Following W.G Sebald’s Austerlitz through the East End

Austerlitz walk – Liverpool Street to Mile End

A walk following the route taken by W.G Sebald through the East End of London when writing his acclaimed novel Austerlitz, in the company of artist Bob and Roberta Smith. The central character of the book, Jacques Austerlitz arrived in England at Liverpool Street Station as a young child on the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The station plays an important role in the book and was where our walk started. The route was provided to Bob and I by writer Iain Sinclair who had re-traced Sebald’s footsteps guided by poet Stephen Watts who had led Sebald on his East End drifts. An evocative account of these walks can be found in Iain’s wonderful book The Last London.

Our walk ended in the gloom of Tower Hamlets Cemetery, unable to find the stone angel pictured in Sebald’s book.

The key locations are: – The Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street Station, Toynbee Hall, Greatorex Street (home of Yiddish poet Abraham Stencl), Brady Street Jewish Cemetery, Alderney Road, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, St. Clement’s Hospital (site of).

What’s Happening Here? Olympic Park survey

Pudding Mill Lane

 Pudding Mill Lane

The no-show of a herb forager for a walk around Pudding Mill Lane gave me the opportunity to log developments around the site as part of my on-going obsession with the Olympic zone. It appears as if not a great deal has changed around Pudding Mill Lane over the last five years or so other than the appearance of this signage on stone surfaces. ‘What’s Happening Here?’ seems to capture the mood perfectly.

Pudding Mill Lane

“Pudding Mill Lane is one of the five new neighbourhoods being created as part of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. In total, 33,000 new homes will be created on or around the Park by 2036.

Over the two Pudding Mill sites (including this one at Pudding Mill Lane) we’ll be creating:

  • 1,500 new homes
  • 36,000 sqm of employment space
  • A nursery
  • A health centre
  • Community spaces.”

https://www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/

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UCL East

UCL East – East Bank Stratford

 East Bank / Stratford Waterfront

Heading back towards the Olympic Stadium the hoardings have gone up around the East Bank development. Here’s the official description of East Bank:

“East Bank is a new powerhouse for innovation, creativity and learning on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It is a unique collaboration between world-leading universities, arts and culture institution that opens up opportunities for everyone who visits, lives and works in east London.”

It’s divided into two sections – UCL East (pictured above), and Stratford Waterside which will contain:

  • Sadler’s Wells East, a 550-seat theatre and hip hop academy
  • UAL London College of Fashion campus for 6,500 students
  • V&A East a new museum at Stratford Waterfront  (V&A will also have space at Here East)
  • The Smithsonian Institution will have presence on the site in partnership with the V&A
  • ‘State of the art’ BBC music studios

Olympic Park

Waterden Road

Last night walking through the Olympic Park towards the London Stadium along Middlesex Way the footpath was closed – a regular feature in the Park since it opened after the Olympics. The ‘What’s Happening Here’ signage explained that this was due to changes to the road layout that will connect the South of the park to Waterden Road – presumably as a consequence of the developments around East Bank and Pudding Mill Lane. This potentially means a significant increase in traffic cutting through the park from the West disecting the parkland leaving the area between Waterden Road and the Eastway as the last remaining open space in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (see map below). And I believe the area marked as Hopkins’ Field is earmarked for housing development (although that could be incorrect).

London Olympic Park Map

“© OpenStreetMap contributors” https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

London Olympic Park

“© OpenStreetMap contributors” https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

The London Loop – Ewell to Coulsdon

It’d been too long since my last walk on the London Loop back in August 2019, when I’d walked section 8 from Kingston to Ewell. Summer felt like a distant memory when I alighted at Ewell West Station to pick up London’s 150-mile orbital walking trail.

London Loop Section 7 (walking in the reverse direction)

This section starts with a magnificent piece of modernist architecture at Bourne Hall, a giant flying saucer shaped 1970 building that landed on the grounds of the former Garbrand Hall. The route takes you through a fine park with a lake and fountains close to the headsprings of the Hogsmill River that was the principal feature of Section 8 of the London Loop.

