by John Rogers
For Heidi, Oliver and Joseph
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Russell Brand
Introduction
1 The Wild West – Gunnersbury to Hounslow Heath
2 Off to Bec Phu – Leytonstone to Beckton
3 The Road to Erith Pier – Woolwich Ferry to Crayford Ness
4 Beyond the Velodrome – Lewisham to Tulse Hill
5 The ‘Lost Elysium’ – Sudbury Hill to Hanwel
6 The End of the World on Uxendon Hill – Golders Green to Wembley via the Welsh Harp
7 Wassailing the Home Territory – The Lea Valley
8 Pilgrimage from Merlin’s Cave to the Land of the Dead – Saffron Hill to Hornsey
9 Life on Mars – Vauxhall to Tooting Bec
10 Going Down to South Park – Wanstead Flats to Ilford
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements and Thanks
Copyright
About the Publisher
John Rogers is an important person in my life. As well as being one of my best friends he serves as a navigational point in musings and conversations. Often when discussing the non-negotiable nature of sin my mates and I will say, ‘Well what would John Rogers do?’ As you will learn in these pages John lives in Leytonstone with his two sons and his wife, Heidi, and in spite of the inferred domesticity of that set-up he is a man who lives on society’s margins. Not through occultism or deviance but through his astonishing ability to accumulate and more importantly relay extraordinary information. He is like Prospero crossed with Mr Chips.
I met John in London whilst participating in one of the many half-arsed sub-fringe sketch shows that go on in the capital. We were performing at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith where they used to make TFI Friday. It quickly became clear that the show we were involved in would yield very little and equally clear that John would become a friend for life. John is endowed with a gentle, humble, humorous wisdom, which is evident throughout these pages. You can learn from John on topics as diverse as Marxism, botany, football, punk, astronomy, gastronomy and love. However where John really comes to life is when perpendicular with his boots on. I mean when he’s walking, we don’t have a physical relationship.
Someone once described being in love as like finding a secluded ballroom in the house in which you’d always lived. To walk through London with John is like that. The city is suddenly alive with concealed plaques, submerged rivers and unnoticed gargoyles. John is like an alchemist, not only in that he is unkempt and dresses like a person who has fallen through the cracks, he also makes the mundane and unremarkable glow with newly imbued magic. We once walked through my hometown of Grays in Essex, past the ambulance station at the top of our street, and I instinctively jumped on the knee-high wall to stroll along it as I’d always done as a child. When I told John who was beside me, he said that we could consider memories of a place as objects: left strewn about until we return to collect them.
Once when I was staying on The Strand John, like the tangle-haired shrub shaman that he is, knew all manner of secret doors and passageways that lay unchecked on Fleet Street. We walked through an old, creaking oak door and were suddenly in the quads of Temple. John knew it was there and didn’t care if we were allowed in. This, in fact, is where we saw Thatcher watering roses just months before her death. We went into Lincoln’s Inn, which I never knew existed, and it was like falling down a time tunnel. Not least because a costume drama was being made. Past Aldwych John described two stone giants that adorned a church now used primarily for Romanians, telling me how ‘Gog and Magog’ were Britain’s Romulus and Remus.
Sometimes I think he knows everything. Like most people who are truly wise he never makes other people feel small for not knowing something. John patiently smiles as I tell him all about stuff he knows much more about than me then nods and gently puts me straight. This charming and engaging didacticism is abundantly present in his first book. I am excited that through his writing a wider audience can now share in the joy of John Rogers. That now thousands will, as I have done, begin to understand the character of place, the relevance of history and, most importantly, that adventure is right outside your front door if you’re prepared to take the first step. You, like me, could have no better guide than the man who has written this book.
‘Exploration begins at home’
Pathfinder, Afoot Round London, 1911
Backpacking in Thailand in my early twenties I climbed down off an elephant in a small village in the mountains of the Golden Triangle. The streets of 1994 East London felt far away – I had broken free for new horizons. I entered a small wooden hut where a villager prepared freshly mashed opium poppy seeds in a long pipe. In Hackney such men were called drug dealers – here they were known as shamans. ‘Across the rooftop of the world on an elephant’, I wrote in my travel journal. The flight to Bangkok had been the first time I’d been on a plane; my previous travels hadn’t extended beyond a coach trip to Barcelona. The top of this mountain was the edge of my known world – the real beginning of an adventure.
