Editing Stratford, London (section)

===Original ford and place name origin===
The name is first recorded in 1067 as Strætforda and means '[[Ford (crossing)|ford]] on a Roman road'.<ref name="Mills">{{ cite book |last=Mills |first=D. |title=Oxford Dictionary of London Place Names |year=2000 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]}}</ref> It is formed from Old English 'stræt' (in modern English 'street') and 'ford'.{{sfn|Weinreb|Hibbert|Keay|Keay|2008|p=884}} [[Old Ford#Location of the ford|The former river crossing lay at an uncertain location north of Stratford High Street]].

The district of [[Old Ford]] in northern [[Bow, London|Bow]] – west of the Lea – is named after the former crossing, while Bow itself was also initially named Stratford, after the same ford, and a variety of suffixes were used to distinguish the two distinct settlements, including Stratford-le-Bow.<ref name="Mills"/>
 
The settlement to the east of the Lea was also known as ''Estratford'' (recorded in 1291), referring to the location east of the other Stratford, ''Statford Hamme'' (recorded in 1312) alluding to the location within the parish of West Ham, ''Abbei Stratford'', referring to the presence of [[Stratford Langthorne Abbey]],<ref name="Mills"/> and ''Stretford Langthorne'' (recorded in 1366) after a distinctive thorn tree (possibly a pollarded [[Crataegus monogyna|Hawthorn]]) which stood in the area. The thorn tree itself, was mentioned much earlier, in a charter of the [[London Borough of Newham#Manor of Ham|Manor of Ham]], in 958 AD. The tree is thought to have stood in the vicinity of the modern Channel Sea rail junction, around 200 metres north-north-west of the [[London Aquatics Centre]].<ref>The Place Names of Essex, P.H. Reaney, English Place-name Society Volume 12, Cambridge University Press, p 97</ref>