This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City

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Where London Sleeps was the inspiration, but short on the kind of detail I’d need for an exploration of the area. In my hunt for materials I found a battered old copy of Highwayman’s Heath by Gordon S. Maxwell, published by the Middlesex Chronicle in 1935.

Discovering Maxwell’s The Fringe of London (1925) had been an epiphany for me, realizing that there was some sort of heritage for this odd practice of wandering around neglected streets, following the city’s moods, tracking myths and retracing old paths. It’s somehow more acceptable to be engaged in an activity that pre-dates TV and jukeboxes. Just look at Morris dancing and basket weaving: nobody questions these, because your granny probably knew someone who did them (thankfully this doesn’t apply to marrying your cousin or cooking Starling Pie).

I’d worked out the simplest route to get within reasonable walking distance of the Heath – to skirt North London on the Overground train from Stratford to Gunnersbury and hoof it from there. But the territory between Gunnersbury and Hounslow Heath was completely unknown to me, aside from journeys along the A4 in my sister’s groaning white Vauxhall Cavalier as she ferried me back to polytechnic for the start of each term. So the 388 pages of Highwayman’s Heath were the topographical mother lode.

In common with the celebrated Victorian explorers of the Amazon Basin and the Central African Highlands, the old topographers had more than a touch of the eccentric about them. In the preface Maxwell explains the origins of his book:

One night I had a dream – a vision, if you will. I was on a vast heath stretching desolate and wild for miles. I was alone yet in the midst of a great company – of ghosts that moved as shadows around me. Not malevolent spectres, you understand, but vastly interesting, for in their dim outlines I recognized many famous in history, song and story.

This vision comes to him as he was sitting on Hounslow Heath one morning. He is approached by a group of maidens wearing white robes who tell him they are the ‘Nine Muses’. They scatter jewelled beads across the Heath, hand Maxwell a magic cord and instruct him to travel about the Heath threading the beads together, and that is the contents of the book, like a Middlesex Book of Mormon.

Armed with these potent images of the ripening gallows fruit and the magic cord threaded with the beads of history, I left Leytonstone one Saturday lunchtime. I’d put on a double pair of socks and strapped up my dodgy left knee, as Google Maps had informed me the route I’d plotted from Gunnersbury along the Great West Road, across Osterley Park, through Heston and down to Hounslow Heath would be around ten miles, and that was without the inevitable diversions and detours.

Since an arthroscopy I’d had performed on the knee in Homerton Hospital it had developed the annoying habit of ceasing to perform the basic function of a joint, bending, at almost bang on the eight-mile mark. It’s as accurate as a pedometer. From that point I’m swinging a useless leg-shaped post as if I’ve suddenly received a grant from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. This affliction has struck me down all over the London region, from a slip road beside the M40 near Beaconsfield to late night at the wrong end of Lea Bridge Road as I attempted to make it back to my local in time for last orders. It’s then that I reflect on Homerton Hospital’s reputation as the best place to be treated for gunshot wounds this side of a military hospital in Afghanistan. The most minor keyhole surgery probably lacked a certain jeopardy for the surgeons there.

On the packed Overground train I cram in a few more pages from Highwayman’s Heath and read about the old rural paths that led from Heston to Lampton, adding these to my itinerary. Arriving at Gunnersbury I start out in the direction of Gunnersbury Park, former home of mad King George III’s aunt, Princess Amelia, and later the Rothschild clan. As a tourist exploring foreign cities I’ve sought out palaces and grand houses as a reflex first resort, so why not do the same in the London Borough of Hounslow?

The traffic on Gunnersbury Avenue is bumper-to-bumper heading southwards but northbound you could skip down the white lines in perfect safety. There are allotments along the roadside with ramshackle sheds made from foraged materials that look as if they are left over from the wartime Dig for Victory effort. The sign for a salsa bar props up one end of a planter sprouting triffid-like weeds.

I pass above the traffic on a footbridge and enter the gates of Gunnersbury Park. One possible derivation of the name ‘Gunnersbury’ is from Gunnhild or Gunyld’s Manor, the niece of King Cnut. The Danes held lands in the area up to the time of the Battle of Brentford in 1016, when they were defeated by Edmund Ironside – how could he ever lose a battle with a name like that? Well, he did later on, and ended up having to divide his kingdom with the Danish.

