Trew Era Cafe on the New Era Estate Hoxton

I hadn’t been back to the Trew Era Cafe since its opening back in March 2015 so I was keen to see how this inspiring project was progressing. The cafe was one of the outcomes of the successful campaign by residents of the New Era Estate in Hoxton to fend off developers. Russell Brand opened the Trew Era Cafe as a social enterprise with the aim of supporting people in abstinence based recovery. The aim was also to provide a community space for local people and to source as much produce as possible from the surrounding area.

Trew Era Cafe vegan food

The herbs used in the delicious range of vegan and vegetarian dishes are grown in pallet planters in the walled garden at the back. All the produce is organic. They plan to find allotment space to grow their own vegetables which will form part of the training programme.

Trew Era Cafe coffee

The coffee is roasted by Mission Coffee nearby in Clapton, who also provide barista training. The jams and granola are produced locally. Edit Hats beanies are on sale, for each purchase Edit donate a hat to the homeless. For every postcard bought from the selection hanging on the wall a tree is planted in Scotland and you can even go along and help with the planting. There are free Sunday morning meditation drop-ins and regular evening meetings.

Trew Era Cafe Hoxton

There’s a great friendly vibe around the place and the coffee is fantastic. The plan is to hopefully expand into an vacant unit next door to provide a more diverse range of training and support. Hopefully the Trew Era message will spread beyond Hoxton to the wider world. To badly paraphrase Billy Bragg – the revolution is just an organic soy milk cappuccino away.

Aimlessly wandering the Bloomsbury grid with Gandhi and Lenin

I wanted to go OUT and shoot SOMETHING happening. I followed my instincts – the Central Line to Holborn then sucked north into the grid vortex of the Bloomsbury Squares. I’m sure there’s some sort of occult geometry underlying the lay-out of the garden squares of Bloomsbury (distinct from those arranged on the slopes of Pentonville and following the curve of the high ground across Barnsbury).

Tea Hut

The ‘Cab Man’s Tea Huts’ fascinate me – but you know what, I’ve never actually been in one, how is that possible? The one at Russell Square was presented by Sir Squire Bancroft in 1901. Bancroft was a significant figure in Victorian theatre, instigating a new form of realist theatre “drawing-room comedy” or “cup and saucer drama”. He produced a play by the bizarre figure of Edward Bulwer-Lytton who I wrote about in This Other London – the man who had has wife locked up in an asylum for disagreeing with him, coined a number of cliches still used today and most bizarre of all, wrote a novel that was later the source of Nazi cult that believed in a subterranean secret source of energy and insisted the Luftwaffe develop a Flying Saucer in the last months of the war.

Those tea huts are strange places and who knows what other odd powers have been unleashed by the Bloomsbury grid – just look at the art deco detail on the gate posts of SOAS in the video and the brutalist brilliance of the Institute of Education.

Rendlesham Forest UFO Trail

We wanted to get out of London for a couple of nights after Christmas but had no idea where to go. Then watching UFO documentaries on Boxing Day I got a flash of inspiration – Rendlesham Forest, otherwise known in UFO circles as Britain’s Roswell, due it being the location of one of the most mysterious and compelling UFO cases ever. I sold it to the kids on the basis that it would be like the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost movie Paul where two hapless geeks make a pilgrimage to Area 51. Luckily they bit, we all love that film. There was also the added bonus that Sutton Hoo was nearby (more of that in another post).


I don’t mind admitting that I hadn’t felt this excited about a trip for ages – not since my excursion to a burial mound in Hertfordshire in mid-December – but this was more intense – I had a whole popular cultural history of UFO tourism to transplant from New Mexico to Suffolk and hours and hours of documentaries to watch in preparation. We wondered between us how much the picturesque town of Woodbridge on the edge of the forest had cashed in on its association with the UFO site, would it be like those towns along the Extraterrestrial Highway into Roswell with alien themed cafes and souvenir shops fully of bug-eyed aliens and flying saucer plushies?