Through the village of Ewell we cross into Nonsuch Park, once one of Henry VIII’s hunting grounds that boasted a palace unlike ‘nonsuch elsewhere in the world’, so it’s said. This is a park that invites digression from the main route of the Loop across it’s wide lawns and along avenues.

Ewell

There’s a mile or so of road walking on the other side of Nonsuch traversing streets of postcard suburbia before coming to the end of Section 7 (or the start if walking in the clockwise direction) on Banstead Downs Golf Course. This was the site of one of the more intriguing features of the walk, and one not mentioned on the Tfl guide. Marked on the Ordnance Survey map are a series of tumuli that at the time I found difficult to identify. Checking online after the walk it seems if the Gally Hills Tumuli are in fact Saxon ‘hlaews’, a relatively rare type of burial mound in England with only around 50 or so being identified. The Historic England listing states that these would have been for ‘high ranking’ individuals. An excavation revealed “an extended inhumation with a bronze hanging bowl, a shield- boss, a split socketed iron spear-head and an iron knife.” Two of the mounds still stand in the rough beside the fairway watching the golfers and the ‘loopers’ pass by.

There is a detailed archaeological report here: THE SAXON BARROW AT GALLY HILLS, BANSTEAD DOWN, SURREY by JAMES F.BARFOOT and DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS

Banstead Downs

London Loop Section 6

Section 6 continues across Banstead Downs with some glorious views back across the London basin, towers poking up on the horizon. We then follow Freedown Lane – a long track that runs behind High Down Prison. The prison wall that we walk past is one of the remains of the Victorian asylum that previously occupied the site. Just beyond the prison, there were the remnants of what must have been a signficant building half buried along the top of the bank. Being that the prison was built on the land of the former asylum and hospital, I’m not sure what was here, my best guess is that they were ancillary buildings connected to the hospital, perhaps relating to its wartime use.

The Loop takes us through Oaks Park, landscaped for the Earl of Derby in the 18th Century (the fella who gave his name to the famous race at Epsom). Many of the old trees remain as does the stone grotto. I would liked to have dwelt here awhile but was up against the light, although I was still able to enjoy more fine views back across London.

Banstead Downs

The path progressed across a lavender farm with an old red phonebox in the middle of the field – glorious I imagine in summer. Then across Carshalton Road Pastures, a ridge of chalk downland at the northern extremity of the North Downs. We pick up a sunken path topped by what the Tfl leaflet calls an “ancient hedgerow”, bringing us out onto a housing estate initially developed for returning soldiers from WW1. It’s streetwalking from here down the hill to Coulsdon, with its appealing High Street blighted by angry rush hour traffic and the end (or start) of Section 6 of the London Loop.

Can’t wait to get back out there – the London Loop never disappoints.

A walk along the Clitterhouse Brook with Nick Papadimitriou

 

A41 bridge

Cricklewood Lane

The other day I found myself crossing over the A41 where it intersects with Cricklewood Lane. This bridge instantly triggered memories of walks with Nick Papadimitriou, starting in the summer of 2005, that often took us over this metal bridge with the Hendon Way pulsing below and views of the distant high ground that would later become the subject of Nick’s celebrated book, Scarp.

Clitterhouse Brook

The Clitterhouse Brook

It’s been a few years since I last walked with Nick, following a period of time when we made The London Perambulator, then our radio show on Resonance fm, Ventures and Adventures in Topography. So I was delighted to find him there stood beside the Clitterhouse Brook on Child’s Hill (ok, I rang on his door). Nick spontaneously suggested we walk the length of the Clitterhouse Brook to the point where it makes its confluence with the River Brent at Brent Cross.

Clitterhouse Brook

The Hendon Way

We crossed Basing Hill Park where the water laid heavy on the path, and then walked along the Hendon Way, taking the subway beneath the road to Clitterhouse Recreation Ground.

Clitterhouse

Clitterhouse Recreation Ground

The Clitterhouse Brook

The Clitterhouse Brook

“Clitterhouse Farm means ‘clay house’ farm. Earliest known origin of this farm dates from c.1321 when it was owned by John de Langton. Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries. ” The survey by Cranfield University mentions that some of the farm buildings still exist in one corner of the playing field.

