by John Rogers
London Transport poster
The photos I’d looked at in the Middlesex Archaeological Journal date from the same era as the posters so they weren’t the kind of over-hyped estate-agent spiel that has tried to rename Holborn ‘Mid-Town’ or sell Barnet as the new Camden Town. Only a hundred years ago there was open countryside just seven miles west from Marble Arch.
Sir John Betjeman wrote of the ‘lost Elysium’ in his poem ‘Middlesex’ in the 1950s. When Walter Jerrold wrote his Highways and Byways it was still a place of escape for the people of the crowded, smoggy city. Jerrold saw the coming development of Sudbury, noting the plots marked out for the planned ‘garden city’.
The urban planners saw a different kind of Elysium rising from the Middlesex fields. The ‘place of perfect happiness’ would be an affordable home with a discounted season ticket. How many young couples lured out into the new estates by the swanky ads came to see the tidy rows of streets as the Elysium of Greek mythology, ‘the place at the ends of the earth to which heroes were conveyed by the gods after death’.
A narrow, tree-lined lane opposite the station heading away from the parade of shops and semi-detacheds appears to be a trace left behind for those in search of ‘Field-Path Rambles in Old-Fashioned Country’, which would otherwise seem unlikely in Sudbury Hill at first glance. The lane leads in the direction of Horsenden Hill – could this be a remnant of the Neolithic trackway that led from Brentford to the encampment at Brockley Hill?
Young trees bend over the pavement that takes me on to Ridding Lane Open Space, which occupies a hill with views stretching across West London. A solitary tower block stands in the corner, far removed from the orderly villas of the inter-war expansion into the area. Allen Court has been selected for redevelopment by Ealing Council after the ten-storey block had fallen below the government’s ‘Decent Homes Standard’. A review showed that residents felt unsafe after dark and harboured ‘concerns about drug use and drug dealing’. The block will be demolished and replaced with a mixture of social and private housing – utopia will get a second chance; the view that I capture stretching out behind a tall oak tree deserves it. The architects of the new scheme could look for inspiration in Christine Jackson’s 1930 poster for the new suburb of Sudbury Hill, with its elegantly hand-drawn pipe-smoking men in cricket jumpers leaning against shovels as a child rides a scooter past picket fences and old men pushing wheelbarrows. The ideal of an English settlement is not so dissimilar to a Hobbit shire – a place of cosy conviviality and second breakfasts.
1930s ‘villadom’ is alive and well over the crest of the hill along Sudbury Heights Avenue and down Rosehill Gardens and Melville Avenue into Horsenden Lane North. It’s a land of cheery Sunday car polishers who bid me a bright ‘good morning’. The commuter-ville imagined by the Electric Underground Railway has survived into the 21st century, still serviced by Charles Holden’s sleek modernist stations.
I feel like a tourist from the future with my digital camera, photographing the shadows of bare branches cast across the pebble-dashed row of houses. To a teenager growing up in a post-punk 1980s soundtracked by Wham’s ‘Club Tropicana’ and Duran Duran singing ‘Rio’ on a yacht, ‘pebble-dash’ was as terrifying a P-word as prog-rock and peroxide-induced-hair-loss.
Walking down these streets in the new millennium the people of the pebbledash culture perhaps deserve a higher status – a century on from their birth these suburban outliers have come of age. Whilst people were scurrying off in search of the latest up-and-coming area following the blitzkrieg of regeneration schemes, the pebbledash people stood firm. They’ve placed their faith in an unfashionable mode of living, free of inner-city anxiety and the passing fads of the ‘latterati’. There’s not a breezeblock or aluminium balcony in sight – the solid London brickwork is coated with a layer of sand and cement, and embedded with hardy little round stones. Maybe this pebble-dashed nostalgia is another symptom of turning 40, along with spending evenings building Airfix models of Second World War fighter planes and discovering games consoles for the first time.
