This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City

When I first moved east to Leytonstone I orientated myself by studying its position on a large fold-out A–Z map that I bought from the cabbies’ Knowledge Point on Penton Street. This map lived in my bag for about eight years until it finally fell apart into several strips. Leytonstone is just one fold away from the eastern edge of this black-cab driver’s universe – getting a taxi beyond the Redbridge Roundabout is about as easy as persuading a medieval sailor to head west across the Atlantic. Looking south I traced a straight line through Stratford across Mill Meads to the point where the River Lea empties into the Thames at Leamouth. Between Leamouth and Barking Creek lies the ancient manor of Hamme.

To fully embed Leytonstone’s alignment with the sacred Thames I’d have to walk the route, passing familiar territory at Stratford before lurching into the unknown lands along the Channelsea River and the Lower Lea Valley. As I researched the best path to take, my eyes kept being drawn along the embankment past the old Royal Docks to Beckton.

In my 1970s Greater London Atlas the East Ham Level is annotated with an outline diagram showing the Gas Works at Beckton and the beguilingly named Main Drainage Metropolis. A sewer city. This series of straight lines, circles and interconnecting threads resembles an X-ray image of a suspect package.

Beckton was lodged in a dusty corner of my brain as the unlikely location of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket. This film was a pivotal point in my cinema-going life. Its release in 1987 coincided with the recent opening of a multiplex cinema just outside High Wycombe and the first of my friends to pass their driving test. After closing time at the local pub I blagged a lift to the Wycombe 6 alongside my mate Darren Smith, and whilst the rest of our troupe took in some Tom Cruise fluff, me and Darren enlisted for Kubrick’s Vietnam nightmare.

We emerged from the cinema on to the M40 changed men – we’d never seen cinema like this before, we’d had an experience, felt like we’d been under fire ourselves. It took us a while to realize that the Tom Cruise mob had taken off and stranded us six miles from home at two in the morning. They clearly hadn’t adopted the US Marine code of never leaving a fellow soldier behind. We walked home through the pitch black, short-cutting across fields in the rain, enthralled and troubled by what we’d seen.

The film had caught my eye after seeing a short item on TV about this mad American director who was transforming a disused gas works in East London into the killing fields of Vietnam. Thousands of palm trees had been imported and planted in the Thameside marshes to recreate the landscape of South East Asia at Beckton.

Kubrick famously refused to travel – he hadn’t been back to America since the late 1960s – so the standard option of filming a Vietnam flick in the Philippines wasn’t available. By a stroke of luck not only was Kubrick given permission to blow up the gasworks, but they ‘uncannily resembled’ the French industrial architecture of the Vietnamese city of Hue where the film was set. The ‘Vietnamization’ of this windswept corner of East London would therefore not require such a great leap of the imagination as might be expected.

When the great director sent out his casting call and eager young American actors submitted their audition tapes they couldn’t have dreamed that their prize would be to spend seventeen months marooned on an industrial wasteland, serving four months longer than an official war-time tour of duty. Kubrick commanded them, rolling around in the cold Thameside mud with percussive explosions knocking chucks off the crumbling buildings, each retake requiring a hiatus of three days as the walls were repaired for a repeat of the same attack. The longer his raw recruits bunked down in Beckton, the more they came to authentically behave like a unit of Marines in a hostile foreign field dreaming of home.

Over the years I’d picked up rumours that some of the palm trees had been left behind and were thriving in the polluted alluvial mud. I saw snaps people had taken of fragments of wall on which the set designers had scrawled Viet Cong graffiti. The gasworks also played the role of a totalitarian future London in the film version of George Orwell’s 1984, the walls plastered in propaganda posters and the streets patrolled by jackbooted ‘Thought Police’. I had to go to Beckton to see what I could find of Kubrick’s Bec Phu, as it came to be known to the crew.

I set out on foot late morning one Friday in a fine mist of rain. The first section of my walk down through Leytonstone would be a preamble for a future detailed survey – eyeing up places en route that I’d later delve deeper into. Passing along the footbridge above the M11 link road I looked down to the Olympic Stadium by the Lea and to Canary Wharf in the distance – I knew that Beckton was on the far bank of the other creek. It was between those two tracts of water that I’d have to walk. I was consciously heading away from the Olympic jamboree taking place in the New Stratford that has been conjured up from the toxic earth on Stratford Marsh.

