EastEnders and the interior to the Fowlers' is based on a house in Manor Road, Colchester, close to where the supervising art director lived. The fictional local newspaper, the "Walford Gazette", in which local news events such as the arrests or murders of characters appear, mirrors the real "Hackney Gazette". Walford East is a fictional tube station for Walford, and a tube map that was first seen on air in 1996 showed Walford East between Bow Road and West Ham, in the actual location of Bromley-by-Bow on the District and Hammersmith & City lines. Walford has the postal district of E20.
The Banned (EastEnders) been described as "an horrific scenario where fact and soap merged in messy fashion to give the fictional band a real-life hit with the appalling Something Out Of Nothing." The songs, which "were recorded when the show was riding high on huge ratings success", have not aged well in critical opinion. A critic for "The Guardian" newspaper has commented that "The Banned" was "EastEnders"' "Eighties bid to add a pop angle to their socially conscious template", which "went down like the proverbial ton of bricks". The critic goes on to say: "Worse was the record; an acne-scarred 'song' of no