Chapter Thirty-Eight
Barking
The Bell Beside the Creek
Why is Barking called Barking?
In brief: Barking derives from the Old English Berecingas, usually understood as the people or settlement of a man called Bereca or Berica.
Transport context: London Underground, London Overground and National Rail station.
At low water, Barking Creek is not picturesque.
It is mud, smell, rope, weed and the patient tilt of boats waiting for the tide to become useful again. A man steps down from the quay with a basket on his hip. Another checks a net. Someone has been up since before first light, because fish do not arrange themselves around comfort.
Behind them, above the roofs and yard walls, the abbey bell speaks.
The sound belongs to a house of women.
For much of the Middle Ages Barking Abbey was one of the richest and most important nunneries in England. Its abbess controlled estates, rents, courts, servants and obligations across a wide landscape. Yet the town at its gate lived also by water. Barking stood where the River Roding widened into Barking Creek before meeting the Thames. Fish, grain, timber, people and news could move through that opening.1
The name is older than the railway, older than the municipal borough, older than the brick terraces and bus stands outside the station.
It may be older than the abbey.
The common explanation derives Barking from the people of a man called Bereca or Berica: Berecingas, the settlement or followers of Bereca. Place-name scholarship is cautious with such early forms, and the personal name cannot be made into a character with a biography. There is no surviving Bereca walking beside the creek for us to follow. There is only the linguistic trace of a Saxon group whose name hardened into a place.2
A people became a parish.
A parish became a town.
A town became a station name.
The first figure who can be seen with any firmness is not Bereca but Erkenwald.
In or about 666, Erkenwald, later Bishop of London, founded an abbey at Barking. The first abbess was his sister, Ethelburga. Bede’s account gives the house spiritual weight from the beginning: a community of religious women, linked to one of the major churchmen of early Anglo-Saxon England, placed near river routes and fertile land.3
It is tempting to imagine the foundation as a quiet act of piety in a green place.
It was also a political act.
An abbey gathered land. It organised labour. It made memory. It tied local settlement to royal and ecclesiastical power. The prayers inside the enclosure depended on people outside it: tenants, reeves, fishers, ploughmen, servants, craftsmen, boatmen, women brewing, baking, washing and carrying, children sent on errands between gate and wharf.
Barking Abbey was not a retreat from the world.
It was a way of governing part of it.
The later medieval abbey stood close to the parish church of St Margaret and to the settlement that grew around the creek. Its remains are now fragmented: walls, foundations, the Curfew Tower, the open ground of Abbey Green. But the scale of the former house can still be sensed. The precinct was large enough to make the modern visitor feel that something has been removed rather than merely ruined.4
For centuries, women ruled here under vows of obedience.
That paradox is not accidental. An abbess was subject to church discipline, but within her house she could be a landlord, employer and administrator. Barking’s abbesses held manorial rights and dealt with the long, difficult business of property. The archive remembers their rents and disputes more readily than their voices, but their authority shaped the town.
The station name therefore does not simply point to a suburb.
It points to a lost female power.
Medieval Barking faced two directions.
One direction was inward, towards the abbey gate, the parish church and the market-place. The other was outward, towards the creek and the Thames.
Fishing made the town known. Barking boats worked the river and the wider estuary. Later, as London’s appetite grew, Barking’s fishing industry extended far beyond local waters. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Barking smacks were part of a major trade supplying the capital. The work was hard, seasonal and dangerous. It required capital for vessels and gear, but it also required hands: men to sail, boys to learn, women and traders to handle what came ashore.5
A fish port is a place of rapid decisions.
The catch spoils. The tide turns. A damaged net cannot be left until next week. Weather must be read by people whose living depends upon guessing it better than their rivals. The quay is therefore an office without desks. Prices are argued in smell and noise. Loss is carried home in silence.
The abbey’s bell and the fishers’ tide kept different forms of time.
One marked prayer.
The other marked survival.
After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the abbey ceased to be the great institution around which Barking’s medieval identity had turned. The house was surrendered in 1539. Buildings were stripped, adapted or quarried. The abbess’s authority vanished from daily administration.6
The town did not vanish with it.
This is one of London’s repeated lessons. A powerful institution may disappear, yet the settlement that formed around it continues because roads, habits, families and water routes have already done their work. Barking kept its church, market, wharves and name. The spiritual economy collapsed, but the practical geography remained.
The creek still led to the Thames.
The road still led inland.
People still needed to eat.
By the nineteenth century Barking had become a place of change and pressure.
The fishing trade still mattered, but industry and suburban growth were beginning to alter the town. Barking’s old centre lay around the market-place, North Street and the creek. South of it were marshes and river industries. North and west, new streets began to appear as the railway made daily movement to and from London more plausible.7
The railway arrived in 1854, when the London, Tilbury and Southend route opened a station at Barking. At first the station served a town still visibly older than the railway: abbey remnants, parish church, creek, quay, market and houses that did not yet form continuous London. But a station changes the arithmetic of land.
Distance becomes timetable.
Fields become possible streets.
A place that had sent fish to London could now send clerks, workers, shoppers and schoolchildren. The railway did not create Barking, but it gave the old town a new outward rhythm. Later lines and services made the station increasingly important. District Railway trains reached Barking in the early twentieth century, and electric Underground services fixed the name into the daily speech of passengers far beyond Essex.8
The station became a hinge between older and newer Barking.
To the south and east remained the memory of creek, abbey and market. Around the station gathered roads, shops, buses, sidings, railway buildings and the mixed impatience of interchange. The old name began to appear on posters, tickets, enamel signs and eventually electronic displays.
