The Recreation Ground was opened in 1892 and is named after James Keir Hardie, who was returned as the first Labour MP by the constituency of West Ham South in 1892. Indeed the County Borough of West Ham is important in socialist history: in 1898-1900 it had the first socialist administration in the country; the Stratford Society which was founded in 1862 by rail workers became the London Co-operative Society, and one of the first unions to be founded was in Canning Town in 1889 later becoming the General Municipal Boilermakers Allied Trades Union. The area had developed mainly from the 1880s although Custom House Station was built in 1855. Later the post-war large Keir Hardie Estate was built on the badly bombed area of Custom House.
