by John Rogers
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
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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.
The current state of the dried-up July watercourse clogged with dumped car tyres would have left me as marooned as the marauding Danes. Some plans work far better in the imagination.
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I’ve been on the move now for three hours and still have some distance to go on my loopy route to Bec Phu. I want to follow the journey the monks of Stratford Abbey took after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century when they retired to a mansion in Plaistow. This would have been a traumatic event for the monks, kicked out of their home by Henry VIII once he assumed the role as Supreme Head of the Church in England after his split from Rome. Although there’s nothing to suggest the monks of Stratford were wholly guilty of the crimes levelled at monasteries and abbeys – of exploiting dubious religious relics for financial gain and of growing rich, fat and lazy thanks to donations from pious simpletons – they had built up a substantial annual income that Henry wanted to get his lecherous mitts on. But to some extent theirs was a walk of shame from the wealth of th
eir abbey to the relative modesty of the Plaistow retreat. As I’m wondering how far from the spiritual path the mucky monks of Stratford had strayed, I see another mob of recreational walkers and descend from the Greenway straight to the door of a café.
At this stage any café would do and I don’t pay much attention as I enter. Inside, the walls are coated in a tiled layer of Polaroids that the owner tells me are of ‘friends, enemies and events’. Standing before them is a mannequin dressed as an American Indian squaw but he says, ‘She needs a change, really, for the summer.’ This is more than a café; it’s a project. The menu holders on the tables contain books, enticing you as much to read a few pages of Paulo Coelho as order a slice of cake with your cappuccino.
I take the chance to survey my options; I’ve already by-passed Abbey Mills – the pumping house and surviving Templar mills now converted into a busy film and TV studio. Where Joseph Bazalgette engineered the sewage system that sits beneath the Greenway, his great-great grandson returned to stage the original series of the reality TV behemoth Big Brother at what is now called 3 Mills Studios. I’ve heard it remarked that where one Bazalgette pumped the shit out of London, his descendant devised a way to pump it all back in. But whereas the sewage system still remains a vital part of our daily lives, Big Brother has faded into irrelevance. Abbey Mills is now better known for its association with the strange animated creations of Goth prince Tim Burton.
Ploughing onwards to Plaistow I pass East London Cemetery after stopping to note down the Bronzed Age tanning salon by the gates. Maybe people become conscious of their pallor when visiting dead relatives. I’d planned to pay homage to Dr Pagenstecher, who was buried in the cemetery in 1926. People leave strange mementos on the graves of the famous but I think my perambulation through the Hammes is tribute enough to this Prussian immigrant who formed a deep attachment to the area.
I soon realize that the chances of finding the plot of Dr Pagenstecher are remote – the cemetery is a vast necropolis of headstones dedicated to Mum, Dad, and Granddad. There’s a large marble dartboard for BILLY and fresh flowers in West Ham colours. The notorious East End singer and actress Queenie Watts lies resting here somewhere as well. She starred in one of the great London films, Sparrers Can’t Sing, filmed around Limehouse and Stratford, reprising the role she played in real life as the landlady and lounge-bar chanteuse of the Iron Bridge Tavern in East India Dock Road. She also appeared in Alfie, providing the soundtrack for Michael Caine’s pub brawl. But I start to feel as if I’m intruding with this tombstone tourism and move on.
I’ve never been sure how to pronounce Plaistow – whether to give it a flat ‘a’ or to round it into a provincial, potentially poncey-sounding ‘ar’. I’ll go with whatever Ian Dury spits out in his bawdy ballad ‘Plaistow Patricia’. Dury opts for the rounded ‘ar’ but growls through it with such venom that even Johnny Rotten would have told him to tone it down a bit.
The approach into Plaistow via Upper Road hints at the well-to-do rural past when this was a prosperous village favoured by City merchants and Old Money. Pagenstecher noted how in 1768 only four people in Plaistow were eligible to vote and they had to walk to Chelmsford to cast their ballot. In 1841 the population was eerily recorded as being 1,841. The building of the Victoria and Albert Royal Docks saw the population surge to over 150,000 by the early 1900s. The grazing meadows of the Plaistow Levels that produced the infamous monster ox on Tun Marsh, weighing in at 263 stone and sold at Leadenhall Market in 1720 for a hundred guineas, sprouted rows of terraced houses. Pagenstecher wrote that it was ‘the most remarkable transformation from a rural to an urban community … without parallel in the United Kingdom’.
I’m partly following the footsteps of Thomas Burke in his 1921 book The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London. Burke was an early champion of overlooked London. Eighty-something years before Iain Sinclair mapped the city’s outer rim with his celebrated epic millennial yomp round the M25 in London Orbital, Burke was chronicling the changing face of what it is now fashionable to call ‘edgelands’. He saw wonder in the new suburbs where the cement was still fresh on the redbrick villas. He was the original poet of the new commuter class, clerks and salary men, their aspirational wives and burping children, and was Edwardian London’s psychogeographer.
