Temple Mills is a district located on the boundary of the London boroughs of Newham and Waltham Forest, with a small part also in Hackney in east London. Temple Mills was home to a marshalling yard and wagon works belonging to the Great Eastern Railway. Temple Mills Lane is to the north of the London 2012 Olympic Park History Medieval Hackney was almost entirely rural with much land owned by Sir Thomas Mead. Agriculture and related trades were the main forms of employment. Arable crops were grown, such as beans, wheat, oats and barley. This created a need for milling of the grain, and there were several mills in Hackney. Temple Mills were water mills belonging to the Knights Templar, used mainly for grinding corn from their extensive lands in Homerton and the Marshes. The mills straddled the River Lea and so were partly in Hackney and partly in Leyton. During the 17th century and 18th century, the former Templar mills were used for a variety of industrial purposes. These included grinding rapeseed for oil, processing leather, making brass kettles, twisting yarn, and manufacturing sheet lead. Gunpowder production at the mills led to a tragedy on the night before Easter 1690, when Peter Pain (a Huguenot refugee from Dieppe) was blown up together with two of the mills, three stone houses, and a vast quantity of gunpowder manufactured by him for the government. His family, and a French minister, also died in the blast. Temple Mills was also the site of Chobham Farm, a meat cold storage warehouse. A strike and picket of the site in July 1972 led to the arrest and imprisonment of five trade unionists known as the Pentonville Five. The dispute spread nationally becoming a cause célèbre for the trade union movement and created a political crisis. As Temple Mills is located in part of the Lower Lea Valley, it is often subject to flooding. Railways Wagon works Temple Mills wagon works was opened in 1896 by the Great Eastern Railway on a 23-acre site to the east of the Stratford to Lea Bridge line with an entrance off Temple Mills Lane. Before then, wagons had been constructed and maintained on the original Stratford Works site located between the Great Eastern Main Line and the Stratford to Lea Bridge line. The constrained nature of that site saw the move to Temple Mills (which might have also