It turns out that there was not so much a secondhand DVD of the X-Files in one of the numerous charity shops in Woodbridge. The two independent bookshops didn’t stock a single book on UFOs at all – anywhere. The local cinema had a solitary screening of Star Wars. Woodbridge was a town in denial of its true heritage as Britain’s No.1 UFO location.

River Deben
So on the final day of our stay, New Year’s Eve, the family caught the lunchtime train back to London and I headed for Rendlesham Forest. They’d seen the place was nothing like the movies, the weather had been bleak and I’d made them walk along the banks of the River Deben in a gale that threatened to blow our Pug into the water.

Due to the lack of daylight I planned to catch a bus to the forest, but I’d missed the one bus per day running in that direction. The only taxi company in town didn’t have any cars available till mid-afternoon, so I decided to walk the 6 miles to the forest edge. I dropped by the independent bookshop and bought an OS map even though I can’t actually read maps, I like looking at the pictures, it would give me something to read along the way. I filled my pockets with fruit bars from Holland and Barrett and headed along the road out of Woodbridge.

Woodbridge Golf Course byway
After crossing the Deben and taking the turning for Rendlesham Forest I headed up a Restricted Byway across Woodbridge Golf Course. The sky was clear blue, I was bound for the Forestry Commission’s UFO Trail – I felt like a kid.

The first sighting of mysterious lights to appear moving through the trees in Rendlesham Forest happened at Christmas 1980. Two US Airforce guards stationed at RAF Woodbridge Airfield spotted the lights from the East Gate of the base. They were given permission to investigate and followed the lights deep into the forest where they encountered a strange object hovering in a clearing. One of the patrolmen, Sergeant Jim Penniston approached the craft and reported touching it.

Two nights later the lights reappeared but this time a larger, better equipped team went to investigate. Remember this was the height of the Cold War, nuclear bombers were stationed at neighbouring RAF Bentwaters, and RAF Woodbridge was also a strategically important base with a large weapons stockpile and it has been claimed the storage site for nuclear warheads. This was a potentially serious incursion of the terrestrial variety.

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The party on this night was led by the deputy commander of the base Lt. Col. Charles Halt. They took geiger counters, floodlights and more significantly a small tape recorder on which Lt. Col. Halt narrated what he was seeing. On return to the base he filed a report to the US Airforce – released a few years later under FOI entering Rendlesham Forest into the annals of UFO lore and still one of the most compelling UFO encounters ever. Here I was following their footsteps on New Years Eve 2015, almost 35 years to the day since the event.

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But I had some ground to cover before I reached the UFO Trail on the far side of the forest and with my highly dubious map reading skills it was 50/50 whether I would ever get there. Luckily there is an enormous Airfield in the middle of the forest so if I could just find that I could follow the perimeter fence to the East Gate.

After ducking shanked drives on the Golf Course and nervously skirting an archery range I came to the edge of the forest. I ignored the orange tape barring a muddy path – the alternative was to flail amongst the featureless pine swamp. A short concrete post stamped with the letters MOD indicated I had hit the northwestern corner of the airfield. Looking through the chainlink fence at the disused runways – a relic of the Second War World and then Cold War, now an army facility, it was eery to think that there may have been enough nuclear warheads stored here to have triggered a nuclear apocalypse. The idea of little grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli paying a Christmas visit is quaint in comparison.

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I bumped into two men and a woman looking at the base through binoculars and making notes – we struck up conversation. They told me about the airfield’s original use as a WW2 landing strip for stricken bombers returning from mainland Europe. They were looking for remnants of the RAF’s FIDO system where petroleum was burnt in great plumes along the runway to disperse fog. I mentioned the UFO Trail as we walked together to the East Gate.

The light was fading now, the last hour before sunset, a good time to follow the UFO Trail into the forest, imagining how those young American airmen might have felt on that cold night 35 years ago following strange lights into the trees, it must have surely crossed their minds that it perhaps had something to do with the Russians? Maybe it did?

