This Other London

by John Rogers

  In the year that The Coming Race was published, Rosina authored Where There’s a Will There’s a Way and Chumber Chase. I’ve found it difficult to discover what they were about, probably because her writings didn’t inspire a genocidal regime and end up as the subject of a documentary on the History Channel.

  I sit and revive myself, absorbing the view westwards across farmland. With the early-evening sun on my face, the songbirds and the distant ring of leather on willow, it’s almost a picture-postcard pastoral scene – wedged between a major death road and the M4 motorway. Maxwell cautioned that the bucolic nature of the area was under threat in the 1930s but perhaps the building of the roads has helped preserve it. Now you have an express route into the ‘real’ countryside, why bother with Wyke Green?

  The path across Wyke Green

  Maxwell noted the flavour of ‘bygone times’ hereabouts and reported how a friend had told him that one of the last bare-knuckle prize-fights had taken place on the green where I was now recovering from being floored by the traffic. Bare-knuckle boxing must have survived in the area as I later read about ex-fighter turned pro-golfer ‘Gypsy Joe’ Smith from Wyke Green, who won the London Heavyweight Unlicensed Boxing Championship at Osterley. Wyke Green sits on the edge of Osterley Park.

  The golf course where Joe learnt to play is home to a circular Neolithic earthwork, absorbed into the contours of the course. A miss-hit drive could end up back in the Bronze Age.

  I now have just over an hour to reach Hounslow Heath if I want to explore it in the light. I follow the footpath that cuts through a field of young wheat. Legend has it that the wheat produced in this area was so fine it was used to bake Elizabeth I’s bread.

  Looking south from here the spire of a church pokes above the rooftops. Low-hanging horse chestnut trees are in full bloom. There are bluebells growing among the stinging nettles and the hawthorns are heavy with their May blossoms. In Celtic mythology hawthorn, also known as May Tree, is where the Little People hang out, waylaying unwary travellers. Maybe that explains my extended rest within the grove on Wyke Green. The workaday world of London life feels far away from here, faery magic temporarily transporting me to a different realm of time. A lad sprawled across the path supping a can of Tennent’s Super and chatting loudly on his phone relocates me to the digital age and so I push on.

  This now feels like a country walk. I skirt the edge of Osterley Park, which I had tentatively planned to visit. Osterley is maintained by the National Trust so I imagine that it has preserved its aristocratic trappings. The house earns its keep as a film location, convenient for London-based crews. It’s starring as Batman’s mansion, Wayne Manors, in The Dark Knight Rises, but has also passed for Buckingham Palace in Young Victoria and scored credits in Horrible Histories and The Chuckle Brothers.

  The manor houses and mansions form a line through West London now marked by the major roads – Chiswick, Gunnersbury, Boston Manor, Syon Park, Osterley, Strawberry Hill. This part of West London seems to have had the same relationship to the demi-monde and fashionable society of the 18th and 19th centuries that Buckhurst Hill and Chigwell have with Premier League footballers and reality TV stars today. In two hundred years’ time will people be visiting the Brentwood gaff of Amy Childs, looking at mock-ups of her signature vajazzles and fine collection of weaves hung out like American Indian scalps?

  The last hangers-on from the world of powdered wigs and miserable marriages were swept away when the ‘age of mobility’ demanded better and faster roads to ease the city-centre congestion. Motorways were built to ‘by-pass the by-passes’, such as the Great West Road, in a grand vision of modern London outlined in The County of London Plan, written in 1943. The M4 careered through the grounds of Osterley Park, leaving it to serve up cream teas and play a supporting role as a backdrop in period dramas. There was a certain democratizing zeal to the early days of the road-building craze, however misguided we might view it now. It also bequeathed us the legacy of these peculiar lands trapped between highways and somehow suspended outside time. That might explain why so many episodes of Doctor Who were shot in the area.

  I follow the path in a happy daze, guided by a tower block marking the location of Heston, into an overgrown meadow of cow parsley and blackberry bushes. A group of Asian kids, giddy on Lambrini, jump to their feet and brush themselves down as I approach. Grazing horses saunter over the uneven clods of grass. This is a rare slice of remote London.

