Found Memories

Before Christmas I found a collection of old photos in a junk shop on Hainault Road, E10 which had come from a house clearance not far away in Leyton. The first handful I dragged out of the 1980s Marks and Spencers carrier bag contained these pictures of a bike shop on Church Road Leyton, Graystone’s, and what looks like the gathering of a cycling club.

The date “1938” is written on the back of this photo. When I zoomed in, one of the posters on the wall behind reads, “HANGED BY HIS OWN FATHER”. The name of the road is also clearly visible – Capworth Street.

They look such cheerful bunch – I wonder if they were worried about the events in Europe. At the beginning of 1938 the government announced that all British schoolchildren would be issued with gas masks. I bet the kids loved it, but as a parent, I can imagine that would have created a real sense of anxiety, a fear of what was possibly to come. Maybe it never crossed their minds – they were too busy flirting and showing off – discussing the best route to take through Epping Forest.

This is the site of Graystone’s on Church Road now. Although there is no sign of the shop you can see the detail around the front door next to it has survived and the exterior of that house looks pretty much the same.

And Capworth Street seems little changed – although a large group of cyclists posing for a photo in the middle of the road would soon be shunted out of the way by an aggressively driven customised car.

You can’t help wondering what happened to them during the war. I know that the owner of the photos was in the navy and obviously survived – but the rest? 

This photo looks like Marsh Lane Fields from the view of the gasometer behind the line of trees, augmented by the proximity of the house to Marsh Lane (and also to Graystone’s). There’s no date, but another one from the same set is dated 1953, the Goon Show was on the radio, Christie committed his murders at 10 Rillington Place and both Stalin and Dylan Thomas went to their graves (not together of course).

It feels odd to be in possession of somebody else’s memories. Aside from the few photos of local interest the majority of them are classic family snaps – weddings, birthdays, holidays, spanning at least 50 years.

I’m curious to know why some member of the family didn’t want them when the owner died and there was the inevitable sifting through of possessions. Some of them seem to date back to the early part of the century – you’d imagine they’d be treasured heirlooms.

My wife finds them “creepy”, and although I disagree I can see what she means – we weren’t supposed to see these photos (this is well before the Facebook age of obsessively sharing every moment of our lives with a legion of tangetial virtual ‘friends’). The people in these photos are ghosts – not half-remembered school mates.

My Mum’s family were naval folk so I was familiar with the names neatly written on the backs of these photos – Alexandria, Malta Harbour, Gateway of India.

But this one has a different story begging to be conjured out of its fading ink. The writing on the back (in ink this time rather than pencil) says:

“WE THREE”, Nathanya Camp, Palestine Nov’ 1945

From what I can glean online Nathanya Camp was a ‘leave camp’ for British forces serving in the middle east during the war. In November 1945, when this picture was taken, President Truman announced an inquiry “to look into the settlement of Jews in Palestine”. In November 1945 Zionist guerilla fighters were carrying out violent attacks on the Palestinian Railway system leading to the death of a British soldier.

But this is probably the most curious of all the photos. The huge (plastic?) swan, dancer emerging from a grotto on an isolated jetty – it is Lynchian, a still from a discarded work by the Blue Velvet director found in a faded, crumpled Marks and Spencer carrier bag in a junk shop in Leyton, east London.

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Ken Livingstone in Leyton

   Ken Livingstone in Leyton by Fugueur 

Monday evening I went along to Leyton Town Hall (now Orwellianly renamed Leyton Management Offices – what are they managing I worry?) to attend Ken Livingstone’s ‘Tell Ken’ event.
I took the liberty of recording a few bits which you can listen to above.

Overall I found Ken’s tone very positive – I had become disillussioned with his last term as mayor towards the end, with his seemingly too cosy relationship with the corporate interests of the City of London and his love of skyscrapers and big developments. He seemed to have long forgotten the Red Ken that I met when chairing a Labour Students public meeting during the City Poly occupation of 1991.

Maybe I had primed myself for disappointment by using the Labour Party’s refusal to select Ken as its mayoral candidate in 2000 and his subsequent expulsion as the long overdue catalyst for leaving the party I’d viewed as a birthright.
The fact that he later rejoined the party and stood for Mayor as a Labour candidate in 2004, even after the invasion of Iraq at a time when Labour was very much the belicose Party of war, was a bit too much for me at the time.
(Some unfortunate young Labour candidates knocked on my door around this period and received a rant about how they were no better than members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party with hands drenched in the blood of Iraqi children – they didn’t seem to see this coming for some reason).