Preparing for the ascent of Horsenden Hill I pop into Costcutter and optimistically enquire whether they sell takeaway coffee. My hopes are temporarily raised when the bloke thinks I mean ‘copy’, which we laugh off, and I settle for a banana and a tube of Murray Mints. If I were in serious need of a caffeine hit the Ballot Box Pub is open for business and advertising the freshness of its coffee, but I was raised to think it was an affront to the landlord of a pub not to drink alcohol – and there’s a full programme of Soccer Sunday about to kick off that would almost certainly waylay me as effectively as the faery folk beneath the hawthorn bushes. The Geographia Greater London Atlas from the mid-1950s marks the area around the Ballot Box as Brabsden Green, a name straight out of Trumpton. The pub is all that remains of the village, the other buildings having been demolished after the war.
The wet grass sparkles with large pearls of dew as I climb the northern face of the hill. Two men fly a model aircraft in wide circles high above the rooftops. The summit of Horsenden Hill stands 273 feet high with views across four counties – north-west out to the Chilterns, Hemel Hempstead and Watford; south and west to Windsor Castle, Runnymede and the North Downs. It’s a canvas so vast that the built environment is reduced to brown smudges and ridges of red tiles. You get a glimpse into a prehistoric London occluded at street level. There were settlements on Horsenden Hill dating back 7,000 years, and excavations have turned up flint tools and numerous potshards from the Iron Age through to the Romans.
The name is said to mean ‘Horsa’s Dun’ – ‘dun’ being an Old English word for ‘hill’, the hill of Horsa, most likely a Saxon warrior and possibly buried within the summit. In The Chronicles of Greenford Parva published in 1890, John Allen Brown recounted a Mr Farthing’s earlier version of ‘A Legend of Horsenden Hill’.
The story goes that Horsa and his wife, a woman who ‘was gifted with supernatural powers’, had one daughter, Ealine, whose beauty and intelligence were famed throughout the region. For some reason she rejected the advances of all the suitors who came to ask for her hand until she married Bren, the chief of a neighbouring tribe. ‘The joining of the hands over the holy stone over the magic circle was performed with great pomp and ceremony according to the rites of Odin, the Saxon Deity, and after a festival of many days’ duration, Bren carried home his beauteous prize to his own castle.’ So far, so fairy tale.
But the match wasn’t a good one. Ealine was bookish and bright, Bren was coarse and crude, and soon he was fooling around with the local women ‘whose tastes and sentiments were more in accordance with his own sensual disposition’. Feeling scorned, Ealine dispatched a starling she had taught to speak to carry the news of her faithless husband’s philandering to her father. Horsa reacted as any self-respecting Saxon warrior whose daughter had been dishonoured would and promptly raised a fierce army to exact revenge. Bren got news of the impending attack and ‘the two armies met and crossed at the ford which has ever since borne his name’ – Brentford. In the ensuing battle, ‘Bren was slain and Horsa mortally wounded.’ He ‘died of his wounds and soon after buried with great pomp, along with his arms and favourite war-horse’ on the spot that ‘has ever since borne his name’.
Ealine and her mother retreated into the forests of the vale, where they continued their learning and were worshipped by some of the local rustic people for their wisdom and knowledge of magic. After living to a grand old age the area where Ealine died was named Ealine’s Haven, where today buses to Ealing Broadway terminate at Haven Green.
According to Farthing’s story, even into the 19th century local people would try to avoid Horsenden Hill late at night, not because of footpads or highwaymen but because of the sound of Horsa’s giant steed that restlessly roamed the land. ‘And some go so far to as to affirm they have seen the shadowy form of the dead warrior when the pale moon illumines the hill, and the white mists curl upwards from the vale at its foot.’ One morni
ng large, blue-tinted hoof prints of a giant horse were found ‘scorched’ into the hoar frost, marking a path across a field at Greenford Marsh in the direction of Horsenden Hill. Allen Brown adds the note that it was ‘undecided whether the difference of colour was due to the fiery feet of Horsa’s steed or to unequal condensation due to causes that may be easily explained’.
