This Other London

by John Rogers

  The wassailers arrive from Hackney Downs, a procession of about a dozen people, mostly women, some pushing bikes loaded with provisions for the picnic at the end of the walk. There is some debate about which tree to wassail; tradition dictates that it should be the King Tree but this is Hackney so we gather around the Queen Apple Tree. The Wassail is a form of fertility ritual once performed in rural communities to sing and drink to the fruit trees to ensure a good harvest, wassail being Anglo-Saxon for ‘be well’.

  Song sheets are handed out and we all gather around the wooden wassail cup containing cider. Toast is dipped in the cider and hung symbolically from coloured ribbons on the boughs of the apple tree to remind it of last year’s fruit and as a gift ‘for the robin’, otherwise known as the ‘Orchard God’. This is carried out with enthusiasm and good cheer, helped by the passing round of hot mulled cider and spiced rum. The onward march of the technological revolution into the digital age hasn’t dampened our tendency to believe in the mystical. The more gadgets and information we have grafted on to our brains just increases the urge to seek out visceral and communal experiences – it’s just a shame it has to involve singing. Why do these local customs always involve standing in a circle singing your heart out – or in my case mumbling into my scarf?

  The Tree Musketeers have been practising and are in fine voice as they launch into the Apple Tree Wassail – ‘Old apple tree, we’ll wassail thee.’ The singing is hearty and mellifluous for such a cold, damp day. It ends with loud cheers of ‘Wassail! Wassail!’ to scare away the evil spirits and awaken the slumbering, benevolent orchard-god. The libation is poured onto the ground around the roots and a good harvest is assured. The flask of delicious mulled cider is on its rounds again in the company of the spiced rum and you can see how this would have been an excuse for a Twelfth Night end-of-Christmas piss-up when it was carried out around the village orchards at dusk. The farmer would have fired his shotgun in the air with the ‘wassails’ to make sure the evil spirits were banished. In Clapton that happens all year round.

  As the circle around the apple tree breaks up for the walk to Springfield Park Community Orchard I notice Katy Andrews amongst the group. I try to ask her what she thinks about the state of Leyton Marsh but she gets on her bike, shouting back that we can talk about it at Springfield.

  The group moves along the towpath past the new apartment blocks that are another phase in the gentrification of Clapton. It’s an ambitious act to take an area up-market that was best known for its ‘Murder Mile’. But the evidence is there on the riverbank, with the wax jackets and designer jeans tucked into the expensive wellies of clear-skinned people walking bijou dogs.

  We cross Kings Bridge, spanning what was once the boundary between the counties of Middlesex and Essex, to Sandy Lane that runs along the edge of Leyton Marshes. Before the Norman Conquest this crossing would also have taken you from the land of the Saxons on the Middlesex side to that of the Viking Danelaw in Essex. Now it merely separates the London Boroughs of Hackney and Waltham Forest.

  Looking east over the windswept marshes is almost to look back in time – if you could screen out the pylons. The Lee Valley Regional Park recently re-introduced a herd of grazing cattle to maintain the natural heritage of the grasslands. The authority talks of how this is ‘a landform which is little changed since the glaciers retreated north many thousands of years ago’. This is also part of the Lammas Lands.

  The other side of the Lea Navigation is a more recognizable 20th-century vista of council blocks wedged tightly together on the slopes rising up to Clapton Common. The Anchor and Hope pub perches on the towpath with a barge pulled up outside. It has seen many of the changes from the industrial working river to the leisure zone/amenity space it has become. I ask the lady walking beside me pushing a heavy bike bearing the picnic provisions what it’s like. She ruefully notes that it is ‘reflective of the area it serves’. I check that this means a crossover between estate geezers and the designer wellie mob, and she nods with a smile.

  We are called to stop beneath the brick arches of a railway bridge where aviation pioneer A. V. Roe built Britain’s first working aeroplane. The fragile-looking wooden-framed triplane was pushed out onto Walthamstow Marshes and in July 1909 Roe became the first Englishman to fly in an English-made machine. This historic event was described by Roe’s assistant, Mr Howard-Flanders, as ‘not much of a flight, just a hop with a minor crash’. Only ten years later they were flying from Hounslow Heath to Australia, in some cases still hopping and crashing but over longer distances.

