This Other London

by John Rogers

  The confluence of the Dartford Creek and the Thames forms the boundary of Greater London in my 1970s atlas of the city. At low tide it’s little more than a boggy ditch. During the spring tides large barges ferried goods along the creek to the wharfs at Dartford. Today the huge flood barrier standing sentinel over the river looks like a dramatic over-reaction, although the recent £5 million investment is evidence that the threat of flooding remains.

  The creek effectively marks both the symbolic and literal end of the journey. This point of conclusion is always a slightly odd experience and makes sense of the cliché that it’s the journey that matters not the arrival. Across the creek sit the Dartford Salt Marshes, where the Vickers Vimy that flew from Hounslow Heath to Australia would have been test flown from the Vickers airfields laid out on the rugged grassland. There’s the constant crack of the shotguns of Dartford Clay Pigeon Club near the site of the Astra Fireworks Factory that provided the pyrotechnics for the Royal wedding of Charles and Diana. This point is so far from human habitation that at the end of the 19th century floating smallpox hospitals were moored here. It feels not just like the outer reaches of the city but of the earth, with the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge acting as a tether to the rest of the world. The only sensible thing to do now is to head inland in search of transport back to the ‘other’ world.

  Howbury Moat

  The path that hugs the creek before making a split for Slade Green is cosseted by steep hedgerows vibrating with birdsong. A break in this mellifluous green tunnel reveals Howbury Moat, the remains of a stone manor house originally dating from around the year 900 surrounded by a wide, green tract of water. It’s a place frozen in time, oblivious of the rooftops of the lowrise housing estate bumping up against its 16th-century tithe barn. The writer Roger Deakin started his epic open-water swim across Britain in a moat like this. I play the image in my mind of a wild-haired, middle-aged man ‘breast-stroking’ his way through the algae. I have a momentary temptation to ‘do a Deakin’, jump the gate and plunge into the water – would that be a fitting conclusion?

  Two ladies rounding the corner of the path interrupt my fantasy as they bid me ‘good evening’. The image of the wild swimmer dissolves into the pond weed. I move on along the path till it runs out into the quiet of the suburban streets of Slade Green and the end of this wilderness adventure.

  In the Olympic summer of 2012 cyclist Bradley Wiggins was one of the most celebrated people in Britain. He headed into the Olympics off the back of being the first Briton to win the Tour de France. His fame was so great that he relegated David Beckham to a walk-on role in the opening ceremony as he rang the bell that announced the commencement of the Games. It was a moment of pride that would have been keenly felt in a neglected corner of South London.

  Wiggins was partly responsible for some of the Olympic spirit seeping through my pre-Games cynicism. Along with nearly seven million other people in the UK I tuned in to watch the road time trial, as interested to see how the streets of suburban south-west London presented themselves to a huge global audience as much as to cheer home another gold medallist. Buried amongst the deluge of praise poured upon the victorious Wiggins, somewhere in the social-media torrent I caught a reference to Herne Hill Velodrome, the cycling venue for the 1948 London Olympics and the place where Wiggins had learnt to race. There were photos of this ragged-looking public track, a world away from the new, multimillion-pound velodrome erected on the site of the old Lea Valley Cycleway. Although I struggled to fully buy into the hoopla taking place on my doorstep, this echo of the 1948 Olympics grew in romantic stature. Herne Hill Velodrome was under threat. Even though cycling was the new rock and roll, one of its seminal venues was being allowed to slowly fade into the past. To have seen Wiggins at Herne Hill would soon acquire the same mythic status as having witnessed Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre or Hendrix at the Marquee.

  The question of the route to Herne Hill was easily settled. I had fallen in love with the Docklands Light Railway – the DLR. The affair was sealed on the return from Beckton, sliding through a glorious sunset as if levitating above East London on a magic carpet. Public transport has the ability to inspire strong emotions – mostly in men. Now I had become smitten. The outer limit of the DLR is at Lewisham, a terminus that sounds so distant from the brave new world of Stratford. And another place in London I had never been.

  The options from Lewisham to Herne Hill seemed straightforward. Through Ladywell, Honor Oak, skirt Dulwich and into the velodrome for the conclusion of the penultimate race of the season – the Autumn Omnium.

