by John Rogers
I chat to a local resident walking his dog and mention the bomb damage the area suffered during the war. He cheerily tells me the roof of his house was blown straight up into the air and landed back firmly in place. He also tells me that this land was originally covered in market gardens.
I’m drawn across the road to a bright-red tin hut with emerald-green trim around the roof, doors and windows. Above the entrance it reads ‘Gospel Printing Mission’ on a small, black plaque. It looks curiously out of place. The man tells me that he’s never seen anybody go in or out of the building. When I check online I discover that the mission was led here from its previous home in Barkingside after receiving word from God obtained through ‘urgent prayer’.
The printing presses inside this tin shack send out Christian literature worldwide in several languages. The clatter of the Rotaprint press must echo around the metallic structure, making a hell of a din. I didn’t find a clue to the Butcher of Culloden question, but here was a parallel between Balaam acting directly on the word of God and the Gospel Printing Mission being instructed by the Lord to set up a publishing operation in an old shed off the Barking Road not far from Balaam Street. As God directed Balaam from the Plains of Midian to the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, he guided the GPM to Plaistow – no less epic a journey in its own way.
If God were speaking to me now he would probably tell me to get a bloody move on. The sultry weather has clearly befuddled my brain. I urge myself onwards by paraphrasing the Beastie Boys, singing to myself ‘No Beer till Beckton’ to the tune of their rap-rock smash ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn’. It’s probably not a deity feeding me this line but perhaps the spirit of recently deceased Beastie Boy Adam Yauch.
Tunmarsh Lane sets me on a direct track across the marshes to Beckton, except that here the wetlands have been tamed by housing. I almost instantly break my Beastie Boys pledge and suck down a can of Stella as a medical precaution against a seizure of the left knee. A good friend familiar with the workings of painkillers informs me that where codeine caused me anxiety and nightmares, my metabolism clearly responds well to beer-based palliatives. In an ideal world this would be a few pints of real ale supped in a comfortable pub. When I’m on the hoof I need something a bit more direct.
The Bobby Moore Stand of West Ham United’s Boleyn Ground at Upton Park is visible above the rooftops. Legend has it that the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII resided in a castle here that survived into the 20th century. With West Ham soon to relocate to the Olympic Stadium, that element of their mythology will be left behind. The Hammers carry forth the memory of the dockyards in their nicknames – when the 35,000-strong Upton Park crowd bellow out ‘Come On You Irons’ they sing back into being Thameside Ironworks FC, which the club first played as when set up by the owner and the foreman of Thameside Ironworks and Shipbuilding Co. in 1895. They changed their name to West Ham in 1900 and then promptly moved their ground from Plaistow to a corner of East Ham.
There is an intense sense of belonging around Upton Park on match days. Football thrives on its tribalism, but as the claret and blue hordes filter along Green Street it has more the air of a regional clan gathering, an extended family of tens of thousands assembled for a folk moot.
This communality is also evident in the civic pride of the old municipal publications. I’m reminded of this as I pass the New City Elementary School in Tunmarsh Lane, built in 1897. When not boasting about the quality of West Ham’s Druid ceremonies in times gone past, Fifty Years a Borough (1936) shows us photos of the ‘latest motor ambulance’, pupils sitting down to lunch at the open-air day school, the first electricity dynamos at Canning Town, the Turbo Alternator at the West Ham Generating Station, and children being met by their parents as they are discharged from Plaistow Fever Hospital. The first paragraph on local history states, ‘Local history is the cradle of true patriotism, and local patriotism is the best stimulant to efficiency and progress.’ Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, writes in the introduction that ‘the New Society of social and moral responsibility combined with the new ideals of communal ideas is moving in the Borough.’ It’s stirring stuff.
It feels appropriate now to take advantage of another civic utility and jump back aboard the Greenway. The straight path that I was so scornful of earlier now opens up like a songline leading directly to the centre of my destination. The can of Stella Artois becomes my ayahuasca, a potent tribal brew that opens up channels of enlightenment. Amazonian Indians drink this hallucinogenic draught as part of a shamanistic initiation ceremony. Through the ritualistic imbibing of Belgian lager I see the Greenway as a ley line marked out in turds that takes me to the locked gate of the ancient East Ham Church.