Burke was scathing about places he disliked – Ilford gets a real pasting in The Outer Circle. Moving round into the High Street it speaks volumes of how badly the area must have suffered in the Blitz that Burke wrote glowingly of the ‘Plastovians’ and their neighbourhood. Any notion of Plaistow as a quaint village in the marshes fades away with the grubby Costcutter hugging the corner. It’s a landscape of uninspired post-war blocks. Although there is still a buzz around the place, it has a feel of grim determination rather than the people ‘full of beans’ whom Burke described.
There is a poignant record of the bomb damage inflicted on Plaistow on the night of 19 March 1941. The Metropolitan Police kept detailed inventories of the losses of each night’s raid, often short entries of a few sentences. But the roll call of destroyed properties and fatalities this time runs to over two pages. It was the worst night of bombing London had seen since the Battle of Britain. This is a sample, neatly typed out with administrative simplicity:
1 HE. Bomb at Rivett Street. 50 houses demolished. Tidal Basin Railway Station, 2 P.H.’s, and 20 houses damaged.
It records how ‘about 1,500 Incendiary bombs fell on the section’. A convent and a furniture depository were logged amongst the buildings ‘completely destroyed’, along with Leyes Road School and numerous other houses and pubs.
If March 1941 wasn’t bad enough, later in the war German V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets fell from the sky. One ward alone lost 85 per cent of its houses. It’s a miracle anything pre-war is left standing. It’s too easy at times when bemoaning the state of certain parts of London to forget that only sixty years ago some of them were still lying under piles of Blitz rubble. Consequently, I don’t look too hard for the fragment of the mansion where the Langthorne monks retired, which was supposedly in the back garden of a Methodist chapel opposite the Black Lion pub.
I’ve been carrying my rain jacket most of the way and haven’t needed it since Leytonstone. It’s got hotter as the walk has progressed and my feet are starting to ache. I feel the heat coming off a No. 69 bus stuck in traffic. I’d seen that bus many times lumbering through Leyton and always wondered where it went. Now I know – it goes to Beckton. I could have just got a No. 69 straight to Kubrickland rather than hoofing it all this way. But where is the adventure in that?
Into Balaam Street, which, despite its Anglicized pronunciation of Bale-ham, is a reference to a character with occult powers written about in the Jewish Torah’s Book of Numbers. Dan Brown would be having kittens by now – the martyrs burnt on Stratford Green, the destroyed mural in West Ham Church, monks driven from their monastery on Templar land, Christ’s foreskin buried beneath the Olympic Stadium that I made up, and now a character from an ancient Hebrew text open to multiple interpretations. Even I’m intrigued.
It seems Balaam was a Gentile prophet from Babylon who rode a speaking ass. We are now far beyond the Pythonesque world of Edwin the Free Priest. From what I can glean, when urged by the hostile King Moab to predict the doom of the Israelites, Balaam instead sung the praises of the wandering Jews in search of the Promised Land. However much pressure Moab put him under, Balaam continued to produce prophecies of a glorious future for Israel. But after that heroic moment he introduced prostitutes and bacon sandwiches into the Israelite community, causing God to inflict a terrible plague upon them that killed 24,000 people, including Balaam himself. What this has to do with Plaistow I have no idea but rather than showing the way to the Promised Land, Balaam Street leads to the Barking Road. And you don’t need a Princeton-educated semiologist to work out where the Barking Road takes you.
Another nod to Eastern influences is the ‘Byzantine-style’ Memorial Community Church just past Michelle
’s American Nails and Tooth Diamonds. It rises from the levels on the Barking Road, a majestic, cathedral-like structure built in 1921 to commemorate the dead of the First World War. The names of the fallen soldiers are cast into the bells that ring out from the east tower.
The building of the Barking Road in 1807 effectively killed off the marsh men who earned their living as cordwainers, potato growers and graziers. The road brought city clerks and dock workers. In 1963 it carried the Beatles to chaotic gigs at the Granada Cinema, East Ham. On the second occasion, their manager Brian Epstein told them the news that their forthcoming single ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had sold over a million advance copies. Hanging around backstage pre-show, munching takeaways that had to be delivered by the police, this could have been the moment the mop-topped Scousers realized that they were seriously big news.
The Granada Cinema survives as a Gala Bingo Hall and I consider popping in to try my luck and see if I can access that hysterical moment in pop history. Perhaps there’ll be an old dear crossing off numbers who was there at the gig that night. With the first twinges of pain in my left knee it could prove a detour too far, so I stay on track.
I do however allow myself to wander into Cumberland Road where the Duke of Cumberland lived. One of the dukes of Cumberland had the cheerful nickname of the ‘Butcher of Culloden’, which I don’t think was meant ironically. He makes a peculiar appearance in the local version of a mummers folk play particular to the village where I grew up. The play was common all over the country and had a set of stock characters, but for some odd reason in the version played out in Wooburn Green, Bold Slasher or Saladin was replaced by the Duke of Cumberland. There lies a genuine historical conundrum and however much I allow myself to drift on flights of fancy I don’t really expect to find the answer along this neat row of terraced houses.