  Our tribute to Roe is to sing ‘Here We Come a-Wassailing’ gathered in his railway arch, but chosen for its acoustics rather than the historical resonance. ‘Bud and blossom, bud and blossom, bud and bloom and bear/So we may have plenty of cider all next year.’ Again the singing is tuneful, reverberating around the arch – aside from my low-droning monotone sounding more like a tribute to Roe’s broken propellers.

  Over in Springfield Park we gather round a tall old pear tree, the oldest fruit tree in the park we are told. More revellers are waiting. It’s now closer to the dusk of tradition. A rook ‘waaarks’ loudly in a nearby tree as toast dipped in cider is hung on to the branches once more. A dog cheekily takes a drink from the wassail bowl and we again run through the repertoire of songs, swelled to a hearty rustic choir of thirty or so. The mulled cider and rum are passed around, hitting the spot. Springfield Park has the added pagan significance of being a place of ‘springs’, as its name suggests.

  The final wassails go up into the freezing air, then Katy stands forward to announce another wassailing later in the evening leading off from the Nags Head in Walthamstow. I’m all wassailed out and leave the party to their picnic under the bandstand with the sap rising in the fruit trees.

  Standing on the sixth bridge of the day, I look north along the Lea weighing up my options. This needs to be a circular walk for both symbolic and practical reasons – to form an alternative beating of the bounds but also to take me back to my front door on foot. One option is to push on along the riverbank and cross the Lea at Ferry Lane where Mark Duggan was gunned down by police, triggering the riots of 2011. The sun is cresting the hill behind the trees towards where mythology tells us Queen Boudicca set up camp near Copped Hall from where she variously either marched on London or made her last stand. I’ve no intention of making my last stand further up the Lea Valley; this cold could well seize my Homerton-knee despite my long-johns and so I march onwards to Walthamstow.

  The bridge leads into Springfield Marina where the Coppermill Stream forms a small basin as it empties into the Lea. Mallards glide over a carpet of apple-green algae and reggae plays from one of the moored houseboats. The Coppermill is one of the Lea’s main tributaries, being part of a designated Site of Metropolitan Importance. Three varieties of reeds grow in tall wands from banks that also sprout willows, hawthorn, elder and Russian comfrey. A flock of birds whirls into the air.

  The stream takes its name from the mill that had been here prior to the time it was mentioned in the Domesday Book. Before copper it produced linseed oil; now it is Gate 4 of the Lea Valley Reservoirs with its grand Italianate tower worthy of the Renaissance towns of Emilia-Romagna that inspired its architecture. The reservoirs form an immense body of water over seven miles long. The millions of gallons from this network of twelve reservoirs are heading straight towards where I’m standing outside the gates of the Coppermill Advanced Water Treatment Works. Here the murky aqua will be cleaned up and pumped out into the bathrooms and kitchens of London. It’s an awesome location even though the buildings of the Treatment Works look like a regional tax office. What they do behind the green wire fence separates us from the age of cholera and typhoid.

  The journey along Coppermill Lane into Walthamstow High Street mirrors the transition of Walthamstow from rural hamlet into busy market town absorbed into the railway-sponsored expansion of London. The market stretches the length of the High Street and lays claim to bein
g the longest open-air street market in Europe. As it isn’t trading today people stroll down the empty boulevard like an Italian Sunday-evening passegiatta past Argos, Superdrug and the 99p shop. Ricco’s elaborate coffee lounge with its velvet chairs and gilt mirrors is full with a well-dressed crowd.

  I’ve continued my habit of missing lunch. The Riverside Café had been packed and all I’ve had to eat is a couple of the Bahlsen biscuits bought at Dennis’s shop. The locally listed L. Manze’s Pie and Mash Shop is closed – pie and mash would have been perfect for a day like this. A plaque on the shop front tells the story of how the Manze family emigrated from Ravello in Italy in 1878 before building their pie and mash empire. This is an off-shoot, established by one of the brothers, Luigi, who opened it in 1929. Such a core London tradition perpetuated by Italian immigrants. I took my half-Italian, half-Australian wife to the Manze’s in Chapel Market when we first moved to London together. She politely declined the liquor and quietly chomped through her solitary dollop of mash and one pie – and never went back again.

