This Other London

by John Rogers

  Then the Thatcher Tory government went on a road-building binge, green-lighting hundreds of schemes. Opposition to the road that would link East London to the M11 motorway resulted in an official inquiry held at Stratford Town Hall. An army of Department of Transport lawyers lined up against a phalanx of some of the country’s most creative minds. Proceedings opened with one of the activists arriving with a carrier bag over his head weighted down with a bunch of keys on each corner. He was thrown out. Ian presented a slide show containing pictures of every tree, house and bush that would be destroyed by the road. His performance/presentation, with accompanying commentary, lasted an entire day. Without the benefit of an expensive legal defence team, delaying tactics were the best weapon they had. Noticing that the judge was being less than attentive when they delivered their evidence, one day the protestors, upon a precise cue, all put on animal masks. The judge looked up and impatiently pointed out that ‘This isn’t a pantomime!’, leading to the inevitable chorus in reply of ‘Oh, yes it is!’ An eighty-year-old lady danced across his desk. This litany of stunts and pranks is dutifully recorded in the official transcripts.

  When this failed, discussions took place over whether to form a microstate called Leytonstonia. A two hundred-year-old grove was occupied and borders erected. Long debates were held over what to use as the official currency. The militant vegans present always seemed to win the argument in favour of using carrots.

  As the streets started to be demolished one by one, a last stand was made at Claremont Road. The bulldozers smashed their way through, obliterating over a thousand houses, and left behind a six-lane highway sitting in a deep cutting that creates a continuous drone of white noise.

  The community was scattered across London and beyond. Some stayed in the area but Leytonstone’s heyday as an artistic hub had been ended by a motorway. Bob’s Leytonstone Centre for Contemporary Art, a shed in his garden not far from the road, continues the legacy of the E11 avant-garde.

  Studying the ‘zincographed’ 1881 O/S map in the local archives at the Vestry House in Walthamstow you can see that where Dennis’s shop is today was once a large pond in open fields fed by the brook. The houses I walk past at the end of Newport Road first appear on the 1894–6 map. But the first settlers came this way in the Neolithic, leaving behind some finely knapped stone implements that were dug out of the fields of Bent’s Farm in the 19th century.

  Turning into a built-up Francis Road, it too came into being some time in the period between the two maps but only with the first few houses and the police station. The Northcote Arms pub had been built along with a mortuary and a sewage works near the end of the stream in Leyton. The suburb that I now walk through had grown out of the fields in the space of ten years. Chicken2Eat is open, as is Pizza on Demand and the Sklep Polski, but the Bengali International Centre is closed, and the shutters are down on most of the other shops and smorgasbord of small businesses.

  An eagerly contested football match is taking place on Leyton Cricket Ground, home to Essex County Cricket Club until the 1930s. Essex beat the Aussies on this ground in 1905 and England played a Test match here when a well-struck six would have landed the ball on the trams passing along Leyton High Road. Herbert Sutcliffe and Percy Holmes would have tonked a few of those in their record-breaking partnership of 555 playing for Yorkshire against Essex in 1932. A home to first-class cricket isn’t necessarily the immediate association people make with Leyton.

  In 2006 Labour Home Secretary John Reid chose the cricket club as the venue when he came to lecture the Muslim community about making sure their children were not being radicalized by extremists. The meeting came to national attention when one local character took objection to Leyton being singled out as the source of radical Islam and told Reid as much from the back of the hall. The media leapt on the ‘heckling of the Home Secretary’ by a supposed ‘well-known Islamic militant’. Nowhere in the acres of news reports did it mention the heritage of the site, nor the role of the Muslim community in keeping it alive as a cricket ground.

  Six years later, those Leyton and Leytonstone kids that the government was so concerned were being groomed for suicide missions were at the heart of the Olympic effort as part of the ebullient and brilliant brigade of volunteers. The biggest terrorist target in the world was in an area the Home Secretary had previously designated as perilous as Baghdad or Kabul, having denounced its people as dangerous radicals. Instead, they acted as perfect hosts to the international community. John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, possibly owes the people of Leyton an apology.

