by John Rogers
Looming over the park and the city below is the GPO Research Centre at Dollis Hill. This is a huge, grey, 1920s building dominating a high ridge. Once the cutting-edge centre of telecommunications research for the Post Office, it has inevitably been converted into ‘luxury’ flats.
We slip through the automated gate behind a departing car and reckon we have a few minutes to explore the grounds before security kick us out. ‘To Strive To Seek To Find’ is carved on one side of the entrance. On the other, ‘Research Is The Door To Tomorrow’. Officially opening the site in 1933, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald spoke of his pride that ‘Today, London is most conspicuous of all the capitals in the progress and the application of electric science.’ This was no idle boast. When Apple was still just a seasonal fruit, the world’s first digital electronic computer was built at Dollis Hill. The Colossus, designed by Tommy Flowers, played a vital role in the breaking of German codes during the Second World War. The speaking clock and transatlantic telephone cables were also developed here. But this was not only a place of innovation; it was also a place of secrets. There was a door marked ‘Post Office Special Investigations Unit Research’, which was allegedly an MI5 laboratory and interception centre.
Dollis Hill was the site of a subterranean ‘citadel’ constructed as an emergency war-time Cabinet retreat, codenamed PADDOCK. The Whitehall planners had built the underground Cabinet War Rooms in Westminster but, realizing that they wouldn’t survive a direct hit, decided that a ‘purpose-built totally bomb-proof war headquarters’ was needed. This was the bunker at Dollis Hill, ‘a last resort Citadel’ in the words of Winston Churchill if the government was unable to continue in Westminster. PADDOCK contained thirty-four rooms over two floors beneath layers of reinforced concrete. There was a private apartment for Churchill, with rooms for his staff and accommodation for the War Cabinet. As Ken Valentine points out in his book Willesden at War, the morning after the heavy bombing of the docks in the East End in September 1940 that marked the start of the Blitz, ‘the first thing Churchill did was not to visit the battered East End as one might infer from his biographer’s account. Instead, he hurried out to Dollis Hill to see for the first time the emergency war HQ.’
The bunkers are still there. Photos and footage online show the old dials and valves, the air-raid warning lights and apparatus for purifying contaminated air. The perfect place to hide out in the event of a doomsday scenario.
After five minutes we are still at liberty in the grounds, not a soul around. Maybe they have retreated to the bunker in preparation for the coming apocalypse. It’s actually a disappointment not to be apprehended – security guards are often an excellent source of information and would have been our best chance of a view of PADDOCK.
Outside the gates we take in the expansive view north across what Nick insists I write down in my notebook as the ‘Valley of the Sulis’. ‘Don’t explain,’ he says, ‘just put that down, Valley of the Sulis,’ and he walks off ahead as I write it down and take a photo of the silver ant cars crawling along the twig of the M1 motorway. Sulis was a Celtic goddess associated with healing adopted by the Romano-British at Bath, who merged the deity with the Roman goddess Minerva. Only Nick knows what relationship this has to the valley containing Hendon and Kingsbury, and he isn’t telling; all he’ll say is that the area is also known as Oxgate and Coles Green.
The view over the ‘Valley of the Sulis’
This was the type of exchange that characterized the radio shows we produced for Resonance FM that centred round a field recording from a walk just like this one. From hours of audio I’d recorded on a handheld device a significant portion would be debating about which route to follow, realizing that we were lost and Nick yet again berating himself for not bringing a compass, even though neither of us know how to use one.
Today’s walk has been fairly typical – several hours of unbroadcastable banter. I haven’t done enough research but am clinging on to the few factoids that have lodged in my befuddled brain, so I keep going on about trying to find the underground passage that leads from Uxendon Farm to the hill. Nick is dismissive of this and spends much of the time talking about the novel he’s just started writing, none of which I can repeat (nor record for possible future use). In between that I’m recounting funny things my kids have said and trying to explain Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which I’m sure Nick would love.