  My rumbling belly is taunted by the smell of roast meat from the Lord Palmerston pub on Forest Road but I’ve resolved to get to the William Morris Gallery for a first look before it closes. I’m tired and hungry climbing the rise with the dark ridge of Epping Forest ahead. I pass Pumps Gym – ‘Walthamstow’s Premier Hardcore Gym’ boasts a sign propped up against the wall behind a stack of broken cardboard boxes and a three-legged armchair.

  With the gallery in sight forty minutes before closing time I bump into the lady on her bike from the wassail; she urges me on to the gallery by telling me that there’s a good café there.

  The William Morris Gallery occupies the childhood home of the eponymous artist, designer and writer. It’s a stately Georgian half-mansion set in landscaped grounds. Morris was a prolific and passionate polemicist as well as a designer of lovely wallpaper. Quotes from his works are painted on the walls. ‘I do not want art for the few, any more than education for the few, or freedom for a few.’ It’s a sentiment that I imagine Bob would heartily endorse. As a trustee of the Tate Gallery he has tirelessly campaigned for the democratization of art and against the coalition government’s cuts to arts education that he fears will return us to the days of art schools as establishments of the elite few who can afford the escalating fees. Bob was asked to contribute a piece of work to the gallery. Sensing a certain paradox in Morris’s socialist beliefs and his multimillion-pound bespoke interior design and furniture company, Bob spelt out his reservations about Morris in one of his distinctive colourful text paintings.

  WILLIAM MORRIS TOGETHER WITH PUGIN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE APPAULING LACK OF TASTE OF THE ENGLISH.

  EVERYONE COVERTS GASTLY PEROCHIAL VICTORIAN HOVELS AND THEN DECORATES THEM WITH SICKLY FLORAL WALLPAPER.

  LIKE MOST SOCIALISTS MORRIS WAS DELUSIONAL. HE THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS A WORKING MAN WHILST EMPLOYING PEOPLE TO SLAVE FOR HIM METICULOUSLY HAND CRAFTING HIS RUBBISHY KITSH.

  IF PUGIN AND MORRIS HAD NOT LIVED WE WOULD ALL LIVE IN DECENT ACCOMODATION IN UP TO DATE MODERN CITIES LIKE PEOPLE DO IN EUROPE.

  DAMN BOTH OF THEM.

  Morris’s most enduring legacy does seem to be his floral designs printed onto wallpaper and gift-shop notebooks rather than the Utopian socialism he discovered later in life after the failure of his marriage. Before he decided to emancipate the working classes his principal mission was to bring what he saw as beauty into dowdy, cluttered Victorian homes – a crusade against poor taste rather than inequality and injustice. It’s a bit like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen joining the Workers Revolutionary Party following a midlife crisis.

  The gallery shows us how Morris was an enthusiastic medievalist who swanned around in plate armour and chain mail posing for paintings by his Pre-Raphaelite chums whilst dreaming of an Arcadian past. Wandering around the exhibits, from the lush baronial interiors he created for the wealthy – his Romantic desire for an age of chivalry – to the radical slogans painted on the walls, Morris’s credo comes across as a peculiarly English form of poetic radicalism in which the revolution not only promises liberation for the oppressed but really nice soft furnishings as well. Was there something about growing up in 19th-century Walthamstow that inspired this medievalist socialism that owed more to the Icelandic sagas that he translated than the works of Karl Marx? I ponder this as I buy a copy of his seminal work, News from Nowhere, and a roll of signature Morris print gift wrap to wallpaper the inside of my shed door.

  As I emerge into the early-evening dark on Forest Road the bells toll from the illuminated clock tower of Walthamstow Town Hall, an imposing 1930s Portland stone structure. It reminds me of Mussolini’s fascist architecture in Rome, much of which was built at the same time that Philip Hepworth designed the Town Hall. Hepworth had been on a scholarship at the British School in Rome before Mussolini came to power. The sculptor he commissioned to carve figures into the building, John Francis Kavanagh, had also been at the British School in Rome in the early 1930s. And by a spooky coincidence Bob and Roberta Smith won a scholarship to study there in the 1980s. Kavanagh’s sculptures stand in the car park round the back of the Town Hall above loudly humming extractor fans – the angular modernist figures representing ‘Work, Education, Fellowship, Motherhood, and Recreation’ looking northwards over Chestnuts Fields.