In the gloom of the hut was another group of travellers – fellow explorers and adventurers. I spoke to the pale, willowy girl sitting next to me, dressed in baggy tie-dye trousers, a large knot of ‘holy string’ on her wrist from a long pilgrimage around India. She told me stories about an ashram in the Himalayas and gave me the address of a man with an AK47 who could smuggle me across the border into Burma. A few more minutes’ conversation revealed that this wise-woman of the road was an accountant on sabbatical who lived two doors down from my sister in Maidenhead. I had come 6,000 miles to a remote mountainous region to sit in a shack with a group of Home Counties drop-outs chatting about a new Wetherspoon’s in the High Street.
Hostel dorms were full of wanderers who claimed to have ‘discovered’ beaches and villages merely because they weren’t in the latest Lonely Planet Guide, ignoring the fact people were already living there. Seemingly there was nowhere left to ‘discover’, the whole world was very much ON the beaten track. I spent two years bunkered down on Bondi Beach but longed for windswept, collars-up London evenings, to be in this city indifferent to the whims of the individual, a slowly oscillating hum of existence, to feel millennia of history squelching beneath wet pavements. I also missed a decent pint of beer that wasn’t served in a glass chilled to the point that it stuck to your lips.
Returning to London and eventually starting a family didn’t mean settling down. I usually wear walking boots and carry a waterproof jacket just in case I spontaneously head off on a long schlep towards the horizon. I’ve remained on the move.
One Sunday winter evening I travelled five stops on the Central Line from Leytonstone to Liverpool Street to walk along the course of the buried River Walbrook. I didn’t see a soul until I popped into Costcutter on Cannon Street to buy a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels to drink on the pebble beach of the Thames beside the railway bridge. The backpacker trail had been as congested as the rush-hour M25, whereas the pavements above a submerged watercourse running through the centre of one of the biggest cities in the world were deserted. If I’d taken an afternoon stroll in the Costwolds I’d have been tripping over ramblers at every field stile, but here I had the streets to myself, the only other people I saw were the snoozing security guards gazing into banks of CCTV monitors. This walk, inspired by an old photo I’d seen in a book bought in a junk shop of a set of wooden steps leading down from Dowgate Hill, had led me to a land twenty minutes away from my front room more mysterious than anything I’d encountered in Rajasthan or the Cameron Highlands.
Randomly flicking through the pages of an old Atlas of Greater London a new world revealed itself. The turn of a wad of custard yellow pages and there
was Dartford Salt Marsh reached by following the Erith Rands past Anchor Bay to Crayford Ness. Skirt the edge of the Salt Marshes inland along the banks of the River Darent, down a footpath you find yourself at the Saxon Howbury Moat.
This atlas of the overlooked was richly marked with names written in italics that would be more at home on Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings than in the Master Atlas of Greater London. Hundred Acre Bridge should be leading you to a Hobbit hole in The Shire rather than to Mitcham Common and Croydon Cemetery. Elthorne Heights and Pitshanger sound like lands of Trolls and Orcs but where the greatest jeopardy would be presented by my complete inability to read a map or pack any sustenance beyond a tube of Murray Mints.
I set out to explore this ‘other’ London and pinned a One-Inch Ordnance Survey map of the city to the wall of my box room. It felt unnecessary to enforce a conceit onto my venture such as limiting myself to only following rivers, tube lines or major roads. I also didn’t fancy the more esoteric approach of superimposing a chest X-ray over the map and walking around my rib-cage. I wanted to just plunge into the unknown – ten walks, or what now appeared as expeditions, each starting at a location reached as directly as possible with the fewest changes on public transport, then hoof it from there for around ten miles, although it’d be less about mileage and more about the experience. I’d aim to cover as much of the terra incognita on the map as possible, spanning the points of the compass and crossing the boundaries of London boroughs as I had done borders between countries.
