This Other London

by John Rogers

  Thamesmead takes you by surprise from the raised embankment of the path. It’s as if a fistful of towers from the Barbican have been picked up and dropped on a conveniently empty patch of land, like a giant has put them down there whilst shuffling around the other city-centre blocks and forgotten to put them back. It appears as a kind of Brutalism-on-Thames, the grey of the concrete perfectly camouflaged against a leaden sky.

  That December walk with Nick now feels distant in the mid-August heat. I make my way up Plumstead High Street as it forms a gentle incline following the course of a submerged river, leading into the uplands upon which spread Plumstead Common, Woolwich Common, Bostall Heath, Blackheath and Greenwich Park, forming a seven-mile-long body of heath and woodland. It’s a grand geographical formation of open land some 200 feet above the level of the Thames, which can be seen from the northern heights of Highgate and Hampstead on a clear day.

  As I lumber on up towards Bostall Woods with dark clouds moving in overhead I see it as one of the natural wonders of London. I catch my breath at a bus stop next to a woman actually using it as a bus stop, and survey the view westwards across Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs to the skyscrapers of the City of London and beyond. The council blocks that skirt the southern edge of the woods must have some of the finest views in London. As the bus approaches, windows dotted with the dark silhouettes of its passengers, you wonder at how different their impression of the city must be with this vista a feature of their daily commute.

  Gordon S. Maxwell dedicated a chapter to Lesnes Abbey and the Abbey Woods in his 1927 book Just Beyond London. Apparently the ruins should be pronounced ‘Le-Nay’ Abbey, but that just sounds too French for South London. His vision of this area as ‘romantic lands’ stands up today even in the exhaust cloud of a No. 99 bus. Maxwell wrote lovingly of the tram journey that he took along the same route up Bostall Hill. It was perhaps Maxwell’s description of the 1,000-acre woodland that had prepared me for a wilderness experience on this trek. So I found myself entering the dense Abbey Woods with a tinge of apprehension. I have clearly been a city dweller for too long.

  The sound of children playing wafted through the trees, an echo of my own childhood spent building camps in the woods just off the A40. It’s not a sound normally associated with South London. A group of boys pass pushing their bikes, with rucksacks of provisions and carrying fishing rods. The scene was more Enid Blyton than Henry David Thoreau, or indeed tabloid scare stories of gangs and feral rioters.

  I was attempting to access the woodland spirits and reawaken my pagan instincts when I found myself back on the A206 Woolwich to Erith road buzzing with afternoon traffic. This is not the place to perform the Rite of Three Rays.

  Plunging back into the undergrowth I came across the Belvedere Private Clinic discreetly nestled amongst the trees. The clinic not only claims to be ‘One of the UK’s leading providers of breast surgery for women’ but also offers the same service to men. It’s perfectly located to frustrate the efforts of telephoto

  -lens-touting paparazzi hunting for that priceless snap of a post-boob job Z-list celebrity. If a surgeon were to be wandering the grounds taking a fag break between shoving in silicon implants or sucking out unwanted moobs, I could always grab him for a quick second opinion on my liability of a left knee. However, it doesn’t look like the kind of place that welcomes loiterers so I push on.

  Maxwell tells us that the wood is just a fragment of the great forest of Kent. The stands of hornbeam that line the banks give a sense of scale belying the 217 acres that survive. It starts to rain, the drops sounding out a gentle tapping on the leaf canopy as I by-pass the chalk pits and fossil beds where you are welcome to dig down into the Eocene epoch in search of prehistoric sharks’ teeth.

  Maxwell also wrote of a series of deep shafts in the West Wood descending 60 feet to a series of small rooms furnished with wooden furniture and earthenware pottery. He speculated that they are Dene or Dane Holes cut to provide a hiding place from marauding Vikings.

  The ruins of Lesnes Abbey emerge through the trees, announced by a further sun shower. A gardener, unperturbed by the rain, strims the grass between the stone foundations. Two children clamber along the top of what remains of the outer wall of the great hall. Beyond them poke the high-rise concrete towers of Thamesmead Estate.