(Geophysical Survey of Land at Clitterhouse Playing Field, Brent London, 2015)

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Tin Town

We followed the brook into a postwar housing estate that Nick said was know locally as ‘Tin Town’, due to the metal cladding on the houses.

Clitterhouse

Clitterhouse

Brentfarm Cottage, Nick told me was the site of a sewage farm now occupied by a school. The Hendon Fever Hospital was also located hereabouts on former farmland sold off in the 1880’s.

Clitterhouse Brook

The Clitterhouse Brook gushed from a concrete pipe and flowed beneath the North Circular to make its confluence with the River Brent on the far side of the road near Brent Cross Shopping Centre. It was a majestic sight to see this suburban stream rushing to meet its mother river before working its way to the Thames at Brentford.

It was also great to be back out walking with Nick again.

London’s Lost Rivers – the Black Ditch with Tom Bolton

A Walker’s Guide to London’s Lost Rivers – Volume Two

Tom Bolton’s second volume of walks along London’s Lost Rivers traces the paths of eleven subterranean watercourses. Whereas Volume One mapped out the better known lost rivers of London such as the Fleet and the Tyburn – Volume Two is a guide to the more obscure buried streams and brooks that shape the city – the Bollo Brook, Cock and Pye Ditch, Counter’s Creek, Falcon Brook, Hackney Brook, Moselle, and Stamford Brook. Tom took me for a walk along the first river in Volume Two – The Black Ditch, rising somewhere in Stepney Green then wending its way through the East London streets of Stepney, Poplar and Limehouse before making its confluence with the Thames at Limekiln Wharf.

Black Ditch

“In it’s very name The Black Ditch reveals its status an unappreciated river. Despite its route, which runs through the heart of the East End, the Ditch is generally dismissed as no more than a sewer.” – Tom Bolton

Black Ditch

London’s Lost Rivers – A Walker’s Guide by Tom Bolton is published by Strange Attractor Press

Walking the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation

A walk from Chelmsford to Maldon

Chelmsford, the town where the great Elizabethan astronomer, occultist, master magician and advisor to Elizabeth I, John Dee, was educated. And where Guglielmo Marconi produced the world’s first wireless sets, was a great place to start a walk. There’s something in the waters of Chelmsford, the confluence of the Rivers Can and Chelmer on the edge of the town producing a curious Magick, that is channeled into the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation and flows out to the Blackwater Estuary at Maldon. You could sense it in the landscape lining the watercourse, it oozed through the muddy path and stirred in the channels and tributaries that fed the canal. It whispered in the swaying reeds and grasses and rattled the bare boughs of the trees. Maybe it was something the Romans left behind.

Along the Chelmer

My walk began at Springfield Basin just on the edge of Chelmsford where new blocks of flats rise on the sites of the warehouses and wharfs where softwoods from Maldon would have been unloaded and stored. The navigation opened  in 1797 and the last barge floated into the basin in 1972.

Chelmer

It was a wet and misty late morning as I left the town behind and headed through a field of tall dead teasels and beneath a motorway flyover. I was entering the landscape of The Essex Serpent. Progress along the Chelmer was marked by a series of locks – Barnes Mill Lock, Sandford Lock, Cuton Lock. Paper Mill Lock notable as a filming location for the brilliant BBC TV show Detectorists, which is set in the North Essex countryside.

Ulting Church appeared through the denuded trees on a bend in the river where swans munched on greens in the field. The present church dates from 1150 and was once a site of pilgrimage, said to be as significant as Walsingham (although I am unable to find out why).

Chelmer

The mist rose off the river in the last hour of daylight and I wondered if The Chelmer had a deity like the rivers of London in Ben Aaronovitch’s excellent series of books. If such a god/dess does exist they dwell in those reaches near the Langford reservoirs around the point where the Blackwater joins the Chelmer before it breaks free of the Navigation and heads through Maldon to the Blackwater Estuary.

River Chelmer

I followed the Langford Cut as far as the Tesco Extra the size of a village, on the edge of Maldon, and followed the Chelmer to the dock. It was pitch black, the only illumination coming from a lamp on a sail barge moored at the quay. It feels like an unfinished journey – I need to return to walk the Blackwater Estuary out to the sea. On the bus back to Chelmsford I started to plot my return.