From that point on the manor changed hands through various minor royals, merchants and bankers till it was finally handed back to the people in 1926, fittingly enough the year of the General Strike when the British establishment genuinely teetered on the brink of collapse. In the end it was the building of the Great West Road along the edge of the park that forced the aristocrats and bankers out of their city retreats, rather than a popular uprising.

Neville Chamberlain, then Minister for Health, presided over the grand public opening of the house and its grounds just a week after the strike had ended and Parliamentarians had returned to harrumphing at each other across the Westminster benches as if nothing had happened. There’s twenty-eight seconds of silent Pathé newsreel that capture the dignitaries lined up on the veranda above a huge crowd – ‘Another Lung for London’ the title declares.

When he was Prime Minister, Chamberlain passed through Gunnersbury again, on a more historically resonant occasion. In 1938 he flew from Heston Aerodrome, just a couple of miles away, to appease Hitler in Munich. Chamberlain pictured on the runway at Heston waving the treaty he’d signed with the Führer to a triumphant crowd is one of the enduring images of the 20th century, and it took place in a field that I’ll traverse later. As he made his way back into central London along the A4 did Chamberlain remember that May afternoon twelve years previously when he’d cut the ribbon at the house?

The exterior of the house now shows signs of neglect and decay. The white paint on the walls and wooden window frames is chipped and peeling. Buddleia sprouts from cracks in the foundations and crevices around the guttering and spills out of the chimney pots. Weeds flourish in a Grecian urn.

Gunnersbury Park House

Through grimy windows I can see sparse rooms furnished with trestle tables and moulded-plastic school chairs. What were the guest rooms of the Rothschild dynasty now host education workshops and talks by local community arts groups. On the veranda that boasted one of the finest views across the south of London out to the Surrey hills the only other person is a forlorn-looking bloke sucking on a can of lager where once royalty took tea. The intensity of the birdsong adds to the feeling of abandonment. I’m heartened by this first impression of Gunnersbury; I wasn’t in the mood to pay my respects to the gentility of former times.

The house now hosts the Ealing and Hounslow municipal museum. I drift about half-looking at the exhibits but mostly enjoying the current incarnation of this grand country residence as a council utility with its scuffed skirting boards and fire exit signs. In a room with gold-leaf trim around the ceiling and lit by a crystal chandelier there is an exhibition of children’s art mounted on free-standing boards that obscure the finery of the room. This could be the place where the antiquarian Horace Walpole was summoned to entertain Princess Amelia and commissioned to write verses for the Prince of Wales. There is little reverence for its former glories.

It’s a brief glimpse of what Britain might have looked like if the more radical elements of the General Strike had been successful. We could be going to Buckingham Palace to make a housing benefit claim, or you might be residing in a council flat in the converted Windsor Castle.

The revolution has yet to come, of course; we’re a nation still enthralled by monarchy, addicted to Downton Abbey and ruled by a government of privately educated millionaires. But there was something about this house that made me feel optimistic. Maybe it was the photocopied information sheets on sale in the gift shop for 20 pence each.

According to conspiracy theorists, this would have been the nerve centre of the shadowy Illuminati whom they believe were established by the Rothschild banking family to control the world. Being unimaginably rich and Jewish, the Rothschilds have been a magnet for conspiracy nuts. My favourite bonkers Rothschild conspiracy theory is that, not content with owning the Bank of England, between them Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his son Lionel fathered most of Queen Victoria’s children. I’d have thought they’d have had their hands full containing the weeds in the huge garden.

Lionel might not have cuckolded Prince Albert, but Victoria’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is believed to have asked him for a loan in the library of this house to buy shares in the Suez Canal. Disraeli had been the first Jewish MP, holding out for eleven years to take his seat in the House of Commons until the law had been changed to allow him to swear a modified non-Christian oath.

The history hits you from all sides, but ultimately it is people who create the narratives. It’s the mundane day-to-day lives of the small army of domestic workers who churned the butter in the kitchens, lovingly tended the grounds and groomed the horses in the ruined stables propped up by scaffolding in a shady corner where I watched a robin redbreast sing from the aluminium security fencing.

The 1881 Census records thirty-three servants residing at Gunnersbury, including George Bundy the head coachman, his wife and three children; William Cole the coachman from my home town of High Wycombe; Fanny South the domestic servant; Elizabeth Kilby the kitchen maid; and Emily D’Aranda, one of three nurses. I wonder what memories they had of Gunnersbury Park.

