This Other London

by John Rogers

  The footprint left on the ground by the temporary police station has made the boggy land even wetter than usual after the recent rainy weather. A lake has formed on the fairground where the Easter Fair should have been but which passed us by this year. Historically, large crowds have thronged to the Flats from all across East London to visit the circuses and fairs. I carried Joe over here on my shoulders to his very first trip to the circus – he loved it; my first experience of the circus scared the living daylights out of me. He couldn’t get enough of it – or the candy floss, chips, fizzy drinks and glowing swords.

  The boys get excited by the deep drainage ditches, thinking they had something to do with the POW camp. ‘Leap of faith,’ shouts Joe as he jumps across. Ollie walks over via a log bridge.

  The acid grasses provide a habitat for rare ground-nesting skylarks. ‘Help Save Our Skylarks’ signs are posted on gateposts. We hear birdsong. Ollie scans the skyline once more with the binoculars.

  We make our way to the H-shaped metal frames that tethered barrage balloons to the ground. Joe called them ‘suicidal balloons’ when I told him some were designed to explode when they tagged low-flying aircraft. There were also anti-aircraft gun emplacements hidden in the wooded fringes. On a previous walk we stumbled on the concrete foundations buried beneath the undergrowth. Joe stops to inspect a ditch and calls Ollie over to him. They emerge carrying a large lump of rusting iron snapped into a jagged triangle. A real archaeological discovery – a possible chunk of Second World War infrastructure. Joe insists that we bring it on the walk with us but it weighs a tonne. ‘I’ll carry it all the way,’ says Joe, but only makes it to the next circle of trees where we leave it hidden in the roots of a fallen tree.

  There’s a howling wind that makes Heidi and Ollie want to get to shelter. I’d promised them a slap-up lunch at the petrol station on Aldersbrook Road in true Alan Partridge style. It has tables and chairs, a hot-food counter and Costa Coffee. I made the boys watch two episodes of Partridge in return for watching a South Park video – they were not overly impressed. It was a major blow to my parenting.

  The petrol station replaced Aldersbrook Farm although cattle were grazed on the Flats until the BSE outbreak in the mid 1990s. Aldersbrook is an area not only between places but stuck in time. An Edwardian development built in a rapid burst between 1900 and 1910, it is wedged in between Wanstead Flats, Wanstead Park and the huge necropolis of the City of London Cemetery. Most shocking of all, there’s no pub – just a small row of shops with an off-licence, barber’s, chip shop, newsagent and the Hitchcockian Courtney Hotel. You’d have to cross the Flats to the Golden Fleece on Capel Road if you fancied a pint. Consequently, there’s a thriving bowls club and a popular amateur dramatics society that puts on performances in the church hall. Kids play unattended. It’s the lost suburb where the locals have continued old habits in isolation, free of the influences of modern life like an isolated expat community in a colonial backwater.

  Wanstead Flats in 1908, from Epping Forest by Edward North Buxton, 1923

  It’s held up as being a model Edwardian suburb – part of the expansion of London into the surrounding countryside. Gone are the Italianate and Gothic influences of the Victorian houses. Aldersbrook embraced the ‘vernacular revival’ with wooden frames around pointed gables and stained glass in the front doors. It always seems like a happy place.

  When I have pangs for a quieter life but ones tempered by the terror of leaving the magic spell cast by the red ring of the boundary of Greater London, I come over to Aldersbrook and daydream. When gritty social-realist Mike Leigh shot a film here, Another Year, it turned out to be one of his most wistful, light-hearted productions so far. But what kind of life could you have without a local pub? The Courtney Hotel doesn’t even have a bar. You’d end up sitting on a bench with cans of beer by the Alexandra Lake throwing crisps for the ducks and the geese.

  Fuelled up on pasties, Pepsi and chicken-flavoured crisps we move on down Park Road to the banks of the Heronry Pond in Wanstead Park. William Addison, one of the chroniclers of the history of Epping Forest, mooted the idea that the heronry, which still has actual live herons bingeing on fish, was established in the 16th century by the Heron family who owned the estate. Sir John Heron had been Treasurer to the Household of Henry VIII – a precarious position that caught up with his devout Catholic son, who had his head lopped off for not recognizing the king as head of the Church. The herons are in good health, however.