The various excavations of Horsenden Hill didn’t uncover the remains of Horsa or his mighty steed, just bits of pot and flints. The remains of seven Saxon warriors, however, buried with their spears and wrapped in hemp cloaks still fastened by bronze brooches, were found on Cuckoo Hill, Hanwell. The field where they fell in battle is near a bend in the River Brent and until recently was know as ‘Blood Croft’. Did they die in the conflict between Bren and Horsa, and not in a clash with the local British tribes as some accounts claim? The path from Blood Croft to Horsenden Hill would cross Greenford Marsh where the spectral hoof prints were scorched into the frost. That is surely a better yarn than explaining it away as an odd pattern caused by condensation.
It’s in the direction of Cuckoo Hill and Greenford that I now need to go if I want to take in the majesty of the Wharncliffe Viaduct at Hanwell in the last of the late-afternoon light. The dark winter evenings have drawn in since my last walk just six weeks ago – the autumn of the omnium has given way to early winter. I need to break the spell of Horsenden Hill with its myths and legends, and start to descend, walking over a carpet of bronze leaves beneath the denuded oak trees.
Any mental flights of fancy are rudely broken by a loud shout of ‘Fore’ as a Sunday-morning hacker shanks his drive off the tee in the direction of the Hanger Lane gyratory. Fancy building a golf course on a Scheduled Ancient Monument; before you know it there’ll be crazy golf at Stonehenge. I turn towards the third tee and incredible views east towards the towers of the City of London and Canary Wharf open up above a green where a golfer sinks a ten-footer and clenches his first in celebration as if he has just won the US Masters.
The path over Horsenden Hill
Avoiding golfers and being chased by untrained dogs I end up walking along an avenue of spindly birch trees and young oaks. Through an alleyway and the distant past melts into more classic suburbia with little of the intervening few thousand years between. I crack open a packet of Cadbury’s Snack Biscuits as I casually browse Google Maps on my phone to get my bearings. I nearly choke on a chocolate shortbread square when I see that after over an hour drifting around Horsenden Hill, rather than follow the ancient trackway to Hanwell I’ve taken a newly laid gravel path straight back to Sudbury.
Modern GPS technology guides me around the base of the golf course and along a narrow footpath ankle deep in mud. The trees form a tunnel overhead and this now feels like a true remnant of the ancient trackway. It wouldn’t be much fun to go on a walk and not get lost – I’ve always thought that was the only reason to plot a route beforehand, so that you can deviate from it and plunge into the unknown.
It wouldn’t be the unknown I’d plunge into if I continued to follow the red dot gliding over Google Maps but the Grand Union Canal, making its way slowly from Paddington Basin through Slough to Birmingham. Meeting the canal here prompts a memory of filming the writer Will Self walking along the towpath towards Heathrow with our mutual friend Nick Papadimitriou. I’d been busy trying to stay out of the murky waters as I shuffled backwards endeavouring to keep them both in shot and capture decent audio of their intense riffing, so I couldn’t be certain that this was the section of the canal we’d walked along that day in June 2008.
Luckily the event was recorded in Will Self’s book Walking to Hollywood, where I am played by the former Happy Days actor-turned-blockbuster-movie director Ron Howard. In the narrative of the book Will is deeply annoyed by the intrusion of the filming, and paranoid about being captured on camera. The ‘Ron-John’ character, a ‘bat-eared sycophant in a letter jersey making up to Henry Winkler’ (that’s me all right) hands the Will Self character the camera so he can check he hasn’t been filmed. ‘When he offered me the camera for my inspection, rather than examining the playback, I simply removed the tape cassette and chucked it in the canal. He trudged away disconsolately over Horsenden Hill …’, it says in the book.
I was wearing a 1950s-style red-checked shirt that day and I was called ‘Ears’ by Whiffy Smith at primary school, so the description is not a total liberty. The tape-tossing into the canal, however, was thankfully a fiction and I didn’t ‘trudge away disconsolately over Horsenden Hill’, but made my way to Perivale Station, where I am again heading but this time with a much smaller camera that fits neatly in my pocket. The idea of a semi-fictional version of myself walking over Horsenden Hill before the real me seems in keeping with the mythology and industrial experimentation of Perivale. It is an eldritch zone, seemingly, with the ability to warp reality. From Horsa’s wife’s dalliances with fairies among the trees of ‘Fairey Vale’ in Saxon times to the peculiar glass box transparent car with inflatable plastic seats – the Quaser-Unipower manufactured here in the 1960s – you sense there are uncanny occurrences taking place in these streets and the industrial estates.