Barking had been a sound before it was a destination to many Londoners.
That gave the name an odd second life.
A passenger can hear an announcement for Barking and think first of a dog. The joke is obvious, almost unavoidable. Yet the word’s true history is not canine. It belongs to a Saxon people, a religious house, a creek town and a railway junction. The pun is modern surface-noise. The name underneath is older and stranger.
London often hides seriousness beneath a word that sounds comic.
Barking is one of those traps.
The Abbess at the Gate
Imagine the abbess’s steward at the gate on a cold morning.
He has not come for romance. He has come because someone owes rent, someone disputes a boundary, someone has failed to perform a service, someone wants timber, someone has brought fish, and someone is asking whether the abbess will grant what only she has the authority to grant.
The woman whose name stands behind the command may not appear in the yard. She may be in chapter, at prayer, in consultation, ill, travelling between estates or reading a document prepared by men trained to make power look like ink. But the town knows where authority lies. The abbey gate is not decorative. It is a border between petition and decision.
A fisher waits beside a cart.
A tenant rehearses his grievance.
A servant carries a message inward.
This is the human scale of Barking’s old importance: not the abstract statement that the abbey was rich, but the moment at which ordinary people discover that the life of the town passes through a religious household ruled by women.
The abbey’s ruins can make that power seem gentle because ruins are quiet.
It was not quiet then.
It was administration, discipline, privilege, charity, argument and work.
Modern Barking was remade again in the twentieth century.
The borough expanded. Council estates, factories, arterial roads and new civic buildings altered the relationship between the old town and its edges. The nearby Becontree estate, begun after the First World War, brought enormous population change to Barking and Dagenham. The fishing port had already declined. Creekside industry no longer organised local identity in the old way. The station, however, became more central rather than less.9
Barking today is a major interchange. TfL records it as a stop for Underground, Overground, bus and National Rail services, in fare zone 4, with an address on Station Parade and Longbridge Road.10 The District and Hammersmith & City lines bring it into the Underground map. The London Overground route towards Gospel Oak and Barking Riverside makes it part of a newer orbital story. National Rail services still run eastward towards Essex.
The map has thickened around the name.
Yet the present station does not explain why Barking matters. It is the latest mechanism by which an old place sends people elsewhere and receives them back. The creek did that. The abbey did that. The market did that. The railway does it now.
Walk from the station towards Abbey Green and the layers are close enough to feel almost compressed. Traffic presses along modern streets. The remains of the abbey stand in open ground. St Margaret’s church still keeps company with the site. The Curfew Tower survives as a hard vertical memory beside the absence of the larger house.11
The town has been rebuilt around losses.
The abbey is gone.
The fishing port is gone.
Much of the old creekside economy is gone.
But the name has proved exceptionally durable. It has survived religious reform, river decline, suburban building, municipal reorganisation and the railway’s habit of simplifying complicated places into single words.
Barking is not named for the station.
The station is named for everything that came before it: a Saxon people glimpsed through language, a saint’s foundation, an abbess’s authority, a creek full of working boats, a market town at the eastern edge of London’s appetite.
At the platform, the word appears in capitals.
BARKING.
Most passengers read it as instruction: change here, alight here, wait here.
But the name is older than instruction. It is a remnant of people who could not have imagined electric trains, and of women whose abbey once made this place matter to kings, bishops, tenants and fishers.
Stand outside the station and listen hard enough, past buses, brakes and announcements, and another sound returns.
Not a dog.
A bell by the creek.
Notes and Sources
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A History of the County of Essex, volume 5, “The ancient parish of Barking: Introduction,” British History Online, for Barking’s position at the Roding, Barking Creek, the medieval town beside the abbey and its later importance as a fishing port: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol5/pp184-190. ↩
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Ibid., for the place-name explanation “Berica’s people” and the early Saxon settlement. ↩
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Ibid.; and A History of the County of Essex, volume 5, “The ancient parish of Barking: Abbeys and churches founded before 1830,” for Erkenwald, Ethelburga and the foundation of Barking Abbey: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol5/pp222-231. ↩
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Historic England, scheduled monument entry for Barking Abbey and the Curfew Tower, for the surviving fabric and the extent of the former precinct: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1003581. See also Barking and Dagenham Council’s visitor information for Barking Abbey ruins: https://www.lbbd.gov.uk/barking-abbey-ruins. ↩
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A History of the County of Essex, volume 5, “The borough of Barking,” British History Online, for Barking’s town centre, quay and fishing economy: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol5/pp235-248. ↩
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British History Online, “The ancient parish of Barking: Abbeys and churches founded before 1830,” for the surrender of Barking Abbey at the Dissolution and the later history of St Margaret’s. ↩
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British History Online, “The borough of Barking,” for nineteenth-century urban growth, the market-place, creek and streets near the railway. ↩
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R. V. J. Butt / Railway & Canal Historical Society, Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: A Chronology, entry for Barking, for the 1854 station opening and later railway chronology: https://rchs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Railway-Passenger-Stations.pdf. See also Transport for London’s Barking station page: https://tfl.gov.uk/tube/stop/940GZZLUBKG/barking-underground-station. ↩
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British History Online, “The borough of Barking,” for twentieth-century expansion and suburban development in Barking and the surrounding borough. ↩
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Transport for London, Barking Underground Station, for present-day modes, fare zone and station address: https://tfl.gov.uk/tube/stop/940GZZLUBKG/barking-underground-station. ↩
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Historic England, Barking Abbey scheduled monument entry; and the parish church listing for St Margaret, Barking, for the surviving medieval and later fabric near the abbey site: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1064408. ↩