  Heidi is completely disorientated, unable to understand how we’ve arrived at a point that we usually approach via Bush Wood and the Shoulder of Mutton Pond. The boys wave at the ducks and point out a bench that has been hewn from a fallen tree. The distractions are working.

  Water now forms a major part of the landscaping of the park. Shoulder of Mutton, Heronry and Perch ponds act as an aquatic boundary to the edge of what remains of Wanstead House. A neoclassical tea hut shimmers across the long stretch of water, although the food and drink on offer is quintessential park fayre – strong tea, sticky pastries, ice cream, cheese and cucumber sandwiches. We walk along the avenue of limes to the only surviving building of the house – the Temple. Mary Tudor received Princess Elizabeth here on her way to be crowned in London. A thousand other sycophants who’d opposed her taking the throne rushed out to kiss some royal butt, hoping to save their necks. Liz came back as queen when the Earl of Leicester owned the house and spent a week wandering the grounds not having sex. The estate passed through the hands of various movers and shakers in the post-Elizabethan world, like Alan Sugar flogging an Essex mansion to Simon Cowell who gives it to somebody at ITV who gifts it to a rising star rent-free who is then found dead in a pool. There’s something sordid and borderline criminal in the way that the estate was handed around, not so far away from the Ill Manors movie made in the area, written and directed by Forest Gate’s pop superstar Plan B. The hoodlums didn’t haunt the tower blocks of Manor Park but ingratiated themselves into royal circles till the Monarch Mob Boss carted them off to the Tower, Tyburn or exile. The monarchy must be the world’s most successful Mafia clan, looking at the changing fortunes of Wanstead Park.

  It eventually fell into the hands of Josiah Child. He was Governor of the East India Company, a private corporation that employed a powerful mercenary army and ruled a large chunk of India. One of its primary commodities was opium. Child lavished money on his Wanstead estate in the manner you’d expect of the head of an international drug cartel and laid out the fabulous grounds that we walk over today. The house that one of his descendants planned to be ‘a palatial mansion that would be to the east of London what Hampton Court was to the west’ was ultimately sold off as building material.

  Down in the trees around the lake that surrounds Rook Island Heidi exclaims, ‘What’s that?’ Through the fingers of new growth we can see the Grotto, the other palpable remains of Wanstead House. Film-maker Ian Bourn told me how he’d taken acid over here one day and seen little men at work in its alcoves. Jimi Hendrix is said to have written the LSD hymn ‘Purple Haze’ in the Upper Cut Club on the other side of the Flats in Forest Gate – had he also dropped a tab and walked this way like Ian?

  The Grotto in Wanstead Park

  ‘It’s like something from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ says the clean-living Heidi. She brilliantly played Puck in a production in Sydney with Greta Scacchi as Titania. We all gang up on her to reprise the role but she claims modesty and offers Joe a chicken sandwich, which he takes.

  The sylvan scene inspires me to take out my pruning knife and attempt to make the boys (blunt) swords. I find a suitably straight young branch broken on the ground but I almost slice my thumb off with the first two slashes to shave the bark. Heidi preaches caution and I have to reluctantly concede to my sons that woodcraft clearly isn’t a hereditary trait.

  Ollie decides to start teasing Joe on the fictional basis that Joe likes One Direction. This is a terrible insult to lay upon a seven-year-old boy, second only to d
eclaring that they are a ‘Belieber’. It’s just as well I failed to hack out some swords or there’d be a battle royale. Joe hits back with language that defies his tender age, Brian Jones haircut and slight lisp. Suddenly the walk has turned into an episode of South Park. I pull the Cartman, Stan and Kenny effigies from my pocket in an attempt to broker a peace. The boys play out their row with the characters – it ends, inevitably, with Kenny dying. ‘You killed Kenny, you bastard,’ says Stan in the hands of Ollie. They laugh and Ollie compliments Joe on the quality of his Cartman impression.

  We cross a bridge partly covered in weeds into a debatable territory of half-growth and fly-tipping. Joe finds moss-covered bricks under the leaves. I show him the 1950s Geographia Atlas marked with an isolation hospital nearby where they treated people suffering from diphtheria and scarlet fever. There was also the Redbridge Borough Nuclear Shelter in the vicinity and a sewage farm. Lots of reasons to leave the rubble undisturbed.

  Olly has flopped down on the grass beside the River Roding. Distant towers are visible through the trees. ‘There’s Ilford, Ollie,’ I say, to inspire him onwards.