  The word ‘monk’ derives from the Greek monos or monachos meaning ‘solitary’ or ‘alone’. When Lesnes was established in 1178 it would have provided a secluded location for the few initiates to get in touch with their higher being after they had moved up here from the Augustinian priory in Aldgate.

  The abbey had been dedicated to that ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas à Becket, despite the fact that, or possibly because, he had previously excommunicated its founder, the Norman regent Richard de Lucy. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket went on an excommunication binge to the extent that when Henry II muttered words to the effect that Becket had become a pain in the arse and he’d be better off without him, there was a queue of disgruntled, godless Norman knights around Canterbury Cathedral ready to lop the archbishop’s head off. The year after his murder the pope made Becket a saint and, as a supporter of the murderous king, de Lucy was required to make amends.

  The ruins of Lesnes Abbey

  The records show that Lesnes was in a constant state of disrepair and financial disarray. When the Bishop of Rochester visited in 1349 the fabric of the building was ‘so destroyed through lack of care that it could not be repaired during the present century or even before the day of judgment’.

  Those kids aren’t actually allowed to clamber on the walls, but given that they are still standing over 650 years after the Bishop of Rochester’s visit it can’t do much harm.

  Not long after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries Lesnes was being plundered for its stone. By the 17th century Britain was littered with the ruins of abandoned religious buildings in the way that the fringes of our towns and cities today are adorned with derelict factories. The antiquarian John Weaver toured these sites, recording the ‘ancient funeral monuments’ and ‘their Founders, and what eminent Persons haue beene in the same interred’. He surveyed Lesnes Abbey in 1631 and noted, ‘What numbers of Citizens and others at this very time, go to Lesnes Abbey in Kent, to see some few coffins there lately found in her ruines, wherein are the remaines of such as haue beene there anciently interred.’

  Farm labourers digging in the grounds had unearthed a lead-lined coffin:

  the full proportion of a man, in his coate armour cut all in freestone; his sword hanging at his side by a broad belt, vpon which the Flower de luce was engrauen in many places … the remaines of an ashie drie carkasse, lay enwrapped, whole and vndisioynted, and vpon the head, some haire, or a simile quiddam of haire appeared.

  It feels oddly serene to wander over that same ground amongst the footprint of the abbey. I enter the chapter house where de Lucy was buried and try to imagine it with all the monks of the abbey sitting on the stone benches laid into the walls as they gathered to discuss monastic business. There would have been some odd characters shacked up out here in the woods, spending their days gardening and painstakingly copying out vellum-bound manuscripts by hand. What would the monks have made of the Kindle? They’d probably have written it off as a passing fad and gone back to their quills. In the small information centre there is a yellowed display card mentioning the excavations performed by William Stukeley in 1753. He drew floor-plans of the buildings, identifying the uses of the various rooms. He may be better known for leading the Druid revival but his work also included the diligent logging of the relics of antiquity. My desire to pay a Druidic tribute to Stukeley has diminished in the face of the reality of the journey; the solitude high on this plateau that brought the monks here has been slowly eroded as the city has sprawled. I’m sure Stukeley would be satisfied that his labours have resulted in the care with which the site is now tended, and even that it forms an impromptu playground.

  From a bench on a raised bank
above the ruins I look out to the Essex Hills through my binoculars and also spy the top of a large, white cruise liner docked at Tilbury, slightly obscured by the domed roofs and wind turbines at Cross Ness. The river gracefully curves around the Erith Rands to Crayford Ness and the confluence of the Thames and the Dartford Creek – my destination. That feels a long way from this vantage point. I munch the remainder of a muesli bar that has been pulverized at the bottom of my bag, making it look like something that came out of de Lucy’s coffin, and head back up through Abbey Woods.

  I manage to miss the tumulus lurking beneath the boughs, a funeral monument so old it makes the abbey seem as modern as Thamesmead. Before I’m able to start jotting down an itinerary of woodland plants a Tudorbethan estate appears at the end of the footpath. The woods are an illusion, the forest of Kent has been felled and it’s the land of the suburban semi that now holds sway – that’s where the path leads.

