by John Rogers
This dirty old highway was my first real tangible idea of London. As a child I travelled up to Ealing and Hillingdon for cricket matches with my dad, first in his battered old Hillman, followed by a green and then an awful purple Austin Marina (funny how you date your childhood by what car your dad was driving – Hillman mid-70s, green Marina late 70s, purple Marina early–mid-80s). Just after the war, Dad cycled up along this same road from Wooburn Green to Ealing with his friend Podgy Winch to visit an evacuee who’d stayed with Podgy. He had a brand-new three-speed racer bought as a reward for passing his 11-plus, and remembers that he hardly saw any cars the whole way there and back on the forty-mile round trip.
For me, these outer suburbs along the Western Avenue were London, the big, scary city with its London Transport bus stops as exotic as the Taj Mahal. When I started at polytechnic in 1989, that glorious puke-stained, feedback-drenched adventure began with a lift from my sister along the A40 in her car stacked with records, a guitar and a few clothes. When we passed over Notting Hill on the Westway with its white, high-fronted houses, my stomach tensed, I felt sick – a small lump in my throat – I was leaving home at eighteen years old. Cathy was playing some godawful music that stemmed the flow of any authentic emotion and by the time we had emerged across the City on the Whitechapel Road I was raring to go. This road is the beginnings of my London – and also an asphalt umbilical link to the place of my birth.
On this day, any feelings of sentimentality and pangs for Bucks are outweighed by rumblings of hunger. The need for food and the desire to go inside one of London’s most iconic buildings could potentially be dealt with simultaneously, now that Wallis, Gilbert and Partners’ iconic Hoover factory has found new life as a Tesco superstore. Once again British art deco was sponsored by an American industrial giant, like the architectural gems of the Great West Road. As a kid travelling up from the sticks this was the first real statement that you had arrived in the big city – a vast, white-tiled slab adorned with flags. The angular lines of the pillars around the grid-pattern windows and the lanterns topping the concrete posts of the outer wall looked like Gotham City – it was easy to imagine the silhouette of the Caped Crusader swooping in front of the floodlit façade at night.
The Lloyds Bank opposite is a more understated modernist block, also tiled white with a green ceramic relief in the apex of the roof that looks like the spiky green ears of the young wheat that had once made Perivale famous. Above the main entrance to the Hoover Building next door, in a similar angular pattern, the wheat has ripened to a luminous gold.
However architecturally important the building might be, it is still a Tesco superstore and on Sunday afternoon it looked rammed – not with admirers of 1930s architecture but with all those thousands of people who decide to go to the supermarket an hour or so before the only time in the entire week when it closes early. I can’t compete with these people; there’s probably a healthy sprinkling of Doomsday Preppers amongst them, stocking up for the imminent government collapse, asteroid collision or zombie apocalypse. I cross the footbridge over the eight lanes of traffic, feeling like Philippe Petit tightrope-walking between the Twin Towers in Man on Wire, to the clump of buildings in the lay-by (it’s a bit of an exaggeration but I suffer from slight vertigo).
Starvin Marvin’s silver bullet 1950s diner seems the perfect eatery to complement the iconic architecture over the road, but it’s so busy that even people with babies bawling in hand-held car seats are prepared to queue. The only place left is the Mylett Arms attached to the end of a Premier Inn.
Despite my ravenous hunger there isn’t time to order any pub grub if I want to reach the Wharncliff Viaduct in daylight. Instead I settle for a pint of Bombardier in honour of Remembrance Day, and a packet of cheese and onion crisps. At a table with a ‘road view’ I am tormented by the ‘Fayre & Square’ menu with its photos of burgers dripping in cheese and bacon, and huge medieval roasts. If I order now that’ll be the end – the second half of the Liverpool vs Chelsea match is about to start and the ale is going down very nicely, but another pint would write off the rest of the day. I wait for the alcohol to seep into my legs, then haul myself from the table.