After walking alone for the best part of the year it’s just a pleasant change to have any chatter to accompany the sound of your own footsteps. As eagerly as we chuntered on we both openly acknowledged the fact that we preferred to walk alone – Nick was even planning on writing a whole book on the subject. This walk is therefore a welcome interlude before we return to our solitary schleps. I’m already ruing that we by-passed the Fred Kormissculpted memorial to concentration-camp victims in Gladstone Park because of the argument about the origins of the green parakeets. I try to raise this with Nick but he’s too busy telling me about the central plot of his novel.
I’ve only just noticed that Nick isn’t carrying a bag; he just threw on a jacket as we left the flat. My permanent mental image of Nick is of a man wearing a Russian hat with a canvas satchel containing a large notebook and an old Bartholomew’s atlas. Here he is, hands in pockets, hatless with a woollen lumberjack coat. Meanwhile, I’m not only rugged up in a thick fleece and waterproof jacket but packing a messenger bag containing a camera, field recorder, travel tripod, spare batteries and memory cards, water bottle, 1950s Geographia atlas, sheaf of notes, archaeological report of the excavation of Dollis Hill (unread), first aid kit, BlackBerry, knee strapping and spare cap. And I feel quietly proud for packing light. Nick tells me he stopped writing up his walks some time ago whilst I find even more methods for documenting almost every footstep.
I knew all this electronic clutter annoyed Nick on one level. Waiting for a train at London Bridge when we were heading off on our previous walk together he’d told me I that he’d once thought of me as an artist but I was now ‘just some sort of media type’. It’s still one of the most offensive things anyone has ever said to me (even including the indirect ‘bat-eared sycophant’ dig via a description of Ron Howard).
Since that first video we’d made together I’d started working for a small independent production company. Aside from the doomed pitches of well-meaning documentaries to BBC4 and More4, I had inevitably been sucked into the meat-and-drink world of the TV Moloch, writing up generic formats for dating, cookery and clip shows. I’d worked up passion projects for Saturday-night shiny-floor-show presenters and beloved soap actors – all of which were thankfully never made. Slowly some of the twisted logic that justified this pile of dung being spewed out into the public domain through the idiot box had seeped into my own worldview. I’d seen behind the curtain and caught a glimpse of the tired, toothless old bloke pulling the fraying strings.
My response was to develop a dating format in which people were hooked up with their ideal match on every characteristic apart from the caveat that they followed an opposing religion, which would be revealed to them in the presence of their families after a perfect date. Inter-Faith Dating wasn’t the kind of ‘edge and jeopardy’ the broadcasters were after. Was JFK My Dad? speaks for itself. Mind Control Live, in which contestants were locked in shipping containers on an abandoned airfield and subjected to government mind-control experiments wasn’t the type of reality show E4 were thinking of, apparently. Made in Chelsea took that slot instead.
Nick had seen me go from the idealist outsider who thought that National Psychogeographic could be the prime-time Channel 4 replacement for Location, Location, Location to a battle-scarred bloke cutting a taster tape for a TOWIE make-over show – and thinking it would be great telly.
My final week in the job involved an excruciating meeting in a floor-lit, glass-walled room where the cold-blooded vice president of the channel made repeated references to not being interested in making TV for men with beards. Nobody had suggested maki
ng TV for men with beards. Looking around, I was the only man in the room and the only person with a beard – I’d clearly rubbed her up the wrong way. Maybe she didn’t like my idea of Dead Celebs, in which we faked the deaths of the nation’s favourite celebrities to see what the reaction would be whilst the ‘dead celeb’ looked on. I was quite proud of that one. I hadn’t managed to redeem myself with Zombie Wasps, either. The passionate plea that this was a pressing global issue probably put the final nail in the coffin.
The thing that had hurt me most about Nick’s jibe was that perhaps he had been right – up to a point.
Not long after the final radio show had been broadcast I’d been working in Los Angeles, and found myself at some glitzy event stood chatting with a famous comedienne and one of the new rising stars. For a ‘media type’ this should have been a big moment – for people in film and TV, working in LA is like an oil man landing a job in Saudi Arabia. But as she nattered away about something I was mentally plotting a walk along Hainault Road, round the back of Whipps Cross Hospital and up to the Royal Oak pub at the top of Lea Bridge Road. It had just dawned on me that I’d never been there, and here I was glazing over in front of two charming, funny, pleasant Hollywood stars as I took an imaginary walk on a wet Tuesday evening through Leytonstone to the Walthamstow border.