This small flint and stone building dates from the early 12th century and claims to be the oldest church in London still in regular use. The site dates back much further, though. During the laying of the sewage pipes in 1863, Roman funeral remains, including two complete skeletons, were excavated in the churchyard. Of more relevance to me is the burial place of the antiquarian William Stukeley, laid to rest here in 1765. Through his celebrated accounts of Stonehenge, Avebury and ‘the Curiosities of Great Britain’, Stukeley is responsible for making a link between the Neolithic stone monuments of Britain and the Druidic religion. Aside from being a Freemason (do I even need to make the Dan Brown reference? – the church is also called St Mary Magdalene), he referred to himself as a Druid.
When I come over all pagan, as when speculating on a Druidic past for the Groves of Stratford, it is largely down to Stukeley’s revival of the indigenous religion of Britain. There are now thought to be at least as many pagans in the UK as Jews and Sikhs. Upwards of 30,000 descend on Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice each year. The man buried somewhere in the churchyard beyond the bolted iron gate is in no small way responsible for this.
As I pass under the A13, Billy Bragg’s ‘Trunk Road to the Sea’, Beckton is now firmly in my sights. I stop for a rest in the pub tacked on to the end of a Premier Inn. The place is buzzing with Friday-evening drinkers and diners. A lady sitting behind me says to her husband in a tone of complaint, ‘I’m a lady who likes quality.’ This must have been in reply to him bemoaning why they couldn’t have saved a few quid and stayed at a Travelodge instead.
When I order my second pint (and get overly excited about the fact they sell Worcester Sauce crisps), I mention Full Metal Jacket to the young lad pulling my ale. ‘Great movie,’ he says. I tell him it was filmed at Beckton Gasworks and he does a comedy double-take. His eavesdropping colleague nearly drops the two glasses of rosé he’s handing to a punter. I explain how the place was condemned and Kubrick was permitted to blow it up, and throw in that there would have been helicopter gunships fizzing over the roof of the pub during filming. The rest of the thirsty crowd at the bar don’t seem as interested in this nugget of cinematic history as they are in placing their order, so I leave them with that vignette and return to the important task of lubricating my knee joint.
Heading back out into the bright early-evening sun I look for the grimy ‘marginal’ rows of workers’ cottages that Kubrick’s scriptwriter, Michael Herr, noted on their drives to set each day. According to Herr, Kubrick compared the proximity of the cottages to the gasworks to the Hollywood studio system keeping labour close at hand and dependent. This indicates how much Kubrick had fallen out of love with Hollywood – that he came to compare his lot in glamorous Los Angeles to that of a poorly paid London industrial-plant worker.
A generic modern housing estate has spawned upon this area once noted for its large population of sailors. Press gangs were common here in the 18th century, as were smugglers who sailed up Barking Creek with their contraband before stealing across the wetlands.
The environment may have been tamed but it still presents an uncanny landscape. To stand on the Sir Steve Redgrave Bridge with passenger jets parting your hair as they come in to land on the runway of City Airport is one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had
in twenty years of travelling. When I made my way up the steps of the great temple complex of Borobudur in Java, one of many candidates for the Eighth Wonder of the World, I was a person who had just seen too many temples. My flabber had been gasted. That was until I sloped along this section of the Woolwich Manor Way.
Watching the jets take off from the tarmac, surrounded by water, into the dark clouds hanging low over Canary Wharf, then looking back to the hexagonal concrete pumping station sitting on a traffic island like a stranded UFO, I found myself in a state of incomprehension. To add to the craziness, DLR trains glide through the air along a concrete rail doing a waltz around the flying saucer. What was this place?
For the duration of the Olympics it was home to the US Olympic Team, who had shunned the official Olympic Village in Angel Lane due to fears over security. The danger here is not terrorism, but sensory overload.
The bridge leads to the Woolwich Ferry across the Thames. It’s a journey I need to take at some point – south across the river. I’ll return here later in my quest, but for now I need to find a corner of East London that is forever Vietnam.