  The exit from the field is through a hole in a hedge that dumps me on an over-active B-road. Brushing hawthorn flowers from my hair, it’s as if I’ve dropped in from another era rather than skipped across from Wyke Green. This farmer is clearly no friend of the Ramblers and I can’t blame him – they don’t so much walk as organize mobile conversations.

  This is now the final approach into Hounslow Heath, across the terrain where Maxwell wrote of getting lost when the fields of Heston were built over in the inter-war years. He’d returned to the area to take a friend on a ‘country stroll’: ‘When I knew this walk it was pleasant field-paths, shaded by noble elms, as rural a ramble as the heart could desire, but now it is all bricks and mortar and new roads all exactly alike.’ I pick up one of Maxwell’s field paths I’d read about on the train. It leads me behind gardens of smoky BBQs and backyard water-fights over the Great West Road into Lampton.

  I’d heard of Heston because of its famous motorway service station that serves cracking 24-hour fry-ups. Lampton on the other hand was virgin ground, a medieval hamlet hanging on in the suburbs. Cutting across Lampton Park there is more cricket, but this time an informal occasion with only half the players wearing whites. I ask the lad at long-on who’s playing and he tells me with a smile that it’s just a ‘friends’ match’.

  Charles Dickens was apparently very fond of Lampton and often visited Lampton Hall. There are certain associations that any self-respecting London suburb will try to claim – a pub where Dick Turpin hid out, any kind of link to Dickens and a brush with royalty. Hounslow ticks all these boxes convincingly with a great big fat marker pen. I don’t doubt that Dickens sojourned in this park; I fancy loitering a while myself and sit down next to the path to admire a great chunk of sandstone.

  Lampton Sarsen stone

  I read the plaque beside the Sarsen stone as kids whizz past me on scooters. The gist is that the rock was formed from a bed of sand that lay beneath the sea covering this area around 50 million years ago. There’s a number to get your head around – Dickens coming out here 130-odd years ago I can cope with, but 50 million years ago and Hounslow part of a great sea? The sandstone gradually worked its way nearer the surface to rest on the London Clay about half a million years ago before it was excavated from a gravel pit.

  The land submerged in water, then large beasts roaming the wild forests are sobering thoughts when looking across at children playing, gaggles of gossiping teenage girls and lads passing a ball around. This world we hold so dear is transient and there will come a time when all that is left of Lampton is this lump of archaic sandstone, and possibly the plaque.

  I pass through a tunnel beneath the Piccadilly Line and into a clichéd landscape of outer London suburbia. An old lady watches me from her chair in a glass porch. There are bricks stacked in the front garden of the house next door waiting to be transformed into an extension. Tomorrow the men will emerge to wash their cars on the drive. The planes bound for Heathrow almost skim the chimney tops on their descent.

  Only now do I realize that I haven’t stopped for food since the café in Gunnersbury Park and have run out of water. But as an experienced suburban survivor I know how to source provisions in this seemingly barren landscape. I nip into the corner shop and bag a samosa and a can of Stella Artois.

  With provisions for the onward journey I turn into Staines Road. The evocative images painted so vividly by Walter George Bell in Where London Sleeps loom back into view. This was one of the principal old coaching roads and the Middlesex section of the Roman road Via Tri
nobantes (better known as Stane Street) that passed through Pontes (Staines) on its way to the great town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester in Hampshire). It is along the pavement here that the gibbets would have decorated the roadside with their putrid drooping cadavers of highwaymen and footpads.

  A highway robbery was reported in the Hounslow Chronicle in 2011 when three masked men leapt from a car and snatched a backpack containing cash and jewellery from two men ‘oriental in appearance’. Aside from the use of a dark green car as the getaway vehicle, this could have been a crime from a different age. Perhaps Claude Duval or Galloping Dick slipped through a tear in the space–time continuum and then landed back in the 18th century with a stash of worthless bank notes.