  I sit beside the oval fountain that magnifies the majesty of the setting. A young couple take photos of themselves posing in front of the plumes of water. The girl, tall and blonde, is wearing a tight black outfit. There must have been something in that mulled cider, because for a moment with my short-sightedness and the refraction caused by the water droplets she is Anita Ekberg in the famous scene from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in which she wades into the waters of the Fontana di Trevi.

  Adjacent is the Assembly Hall, built in the same style. Engraved high above the entrance is the inscription ‘FELLOWSHIP IS LIFE AND LACK OF FELLOWSHIP IS DEATH’ – that’s quite an intense message to absorb on your way in to a performance by the Forest Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s taken from William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, his ghost still haunting the area.

  The venue has played host to more seminal players in British musical history than the Forest Philharmonic. Ian Bourn told me that in the 1970s Pink Floyd had played there, and in June 1976 he went to a triple bill of the Sex Pistols, Ian Dury and the Kilburns, and the Stranglers, which drew such a small audience that Ian Dury refused to perform – Walthamstow wasn’t ready for punk, it was still hooked on coiffed guitar heroes and keyboard solos. The gig was a kind of homecoming for Dury. He studied at Walthamstow Art College just a Johnny Rotten spit away next door on Forest Road, where he was taught by legendary pop artist Peter Blake, famous for his Sgt. Pepper album cover.

  I lumber on along Shernhall Street, one of Walthamstow’s oldest roads, past more pampas grass (there had also been some in Coppermill Lane) and drop down to Church End, the centre of what must be the most unlikely village in England. Say ‘Walthamstow’ and people will conjure up images of boy band East 17, the dog track used in thousands of mockney gangster movies and TV shows, and news reports of arrested terror suspects (the cognoscenti may associate it with Turner Prize-winning ‘Tranny Potter’ Grayson Perry who has his studio in the area). St Mary’s Church, with the 15th-century timber-framed ‘Ancient House’ opposite, the quaint path leading past the 18th-century almshouses to the Vestry House built in 1730, is as incongruous to the popular idea of Walthamstow as finding a KFC at Buckingham Palace. It would be perfect for an episode of Midsomer Murders or another unnecessary Jane Austen dramatization.

  In keeping with village tradition there is a pub at the heart of communal life. The Nags Head is rammed and a jazz band is ‘ppptoopping’ away in one corner. I manage to push through to the bar and get a pint of ale. As I turn, my arm is grabbed and I’m exhorted to ‘toast in Anglo-Saxon’ – it’s Katy Andrews. I’m perplexed. ‘Wassail,’ she says, ‘it’s a toast.’ The wassailers that had meant to leave at 4 p
.m. are still sitting in another room munching on pizza at six o’clock. It’s a young, cool, hipsterish crowd in the Nags Head that you can’t imagine toasting fruit trees in an old language on a biting cold evening. Not when there’s a jazz band playing.

  Katy is just starting to tell me what she thinks of the state of the marshes after the Olympics when the Walthamstow wassailers head out of the door. She gathers up her bags and dashes off after them.

  A waitress passes carrying an obscenely large calzone that reeks of garlic – a reminder that I still haven’t eaten. It provokes an uncomfortable memory from the time I lived in Modena, Italy, working as an English teacher, when I caused uproar in my local bar while ordering a calzone. I accidentally omitted the letter ‘l’, proudly and confidently ordering a ‘cazzone’. There were astonished belly laughs all round, coffee was spluttered across tables, knees were slapped, ribs ached. ‘Can you say that again please?’ the barman managed to ask through his sniggering. Adopting the principle that they would understand me if I just spoke louder I said again in a raised voice, ‘Vorrei un cazzone, per favore.’ The laughs were even louder this time. I had politely ordered a ‘big dick’. I’d go hungry for a bit longer. I wasn’t going to take any risks that the waitress in the Nags Head spoke Italian.