Over the road from the Premier Inn car park a lichen-encrusted lychgate welcomes you to a glimpse of the ‘Pure Vale’ of legend. In a leaf-strewn alley stands ‘The Ancient Church of St Mary the Virgin’ that dates back to 1135 when the entire population of the parish could have assembled around a few tables in the Mylett Arms. The 16th-century brilliant-white weatherboard tower is dappled with leaf shadow. It’s packed to the door for the Remembrance Day service so I wander into the churchyard to look for some of the tombs mentioned by Jerrold and for the 13th-century lepers’ window on the south side of the chancel. A flock of green parakeets swoops noisily from the ash and pine trees over the headstones to Ealing Golf Club. Just as I’m trying to document what I think is a rare bird sighting on my pocket camera the vicar very politely asks if he can pass. I turn to see the entire congregation lined up patiently behind me outside the church; they smile as they pass on their way to lay a wreath at the war memorial.
St Mary the Virgin’s, Perivale
Watching them walk through the graveyard makes me think of my grandfather, William Rogers, who fought as a teenager in the First World War, seeing action at the Somme and Vimy Ridge. He died two months after I was born. Following the carnage of the trenches he led a quiet life as a diligent shift foreman at one of the local paper mills, his leisure time spent playing dominos in the Barley Mow across the road and watching Wycombe Wanderers. My dad always says he was a quiet man; no wonder after what he had experienced at such a young age. And here I am yomping through old Middlesex searching for adventure. I reckon he’d be glad: I’m terrible at Call of Duty, would have been late for shifts at the mill and never got the hang of dominos – wandering around London is probably the best thing for me.
The scene outside St Mary’s churchyard is ridiculously sylvan – a wooden bridge over the winding River Brent where weeping willows droop into the gently trickling waters. It would be nauseating if it weren’t counterbalanced by the brutality of the Western Avenue. When Jerrold walked through Perivale, Ealing and Hanger Hill and saw the early signs of the suburban sprawl to come, he would probably have been surprised that this pocket of rurality managed to survive. This was the Middlesex countryside promised in the pages of Highways and Byways and advertised on the old London Transport posters. Perhaps Elysium wasn’t lost after all; it just fell down the back of the sofa with the TV remote and some loose change.
Walking on past Pitshanger Allotments, the oak leaves glowing in the early rays of sunset, I take an added interest in the various models of homemade sheds on display that have been constructed from mismatched lumps of wood and pallets. I’ve just finished constructing a kit shed at the bottom of my garden that stretched my DIY skills to such a limit that it had a similar effect as the space race had on computing and dehydrated foods. My shed is a bit mamsy-pamsy compared with these proper working sheds. I have collaged the ceiling of mine with an A–Z bought in a charity shop for 99p – an odd experimental 1990s edition with lurid colours printed on overly glossy paper. It was too distracting as a practical object but as ceiling decoration it looks like a London-lover’s Sistine Chapel. I’ve glued the pages at random on the roof so that Perivale morphs into Falconwood before moving on to Avery Hill and Black Fen, names worthy of any misguided heroic quest.
Thankfully, my path leads further through Ealing across Pitshanger Park and Scotch Common. Arthur Mee explains the name of Pitshanger as deriving from ‘hangra, a wooded slope, and pyffel, a kind of hawk’, neither of which are apparent as I head onwards down Argyle Road – the kind of street that made Ealing one of the more appealing suburbs thrown up by the westward expansion of the city. Such slumbering domesticity always seems to suggest a greater mystery lurking behind the respectable façades. Shape-shifting lizard people, retired assistants of intergalactic Time Lords, and Mossad
assassination cells would never be seen dead in Knightsbridge or Shoreditch – but the streets of Ealing are the perfect environment in which to melt into the background. What could be more normal than Ealing? An advert for a Psychic Fayre at the Town Hall hints at more esoteric happenings in the area.
Somewhere nestled in this comfortable ‘Villadom’ will be an old person who’d be able to utter that blessed cliché, ‘I remember when this was all fields.’ A photo in Kate McEwan’s Ealing Walkabout shows the junction of Scotch Common and Argyle Road from 1902 with two young women in Edwardian dress standing in a deserted country lane. McEwan writes that ‘Argyle Road follows the line of the ancient “Green Lane” from Perivale’ – the same trackway linking Brentford with Brockley Hill that I have been following from Sudbury Hill.