  Going out to Herne Hill would also place me within the orbit of Tulse Hill. There is a chapter in Where London Sleeps that claimed Tulse Hill had been the birthplace of astrophysics. It was too good to resist. What better way to round off an excursion to a sporting event than with a journey into a baffling area of science? The path seemed easily navigable on both my trusted Greater London Atlas and the One-Inch Ordnance Survey map of London pinned to my box-room wall. It would be a trek through a sequence of places completely unknown to me.

  The DLR to Lewisham terminates at Loampit Vale at the confluence of the River Ravensbourne and one of its tributaries, the Quaggy. The Light Railway shadows the Ravensbourne from near the point where it empties into the Thames at Deptford. The river carves out the valley where Lewisham lies ‘shaped rather like a full-blown rose with the side petals beginning to fall away’. Harry Williams’s romantic description laid down in 1949 is not immediately apparent in the shadow of the vast new Renaissance development that dominates the approach. Whilst Renaissance promises to ‘deliver an exciting future for Lewisham’, the name of the suburb points to an ancient past. In his history of Lewisham, John Coulter speculates that the settlement was first established by a Jutish warrior named Lëof or Lëof-suna – which more or less means ‘home of the dear son’. By AD 918 it had taken on the more recognizable form of ‘Lieuesham’ when Alfred the Great’s daughter Elfrida made a gift of the area to the abbots of Ghent. In the 1600s it was phonetically pronounced ‘Lusame’, which is not far off how I imagine it’s often spat out in the Wetherspoon’s on the High Street.

  I’m drawn into the centre of ‘South East London’s biggest shopping centre’ by the bright hand-painted sign for Lewisham Model Market, lopsided yellow lettering on a crimson background, precariously hanging above a royal-blue set of doors.

  I’ve been to London’s flower markets, fish markets, antiques markets, meat markets (both varieties), old cattle markets, flea markets, craft markets, covered markets and numerous street markets – but never to a model market. The entrance to the Lewisham model market is at the end of Love Lane, a narrow passageway where the fruit vendor tells me the market has been closed for three years. Whilst there was a spirited campaign to save the trendy Columbia Road Flower Market, Lewisham Model Market seems to have died a quiet death.

  It’s a sedate September Sunday morning with a few early drinkers sucking on fags outside the Wetherspoon’s. There’s a gentility to the High Street hiding behind the identikit shopfronts – Currys, Primark and Poundworld all mask fine modernist-looking buildings. They seem to be maintaining a stately dignity despite the vandalizing of their façades by cheap chain-store signage. Poundworld took on its ‘steel frame construction with stone-clad façade’ from another bland high-street regular, Peacocks. Before that it was the flagship site of Chiesmans Department Store, opened in 1921 on the site of the original 1880s drapery shop. The Currys had been a large, elegant Woolworths that seems to have been cut in half over time.

  Lewisham town centre suffered the single worst V-1 flyingbomb attack in South London, in July 1944, when 59 people died and 124 were seriously injured. A photo shows the devastation of the explosion, with a whole section of what had been a crowded market flattened. What was left standing was then hit again by the ‘post-war blitz’ of the 1960s.

  Above a shop next to Primark the sounds of a loud, joyous chorus of evangelical singing backed up by a puls
ing rhythm section wafts across the High Street. A one-legged man sitting on a folding stool outside has the look of a fella who’s seen it all. Perhaps he was here in August 1977 to witness the Battle of Lewisham.

  In the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the release of White Riot by the Clash, the National Front marched through Lewisham protected by 3,000 police officers, a quarter of the Metropolitan Police Force. The march was a deliberately provocative gesture in an area with a large black population.

  When the National Front were met by an alliance of antiracism activists, headed by the Socialist Workers Party, the scene quickly descended into a riot on a scale that makes the disturbances of August 2011 seem relatively well mannered. Bricks were handed out from the construction site of the Riverdale Centre that I’d passed on the way into town. The police responded by charging into the crowd in Transit vans and wielding riot shields for the first time on British streets outside Northern Ireland. By the end of the day 214 people had been arrested and 11 policemen hospitalized.