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There was no one around. The Forestry Commission have brilliantly marked a series of posts topped with metal ‘UFO Trail’ plaques, and bearing the popular image of an alien on the reverse. It really sets the scene. I looked down the straight lines of pines imaging the light slaloming through the trees, till I arrived at the clearing where Sergeant Jim Penniston encountered the craft. Fully entering the spirit of the tale the Forestry Commission have placed a full scale replica of the object as sketched by the airmen – including the strange markings on the side that Penniston claims to have reached out and touched. It is a fantastic location. I lingered in the clearing for a while with the craft as the sun descended to just above the horizon creating a halo effect through the pine trunks – an amber spotlight shining from the west.

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I would regard myself as a suggestible UFO skeptic, although I am beguiled by stories of mysterious phenomena – it’s just that beings traveling in space craft from a distant star system is probably the least likely explanation for the strange lights frequently spotted around the world. We live in a technological age so we look for a technological explanation and see spaceships and probes, in religious age they saw angels and gods, in a mystical age they saw spirits. Where explanations have been found for mysterious objects and glowing lights they are no less remarkable in my eyes – ball lightning, methane bubbles ignited by electrostatic charges in the atmosphere, millions of years old comets hurtling through our solar system, 1960’s Soviet space debris disintegrating on re-entry, test flights of top secret military aircraft that won’t be acknowledged for decades if at all. Who needs ET.

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I moved on to the open field where lights beamed down from the sky at the feet of the investigating party of airmen. Hardly evidence of extraterrestrial visitation but a very peculiar event nonetheless. They returned to the base in the early hours of the morning wondering how the hell this was going to look in an official report and whether they would still have a career in the military afterwards. I continued on to the final clearing where a craft had been spotted then down the muddy path through the trees enjoying the clear twilight sky.

Lt. Col Halt submitted his report and both the US Government and the UK Ministry of Defence investigated the events. In numerous UFO documentaries the witnesses have recounted stories of being interrogated by moody Men in Black, of being drugged and warned to keep quiet. All consistent with a sensitive Cold War situation as much as an episode of the X-Files.

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I found my way back to the carpark and used the last faint charge in my phone to call for an lift out of the forest, if it died on me or all the taxis were fully booked by New Year’s Eve revellers a space craft might be my best option for getting to the station. Luckily a Silver Ford Galaxy was dispatched to collect me. A Galaxy, how apt, and it was silver.

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To my knowledge there has yet to be a sufficient explanation for what numerous highly trained airforce personnel spotted on two occasions in Rendlesham Forest at Christmas 1980 – the woods are retaining their secrets just for now. It’s a shame though that Woodbridge can’t embrace it’s role as Britain’s Roswell and open up some tacky souvenir shops with inflatable grey aliens and a UFO themed cafe would be nice as well.

The abandoned City of London

The streets of the City of London seem more abandoned than usual on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year. Walking between Liverpool Street and Holborn out-of-hours is my favourite place ‘to get away from it all’ any time of year – on balmy summer evenings it has the feel of Madrid in August, empty streets, closed bars. But life does continue to lurk on odd corners mopping up the tourist trade and servicing the small but growing resident population of the Square Mile.

Bow Lane office

But when I went wandering early evening on Sunday there was barely a sole around save for in the vicinity of the transport hubs. Once I had breached the London Wall at Moorgate I had the City to myself (under the watchful gaze of CCTV). It threw up Daniel Defoe’s descriptions of London during the plague years when people fled the City, and the post-apocalyptic images in The Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later. You sense the buildings starting to breathe once more free of the insect hoards.

Watling Street

Watling Street

The ancient Watling Street lit a path in Christmas lights to the dome of St. Paul’s where folk scuttled around. Cross the road to Carter Lane and the people disappeared, whatever traffic there was inaudible, the bells of a distant church chimed.