I pass the site of the childhood home of Alfred Hitchcock, a visionary director who made the reverse journey to Kubrick, heading west to Hollywood. When I’ve been out in Los Angeles on conscription writing trips, homesick for the streets of Leytonstone and daydreaming of a rainy night-time wander up to the Whipps Cross Roundabout and stopping for a pint in the Hitchcock Hotel, I’ve thought of Alf and wondered whether he ever pined for Leytonstone. Given the notorious anecdote of the young Hitch being sent to the police station over the road by his father with a note telling the officer to lock the boy in the cells for ten minutes, I’m not sure he had particularly happy memories of the place.

The excursion really starts as I enter Stratford. This stretch of the High Road is desperate, far enough off the beaten track to not have qualified for an Olympic makeover. If you peer along the streets of run-down terraced houses you can see the Olympic Village glistening on Angel Lane like a glorious Gulag. It seems to have been modelled on a despot’s palace.

I’d toyed with taking the trail along Leyton High Road into Angel Lane, following a route I’ve walked periodically over the last six years as the Olympic development evolved. But I’m keen not to lapse into a splenetic rant against land-grabs and property developers, frothing at the mouth about the breaking up of one of Europe’s oldest housing co-ops at Clays Lane, the horror of the state-subsidized shopping mall through which visitors to the Olympic Stadium have to pass – the way to the 100-metres final being via Zara, handy for a cheap Third World T-shirt but hardly the Wembley Way. Westfield Stratford City must be the only shopping mall in the world with its own running track, ideal if you’ve over indulged in the food court.

This description of the area in Dr Pagenstecher’s History of East and West Ham, published in 1908, struck me: ‘Turning down Angel Lane, you soon entered upon a country road, running between high banks topped with hedges. Now the fields are gone, and most of the land has gone into the hands of building societies or speculative builders.’

Dr Pagenstecher was passionate about what is today called Newham. He appeared to care deeply about the living conditions and opportunities for its mostly working-class inhabitants. I try to see through my cynicism to how he would have viewed what has happened in Stratford in recent years – progress for the local population and a chance for advancement, or a criminal waste of billions of pounds of investment that has by-passed the pockets of those who need it most. And this is me avoiding the venting of my ire.

In the end, I became resigned to what happened. My wife even bought tickets for the family to graze in the grounds around the stadium to soak up the atmosphere. I’d wandered around the Queen Elizabeth II Park site among the buddleia, Himalayan balsam, elderflower and fly-tipped fridges before the bulldozers crashed in and the security fences were erected. I also have to acknowledge I bought the boots I’m wearing from Westfield – I’m compromised from the ground up.

I need to change tack, and turn away from London 2012 across Maryland Point. Maryland really is named after its more famous North American cousin and seems to have benefited from the Games by obtaining a twisted silver clock tower, but not much else. On the other hand Maryland fell foul of a pre-Olympics brothel purge. Reading online message boards it appears that two massage parlours had been satisfying punters for a few years before the Met decided there was something untoward going on beneath the flannel-sized ‘todger-towels’ provided at the door. A Daily Star investigation proved that the moral crusade was unsuc’sex’ful. Stressed-out visitors to Stratford wouldn’t have to look further afield in search of a happy ending after all.

Water Lane carries me past the Manby Arms pub with its huge garden. This is the first real hint of the rural hamlets that studded the marshes and the levels. There are multiple references to groves in the area – The Grove that sweeps from Maryland into Stratford Broadway, Manbey Grove where the pub sits, and across the Romford Road there’s Barnard Grove – all of which lie around what is marked on old maps as Stratford Common. Add in the fact that they’re in the proximity of Water Lane, a pagan past could be imagined for the site, with oak groves and springs having sacred, pre-Christian significance.

An official book celebrating fifty years of the Borough of West Ham in 1936 states: ‘It is quite likely that the area was a centre of communal life of the (pre-Roman) period and that it saw Druid ceremonial at its best.’ Not only do the authors claim the presence of Druids in West Ham but they’ve made a critical judgement about how their rituals squared up against Druids from other areas. Not content with having the best public baths in East London, the grandees of 1930s West Ham boasted that even their Druids were better going back to time immemorial. Try matching that in Tower Hamlets or Waltham Forest.

I’m a sucker for this stuff and will by-pass the other meaning of a grove as a tree-lined suburban street and the fact that, from what I’ve read, most of what we think we know of Druidry is an 18th-century invention rather than a tradition handed down through the mists of time. Drifting the workaday streets as I do you need to embrace the romantic whenever you get the chance – it can’t be all Greggs the Bakers and tins of warm lager.