  With the tense climate of the late 1970s, its high unemployment and wilting national pride, some people have compared resisting the racist National Front at Lewisham to the defeat of Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. But whereas Cable Street has entered into the folklore of London, the Battle of Lewisham has largely been forgotten.

  Lewisham was only meant to be the start point for my trek to Herne Hill and yet I’d managed to get bogged down in its beguiling architecture and social history. Although tempted to find where the brilliantly named Quaggy River ran through the town along a concrete channel, I needed to return to the Ravensbourne to find my bearings and get back on course.

  The river leads me into Ladywell Road. On the corner there’s an ornate, old carved-stone doorway that appears to open to nowhere, an urban enigma. There’s a fine phalanx of Victorian redbrick piles formed by the Coroner’s Court (1894) and Ladywell Baths (1884) with its circular tower. The baths were fed by their own spring but it’s a different water source that’s brought me into the lane – the site of a medieval holy well.

  Within the leather-bound spine of Old London’s Spas, Baths and Wells (1915) Septimus Sunderland M.D. noted that Ladywell ‘possessed two springs, one of which was medicinal’. He went on to write that one of the springs was noted as being in existence at the time of Edward IV (1442–83) and was regarded as a holy well. Steve Roud’s London Lore pointed me towards The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England by Robert Charles Hope, published in 1893, which gives a fuller description of the ‘holy well’. Hope recounted the story of how ‘a poor woman afflicted with a loathsome disease’ was recommended by her doctor to use the waters from the well, only because he had given up hope and she lived in the vicinity of the well. The woman was miraculously cured, the reputation of the Lady Well spread and ‘The waters were given gratis to all comers.’

  The more curious aspect of the story was what happened when they tried to sell the healing waters for profit:

  An attempt to enclose the wells with a brick wall, and to give the profits of such monopoly for the ‘Poor’s use’, was frustrated by the Divine hand in a striking manner. The water lost its virtue, ‘taste, its odour, and effects’, proving that ‘in behalf of the Poor (incapacitated to right themselves) God sometimes immediately steps in for their assistance’. The scheme of enclosure was abandoned.

  This sacred spot was apparently located where the bridge crossed the railway lines at Ladywell Station. I felt the need to mark this stage of the walk with more than a photograph and a scribbled line in my notebook. Two days before heading south I was wandering through Bloomsbury and passed Treadwell’s Bookshop, London’s leading purveyor of esoteric texts. They also sell the ingredients for magic spells.

  Rummaging amongst the small packets of herbs and dried plants I plucked out lady’s mantle, for the obvious name association with Ladywell, and mugwort because it sounds like ‘Muggle’ from Harry Potter – Treadwell’s is like the real-life manifestation of a shop in Diagon Alley. I conferred with the charming lady behind the counter and a serene-looking woman whom I took to be either a witch or a palm reader (she may well have been the plumber but she had a certain glint in her eye).

  I explained that the herbs were for a votive offering at a Lady’s Holy Well and they nodded their approval – both would be suitable offerings. Lady’s mantle is good for the female body. The Folklore of Plants tells us that ‘Dewdrops gathered from its folded leaves were a highly esteemed beauty lotion.’ Mugwort is ‘a source of power and protective against thunder and witchcraft’. More useful to a man embarked on a series of walks with an unreliable left knee, William Coles in The Art of Simpling (1656) said, ‘If a footman take mugwort and put it into his shoes in the morning he may goe forty miles before noon and not be weary’. I only had to cover eight or nine miles before the Autumn Omnium finished at four o’clock.

  When I arrived home I proudly presented the ‘magic herbs’ to my two sons. The elder looked up from a baffling game on the Xbox and declared that I was in danger of turning into a ‘hippy wizard’. Maybe he was right. I wasn’t so bothered about being labelled a ‘wizard’; it was the ‘hippy’ part that bothered me slightly. I got a haircut the next day.

  Approaching Ladywell Station the coast was clear. I took out the small bags and sprinkled some of the contents to the breeze. My votive offering took about a minute to perform. It was hard to conjure up any great sense of ceremonial standing next to an Oyster card reader and a sign warning of a £20 penalty fare for not possessing a valid ticket on the station platform. There was no mention what the fine was for performing unauthorized pagan rituals.