  Traffic thunders along the Woolwich Road. The Eardley Arms looks inviting on one level, but the salmon-pink-necked fellas in sports casuals swilling down pints in the car park next to the shellfish stall are off-putting. The Belvedere Wet Play in the park opposite is more appealing but there may be some sort of law against a 41-year-old man without his children frolicking in the kids’ fountains.

  Belvedere – belle vedere – my Italian is primitive at best but that translates roughly as ‘beautiful view’ – presents a vista stretching out across South London. It feels self-contained, a precious secret hiding behind Abbey Woods, desperate to avoid being nominated for one of those property columns aimed at bargain hunters and speculators. The boys clambering across the flat roof of the library sub-branch are doing their bit to keep the Guardianistas at bay. An old man chips golf balls across the climbing frames just to make sure.

  With such a tantalizing view opened up there are so many distractions – Nuxley Road heading into Bexley, Lessness Heath a rising bank of heathland – but the push is for Erith.

  From the top of Erith Road a panorama presents itself, deserving of the most lush velvet curtains to frame it – a sweep eastwards over Erith to Dartford and the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, across marshlands and out to sea. There are few places in London where you can inhale the breeze and invoke waves splashing against your face. From the crest of Erith Road in Belvedere the sea feels very much a possibility.

  Dropping down the steep tertiary escarpment into Erith you’re presented with a cross-section of the geology of the eastern end of the Thames Valley. In 1907 Mrs Arthur G. Bell wrote that in Erith ‘the whole life-story of the valley of the Thames can be read backwards.’ The road into what Bell described as a ‘picturesque settlement’ is carved through the layers of rock, soil and gravels where the Thanet Sands meet chalk beds. Alluvial deposits from the Thames sit in layers with pebble and clay. London has been so extensively built upon in the last 150 years that it’s easy to lose touch with the very ground beneath our feet. Entering Erith it’s unavoidable.

  The name ‘Erith’ apparently means ‘ancient haven’. An arcane trackway leads into the town centre, indicating that it was a place of prehistoric settlement. The A2016 road from Plumstead to Erith goes by the romantic name of the Bronze Age Way. An archaeological report from 2007 found evidence of extensive flint working in the area dating from the Mesolithic period. Earlier excavations found grave goods buried by Bronze Age Beaker People – named after their love of drinking beer from distinctive crafted beakers.

  The mud flats along the riverbank at low tide have the look of a primordial landscape. A sign warns of the dangers of drowning in the boggy ground. Long, wooden slipways reach out over the alluvial sludge into the river. The only others taking in the fresh air on the esplanade appear to be direct descendants of the Beaker People, except that they’ve traded in their clay vessels for aluminium cans of super-strength lager. Maybe that’s a sign of progress. Bexley Borough Council’s idea of progress is the arrival of Morrisons supermarket, boasting on its website that the store draws in people from ‘as far away as Maidstone’.

  You wouldn’t think this was the same place that witnessed two of the most significant moments in the quest for liberty in England. It was at Erith that the rebellious barons met representatives of King John in the parish church to discuss the terms of Magna Carta in 1215. And one of the inciting incidents of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 occurred at Erith when Abel Ker led a mob up the hill to Lesnes Abbey, ransacked the buildings and forced the abbot to swear an oath of allegiance.

  Erith’s transition to a superstore annexe is so complete that the Erith Riverside marked on maps is in fact the name of a shopping centre – without water in sight. In search of the Thameside resort town of the past I end up in a tangle of retail plazas, arterial roads and service lanes. I’d set my destination in Erith as the pier but weighed down by hunger, a creeping fatigue and disorientation I slope into McDonald’s for a debrief.

  I’ve seen all the horror videos about the food dished up beneath the Golden Arches, but I’m not here for nutrition. Fast-food outlets are the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet workers’ canteen: everything is standardized, utilitarian, affordable – all are welcome. They’re great places to press the pause button and take stock – and the tables are usually big enough to spread out a map and sheaves of notes. You can also mutter to yourself without anybody minding.

  The lad who takes my order looks like a giant Oompa Loompa with tufts of ginger hair sprouting from beneath his uniform hat. He could easily get cast in an American indie movie set in a ‘nowhere town’, playing the very role he’s filling in real life in Erith. My request as to what exactly an M burger is flummoxes him. He stumbles for an answer.

