The Wick was farmland until the railway came. In 1745 it was Wick House and a few cottages. Building started in the 1860s and 1870s, after the station opened.
What arrived then was chemistry. Alexander Parkes made parkesine here from 1866 to 1868, the first true synthetic plastic. Brooke Simpson Spiller ran a dye works at the Atlas Works on . Carless, Capel and Leonard distilled oil here and are credited with the word petrol. A. F. Suter made shellac at the Victory Works on from 1927.
Those firms have gone and their buildings are what the place is made of. The brick sheds have skylights along the ridge and the yards are behind steel gates. Nearly every wall is painted. Artists took the cheap studios from the 1990s and there were more than six hundred by 2013.
The Lee Navigation runs along the eastern side, with the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park across it. The stadium and the Orbit are visible over the roofs. and the railway are the boundary with Fish Island, which is in Tower Hamlets and looks much the same.
The station on was rebuilt in 2018, and its underpass has chemical structures pressed into the concrete. was the 2012 press and broadcast centre. It is on the site of Hackney Wick Stadium, which ran greyhounds from 1932 and speedway from 1935. The stadium closed in 1997 and was demolished in 2003.
runs west past the Trowbridge Estate, where seven towers of twenty one storeys went up in the 1960s and most of it was replaced again by 1996.
