Leytonstone byways to Old Leyton

Be guided by your feet – or a river, road or canal. With the rain lashing down crossing the footbridge over the Link Road the prospects for a stroll did not look good so I fell upon old territory, some of the first streets I walked when I arrived in London as a callow 18-year.

Then the sun broke out over Upper Leytonstone and I followed the old byways along the Leytonstone/Leyton border to Abbotts Park, past the new Exchange development to Leyton Cricket Ground where I imagined I was watching Essex play Australia in 1905. Squinting you can see back to the workers excavating the remains of a Roman villa in the grounds of Leyton Grange back in the 18th Century, until of course the cars come hooning round Church Road.

 

Download the audiobook of This Other London here (excerpt in the video above)

Great shop front signage on Leyton High Road

Leyton Barbers

Why have I not really taken notice of the great signage on Al-Hambra Barbershop on Leyton High Road before? Is because I’m usually too busy counting the growing rash of Estate Agents colonising this end of Leyton’s ancient thoroughfare. I was on my way to Deeney’s for the first time this morning in my never-ending quest for a Cronut when it stopped me dead in my tracks. It’s a real work of art.

Leyton High Road Barber

This end of Leyton High Road didn’t get the Notting Hill make-over in the run-up to the Olympics that washed over the section around the Ruckholt Road approach to the Olympic Park but frankly it doesn’t need it, blessed as it is with great ghost signs and this peach on Al-Hambra.

Leyton High Road shop front

I like the fact it’s a Gent’s Hair Dressers – two words – and not a Barbers. Makes me feel like I could go in and get my long locks trimmed whereas in a Barbershop it’s simply a matter of what number buzz cut you want.

Deeney’s didn’t have any Cronuts after all that.

Over the marshes to the Signature Brew Backstage Bar

Leyton Marshes

Freezing cold crisp blue sky Saturday – perfect day for a walk over the marshes.

Ducking round the back of the ice rink on Lea Bridge Road I first cross Leyton Marsh remembering the January day 3 years ago when I joined the Hackney Tree Musketeers for their wassailing of the fruit trees at Millfields and Springfield Park.

 

Walthamstow Marshes

I walked along the riverbank past Walthamstow Marshes and under the AV Roe bridge where we had sung the Wassailing song that day as trains clattered overhead.

 

Walthamstow Rervoirs

The view across the reservoirs from Coppermill Lane is one of the finest in London – you look across a sequence of bodies of water that stretch for around 7 miles along the Lea Valley.

Signature Brew brewery Leyton

I’ve been wanting to pay a visit to the Signature Brew Backstage bar since it opened last year and I can think of fewer better ways to end a walk than to stroll through a brewery to the tap room.

Signature Brew backstage bar

Tucked away in an industrial unit on the Leyton Business Park the Signature Brew Backstage Bar is an absolute gem serving up their delicious ales in snug surrounded by music memorabilia.

 

The Backstage Bar opens Saturdays 12 – 8 – check the Signature Brew twitter feed first. Address: Unit 25, Leyton Business Centre, Etloe Road, E10 7BT

The Remains of Leyton FC

 

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The gate just off Lea Bridge Road was open so I wandered into the old ground of Leyton Football Club. The pitch now a make-shift parking lot, weed-fringed with bare dusty patches, rubbish and building supplies littered all around. The stands and floodlights lie waiting for the Saturday crowds to return.

The original Leyton F.C. was formed in 1868 although the club that played here was a more recent incarnation. The club disbanded in 2011 halfway through the Isthmian League Division One North season.

The ghost horses of Marsh Lane Fields

The most poignant moment in making this elegy for a London meadow – Marsh Lane Fields, came when I couldn’t recall where exactly the horses had been tethered beneath the pylons. It was the memory of that image – so striking when I’d first seen it on my personal discovery of Marsh Lane Fields, new to the area Beating the Bounds in the driving rain with the New Lammas Lands Defence Committee – that made me realise not only had the horses been erased from the landscape but the pylons as well. How was it possible that I hadn’t noticed before. I’d surveyed the changes to the site when passing through on one of the walks for This Other London and the fact I was running late for the wassailing in Clapton made me hurry through.

marsh lane fields horses

Sunday night I dug out my old camcorder from the top of the wardrobe and spooled through a miniDV tape I shot in December 2006 when the NLLDC returned to Marsh Lane to lead a protest against the proposed enclosure of one end of the ancient Lammas Lands by the London Olympic Authorities for the relocation of Manor Garden Allotments from Hackney. One protest had begotten another. First time this was attempted, in 1892, the people of Leyton marched onto the fields led by their councillors and tore the fences down. A plaque on the Eton Manor Athletics Club commemorates the event. It’s said the land was drained by Alfred the Great and bequeathed to the people of Leyton as common pasture based on the old Lammas grazing system. This mattered little to the Olympic people and their fences went up.

I fast-forwarded through the footage of the protest, the singing of an old marching Song sung during he footpath protests of the early 20th Century. Were the horses a misplaced memory of the stables on the site of the Lea Valley Pitch and Putt (was that a figment of my imagination as well?). But eventually, the horses were munching the grass and taken care of with drawing salve for horses in Standard Definition, today closely mown and rebranded Leyton Jubilee Park, grazing where now allotment holders cultivate rhubarb.