  The area around the cricket ground is the heart of old Leyton. In the early 1700s workers carrying out ‘extensive gardening operations’ in the grounds of Leyton Grange unearthed remains of a substantial Roman building with arched doorways, pavements and polished Egyptian granite. A moated encampment was also discovered in nearby Ruckholts – later famous as the back door to the Olympic Park – that was also identified as having Roman origins. Stone coffins with Roman lettering were dug up in Temple Mills. Some of the old Leyton historians put the pieces together to suggest that this was the Roman station of Durolitum marked on the Antonine Itinerary (a Roman version of an AA Road Atlas of all the roads in the Empire) on the route between London and Chelmsford.

  In his beautiful 1921 Story of Leyton and Leytonstone, W. H. Weston places the Saxon settlement of the Ley-Tun in the area where Church Road cleaves from the High Road. He has visions of folk-moots taking place on a green now built over with shops and housing and that serves as a rat-run through to Lea Bridge Road and Walthamstow. It is one of the least auspicious parts of Leyton, with any former significance long forgotten.

  Evidence of Late Bronze Age occupation dating from the 10th to 9th centuries BC was found during the building of an estate in Oliver Road that splits from Church Road. A field report in London Archaeologist notes ‘a large circular ditched enclosure … Many pits, postholes and other cut features were recorded both inside and outside the enclosure. Possible structures located internally included a roundhouse, a palisaded screen, four-post structures and hearths.’ Evidence of 12,000-year-old Leytonians.

  A map showing the banks of the old River Lea, from The Story of Leyton and Leytonstone by W. H. Weston, 1921

  What deserves to be a cherished part of the borough is apparently not so welcoming in the 21st century. The Waltham Forest Guardian has reported that the estate built on the site is plagued by drug dealers, the houses sprayed with bullets from a drive-by shooting. This hasn’t deterred the building of yet more apartment blocks around Weston’s Roman Durolitum and Saxon Tun as the continuous occupation of Old Leyton advances from the Bronze Age to the Age in which the new structure on the Green looks like a plastic spaceship held together with staples and electrical tape.

  It has taken me an Age to cover a short space of ground. The clock is ticking down till the 1 p.m. meet with the wassailers on Millfields and I’m still not even sure what wassailing is. The sun breaks through on Vicarage Road. There’s a house in one of the roads leading towards Marsh Lane with tall, swaying pampas grass in the front garden, allegedly a sign that the people in the house are swingers. Although I’ve yet to test the veracity of this persistent urban legend by ringing the doorbell in a pair of tight jeans with a bottle of chilled Chablis and a glint in my eye, I have no reason to doubt it. It’s so English to combine gardening and illicit sex.

  Crossing Church Road I’m reminded of an archaeological excavation of my own whilst rummaging around in the Grot Shop on Hainault Road. I unearthed a 1980s Marks & Spencer’s carrier bag full of old photos dating from the 1920s up to the near present – a whole life dumped in a plastic bag and left outside a Leyton junk shop among the mouldering books, broken pushchairs and listing shelves. The pictures that had caught my eye were of a group of young cyclists sitting on their bikes outside ‘Graystone’s Cycle and Radio Engineers’, Church Road. It looks like summer in one photo taken directly outside the shop; they have their arms around e
ach other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera. Another is taken in winter in the street beside the shop; they are wrapped up in warm coats and gloves astride their bikes in a line appearing to be heading out on a ride. They seem to be a cycling club made up equally of men and women, none of them looking much above 20 years old. The date on the back is 1938. On the wall behind them plastered with fly-posters a newspaper headline reads ‘HANGED BY HIS OWN FATHER’.

  They look such a jolly bunch – you wonder if they were worried about the events in Europe. At the beginning of 1938 the government announced that all British schoolchildren would be issued with gas masks. Maybe it never crossed their minds – they were too busy flirting and showing off, discussing the best route to take through Epping Forest.

  Capworth Street, then and now

  What happened to this happy bunch during the war? The owner of the photos served in the navy and collected snaps of the ports around the Mediterranean – Malta, Alexandria and Nathanya Leave Camp in Palestine, November 1945, where he took a photo of a band called WE THREE sitting outside tents holding their instruments – a desert-skiffle combo rocking the casbah.