Now I was back walking with Nick. My head was full of the meaning of the journey, of how it was fitting in with previous treks, of the ever-evolving portrait of the city that was forming.
We crossed the North Circular via a footbridge. Twentieth-century urban planners were obsessed with ring roads and radials – they couldn’t get enough of them. Looking at the 1943 County of London Plan you start to wonder where they were going to find space for all the schemes: ‘Radial Road No. 1, Radial Road No. 19 Streatham By-pass, The A Ring-road, The C Ring-road (North and South Circulars), Sub-arterial radial roads Nos. 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 18 and 20’. That’s just a sample. It seems the road-building was left in the hands of a group of over-excited young boys with a pile of plastic track and a box of shiny new Matchbox cars.
Ken Livingstone came up with a more sensible use for the North Circular when he was canvassing in Leyton in 2011 – build a tram-line along it, swiftly linking east and west. I alone applauded this brilliant plan whilst the rest of the room looked distinctly unimpressed. The next question was about what he would do to reduce parking restrictions.
Nick splays himself across the concrete plinth near the base of the bridge, laid out like a sacrificial victim to the car cult, and insists I take his photograph. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘I’ve just always wanted to be photographed like this,’ he says, still lying flat on his back, arms and legs spread wide whilst the traffic zips past on the other side of the chainlink fence. I oblige but also pull the trick of videoing instead of taking the photo so I capture the moment when he breaks his melodramatic pose to ask if I’ve taken the photo yet.
Nick on the bridge plinth
We brush past tall, brown stems of teasel to a bench beside the Welsh Harp Reservoir. One of the features of these patches of wilderness near the edge of the city has been the lack of people. From Hounslow Heath, through Crayford Marsh, Ladywell Fields and Horsenden Hill there has been barely a soul around. Nick and I are alone – we don’t see so much as even a solitary dog walker. Only two hundred yards away cars whoosh along the North Circular Road. The hills rising out of the valley are thick forests of redbrick houses and yet two blokes are sitting on a bench alone in 170 hectares of open space. There must be some sort of inbred aversion in the city dweller to these seemingly untamed places. Perhaps it’s the fear of getting muddy feet or folk memories of the bear that escaped from the Welsh Harp menagerie in 1871.
The Welsh Harp was once so popular with day-trippers from the East End that it had its own railway station. In 1969 Harold P. Clunn wrote about how ‘The craze for sun-bathing has been freely indulged in on the shores of the Welsh Harp lake,’ but prudish locals complained and the sun-seekers were moved on. The Swinging Sixties clearly didn’t make it this far round the North Circular.
The lake is formed from the damming of the confluence of the Brent with two of its tributaries – the Dollis Brook and the Silk Stream – the latter explaining Nick’s cryptic reference to the Valley of the Sulis. Plugged into the Grand Junction Canal it forms part of a substantial body of recreational waterways that flow through London. It’s a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of the number and variety of its wildfowl population. In London’s Natural History (1945), R. S. R. Fitter lists ‘squacco heron, the night heron, the little bittern, the ferruginous duck, the avocet, and the grey phalarope’ among the birds found bobbing around on the water with the less glamorous ducks, gulls and waders.
With the light fading Nick doubts we’ll make it much further than Kingsbury Church on the far side of the lake. We move off across the marsh grasses to choruses of coots and moorhens.
Checking Facebook on my phone, several friends in Australia joyously mock the Mayans as 21 December passes with the world still seemingly intact. This is all a bit rough on the Mayans – if being brought to the verge of extinction by the Conquistadors wasn’t bad enough, now a bunch of New Age fruit loops have misread one of their most precious ancient documents. The end of the Mayan Long Calendar only meant the start of another – not the end of time itself.