  A footbridge takes us over the North Circular, at night a modern monster marvel of sodium lights and tail beams. The first walk of these journeys started by crossing the North Circular in the west at Gunnersbury and by chance the ending is reached by crossing it in the east.

  The boys are tiring now, their dedication to the mission of delivering the totem figures of Kenny, Cartman and Stan to our parallel South Park the only thing keeping them going. That and the promise of more sugary treats along the way, followed by pizza and ice cream at home.

  We make our way through Cranbrook Park, classic outer-London suburbia of bow-fronted houses interspersed with Edwardian villas and post-war semis. Where the more affluent commuters snapped up the large houses of Aldersbrook, Ilford and its outliers became home to people on more modest incomes. In both cases the very idea of suburban living was seen at the time as an imitation of the habits of the wealthy city merchants of the past, with their mansions in the peripheral countryside. Enclaves such as Cranbrook Park would have been respectable, optimistic places when they were built.

  The community noticeboard in Belgrave Road is simply titled ‘Area Committee 7’, which has an Orwellian tone in its administrative bluntness. A police notice hints at how the optimism of Cranbrook Park hasn’t made it into the 21st century. Ollie reads it out. ‘Operation Hawk. Preying on Drug Dealers.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ they both ask.

  I explain how the hawk is a bird of prey and a deadly predator with excellent vision that swoops out of the sky onto its ‘prey’.

  ‘But they’re not hawks, they’re police,’ says Ollie.

  ‘Why don’t they just arrest them? Why do they have to pretend to be hawks?’ asks Joe.

  This is one of many occasions when I’m at a loss to explain the nonsense of the adult world.

  A murder in Belgrave Road in 1922 became one of the most notorious crimes of the era. It opened up a debate about the changing morality of youth and the nature of this new aspirant commuter class. It was also a case that forever stayed in the mind of Alfred Hitchcock and might have influenced the sinister tone of his movies and fixation with women in peril.

  Late in the evening on 3 October 1922 Edith Thompson and her husband Percy were coming home from seeing a play in the West End when a man jumped out from behind a bush and attacked Percy, ultimately fatally stabbing him. The man turned out to be twenty-year-old Frederick Bywaters, a merchant seaman who’d previously had an affair with Edith. After police found a stash of detailed love letters exchanged by the couple Edith was arrested and charged with the murder, along with Bywaters.

  The story of murder, adultery and the fact that Bywaters was much younger than Mrs Thompson meant it was ripe for the tabloids, who had a field day. When they were both found guilty of murder and sentenced to death a popular campaign was launched to have Thompson pardoned. Her conviction had been built largely on a series of moral judgements and assumptions. She had been condemned by her lurid love letters to her passionate younger man, who had wooed her with tales of adventures overseas and his good looks. Bywaters constantly denied Edith had any knowledge of his plans to attack Percy Thompson. Her appeal was unsuccessful, however, and they were hanged at Holloway and Pentonville prisons on the same day at the same time.

  Hitchcock had a direct link to the case. He had been taught to dance by Edith Thompson’s father, and knew both Edith and her sister when they lived in Leytonstone. He had allegedly planned to make a documentary about the affair. His link to Thompson was one of two amendments that he asked be made to his authorized biography, to avoid embarrassing Edith’s sister, who still lived in Leytonstone.

  I tried to imagine Belgrave Road as the source of Hitchcock’s filmic universe – from these sedate houses you get Rear Window, Vertigo, Dial M for Murder, The Lodger and Psycho. I don’t think this is the kind of image make-over Redbridge Council have in mind for Area Committee 7. These gloomy resonances are dissipated as the boys burst into fits of giggles and it takes me a while to get any sense out of them. They have noticed Fat Joe’s Burgers & Grills over the road. It has distracted them from their sore legs, which I reinforce with ice creams from the corner shop – ready for the last push through Ilford to South Park.

  Cranbrook Road and the High Street have maintained the ‘rush and turmoil’ from when Thomas Burke visited Ilford in 1921 on his ‘Outer Circle Rambles’. He hated Ilford. He described the ‘assaulting and undelightful noise of Ilford Broadway’. ‘It is uncouth, leggy; plagued with the humours of the gawk.’ He compared it unfavourably with Walthamstow, Peckham, Eltham, Brixton and Upton Park. Since first coming out here a few years ago I have staunchly defended Ilford, even irrationally against people who actually live here and who look astounded when I declare my enthusiasm for the place.