It was essential to embark on this journey on foot. For me walking is freedom, it’s a short-cut to adventure. There’s no barrier between you and the world around you – no advertising for winter sun and cold remedies, no delayed tubes or buses terminating early ‘to regulate the service’. Jungle trekking in Thailand and climbing active volcanoes in Sumatra were extensions of walking in the Chilterns with my dad as a kid, and wandering around Forest Gate and Hornsey as a student. Through walking you can experience a sense of dislocation where assumptions about your surroundings are forgotten and you start to become aware of the small details of the environment around you. At a certain point, as the knee joints start to groan, you can even enter a state of disembodied reverie, particularly with the aid of a can of Stella slurped down on the move.
When you walk you start to not only see the world around you in a new way but become immersed in it. No longer outside the spectacle of daily life gazing through a murky bus window or ducking the swinging satchel of a commuter on the tube, on foot you are IN London.
The explorations I’d carried out over previous years had taught me to expect the unknown, to never deny myself an unscheduled detour, and that even the most familiar streets held back precious secrets that were just a left-turn away. Most of all I knew that the more I gave in to the process of discovery the more I’d learn.
I’d initially been inspired to head off travelling round the world by reading the American Beat writers who gallivanted coast-to-coast across America looking for a mysterious thing called ‘It’. After finally landing in Leytonstone I wondered if enlightenment was just as likely to be found on the far side of Wanstead Flats as at the end of Route 66.
I’d been coaxed into buying a copy of Walter George Bell’s Where London Sleeps by the sheer banality of its title. Surely a book that sounds so boring must be brilliant, as if it were a kind of code. Bell must have thought that if the title reflected the sizzling content inside the cloth-bound cover then readers would shy away for fear of overload. I’d suspected that the real action was out in the dormitory suburbs and now here would be the written proof.
Bell recognized that lying latent beneath the newly built suburbs of 1920s outer London there was a history as rich as that celebrated in the City and Westminster. He writes of monasteries in Merton, physic wells in Barnet, a world-famous Victorian astrophysicist in Tulse Hill and Jewish mysticism in Mile End. But it was the chapter on the highwaymen of Hounslow that captured my imagination.
Hounslow was not a place that resonated much within my psyche. It was a series of back gardens and rooftops that you passed through on the Piccadilly Line heading to and from Heathrow. A sketch show I wrote for and performed in used to rehearse above a pub on the High Street. A gloomy bunch of struggling comics and actors gathered once a week, attempting to master the art of savage satire too early on a Sunday morning, hungover, with nostrils saturated in the odour of last night’s stale beer and vomit. These were my only associations with Hounslow, but then I’d never been to the Heath.
You can pass through Hounslow today and not notice the Heath, reduced as it is to just over 200 acres, roughly a third of the size of the Square Mile of the City of London. But in the 17th century it was a vast and dangerous waste on the western edge of London spanning over 6,000 acres. ‘Time was when the heath seemed illimitable, stretching north and south across the old Bath Road far out towards the horizon,’ Bell tells us. To head west out of London towards Bath and Bristol meant a hazardous journey across this land that was so infested with highwaymen and footpads it was dubbed the most dangerous place in Britain. Compared with the level of crime in North Manchester, the current holder of that dubious honour, 17th- and 18th-century Hounslow Heath was more like Mogadishu.
On the rare occasions the highwaymen were apprehended a great show was made of their executions outside Newgate Prison, then their bodies were hung from gibbets that lined the Heath roads, ‘gallows fruit that ripened along their sides’, each rotting corpse marking your journey like zombie lampposts. Bell gives us a macabre vision of the scene that a Georgian traveller would have encountered: ‘Not unseldom a wind blew over the heath, sharpening at times to a gale, and then these grisly phantoms would take unto themselves movement, though denied life, swaying to the creaking of chains in a dreadful death dance.’
How could I not follow in Bell’s footsteps out to the badlands of the Wild West on Hounslow Heath?
***
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.