  This robbery lacks the class of the crimes committed by Old Mob the Highwayman, who also appeared in a double act known as Hawkins and Simpson (I bet they argued over whose name came first). Once when Old Mob robbed a stagecoach on Hounslow Heath he consoled the victims with a ‘story in verse’, earning himself the moniker of ‘the poetical highwayman’. He also held up the coach of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who stupidly used the ‘Do you know who I am?’ line. Old Mob treated this with the contempt that a bouncer on the door of Bungalow 8 shows to a Z-list celebrity trying to gain entry using the same refrain. He told her to pay up because he was the King of Hounslow Heath and needed money as much as the other king. He even had the front to rob the feared Judge Jeffreys, a man known as the ‘hanging judge’. Jeffreys thought mentioning his name would earn him a pardon; instead it led to a very long lecture on morals and ethics from the pistol-toting Old Mob, rounded off by ‘thundering a volley of foul oaths’. The judge duly delivered his purse.

  The highwaymen were the heroes of their day. They occupied the position we now reserve for footballers and X-Factor winners. They stuck two fingers up at authority and conducted themselves with a swagger and style that even Mick Jagger would be hard pushed to match.

  Look at the exploits of Sixteen-String Jack, the original ‘dandy highwayman’, who earned his nickname from wearing ‘breeches with eight strings at each knee’. After being acquitted for a robbery on Hounslow Road early in his career, instead of keeping a low profile he headed straight to Bagnigge Wells near King’s Cross, the trendiest nightspot in Regency London. He strolled in dressed in a ‘scarlet coat, tambour waistcoat, white silk stockings, and a laced hat, and publicly declared himself to be “Sixteen-String Jack, the Highwayman”’.

  Shortly before his final capture he attended a public execution at Tyburn. These were big occasions and positions at the front were at a premium, reserved for the most wealthy and famous. Jack pushed his way through the crowd and then entered the roped-off gallows area protected by the constables. He requested permission to stand upon the platform, observing to the assembled throng that ‘perhaps it is proper that I should be a spectator on this occasion.’

  However flamboyant his public image, he was ultimately sentenced to death for stealing the measly sum of one shilling and sixpence from Princess Amelia’s doctor in Gunnersbury Park. The night before his execution he had a party with seven ladies in his cell and went to the scaffold in a ‘new suit of pea-green cloth, a ruffled shirt, and his breeches were, on this occasion, adorned with the usual sixteen strings – but this time they were of silver!’

  Just before the Heath there is a plaque commemorating the fact that this was the entrance to ‘London Terminal Aerodrome Hounslow Heath’, from where the first commercial flights in Britain took off in 1919. That year a challenge was laid down by the Australian government, offering a prize of A£10,000 to the first Australian to fly from Great Britain to Australia within a period of thirty days. What followed was something akin to an episode of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines pursuing that pigeon.

  Six aircraft took off from Hounslow Heath aiming to make the inaugural flight from Europe to Australia. The Sopwith Wallaby had a hell of a time, with the crew being imprisoned as Bolsheviks in Yugoslavia, suffering a cracked engine in Constantinople and finally crash-landing in Bali. The Alliance P.2 nose-dived into an orchard in Surbiton killing both crew-members. The Blackburn Kangaroo staggered its way across Europe before finally getting tangled in the fence of a mental hospital in Crete with the crew unhurt. The Martinsyde Type A crashed in the sea off Corfu. The Airco DH.9 did make it to Australia but took a monumental 206 days, picking up a consolation prize of A£1,000 and earning its captain the nickname of ‘Battling Ray’ Parer.

  Only one aircraft successfully completed the challenge – a converted Vickers Vimy bomber captained by Ross Macpherson Smith. It travelled via fifteen locations before reaching Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory – a feat that will remain unequalled until Ryanair starts operating flights Down Under.

  In 1920 London moved its airport to Croydon and the skies over the Heath remained peaceful for a few years, until a small airfield on the edge of the Hounslow by Heath Row was developed after the war to become one the busiest airports in the world. Passenger planes now buzzed down over the gorse bushes resplendent in bright yellow flowers at a rate of around one every ten minutes. I spot a Qantas jet arriving from Australia at the end of a flight of twenty-odd hours that the passengers will have found arduous. They should try travelling by Vickers Vimy next time.