***

It’s warm lager that comes to mind on Romford Road. Not because this is the old Roman road that crossed the marshes into Essex – I don’t think lager had been invented at the time of Julius Caesar. The Romans brought hops to Britain as a vegetable rather than for brewing. The memory is of bad student parties in my first year in London when I moved to a terraced house in York Road just past the BP garage. I was a callow 18-year-old who had taken the BBC comedy programme The Young Ones as an instructional manual rather than a sitcom and was determined to ‘live the dream’ of pukey parties, farts, bad jokes and even worse music.

We did a fairly good job in our little three-bed terraced house with an outside toilet. The tone was set in the first week when one of my housemates took both his first taste of red wine and his inaugural spliff at the same time. Unable to negotiate the slide door to the toilet he projectile vomited over three days’ worth of dirty dishes in the sink. We elected him as next on the washing-up rota as a consequence and carried on quaffing the £1.99 litre bottle of Valpolicella.

Another night in the first term, a visitor to our humble home, a public schoolboy who’d fallen through the educational cracks decided to urinate in an empty wine bottle rather than traipse into the garden to use the lavvy. We corked this fine vintage of Château Piss and popped it in the fridge. When our regular Friday-night group feed came round my female housemate rolled in three sheets to the wind, grabbed the chilled bladder juice from the fridge and poured herself a large glass. I swear I did attempt to warn her but she just assumed I was protecting my stash. Upon the first sip she spluttered the urine all over the food I’d just prepared, which our guests decided to eat anyway because everyone was so hungry and my baked bean and cheese-topped toasties were legendary. All the people in those gruesome anecdotes now have responsible jobs, mortgages and children – apart from me. I just have the children.

We felt that we’d so successfully distilled the essence of the Scumbag Polytechnic student lifestyle that, like an ambitious shopkeeper, we expanded the next year to a five-bed house on the other side of West Ham Park. The Spotted Dog pub on Upton Lane became our regular haunt. To us provincials this was a remnant of home, a country pub nestled among the East London grime. We didn’t realize it at the time but the pub dates back at least to the 16th century. It was where the City merchants of the London Exchange conducted their business during the plague years of the 1660s. It was where we celebrated birthdays, exams, and Subbuteo victories.

Happy days. If nothing else my three years at Poly provided me with the cast-iron stomach that stood me in good stead on travels round India and South East Asia. This period also created a permanent connection to the area of London where I entered kidulthood.

In those two years traipsing along the Romford Road I have no memory of ever ducking down Vicarage Lane to West Ham Church. Shame then that I didn’t take the trouble to study the 18th-century map of the area that shows the original name of Vicarage Lane as being Ass Lane. If that hadn’t made us snigger, the Victoria County History records that, ‘the cartographer may have been misled by a rustic informant: the form Jackass Lane, also recorded in the 18th century, seems more authentic.’

Jackass Lane brings me to an old Roman trackway, the ‘Porta Via’ or Portway, that linked West Ham to the Roman camp at Uphall Farm in Barking. Groups of ‘rustic informants’ are sunning themselves on the benches outside West Ham Church. The foundations of this church date back to the Saxon era, the main body being rebuilt by the Norman Baron William de Montfichet in the 1180s. When the eyes of the world fell on the running and jumping on Stratford Marshes I doubt many cast their gaze towards this building with a heritage older than Westminster Abbey. It sits beneath the shade of the lime, yew and oak trees – not a tourist in sight.

I go to take a rest inside and a group of builders on a lunch break wave me through. In 1844 a large, colourful mural was revealed that covered the interior of the church but for some reason was hastily hidden again beneath lime-wash. However, an anonymous pamphlet was published describing the mural as depicting ‘the suburbs of Hell’. Parts of the mural were again revealed in 1865 during renovations, when it was examined ‘under the superintendence of the Rev. R. N. Clutterbuck of Plaistow’. The lurid descriptions of the anonymous pamphlet were debunked before the mural was deemed unworthy of preservation, re-whitewashed and the plaster removed. It has a hint of intrigue almost worthy of a Dan Brown novel, in which no doubt connections would be made between the martyrs burnt at the stake on Stratford Green and the land owned by the Knights Templar around the River Lea nearby. In the Dan Brown version the forbidden mural in this backwater church would have contained the secret of some heresy. At some point a beautiful younger woman would have to be involved – she can play me as the bumbling amateur researcher with a dodgy left knee – and she discovers that the Olympic Stadium has been built to cover a hoard of Templar treasure that includes the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Prepuce (Christ’s foreskin). That might bring the tourists in.