  One night in the Heathcote Arms I was sitting in my usual slouched position, beer dripping down my beard, belly covered in crisps, maps on the table, when a vampish woman sat down next to me and asked if I’d like to come back to her dungeon in Ilford. I’m not sure what marked me out as a potential masochist but I was keen to get some inside info on the area, and diverted comments about whips and handcuffs to topographical features and local folklore. Eventually, my enthusiasm for Ilford dampened her passion for tying up random forty-somethings and so I told her about my research. I asked if she’d mind annotating my map, even though I didn’t fancy any extra-marital sexual deviancy in her cellar. ‘You’re an odd one,’ she said as she left without so much as looking at my map. That was a bit rich coming from a woman with eccentric ideas about the correct use of clothes pegs.

  It’s fair to say Ilford has a poor self-image. It ranked fourth in a national survey of ‘Unhappiest places to live in Britain’. Burke did say that he ‘never saw people so half-happy’. The High Street looks to be suffering from the effect of the Westfield mega mall opening a few miles down the Romford Road in Stratford. Ilford’s ‘expression of unfulfilled desire’ that Burke described now hangs heavily. The Benetton store has been taken over by a pop-up fruit and veg shop. The elegant art deco department stores of the 1920s now house the Money Shop, Premier Work Support, Superdrug and Lidl.

  Ilford High Street

  You sense a stoicism among the ‘half-happy’ faces on the Broadway, though. When a V-2 rocket fell on the Ilford Hippodrome in 1945 the orchestra continued their performance of Robinson Crusoe drenched to the skin by a burst water tank above the stage and covered in dust and rubble. The coat of arms for the old Borough of Ilford bears the slogan ‘In Unity Progress’. In his Potted History of the Borough Norman Gunby wrote, ‘To anyone who may wonder or ask what history Ilford has, I would answer that there is history in every stone, in every particle of earth, and in every grain of sand.’ You can add every late-night shop, park bench and bus stop. Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys wrote of Ilford. Even Burke conceded that it has one of t
he finest parks in London, not South but Valentine’s Park on the border of Gants Hill. Morrissey played a storming gig at Ilford Island in 1995 that I’d heard him mention in a radio interview and fans still rave about on forums. The Dr. Seuss musical, Seussical the Musical, is coming to the Kenneth More Theatre. Bollywood Bowling looks to be doing a good trade. Ilford will survive its current travails and reclaim the title of the ‘Eastern Queen’ that it had once claimed.

  Despite a rest in the High Street the boys are done in. Ollie is echoing words similar to those used by Burke when he wrote, ‘To go to Ilford is a fool’s act.’ A final chocolate stop lifts the spirits, further heightened when they see the sign for South Park Road. We place the Kenny, Cartman and Stan figures on top of the sign for a photo. Joe and Heidi undo their jackets to expose their South Park T-shirts.

  The park gates shimmer like an oasis over the road. The boys collapse on a grassy bank inside. We’ve successfully delivered the South Park effigies to their London home. Ollie has blisters; Joe seems relatively unscathed and is making for the ornamental lake. Heidi gets out the remains of the chicken sandwiches that have been squashed flat at the bottom of her rucksack and the boys feed the bread to the ducks. The Canada geese soon get in on the act, muscling the mallards out of the way; they gobble up the bread then march straight towards the source. The boys run off laughing across the football pitch pursued by two particularly greedy geese.

  Running around with the wildfowl has put them in a good mood. I break the news that from here we might as well walk on to Barking as it’s the nearest station. I’m keen to finish my series of excursions at the ancient settlement of Uphall Camp, a huge, fortified Iron Age settlement, one of the prehistoric sites that gave birth to the city.

  It’s golden hour, the time that walks should end, as the first of these expeditions did on Hounslow Heath a year ago. Then I was alone, slurping down a can of Stella on the western fringe of London. Since then I’d ambled through the hill towns of the southern highlands, the Arcadian western fields, revisited myths and legends around the northern heights, and sung Saxon songs in Clapton. But as I’d found when I struck out for Asia as a youth thinking I’d see the world, the more you see the more you realize what lies undiscovered. That couldn’t be more true than in the exploration of London, as any black-cab driver stumped by a destination will tell you.