size. (That’s $440,000 to $1 million.)
For Nick, the appeal is the enclave’s small-town feel.
“I think that we all look out for each other,” he says. “We’re very neighborly.”
It’s a diverse neighborhood with a commercial drag dotted with kebab shops, Turkish barbers, African and Caribbean restaurants, a halal grocer, not to mention the Cart & Horses, the pub where Iron Maiden got its start.
There’s an immigration lawyer, too. All sorts of nationalities call Maryland home.
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“There’s not one more than the other,” Nick says. “There’s a good blend of people, which is what London’s about. It’s for everyone.”
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And the name? The story goes that after making his fortune in the Americas, a wealthy merchant returned to England and dubbed his estate in honor of the Mid-Atlantic colony.
In the 1950s, a researcher suggested that merchant was Richard Lee, the plantation-owning ancestor of all those Virginia Lees, including Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. By 2020, what might have been an interesting historical quirk had turned toxic. Black Lives Matter protests had spread to England and an association, however tentative, with a family that fought to preserve slavery was too much for some people.
Some local politicians in the borough of Newham, in which Maryland sits, agitated to remove the name from the subway station and other places, prompting a local blogger to grouse that “cancel culture” had come to town.
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It was around then that a historian named Ged Martin did a deep dive on the name’s derivation. Yes, Lee did own property in East London, he noted, but the Lees are far more associated with Virginia than Maryland. Plus, the various dates don’t line up.
Martin posited that “Maryland” derives from the Old English word “maere,” meaning a boundary. Maryland sits near the borders of several London parishes. Martin found examples of other English place names that incorporated the word. Maryland was saved.
“It really got my back up,” Nick says of the efforts to de-Maryland his neighborhood.
The name is important to the community, sitting as it does in the shadow of the better-known Stratford to the west. (Not the one on the River Avon.) Nick is fond of the fancy metal trash cans — laser cut with “Maryland” — that sit outside the Tube station.
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“We’ve got personalized bins!” he says.
We walk past a large set of container gardens outside a high-rise block of flats, funded by the local council and maintained by volunteers.
“Some people in London, they don’t have gardens,” Nick explains.
Raspberries, sunflowers, lavender, a fruit tree — pear or apple; Nick can’t remember — grow in the raised beds.
Nick reaches over some chicken wire to pull out a bottle that’s been tossed inside.
“We do have to give it a little bit of a clean,” he says, carrying the bottle to a nearby recycling bin.
It’s the same in any city in any country: Take care of the place you love and it will take care of you.
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