  Hounslow Heath matches the descriptions I’d read of an open scrubby land of low bushes and rough grasses. There are joggers and dog walkers, butterflies and moths flitting between the sand spurrey and brambles. What was dubbed ‘bad land’ by William Cobbett on his Rural Rides is now a treasured public open space.

  This last remainder of lowland heath with its acid grasses and dwarf gorse is a vital habitat that maintains many plant and insect species rare in the London area. The bees, beetles, spiders, ring ouzels, red-backed shrikes and honey buzzards that make their homes here are a vital component of the world that also produced the Great West Quarter and the Sainsbury Local soon to open over the road.

  Following the winding pathways just before sunset the smell of hawthorn is there again. I’d happily be accosted here by the faery folk. There is a lusty rendition of the evening nesting call from a gregarious portion of some of the 132 bird species that have been recorded amongst the bell heather, silver birch and pedunculate oak.

  Two lovers canoodle on a bench; she brushes her hair over her face as I pass. A rabbit skips across the path in front of me. When my grandfather courted my nan he would catch rabbits for her by throwing his hat over them. That was the way to a country girl’s heart in the inter-war years, at the time that Bell and Maxwell wrote the books that guided me out this way.

  I rest on a bench perched upon a mound almost in line with the approach run into Heathrow. I take a late tea of Stella and samosa, and survey the heath from this raised aspect. I try to evoke images and moods of the past life of this landscape – attempt to tune into its stories. People have lived in Hounslow for millennia – it’s an area of prehistoric settlement.

  Hounslow Heath

  Labourers working on the heath in 1864 uncovered a set of Iron Age figurines that gives us a glimpse into the world of the people who made their homes here. The ‘Hounslow Hoard’ consists of three small bronze boars, two other dog-like animals and a model wheel, possibly suggestive of some sort of solar cult.

  The boar motif was popular in pre-Roman Britain, being found in tumuli around Colchester, on a shield in Lincolnshire and on numerous Celtic coins. One reading of the fascination with boars, according to Miranda Green, is that they represented ‘strength, ferocity and invincibility in a war-orientated heroic society’. On the other hand they might have been made by a craftsman who just happened to like boars and the two other animals were his failed attempts at dogs. Until we discover the secret of time travel we’ll never be completely sure.

  An Iron Age village was excavated where the planes now skid across the airport tarmac of Runway One. A complex pattern of hut circles was unearthed alongside the remnants of a shrine or temple, i
mplying that this might well have been the religious centre of the region. Where people came to worship in time immemorial, today they ascend into the sky.

  The antiquarian William Stukeley believed that he had found a camp built by Julius Caesar on the heath during his campaign against the Britons. The gunpowder for one of the first cannon used in Europe, at Crécy in 1346, was made on Hounslow Heath, part of a military association that continues through medieval tournaments and pageants, the Civil War, RAF raids against First World War Zeppelins to the barracks that are still present. This is just a sample of the rich history associated with these 200 acres of scrubland.

  As a map-illiterate walker, the fact that most tickled me was that it was across the heath that the base line for the first triangle of Britain’s original Ordnance Survey map was laid in 1784. The basis for all our modern maps was created across Hounslow Heath, a place now largely overlooked and ‘off-the-map’.

  I continue my lap of the space in high spirits as I’d reached the end of the trek with my left knee still functioning. A ghostly, pale, gap-toothed lad approaches me from a stand of coppiced trees and asks for directions to the ‘forty acres’. I tell him I haven’t a clue but offer up my 1975 Greater London Atlas for reference. He takes a quick look, says thanks and heads off into the sunset. The Ordnance Survey had now become more of use to a pair of aimless wanderers than the military that General William Roy intended it for.

  I think back to Maxwell’s story of the Nine Muses and contrast it with the world around me. Perhaps Maxwell found some magic mushrooms that morning in the ‘forty acres’ where the pallid lad was heading. Instead of following him to find out I slope back to the Staines Road. I considered a pint in The Hussar to round off the trip but as I was trying to work out if it was full of lagered-up squaddies a No. 237 bus pulled up bound for Brentford. Riding a 21st-century stagecoach along the old coaching road is a far better way to depart the scene.