  Graystone’s has gone, converted into a house. The street beside seems little changed – although a large group of cyclists posing for a photo in the middle of the road would soon be shunted out of the way by an aggressively driven customized car. Crossing Church Road there are no cyclists, just a No. 58 bus to Walthamstow.

  There was also a photo of a dog standing on Marsh Lane Fields with a full gasometer behind, taken in 1953, The Goon Show on the radio in the front rooms nearby. As I walk to where the photo would have been taken 60 years ago my stride is broken by a large, bright sign announcing the council’s plans for Marsh Lane and Ive Farm Fields that include renaming them – Leyton Jubilee Park. ‘The name has been chosen to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee’ –pointing out the blindingly bloody obvious then mutates into the sneeringly patronizing – ‘an event hundreds of you celebrated with street parties of your own.’ All I remember about the Diamond Jubilee was the rain. I took Ollie to watch the flotilla on the Thames and got soaked to the skin. However, a couple of cancelled kerbside cake binges seem to have been taken by Waltham Forest Council as a mandate to strip this patch of ancient common land of any local distinctiveness and lumber it with a moniker that will have already been foisted on countless parks and open-air dog toilets the length and breadth of Britain, to add to the profusion of mind-numbingly banal Millennium Parks everywhere from Landkey to Market Harborough. But that’s OK because at least it won’t get confused with the wildly different name of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, just a drop-kicked obsequious councillor away.

  Marsh Lane

  As I’m absorbing this quango’d travesty local historian David Boote ambles over the bridge across the Dagenham Brook – which seems both appropriate and fortuitous, as what David doesn’t know about the area isn’t worth knowing. David has written numerous publications, including booklets such as Cinema in Leyton and Leytonstone, and When Leyton Was a Village.

  We stand chatting outside the Eton Manor Athletics Club. David has just been surveying the state of the post-Olympic marshes and seems moderately satisfied that things have been put back as they should be, but retains a note of healthy scepticism. Three runners jog up the lane and invite us into the clubhouse for tea. They are preparing to celebrate the centenary of Eton Manor Athletics Club in 2013. I tell them I have to get a move on to go wassailing, pronouncing it phonetically, ‘way-sailing’. All four people correct my pronunciation in unison: ‘woy-sailing’, they declaim. ‘I thought your Anglo-Saxon would have been better than that, John,’ says David, and heads into the clubhouse.

  There is a sign above the door of the Eton Manor cottage commemorating the Lammas Day protests of 1892 when thousands of people from Leyton descended on the marshes to protect their ancient commoners’ rights. The East London Waterworks had dared to fence off land that had been drained by Alfred the Great and given to the local people (again Alfred obviously didn’t do any of the backbreaking labour himself but graciously granted permission and then took all the credit). The fences were pulled down and the land put into the protection of the Borough of Leyton ‘for all time’.

  When I returned here in winter 2006 to join the protest against yet another encroachment on the common land – this time by the Olympic Delivery Agency – there was only a score of people and no riots. We walked around the threatened area followed by a BBC documentary crew and stood in a circle singing the Lammas Land Song:

  The ground on which we stand

  We will not be robbed while there’s a ballot in this land

  This is the land of the people.

  The lyrics were a bit optimistic. It was the councillors we had elected with our ballot who had enthusiastically offered up a portion of the fields to the ODA, whereas in 1892 it was the council leaders who had torn the fences down.

  With the furore largely behind us the flora has started to claim the green metal fencing around the allotments that had caused such uproar. The grazing horses that gave this place such a bucolic feel seem to have been moved but otherwise it wasn’t the horror-show we’d feared. In summer the boys had run through chest-high, swaying grasses. Dragonflies darted between purple loosestrife, yarrow, black horehound and burdock. They looked for caterpillars on the stems of marsh ragwort. Elderberry trees were pregnant with ripe fruit. Now starlings arced through the sky, gathering for migration to Siberia. Hopefully, there is a wildness inherent in this soil that refuses to be tamed by ambitious bureaucrats.