It was the perfect location for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor Who to plonk his Tardis down. The seventh Doctor’s teenage tearaway sidekick, Ace, was from Perivale and throughout 1989 they kept dropping back in on the ‘boring’ West London streets that Ace had left to go roaming the solar system in a battered old police box. Ace may have experienced a ‘Psychic Circus on Seganox’ and licked the Kandyman on Terra Alpha, but back in Perivale she had to contend with a mysterious Victorian mansion called Gabriel Chase that had a Neanderthal butler by the name of Nimrod, and had all her old mates abducted by inter-dimensional Cheetah people who metamorphosed from vicious feral black cats at the local playground. In an echo of the legend of Horsenden Hill, the Doctor finds a strange set of hoof prints running across the hill, prompting another explanation for the phenomenon – neither condensation nor the ghost of a Saxon warhorse but the tracks of shape-shifting, otherworldly, horse-riding bipedal cheetahs. How could anyone say Perivale is ‘boring’? Even the flytipping is imaginative.
I take a photo of an assorted pile of household goods left on the pavement topped by a single, carefully placed Ugg boot. Artist Bob and Roberta Smith has said that fly-tipping forms a kind of ‘unofficial sculpture’. Bob and Roberta has occasionally used these discarded items in his sculptures and paintings, which have then been exhibited in major galleries – including the Tate – completing the journey from the kerbside to the cultural mainstream. However, I think it’s doubtful a major British artist will pass by this afternoon to turn this creation into a Turner-nominated installation, so my photo will have to do.
I briefly linger to take in another great modernist statement by London Underground – Perivale Station, a 1938 design by Australian architect Brian Lewis and completed after the war in 1947. Its elegant concave tall-windowed exterior catches the late-afternoon sun, which also casts long shadows from the traffic bollards. It’s a building that suggests great things will happen once you step into the high-ceilinged ticket hall. You could take the Central Line east to admire Charles Holden’s stations at Wanstead and Gants Hill.
The station was designed as Perivale underwent the early years of its transformation from what Allen Brown called ‘a rustic, deeply secluded hamlet’, ‘almost forgotten’, protected by the River Brent and its habit of flooding. In 1901 the population of Perivale was just 60. Shortly afterwards came the Great Western Railway, followed by the A40 road that linked Perivale to what Professor Peter Hall termed the ‘West London Industrial Belt’. By 1951, Hall tells us, over a quarter of a million workers were employed in this area that stretched from Cricklewood and Colindale down through to Hammersmith, then out further westwards to Slough and the tiny hamlet of Perivale.
The two old photos of Perivale that I’d examined in the pub the week before the walk – one looking from Ealing towards Horsenden Hill taken in 1
904 with not a building in sight, the other of the crossroads of the A40/Western Avenue in 1937 with the first factories emerging from the fields – mark the points at which ‘Elysium’ was lost. ‘Parish of enormous hayfields/Perivale stood all alone’ wrote Betjeman in ‘Middlesex’. As I approach the junction of Horsenden Lane and the A40 that could be the one from the 1937 collodion print, Perivale is certainly not alone but in the company of a herd of stampeding cars careering between London and Oxford. Rather than enjoying the tranquil countryside of the London Transport posters you are washed in great waves of sound, of tyres on tarmac and engine whirr. This wall of white noise serenaded me to sleep at night with my windows open in the redbrick inter-war council house of my childhood, 18 miles west down the A40 – almost exactly half-way between London and Oxford – cosy within its acoustic footprint.
When I was recovering from my knee operation a few years ago, my sleep disrupted by a bad reaction to opiated painkillers, I soothed myself back into a slumber by placing a mattress next to the open windows so I could hear the distant whoosh of the M11 link road. Apparently babies are calmed by white noise because it reminds them of the sound of the womb. My younger son would hug the stereo speakers whenever we put on a My Bloody Valentine CD. I listen to roads.