  Moving on up the hill that climbs out of the Ravensbourne Valley to Brockley and Hilly Fields I checked my notes to discover that the well had most likely been situated on the other side of the bridge. I momentarily considered going back to repeat the symbolic act of well-worship but thought, with the stiff autumn breeze that was blowing, some of the herbs would have made their way across the railway tracks to the correct location. In any case, I was now standing outside a smart Victorian house that bore a heritage plaque marking it as the site of the other well, a more prosaic medicinal spring.

  Septimus Sunderland states that this ‘chalybeate’ mineral spring was the one that gave its name to the area. I whip out my bags of herbs and make another impromptu offering as two lads poke pizza leaflets through the door. The presence of other people makes me realize that not only could this appear a little strange but the small plastic bags of dried green plants to some eyes could resemble a more commonly consumed herb often rolled up and smoked rather than scattered to the breeze. I slip the mugwort into my running shoes, as recommended by both William Coles and my stoner mates, make sure that the handwritten label on the lady’s mantle is visible and shove it to the bottom of my bag. If the frequency of police stop and search in south-east London is as bad as rumoured, I could have some explaining to do. Claiming to be a ‘hippy wizard’ might not be enough to get me off the hook.

  This was the first of several hills that I would climb – although at this point I was blissfully unaware of the fact. I dropped down Arthurdon Road SE4 back into the river valley. A vast redbrick water tower rises from the rows of 1980s council housing. It’s a majestic structure that overpowers its original function of servicing St Olave’s Union Workhouse. It deserves great romances composed in its honour, bardic verses performed at an annual fayre. On the other hand it’s been tastefully converted so that you can rent a one-bed flat for £725 per month.

  In 1953 a young poet and activist, Ivan Chtcheglov, writing under the pseudonym of Gilles Ivain, produced an article called ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, in which he put forward this utopian vision: ‘Everyone will live in their own cathedral. There will be rooms awakening more vivid fantasies than any drug. There will be houses where it will be impossible not to fall in love. Other houses will prove irresistibly attractive to the benig
hted traveller.’

  This water tower could be seen as the realization of that romantic idea of urban living, not delivered by the French revolutionaries of the Situationist International of which Chtcheglov was a founder member, but by a sharp-eyed property developer. Chtcheglov’s notion that architecture should ‘play with time and space’ seems to have been finally manifested in this quiet South London cul-de-sac.

  Aside from the water tower, the institution’s administration blocks and dining hall remain. A fella sat on a step smoking a fag outside one of the renovated buildings confirms its origins: ‘Oliver Twist, ’ent it!’ he laughs.

  St Olave’s wasn’t an ordinary workhouse but an infirmary for the old, sick and frail – one of the first of its kind, starting a new trend in geriatric care. There is an image from 1900 of the dining hall festooned in wreaths of flowers and lit by chandeliers. It defies the Dickensian and Orwellian image of the dark, hellish workhouses of legend. My nan was born the year Ladywell Infirmary opened – it looks much nicer than the old-people’s home she ended up in eighty years later.

  St Olave’s Union Workhouse’s converted water tower

  After ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, Chtcheglov continued to propose new theories of how to re-imagine the urban realm, including the increasingly mainstream idea of psychogeography. Perhaps it’s fitting that he was committed to an infirmary of sorts, an asylum in Paris. I hope the architecture was as inspiring as the Ladywell Infirmary.

  On Ladywell Fields I pick up a yellowed leaf from the Lewisham Elm. The changing of the seasons brings with it a frisson in the atmosphere. A metal plaque next to the tree accords it the status of ‘One of the Great Trees of London’, a survivor of the Dutch elm disease that wiped out over twenty million trees in the UK. If you think of the image of a classical English landscape, a painting by Constable or Turner for example, the elm is there as surely as the rolling green hills and the spire of the village church. It was one of the enduring symbols of ‘this green and pleasant land’. The decimation of the native elm was such a loss that it would be as if everybody suddenly stopped saying ‘Mustn’t grumble’ or every curry house and kebab shop disappeared overnight. Luckily, this totemic emblem of England lives on in Lewisham.