Who the artist was, we’ll never know. Was he a troublesome monk sent out from the nearby Langthorne Abbey to do good work in the community? Once confronted with a fresh white wall, a brush and paints, did he unleash the impulses repressed by ecclesiastical life? Was he some kind of Banksy character who wandered around East London daubing images of fornicating bishops on church walls. Somewhere within the West Ham mural was there a tag as identifiable as the signature on a Damien Hirst dot painting? ‘The Final Doom of Mankind’ that was painted here might have been as synonymous with this 15th-century painter as the Obama/Hope poster is with street artist Shepard Fairey. But then this was an era before artists had egos and dealers. When the mural was painted there would have been no Victorian squeamishness over images of cavorting naked sinners. Vivid, racy murals probably put bums on church seats in those days.

All the time that I’m studying Dr Pagenstecher’s account of the church’s history my ears are tuning in to the builders’ lunchtime banter. The tranquillity of this rare pastoral East London scene is being disrupted by one of the workmen who’d let me into the church giving his mates a detailed blow-by-blow account of a fight he’d had. The image he paints of his rumble would be a true vision of hell if it were rendered as a fresco on the whitewashed walls.

As I make for the door, trying my hardest not to attract the attention of ‘Bonecrusher’, I spot one of the last surviving relics of the great Stratford Langthorne Abbey that is the next stop on my Kubrick schlep. High on the wall of the north tower is a stone tablet carved with a sequence of human skulls dug up in the garden of the Adam and Eve pub. ‘Bonecrusher’ comments to his mates as I take a photo, but they quickly lose interest and return to tales of bust-ups in Barking boozers.

As far as I know, the tablet is all that remains of the great abbey built by Montfichet in 1135 by the banks of the Channelsea River. The Abbey of Stratford Langthorne put the area on the map in the Middle Ages in the way that Westfield Stratford City is aiming to do today. The building of the Eurostar terminal, Stratford International, continues the historic symmetry, as continental visitors would sail up the Lea and disembark at Queen Matilda’s bridge by the ‘Street-at-the-Ford’. The area’s French connection was sufficiently well known for Chaucer to make a sneering reference to the locals’ attempts to converse with the tourists in their mother tongue, referring to ‘French after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe’.

Stone tablet in West Ham Church

Heading down Abbey Road you’d need an active imagination to guess this was the way to a scheduled ancient monument. Where pilgrims trod a path through the marshes the route now reads like a history of 20th-century social housing, from its most enlightened pre-war phase, built by the London County Council, to the high-rise blocks being given a facelift. Straight ahead stand the Towers of Mammon at Canary Wharf and to the north you can just see the top of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture in the Olympic Park, which is about as close as most people from the area managed to get.

Turning into Bakers Row a hint of rurality reappears as poppies poke through the metal railings of Abbey Gardens. A sign invites you ‘to grow your things here’. The Cistercian monks of the abbey were known for their green fingers. The name ‘Langthorne’ was taken from the hedges of ‘long thorns’ that surrounded their gardens on this site. The present-day Abbey Gardens carry on the work of the monks, encouraging local people to use the ‘open-access harvest garden’ to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs in rows of raised beds.

Just inside the gate are the brick and flint foundations of a small building or room that would have been part of the medieval abbey. Around it grow lavender, wild geraniums, cabbages, lettuce and spring onions. An old signal box finds new life as a tool shed and a wind turbine provides whatever power is needed. I think the monks would approve.

The remains of Stratford Langthorne Abbey

Before the Cistercians and their impressive abbey, old Hamme was divided into two manors. There is a map of the area at ‘Ye thyme of Edward ye Confessor’. I’d guess from the spelling that the map was Victorian; those ‘Ye’s’ speak of a longing to connect with a halcyon past. It shows the Manor of Alestan with his eight hides of arable and sixty acres of meadow in West Ham. On the other side of Ham Creek is the Manor of Leured with only one hide of arable and fifty acres of meadow. There is also a parcel of land for Edwin the Free Priest, who sounds too much like a Monty Python character. Out here in the marshes, unshackled from the Church hierarchy, he probably ran around naked with a beard down to his knees. What comes to mind is the scene in Life of Brian when Brian accidentally jumps on a hermit’s foot, making him break his vow of silence as he exclaims in pain. Although back in the 11th century it’s unlikely Edwin would have been disturbed by anyone, let alone a reluctant messiah.