The green space is huge, and littered with crumbling boathouses and stone follies. The remains of a Gothic building stand just over shoulder-high, ivy-draped with thick branches rising from the soil like the muscles of the Green Man himself, Pan reaching out to reclaim the structure for the earth and restore the natural order. Kids run around with ice cream-smeared faces. I hear the clatter of studs on a concrete path by the cricket pitch as a batsman makes his way from the squat pavilion out to the crease. You could easily spend the day here in what Maxwell calls ‘London’s Wonderland’, but I need to push on to reach Hounslow Heath by sunset.

I emerge from Gunnersbury Park under the M4 flyover on the A4 Great West Road. Facing me are the Brompton Folding Bicycle Factory and the Sega Europe HQ. A huge image of Sonic the Hedgehog flies overhead like an avatar of the Sky God.

The Great West Road rises in central London and scoots along Fleet Street, following the path of the Roman road that headed west from Newgate bound for the health resort at Aquae Sulis (Bath). It’s been suggested – in my imagination by a man with a beard wearing sandals – that this section of the road follows an ancient ley line and the Romans merely built along a pre-existing trackway. There could be something in this theory as the route takes you past the Neolithic sites of West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill, places that are over 5,000 years old. It’s an interesting revision of the idea of the Romans as great innovators into a new role as conservationists.

The ancient trackways have been described as the ‘green roads of England’, but there’s nothing green about this particular passage of the A4 built in the 1920s. The new Great West Road horrified Gordon S. Maxwell, ‘This arterial horror sears the face of rural Middlesex,’ he declaimed. I have a vision of him in tweeds standing by the roadside angrily waving his walking stick at the vehicles trundling past in a futile protest at the onward march of the motor age.

I’d read a letter in the Hounslow, Heston and Whitton Chronicle from a man who’d worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company on the Great West Road, manufacturing ‘highly secret components for the war effort’. Steel rings produced here ended up inside the Enigma code-breaking machines at Bletchley Park, ultimately hastening the end of the Second World War.

This part of the road was known as the Golden Mile due to the concentration of big-name manufacturers. There were Smith’s crisps, Gillette razor blades, Beecham’s pharmaceuticals, Firestone tyres, Maclean’s toothpaste, Currys electrical goods and Coty cosmetics, illuminated by a ‘kinetic sculpture’ of a Lucozade bottle pouring neon orange liquid into a glass. It was like a Sunset Strip for factories.

This was the centre of a new 20th-century consumerism. British companies seizing the era of mass production and advertising, and American corporations branching into the European market spearheaded their campaigns from this stretch of tarmac through Brentford.

Art deco was the dominant architectural style that captured the mood of the moment, led by the practice of Wallis, Gilbert and Partners. Their crowning glory was the Hoover Building on the Western Avenue, now a branch of Tesco. They did for art deco in London what Banksy has done for graffiti. Commissioned to build factories they produced artworks that outlived the industries they were erected to house.

I now approached another of their signature constructions, Wallis House, originally built for Simmonds Aerocessories, which sits at the centre of what Barratt Homes are calling the Great West Quarter or GWQ. The new-build elements of the development look as though they’ve been more inspired by post-war East German social housing than the art deco masterpiece that looms over the grey blocks named after the factories of the Golden Mile. Like much of East Germany, the place is deserted.

From the moment I gazed through the window of the Sales and Marketing Suite at the scale model of the ‘premier development scheme in Brentford’, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be welcome inside. I go in anyway and half-consider posing as a potential buyer, but my current look as an out-of-work Status Quo roadie gives the game away before I can even start my spiel.

‘I’m writing a book …’ I say, thinking this must convey some sort of respectability, but don’t get much further.

There is light jazz playing softly and a clean-cut corporate vibe is sucking up the oxygen. The immaculately dressed young man behind the desk repeats the word ‘book’ like someone mispronouncing the name of the aforementioned King Cnut. He’s on to me straight away and probably could have composed my previous paragraph for me in advance. I’ve got ‘long-term renter and ex-squatter’ written through me like a stick of rock and he probably works on commission.

We silently acknowledge the gulf between our worlds and attempt to make small talk. He tells me all the flats are sold, but not much else. I wish him well and skulk off back towards the Great West Road with the Barratt Homes flags fluttering in the pollution like the standards of a conquering army. I spot the first signs of civilian life, a child circling the empty car park on a scooter; it reminds me of images of Midwestern trailer parks, isolated and forgotten.