Welsh Harp Reservoir
We emerge into the kind of streets on the far side of the reservoir that earned Neasden the reputation as being a ‘typical suburb’ in the post-war years. Dapper lines of bow-fronted houses with wood-panelled roof gables, where the cream and white-rendered exteriors outnumber the pebbledash people. There is a vague whiff of Prozac and mothballs carried on the breeze. But unlike other London punchline suburbs Neasden fought back in 1970, after being regularly mocked in Private Eye, with a ‘Stop Knocking Neasden’ campaign. Angry letters were written to newspapers and posters put up at tube stations. It might be time to revive the campaign but this time with the addition of some Hollywood glamour. The ITV drama Mr Selfridge was recently filmed here, prompting chat-show host Graham Norton to describe the choice of location as ‘cruel and unusual’. Lead actor and Hollywood star Jeremy Piven, famous for his role as Ari Gold in Entourage, defended the area, saying it was ‘exciting’ and mooted the possibility of buying a house in Neasden. The next day the Evening Standard reported ‘Norton Knocks Neasden’.
On Blackbird Hill a group of men stand on the pavement in their vests; one is holding a jacket in his hand but doesn’t look like he has any intention of putting it on. This is usually a bad sign when the temperature is hovering not far above freezing. There’s an angry air mingling with the exhaust fumes and although Nick points out the row of terraced houses that now forms a conservation area, my instinct is to push on rather than stand taking tourist snaps. The traffic coming off the North Circular heading to Wembley is relentless. If the pollution doesn’t get us, whatever is keeping the vest men warm might inspire them to take a closer interest in this pair of gawping wanderers.
We do, however, stop to take in the views: first of the narrow canal feeder hedged in by neatly mown grass verges, then of the Brent with its wild banks of trees and shrubs cutting a broad course through the suburban sprawl. There’s been a bridge here for eons and such is the vibe in the area I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fat troll lurking beneath it.
The River Brent at Neasden
We trudge up Salmon Street in the last of the daylight, feeling the steep ascent of the ‘nose-shaped hill’ that apparently Neasden means in Anglo-Saxon. Nick strides ahead like a Polish infantryman marching towards the River Vistula, or perhaps like an impatient man in his mid-fifties. He stops abruptly to admire a 1960s post-box on top of which some wag has placed a Coke can as some kind of statement of symmetry. Nick used to say that he was developing methods of communicating with objects in the built environment so he could unlock their secrets. Reinforced-concrete posts were usual
ly his favourite inanimate conversation partners. I assumed he was chewing the cud with the post-box but he tells me he was just admiring the design. Further along there is a 1920s junction box with chipped blue paint – Salmon Street seems to be an outdoor museum of 20th-century public-utility architecture.
Nick issues the terse instruction that we need to move on and then powers off once more as I’m still fiddling with the contents of my bag. From Salmon Street we turn into another Roman road, Fryent Way, which becomes Honey Pot Lane, and you do have to wonder whether the Romans needed so many roads given that they only had chariots and a relatively small population. There was already the Edgware Road and the track that leads from Hanwell to Brockley Hill heading north. They would have got on famously with the authors of the County of London Plan.
We turn off the pavement to urinate in the trees near the sign announcing the new name given to the site – the banal-sounding Fryent Country Park. Uxendon Hill sounds far more exotic and less like the product of an uninspired brainstorm of the local government development agency. We trade our favourite piss stories. Nick easily trumps my tale of needing a wee on a twenty-hour non-stop bus journey across Sumatra with his epic four days without passing water when he was locked up on remand in Brixton with some vicious-looking squaddies. He’s led a colourful life and reels off the crimes he was banged up for in his early twenties that sound like they’ve come straight from the Beano.
We plod on in the dusk through the ankle-deep, wet London clay that tops the hill covered by denuded spindly birch trees. The rooks and crows are making a hell of a racket and a woodpecker is enthusiastically nutting a tree. A half moon shines brightly over the white stone obelisk trig point that appears like a pagan monument. It’s a site of worship for that curious breed – the map addicts. Humphry Repton’s 18th-century pond absorbs the moonlight, adding to the mystical feel. This should also draw adherents to that greatest of British cults – the gardeners. Repton was one of the key landscapers who created the idea of the English garden. I have visions of Alan Titchmarsh and Diarmuid Gavin turning up later to dance naked around the water before offering up sacrificial copies of their latest garden-make-over books. Before us is the orange glow of the mother English temple – Wembley Stadium.