There is an even earlier record that Offa, the 8th-century King of the East Saxons, gave two hides of land in East Ham to the Monastery of St Peter in Westminster. The men of Westminster have again got their beady eyes on the region but they aren’t thinking in terms of hides but office blocks and riverside housing developments.

When Ken Livingstone was campaigning in Leyton in 2011 during the mayoral elections he spoke of the real legacy of the Olympic Games being the ‘vast potential’ of the land ‘from the Olympic Park south to the River Thames … between Stratford and the Excel Centre a vast amount of brownfield site … we’ve got enough land there for 40,000 homes and 50,000 jobs.’

Not-so-Red Ken was referring to the Manor of Alestan, which in Alestan’s time was valued by how many hogs could be supported by feeding on the acorns and beech masts of the woodland. When this area is being sold off to the corporations of the ‘dynamic’ economies in China, Brazil and India, they will be talking in hundreds of millions of pounds rather than the hundred swine that could be sustained by whatever fell from the trees. The ancient rites of ‘pannage’ will be omitted from the prospectus sent out boasting of West Ham’s ‘development potential’.

Old Hamme, from The History of East and West Ham by Dr Pagenstecher, 1908

***

Passing over the bridge at Abbey Road the pavement is streaming with men departing Friday prayers from Canning Road mosque, heading for the Docklands Light Railway like a procession of pilgrims. The traffic is intense for such a quiet backwater, and this is before the proposed ‘Mega Mosque’ has been built. The plans for the 9,500-capacity religious centre are being opposed by a MegaMosque No Thanks campaign group among fears that it will turn West Ham into an ‘Islamic ghetto’. I’ve seen a few mosques before but not even the mighty Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri in India calls itself a Mega Mosque. I have to take a look where this potential new landmark will emerge.

Given that the group behind the scheme have been accused of being ‘extreme and isolationist’ I don’t fancy my chances of getting very far. But in fact I am able to amble through the open gates into the grounds unopposed. At present the Mega Mosque is no more than a series of portacabins laid out among the long grass. I try to cross the overgrown meadow to access the banks of the Channelsea River but find the way blocked by an aluminium fence. I seem to be free to wander the site at will. A man in Islamic dress emerges from the kitchens, passes me by with a slight smirk and goes about his business. There could almost be a heritage argument for building a religious centre near the site of Langthorne Abbey; the Cistercian monks could possibly have been described as ‘extreme and isolationist’.

From the mosque I step up onto the Greenway – a path built on top of the Northern Outfall Sewage Pipe that cuts a straight line across the levels to Beckton. This is the most direct route for the unadventurous. It forms a kind of ramblers’ highway above the rooftops, screening out the realities of metropolitan life with a surface optimized for soft-soled dog walkers and commuting cyclists. To confirm this jaundiced assessment my way is soon blocked by a party of about thirty ramblers being led by an enthusiastic guide pointing out the landmarks (I attempt to hear if she included the Mega Mosque). A cyclist in a hurry approaches and it takes the guide too long for the cyclist’s liking to manoeuvre this bloated python of a walking party to one side.

Despite the pedestrian traffic jams the Greenway is a great vantage point from which to take in the course of Alfred the Great’s Channelsea River. It’s believed that the ingenious Alfred cut a series of channels to drain water from the River Lea, stranding a hostile Viking fleet that had moored further along the valley. The skeleton of a Viking longboat was excavated on Tottenham Marshes, lending weight to the story.

It’s funny the way history accords these great accolades to a few individuals. It’s unlikely that Alfred mastered such a feat of civil engineering whilst supposedly single-handedly rewriting the laws of England. According to his chronicler, a pithy Welsh monk called Asser, he had a raging libido and a terrible case of haemorrhoids. It’s more likely that an unnamed group of people put their heads together and devised the scheme to create the Channelsea River, and Alfred approved the idea whilst some unfortunate maiden applied a balm to his throbbing piles.

It had been my original intention to paddle my way down the river to the mouth of Bow Creek, then head overland with the 7kg dingy on my back. I’d walked around this section of the riverbank back in November when the water was high. Looking across the muddy banks sprouting phalanxes of swaying reeds the age of Alfred, Alestan and the Vikings didn’t seem so distant.