That path takes me across the bridge at Drayton Green, the pale-blue paint peeling from the iron walls exposing rust seams with rivets the size of your thumb. Drayton Green was one of the early-medieval hamlets of the area, now a convenient traffic through-route between Ealing and Southall. Cuckoo Lane and Manor Court Road sweep round Brent Lodge Park, the final approach to where the Wharncliffe Viaduct stretches across the skyline. Queen Victoria apparently used to request that her royal train slow down when crossing the bridge so she could admire the view. It’s a true marvel of 19th-century engineering and also the kind of place Alan Partridge would take a lady on a first date. Initially, the most striking feature is ‘Hanwellites 93’ graffitied across the top of one of the arches – who were the Hanwellites? Were they a group of travelling players who took their name from a 1935 Will Hay film, like the Narkovers? A ska band who regularly played at the Railway Tavern? That’d fit. Or they could even be the local five-a-side football team.
Standing beneath the viaduct in the early-evening gloom you feel the full scale of this cathedral to the industrial age. The vast space overhead induces a feeling of religious awe. I read somewhere that shopping malls are consciously built with the same effect in mind: capture a void above our skulls and we instinctively fill it with metaphysical deities and higher powers – it becomes a portion of heaven captured on earth. But whereas Westfield gives me a migraine, my mind is calmed within the cavernous sanctum of the Wharncliffe Viaduct. Birch trees rise into the emptiness, bats swoop to their nests in the hollow brick piers, and the Brent snakes through the undergrowth as the 4.29 slides past to Bath. It put the ‘great’ in the Great Western Railway when it opened in 1837, and was the first structure in the country to be granted Grade I listing, before Buckingham Palace and Hampton Court. It’s a recognition of the reshaping of the land that the railways brought about. In his groundbreaking book The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins compares the building of the railways to the great prehistoric monuments: ‘Nothing like their earthworks had been seen since the earlier Iron Age of pre-Roman times.’ To fully appreciate the Wharncliffe Viaduct, he writes, you have to see it on foot.
Families make their way home from Connolly Dell and Brent Meadows through to Half Acre. I want to feel the full acoustic force of a train thundering on the tracks but when it comes it’s more of a measured release of compressed air, a turbo-powered guff. I linger on a bench in Churchfields for a while watching the brightly lit carriages skim across the horizon. The bells chime out from St Mary’s. It’s one of those early-winter evenings when it is just cold enough to turn your cheeks a comfortable red. The kind of weather that dissolves in the warmth of a pub. Before I can settle down for a pint, though, there is one loose end to tie. To find the studio my sister lived in during her first year at Chelsea Art School. It sat round the back of an old thatched cottage somewhere near the church.
Before the walk she told me that the well that gave Hanwell its name was in the back garden. Despite having the address, the lanes around Hanwell Church (another possible site of pre-Roman settlement) are sheathed in the darkness of a pre-electric age. She barks directions at me down the phone from Maidstone and guides me to a Hansel and Gretel thatched cottage. Gordon S. Maxwell would have knocked on the door and asked to see the well. He might even have just bowled around the back and rummaged around in the garden. But I can’t seem to formulate the opening words in my head and I don’t want to alarm anyone on a Sunday with my walking jacket, ruddy cheeks, beer breath and wild hair. The journey feels complete – standing outside someone’s house in a dark lane gagging for a pint and something to eat.
In the night fields beyond St Mary’s the ghosts of Saxon warriors are stirring themselves to walk abroad and Horsa’s steed polishes its hoofs for its midnight run to Horsenden Hill. I slope up the lane, through the streets that Jerrold described as having ‘the appearance of the urban “hobble-de-hoy”’ and jump on an E1 bus to Ealing Broadway, where a fairy princess lies resting under one of the bus shelters.
My foray into rural Middlesex had made me think of my old walking buddy Nick Papadimitriou. Nick’s greatest ambition is to somehow fuse with this now defunct municipal authority and in his own words, ‘Become Middlesex’. So I had a tinge of guilt about heading out into his homeland without him. There was an unexplored section on the O/S map in my box room, an empty north-west quarter between Wembley and Golders Green, north to Edgware, Stanmore and Colindale – classic Nick country. It would be unthinkable to make a second incursion into these lands without him.