The large block next to the GWQ still awaits its Cinderella moment. The ivy has started to wind its way around the concrete and steel frame, the lower loading bay has flooded, possibly from the brook that gives Brook Lane running down one side its name. The New England Bar and Restaurant on the corner is boarded-up and fly-tipped. It reeks of the foul stench of decomposition.

A scene from an early Sid James Ealing Comedy, The Rainbow Jacket, was shot in this street. For the filming, a prop-built post-box was placed on the street corner. Some residents mistook this for the Royal Mail acknowledging the long walk to the main post office and dropped off their letters. But at the end of the day the celluloid letterbox was loaded into a van and driven away, with the mail dispatched at the post office.

I’ve been jungle trekking in Thailand and have explored the vast Niah Caves in Sarawak, but this walk along the A4 felt like the hardest slog yet. After sucking in car fumes for a couple of miles I crossed the River Brent and was sorely tempted to jump in. With my head starting to spin and the exhaust gases shimmering on the asphalt horizon, the scene started to resemble the classic Western movie moment when the cowboy is lost in the desert, vultures circling overhead, except in my case it’s jumbo jets coming in to land at Heathrow.

Standing in the shadow of the boarded-up Gillette Building, which is preparing for a new life as a swanky hotel, I decide I can take no more of this road walking. I’ve tried to conjure up images of the Neolithic trackway, of Romans heading off on holiday, of stagecoaches and open fields, but all I see is a blur of high-performance automobiles. It’s incredible that anything manages to live here, but where soil has blown into gaps in the concrete and tarmac a diverse ecology of roadside plants flourishes. The organisms we brand as weeds soak up the toxins of the man-made world, even managing to sprout the odd flower to lure in pollinating insects. People somehow inhabit proud inter-war villas lining the kerbside of the type that George Orwell described as ‘rows and rows of prison cells’, their net curtains stained carbon-monoxide grey.

This road has chalked up quite a death rate since it was opened, somewhere in excess of the Falklands War and the Afghanistan campaign combined – all in the pursuit of pushing London further westwards. Even in the 1940s the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Mr H. Alker Tripp, described road death rates in London as having reached ‘battle level’ – and he said that during the Second World War.

Gordon S. Maxwell proposed his own radical solution – ‘Hang a motorist for murder!’ He justified this position by pointing out that within ten years of the opening of the new Great West Road, drivers had killed more people than the highwaymen had managed in over 200 years. At this stage I’m tempted to follow his line of reasoning. ‘A gibbet, duly loaded, by the side of the Great West Road to-day would be more effective, I think, in stopping these murderers than some quite inadequate fine.’ With the speeds of modern drivers they would barely register the dangling corpse of a White Van Man, or if they did it would cause another accident as they attempted to grab a picture of it on their iPhone.

Gillette Corner marks the end of the Golden Mile and I feel like I’ve paid due homage to the fading art deco neon strip – the lights on the four faces of the Gillette clock tower would struggle to raise even a blink in their current state. The main function of Sir Banister Fletcher’s redbrick temple at present is to offer

a meaningful challenge to intrepid urban explorers whilst a ‘development solution’ is sought.

I cross Syon Lane, a name so laden with various ancient meanings I should have known opportunity was approaching. In Sanskrit syon means ‘followed by good luck’, and the turning for Wood Lane that followed presented itself to me at the ideal time. Despite winding off away from Hounslow Heath it would take me towards the village of Wyke Green snugly submerged in suburbia.

Yards away from the A4 and the predominant sound is of birdsong, hedgerows bursting with anthems as if there were competing avian hordes of football fans in full voice. ‘Sing us your best song,’ the starlings taunt the thrushes, whilst the blackbirds know they’ve got it all sown up and launch into full-throttle renditions of the early-evening roosting chorus.

A group of teenage lads play in the nets of Wycombe House Cricket Club. I played on this ground once when I was their age, when coming out here from the Buckinghamshire village where I grew up felt like a voyage into the city. What was urban to me then now possesses all the charms of a rural retreat away from the ‘blood and ugliness’ of the Great West Road.

The sports ground sits on the site of the old manor house, which became part of a chain of private lunatic asylums spread across West London in the 19th century. Wyke House was at one point run by Reginald Hill, who pioneered the practice of non-restraint treatment of mental illness, the enlightened idea that the psychiatrically impaired didn’t need to be chained to a wall. At his asylums the patients dined together and lived a relatively civilized existence in the fields of Hanwell, Brentford and Isleworth.