As a member of the Lea River Park Community Board I have been involved in many meetings about the development of the Fatwalk - you can see the articles under the News section of this website. One of the questions many people ask is 'Why is it called the Fatwalk?' Unfortunately, the answer is really rather dull - so I thought I could brighten things up a bit by completely making something up that's a bit more fun. In the meantime, here's my story:

As you may know, the East India Docks were built between 1803 and 1806 to handle trade from the East Indies. Trade items included tea, spices, indigo, silk and Persian carpets. And it's from the transport of the carpets that we find the origins of this name. As you can imagine, a Persian carpet is very wide. To move the carpets from the ship to the warehouse, two dock workers would walk side by side carrying the carpet and would generally do this in a hurry because the carpets were very heavy. This was pretty inconvenient if you needed to get by on the path in the opposite direction - especially as it was a pretty narrow path along the river-side. You quickly learned to get out of the way if a carpet was coming past, so carrying a carpet in this fashion became known among the locals as 'fat-walking'.

Of course, there are no carpets delivered to the East India Dock Basin these days, except in the form of picnic blankets; but the name Fatwalk has remained for the path along the river.

That's the end of my story. If you'd like to read more about the real history of East India Dock Basin there's some great stuff at the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Docks

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46535

Perhaps one of the architecture team would like to comment on the true origin of the name?