Atlantis Avenue leads me from the UFO pumping station into Armada Way and on to the set of Full Metal Jacket. Fittingly, the Beckton-shot part of the film opens to a soundtrack of Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Were Made for Walking’. It’s an expansive landscape of long, swaying grasses adorned with pylons. There’s not a soul around – the remote London of Thomas Burke who passed through here in 1921, walking from Barking to Cyprus.
It’s such a barren stretch of road that at first I forget to look for visual references to the film. But then the sequences in which red flares drift through the brush become recognizable. The chainlink fencing around the energy plant recalls the perimeter fence of the landing strip as a Westland helicopter, repainted US Marine green, comes in to land. I see the formation of M41 tanks and Marines working their way across the misty East Ham Level as they come under fire from the old gasworks buildings.
Armada Way snakes through to the Gallions Reach shopping complex that appears more stranded than Kubrick’s unit of shell-shocked recruits with their ‘thousand-yard stares’. From comparing various old A–Zs and my Greater London Atlas, this stands over the site of the buildings that feature in the film.
Beckton
Shoppers depart this retail outpost down a road that strongly resembles the highway flanked by ditches along which Vietnamese evacuees flee from the battle scene. Army trucks lumbered where delivery lorries today bring supplies to the consumer garrison.
The squad at the heart of the film gets lost near Tesco and comes under fire from a sniper that I’d place somewhere between WH Smith and Sports Direct. As Matthew Modine’s troops snaked around the back of the Hue/Beckton building harbouring the markswoman, I slide round the back of Tesco and rest on the grass beneath the pylons, where rabbits frolic in the evening sun.
The only physical remains of the gas plant are the gasometers, which naturally don’t feature in the movie Beckton. I concede that it was fanciful to entertain the notion that I might find a brick fragment, discarded ordnance or even a thriving imported palm tree.
I go to head off towards the River Roding but am scythed down as if a Viet Cong sniper had been left behind to continue the fight. My left knee cramps up and I stagger into the fence around the sewage works. There’s no point radioing for a chopper to airlift me out; I’ll have to haul this useless lump of flesh clear of the war zone via the service road.
Maybe it was the heightening of my senses caused by the jolt of pain but I’m drawn to a high grass bank on Royal Docks Road. It catches the amber early-summer-evening sunlight on the tall stalks of cow parsley. In one last effort I clamber over into a secluded, overgrown enclosure. It’s littered with odd dumped garments – single abandoned shoes are always more disturbing to find than a pair. Poking through the weeds are broken lumps of brick and concrete sporting blotches of orange lichen. Huge lengths of pipe lie beneath ferns and brambles. Are these the ruins of Kubrick’s Bec Phu?
Full Metal Jacket ends at a similar time of day, what cinematographers know as the ‘golden hour’. The Marines make their way across this same rough ground of Thameside Marshes drained by the Romans. Matthew Modine’s character Joker narrates the closing lines: ‘We hump down to the Perfume River to set down for the night.’
It had been my intention to set down for the night by the River Roding but I’d never make it. Instead of humping ‘down to the Perfume River’, I hobble to the Docklands Light Railway and home to Leytonstone.
On evenings between walks I decamp to my local pub with a clutch of old walking guides, odd municipal publications and various maps I pick up in charity shops and on eBay. It’s here in the Heathcote Arms, slurping down pints of cheap bitter and decorating my belly with a sprinkling of cheese and onion crisps, that plans are made for future expeditions.
I scan the tables in The Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London 1957–60 as if they hold secrets of the magnitude supposedly encoded in the Mayan Long Calendar. I pore over the columns of Metropolitan Boroughs, Urban and Rural Districts and Parishes. A globule of Marston’s Pale Ale falls on the acreage of Heston and Isleworth. In my reverie I consider whether this is a sign other than that I need a shave.
There must be something in these figures: Acreage, Est. Population June 1959, Rateable Value on 1st April 1960, Estimated Product of £1 rate per head of population – it’s a kind of Domesday Book for London. The report tells us that this ‘sea of figures, statistics and administrative detail’ is to be given great attention as ‘the ways and means are of the utmost importance’ and should be ignored ‘at our peril’. I’d better get my head around it if I’m to gain any understanding of Greater London at all.