  ‘It’s a … well, a … I don’t know how to say it.’

  ‘Is it a burger? Chicken perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’ He seems relieved that I cracked it. ‘Would you like a large?’

  ‘Why not … take that Morgan Spurlock!’ This attempt to lighten the mood fails. Perhaps there aren’t WANTED posters of the Super Size Me director pinned to the noticeboards of every MaccyD’s after all.

  I take a table by the window near a smartly dressed, canoodling couple. Scrutinizing the maps the right way up it becomes apparent that the road to Erith Pier is just outside the window beyond the glass. I slurp down my fizzy drink, slide the debris of the M meal into the bin, and fret about my carbon footprint and the legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt.

  Morrisons supermarket and car park (for all those eager consumers drawn in from Maidstone) occupy the site of a Victorian pleasure gardens and hotel. With daily steamers stopping at the grand pier the town enjoyed an all-too-brief status as a chic tourist magnet. The pier that I promenade along may only be a 1950s replacement but it feels like a sojourn from the city that I’ve left behind.

  The camera I’ve mounted on a compact tripod to film the passing barges must give me an air of authority, as an old lady riding a mobility scooter draws up next to me beside the bench and asks if I know anything about the two large blue and white boats moored alongside the pier. ‘I see their lights from my window at night and wondered what they were doing. One has blue lights and the other red, I wonder what the difference is.’ She lives by the waterfront and tells me it’s such a peaceful area: ‘Never heard so much as an argument,’ she says, ‘wonderful place for children.’ Once it’s clear that I know nothing about the boats she trundles off.

  Intrigued, I lean over the railing to see the Dutch crew of one of the boats having a beer on deck. They tell me that they’re collecting sand excavated from the building of the new ‘super- sewer’ at Beckton and ferrying it downriver. They’re fed up with the ever-changing schedule, days then nights, then back on days. They’re keen to return to Holland but find themselves marooned at Erith Pier awaiting instructions. They join the ranks of people throughout history stranded in the Thames downriver – convicts, sailors, fever sufferers, now Dutch cargo vessels. I wish them well and head for the last stretch of this ex
pedition – the south-eastern frontier at Crayford Ness.

  The road out of Erith along Manor Way is dominated by scrap- yards and recycling centres. The array of brightly coloured mismatched signage creates a shanty town DIY Piccadilly Circus. ‘Pulp Friction’, ‘Hel’s Kitchen’, ‘Abbey Car Breakers’, ‘No scrap will be accepted by any person on foot’. From munitions works and prison ships at Woolwich, to sewage works at Cross Ness, through the dumping grounds of Erith and isolation hospitals on the Salt Marshes to the Littlebrook Power Station at Dartford, the unpleasant but necessary elements of the urban infrastructure are shunted downriver. This is the London not so much forgotten as taken for granted, the guilty secret.

  The stretch of the Thames from Erith town to Crayford Ness is known as Erith Rands. Nestled in Anchor Bay is the Erith Yacht Club with the tinkling of wires on the boats being carried on the breeze that whips over the long grasses.

  Erith Saltings and Anchor Bay

  A gravel path cuts across the salt marshes. A heritage plaque informs us that this ‘last significant piece of Salt Marsh along the inner Thames Estuary’ is now being threatened by rising sea levels. The dark, fossilized trunks of a Neolithic forest, 5,000 years old, poke up through the muddy bank. For over 2,000 years a dense woodland of ash, oak, alder and elm grew along the Thames foreshore till the waters gradually eroded it away.

  Looking inland across Crayford Marshes, horses graze amongst the ruins of Second World War anti-aircraft batteries and pill-boxes. They are strange 20th-century cousins of the derelict Abbey of Lesnes on the other side of the escarpment.

  There is a familiarity now to solitude in these remote reaches of the city at the final stages of a walk at sunset. The path seems to stretch into nothingness, delivering the wilderness experience I’d sought when first plotting a route across the map in the pub. The workaday world feels far away and London is behind me, beyond the dangerous waters of the headlands at Cross Ness and Tripcock Ness.