I also had the stack of Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society to pass on from Walden Books, so I dropped him an email proposing a walk. There was no reply. I sent a Facebook message. Again no response. I checked his Facebook activity and had seen that he’d left a comment on a photo of someone’s cat saying it reminded him of Bob the Street Cat. When he didn’t reply to two text messages and a voicemail I started to fear that he’d sensed my presence in the zone of Horsenden Hill and Sudbury, and had taken great offence. Had I stepped over some invisible line at Hanger Lane and was now engaged in a simmering topographers’ turf war?
As a final act of reconciliation I sent him a postcard from the London Transport Museum. It was a 1924 painting by Edward McKnight Kauffer of The Colne River at Uxbridge by Tram. On the back I wrote: ‘Feel like I’m trespassing in Middlesex without you.’ If this didn’t smoke him out I knew I was in serious trouble.
Sure enough, the day after sending it I received a call. He’d had his head down working on a series of poems and was also engaged in an intense wargame that was at a pivotal stage. ‘Where did I want to go?’ he asked. ‘How about the Welsh Harp and Dollis Hill?’ I tentatively suggested. ‘Fine,’ he said, and not much else. We set a date but two days before, he cancelled. I fretted he’d decided that the Welsh Harp was out of bounds and started to make other plans well away from his sacred territory: up the Lea Valley, across Leyton and Tottenham marshes – along the ancient territorial boundary between the Middle Saxons and the East Saxons.
Then another call – ‘How about Friday?’, and he’d show me Uxendon Hill. ‘You’ll like it, it has a superb view of Wembley Stadium.’ The date would be 21 December 2012, the winter solstice, but also the day that millions of people fervently believed would be end of the world as it marked the end of the Mayan Long Calendar. So serious was this belief that both NASA and Russian President Vladimir Putin had made statements denying that the world was about to end. That really calmed the paranoid minds of the Doomsdayers – it just added more chuff to the already muddled conspiracy.
There was one place in which the Doomsdayers believed they would be safe from the coming apocalypse, Bugarach in the French Pyrennees. Thousands of nutjobs had converged on the picturesque village awaiting the end of days. Nick and I were going to watch Armageddon from Uxendon Hill in north-west London. This was a once in a lifetime event – you’d need a good view.
Nick lives in a tower block on Childs Hill, a seven-minute walk from Golders Green. A peculiar searing white light broke through the clouds illuminating the wet pavement as I worked my way along the Finchley Road, past the Hindu temple and down Wycombe Gard
ens. Nick’s gleaming white tower stands backlit on a mound commanding views across all of North London and out into Hertfordshire. He has been religiously mapping this ground over the last twenty years or so, requisitioning the domain name of Middlesex County Council to publish his findings online. Here you’ll find fine-detailed logs of the course of the Clitterhouse Brook, the Silk Stream and all the tributaries of the River Brent. Despite this he still receives several planning applications a week and various complaints about broken street lights and uncollected bins.
Nick was the perfect guide to the post-flood world. He’d carried out this research for Will Self to use in The Book of Dave, a novel set in a submerged London hundreds of years in the future. A map in The Book of Dave shows the surviving high land of the city around Hampstead and Mill Hill.
Nick greets me at the door holding one of the three feral cats he has adopted. I spot the postcard I’d sent propped on the light switch outside the bathroom. There is the wargame laid out on an old card table with worn green baize – he prevents me putting my tea down next it. ‘It’s the battle at La Fière Causeway, June 1944 between the 505th US Paratroop Infantry Regiment and the German 1057th Grenadiers – the Germans are winning. I’m going to finish it tonight after the walk.’ The notorious French psychogeographer Guy Debord was also a wargamer and even created a game still played today, The Game of War, the tactical brain that helped inspire the Paris insurrection of May 1968 being put to a more recreational use. As far as I know Nick isn’t planning an uprising but uses wargames as a distraction from his study of Middlesex.
I’m a bit late and today is the shortest day of the year, even if it isn’t the last day ever, so I’m keen to get going. But Nick wants to chew the cud over a brew, talk a little about various book ideas he’s been working on, but more about his observations of life in a North London tower block.