One August evening I was sitting there, staring at an Ordnance Survey map, searching for the high ridge of hills that I’d seen from the Greenway on the walk out to Beckton. My guess that it was Abbey Woods was not far off; it had most likely been the edge of Plumstead Common and Bostall Woods.
Scanning across the map I started to tentatively plot a journey beyond those hills that would take me down to the Thames at Erith. My finger slid further east across the map to the Dartford Salt Marshes. The more I looked at the blank area on the map criss-crossed with thin blue lines of streams and drainage ditches, the more it formed in my mind as somewhere exotic and remote.
The Greater London Atlas showed a wide red line marking the border of Greater London cutting right across the marshes – the south-eastern frontier of the city. I had no other tangible reason to place Dartford Salt Marshes on my itinerary, it was just a feature on a map and I can’t really read maps – they’re fairly useless to me as wayfinding aids but I derive so much pleasure from just looking at them, reading them as a pictorial document, a codification of the landscape. Experience has taught me that the reality on the ground is significantly different from the cartographic expression of a place – if that could be captured in a document it would rival the mad living texts of the library at Hogwarts. I felt compelled to go out there.
When I was having my mind blown on the Sir Steve Redgrave Bridge, I’d promised that I’d return to ride the Woolwich Ferry south – this would be the ideal departure point. Working out the route through Abbey Woods with its ruined Lesnes Abbey and around the shoreline at Erith to Crayford Ness took me over the 12-mile point where my post-operative left knee hands in its resignation. I started to experience what I’ve heard Iain Sinclair call ‘range anxiety’ – more commonly felt by drivers of electric cars who fear their batteries won’t take them to their destination.
The path I plotted took me across commons, through ancient woodland and finally to a windswept tract of marshes on the edge of an industrial zone. It looked so remote on the map, I started to think that I’d be starved of human interaction – even of the few words shared with shopkeepers as I purchased my beer and samosas. I’d just have my own voice for company for at least eig
ht solid hours. It reminded me of the difficulties I experienced travelling alone in Borneo enveloped in the rainforest. In the context of my current odyssey, this walk to the Dartford Salt Marshes had become the equivalent of the journey I took up the Rejang River to stay in an Iban longhouse. It was these fears that spurred me on and made this walk irresistible – this was the kind of challenge I had been after. How many strolls in the city can induce a fear of headhunters and hillbilly hijacks?
In preparation I started reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a classic of the wilderness-living genre that gave rise to legions of soft-skinned city types heading into the woods to live in a shack by the labour of their own hands. The possibility that it might in some way have inspired Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage TV series of rustic food porn would surely have Thoreau thrashing around in his grave.
I started to find Thoreau too pious and picked up Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan – A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in the Oxfam bookshop on Kentish Town High Road. It’s the kind of book you expect to find in the fag end of Camden – no doubt originally purchased in the early 1970s when Castaneda’s tales of ancient Mexican Indian wisdom gained by getting whacked on hallucinogenic plants was all the rage. I imagined it at the centre of a weekly discussion group held in a basement flat in Patshull Road, hosted by a sociology teacher at the Polytechnic of North London, where they experimented with jimson weed purchased from a roadside shaman outside the Camden Roundhouse.
My friend and fellow-traveller Nick Papadimitriou, a man steeped in both plant lore and roadside shamanism, once told me that thorn apple plants found on the Thames marshes contain a powerful hallucinogenic toxin in their spiky pods. The eastern flood plains would be the ideal place for an urban mystic to dwell.
In an attempt to engage with a more local form of ancient wisdom I picked up a copy of The 21 Lessons of Merlin – A Study in Druid Magic and Lore by Douglas Monroe. I learnt the Rite of Three Rays to potentially perform in Abbey Woods, where the godfather of modern Druidry, William Stukeley, had led the initial excavations of Lesnes Abbey. After passing Stukeley’s grave at East Ham I felt that perhaps I owed him some sort of tangible tribute.