  I again lose my bearings on the pitch and put beside the large network of Eurostar railway sidings over the road from Marsh Lane. It’s probably just as well that I’ve retired from trekking into rainforests and climbing volcanoes if I can’t find my way across a flat, featureless nine-hole golf course. The cold weather has left the course to the dog-walkers. A path wraps around the legs of the electricity pylons, objects too fantastic to be mere functionaries in the urban infrastructure. As works of art they shame Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park, which is visible on the horizon from this vantage point looking south across the raised white staples of goalposts pinning down the turf on Hackney Marshes. It could have been worse – Antony Gormley modestly proposed a 390-foot steel cast of himself that would have stood among the vista of tower blocks like an impotent giant.

  Finches flit through the brambles climbing the banks of the River Lea that benignly trundles beneath the Friends Bridge. At the time of the great rivers, long ago BC, the eastern bank of the river reached beyond Leyton High Road, submerging land occupied by Leyton Orient, the grand old Town Hall and thousands of homes. It was a mighty watercourse that flowed across the land-bridge connecting Britain to mainland Europe, joining a vast network of rivers. Weston wrote that by comparison the modern Lea is ‘a puny rivulet’.

  I find myself stranded on a peninsula formed by the Hackney Cut branching off on the other side towards Docklands. It’s an area described by a Lee Valley Regional Park leaflet as being of ‘swampy scrub communities’ with ‘natural glades providing an ideal habitat for the resident colony of speckled wood butterflies’ – and reed warblers. A moss-covered concrete embankment lurks beneath the undergrowth like an ancient relic. There’s the temptation to brush aside the moss looking for an inscription. It would read ‘MIDDLESEX FILTER BEDS’.

  A raised concrete path passes over the reed beds in their bleached-out winter state. The sluice gate cranks and sand trolleys have been preserved like religious artefacts. The stillness in the air adds to the sense of reverence as the path takes you up a set of steps to a large central dais sitting prominently in a clearing of tall, bare, spindly trees. The grooves cut into the face of the rotunda are given green highlights by the moss feeding into a smaller central circle. To somebody from a remote tribe unable to read the Lee Valley Regional Park interpretation boards this site has all the signifiers of an important temple complex from an anci
ent civilization. There are even the charred remains of a fire that had been lit directly in the centre of the circle as if part of some kind of esoteric ceremony.

  Diagram of the Middlesex Filter Beds

  It’s an incredibly powerful site, as mysterious as anything I saw in South East Asia or India. It deserves an annual ritual like the floating of candles on the waters of the ruined Thai capital of Sukhothai during the Loi Krathong festival. The celebration of this Victorian monument would have to involve the downing of copious quantities of cheap gin whilst performing some kind of symbolic vanquishing of the cholera epidemics that these water treatment works were built to combat. I settle for sucking on a Murray Mint whilst keeping an eye out for kingfishers – and I have a real ancient rite to attend with the Wassail.

  The Hackney Cut is lined with brightly coloured residential barges. This off-shoot of the River Lea was made to serve the industrial area that ran along its banks down to its confluence with the Thames. Industry has now largely given way to amenity. Cyclists buzz along the towpaths built for horses to draw working barges to and from the timber yards.

  The Millfields Community Orchard sits in the shadow of an old coal-fired power station, now a throbbing electricity substation. This isn’t one of the ornate substations that seem to proliferate around the area, such as the one I had passed in Leyton built from large white blocks making it look like an Egyptian tomb. I became so seduced by these curious buildings that I contacted London Electricity with the proposal for a photographic project mapping them, prosaically titled ‘Electricity Substations of East London’. Surprisingly, they replied with helpful information about where to locate more detailed notes on their architecture. There were clearly great minds at work in the construction of these nodal points in the urban grid, built at a time when the electric age was an exciting new era giving birth to the modern tube network, the light bulb, radio and television. The Lea Valley was at the very heart of this ‘technological revolution’, from the invention of plastics, the first light bulbs (long before Thomas Edison got in on the act), Thorn’s radio components, to the first television broadcast from Alexandra Palace. The modern world crackled into life along this strip of water. It’s an interesting place to witness the revival of an archaic rural tradition.