Carter Lane

Carter Lane

It was only when Fleet Street conjoined with Aldwych did I move among the herd – up Southampton Row, the traffic lanes of Gower Street, popcorn munchers at Odeon Tottenham Court Road – but here a sense of loneliness gripped me – I missed the quietude of the hills and valleys of the Walbrook and the Fleet.

A slice of Moscow hidden on the London Underground

A midweek morning drop the kids off at school then wander. The patch of forest off-cut opposite The Green Man glimmered in the morning sun – it was irresistible. I followed the back roads up to the Redbridge Roundabout then suffered the Eastern Avenue till the chunks of pollution got too big to chew down and I ducked off the main thoroughfares again till emerging at Gants Hill.

Lurking beneath the roundabout at Gants Hill is a network of tunnels more like a space station than a tube station – the eastern cousin of the subterranean complex at Hanger Lane, opened the year before Gants Hill was finally revealed in 1948. Both stations sit upon the Central Line – Gants Hill’s ‘bright empty space’ beneath the roundabout the great tube architect Charles Holden‘s tribute to the Moscow Metro which he had been invited to visit after the builders of the Moscow network had originally been inspired by Holden’s Piccadilly Circus station. (Hanger Lane was completed by a former assistant of Holden – Frederick Curtis).

The golden vaulted ceilings of the concourse between the platforms reverses the pattern of other underground stations which show their wares upfront with decorative ticket halls. At Gants Hill the ticket hall is barely there – a minor node in the tangle of tunnels before the escalators guide you to Valhalla deep below the traffic hell.

Bohemia in the London Borough of Barnet

There seems to be a problem in the Rotten Borough of Barnet – the vanguard rogue state of rapacious property development. This time last year I met the residents being turfed out of their homes on the West Hendon Estate as the Council gifted the land to Barratt Homes, Mrs Thatcher’s favourite builders. Then there were the murky goings on at Sweets Way that I still don’t fully understand but it seems that a large ex-military housing estate that had been leased to a housing association was then sold to a private developer for about 99p with a 1000-year lease.

The latest call I heard from the gallant Barnet Bohemians revolved around a Care Home in Church Walk, Child’s Hill bought by a charity for £1 to run as a care home and homeless women’s refuge but two years later sold on by the charity to a private developer for £12 million to demolish and replace with luxury flats.

What the hell is going on in Barnet – why does premium building land command no more than a solitary pound when sold by the local authority or charitable bodies but then miraculously increase by the millions once in private hands?

The positivity of the Bohemians and rainbow people recently crash landed from the Camden Mothership shines a beacon of hope through the gloom. They occupied the building seeking a Meanwhile Lease so they could provide shelter for the cold winter months and food for the hungry both in belly and spirit. They would also use the space for workshops, discussions, artworks. Utilise it as a base to explore an alternative to the rat race consumerism gnawing away at the soul of modern life.

Turns out the charity that still own the building aren’t as keen on actual charity as the sound of 12 million pound coins rattling in the till. They promptly took legal action, even seeking punitive custodial sentences to which the police thankfully gave short shrift. Even so, 3 days after I shot this video the occupants of Church Walk House were evicted by bailiffs.

All is not lost though – they have since landed once again in Barnet, in an abandoned nightclub on Whetstone High Road.

Star Wars comes home to Leytonstone – Stuart Freeborn celebration

Earlier today saw the unveiling of a blue plaque in Leytonstone on the house in Grove Green Road where brilliant costume designer Stuart Freeborn was er, born, and raised. Freeborn was famously responsible for the character designs on the Star Wars movies – most notably Yoda who he modeled on a cross between his own face and Albert Einstein.

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Murals opposite the Heathcote Arms were painted by artists from Walthamstow’s Wood Street Walls and a small raiding party of Storm Troopers led by Darth Vader oversaw the unveiling of the plaque.

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The project was the brainchild of local artist Elliot Ashton who has lobbied the Council over the years to mark the area’s association with Stuat Freeborn.

Darth Vader was last seen disappearing into The Heathcote Arms for a pint of Jedi blood.