However, he atoned slightly this evening by repeating his commitment to wealth redistribution – and using whatever means at his disposal to help bring that about – such as giving free travel to kids as 40% of children in London are from families living below the poverty line.

He would also look to expand the capital’s social housing sector – although I wasn’t clear whether he can build housing as mayor – and return housing estates as the kind of mixed communities they once were (such as I grew up in), rather than now where you need to be homeless and jobless to be eligible for housing.

Ken explained that the only reason he signed up to the Olympic bid was to get £8bn worth of investment into the East End. He talked about how the land south of the Olympic Park to the Thames would be the next big development area with capacity for 40,000 new homes and 50,000 jobs and that the mayor should be selling this opportunity to the growing markets in China, India and Brazil.

I asked him about Trams – and whether he would revive his proposals to extend London’s Tram network beyond Croydon. To this he conjured up a beguiling image – a tram route that would follow the North Circular from Wembley arcing across the north of London to Waltham Forest.
That romance of that vision alone is almost worth my vote.

There’s more info about Ken’s campaign to be re-elected mayor here.
Do you think there’s any chance that we’ll be able to write-off the Boris years as some kind of bizarre collective halucination?

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In search of the North-East Passage

Headed out from home 7pm on Sunday night on foot in search of the north-east passage. I’m now well familiar with the other two routes across the marshes that separate Leytonstone from the western city, well from London really. But the most northerly was unknown to me. It lies north of Walthamstow in an unpromising corner of the city at the end of Blackstock Road.

I spent the first 100 yards preoccupied with an uncomfortable right shoe. This had the potential to be a fair old yomp so my footwear had better be right. Once fixed I then became overly aware of the sloshing of the water in my aluminium water bottle – and what were the dangers of drinking from an aluminium vessel. I was only two streets away from home.

Soon past Leyton’s archaeology row with Walnut House, and the former home of Essex County Cricket Club. When this area was being developed at the end of the C19t Palaeolithic flint flakes ‘as sharp as knives’ were turned up, forming what was claimed to be a remarkable ‘Palaeolithic floor’.

The cottages in Vicarage Road are in fine bloom – village Leyton lives with the spirit of the antiquarian Revd. Strype. I check-in with the beguiling 1940’s blocks of flats on the corner of Brewster Road with their cross-work brick patterns, they’re aligned to catch the sun like a standing stone monument ready for the veneration of Julian Cope.

I am trying to understand the ‘northern-ness’ of where I live. Leytonstone gains its identity from being on the eastern fringe – we are eastsiders. That is until you look at a map or walk back from central London via the most direct route and find yourself pushing north up through Clerkenwell and Highbury.

Crossing Lea Bridge Road near the fine stone obelisk protecting the library I wonder whether Markhouse Road runs along a watershed. The ground drops away to the west running off into the river Lea. Numerous streams run beneath the tarmac from the higher ground around Whipps Cross and the Dagenham Brook runs just below Markhouse.

The hop fields in Boundary Road have long since gone. The Lea Valley pylons appear between houses. I pass an electricity substation wearing a wig of Russian vine. St. Saviour’s Church looks abandoned. I wander round to the Gothic building behind which turns out to be Barking Lodge, Diocese of Chelmsford, Barking Area Office. There is a CofE school and further church buildings. An ecclesiastical encampment among the heathens of the marshes.

Past the sad scene marking a ‘Fatal Collision’ among the withering yellow flowers are weathered soft toys and three apples.

I move quickly along crumbling Blackhorse Road – reduced to a post-industrial rat-run. Waltham Forest Council has identified this as a spot to ‘re-introduce the country into the city’ – to allow glimpses of the marshes to break through the phalanxes of asbestos-lined buildings. They’ve got their work cut out.

I cross the Valley between Walthamstow Reservoirs and Tottenham Marshes as the sun ducks behind great puffy cloud formations and stop for a swift half in the Ferry Boat Inn.

There’s a certain optimism in the aspiration that drives up the development of Hale Wharf. Great hunks of isolated apartment blocks with birds-eye views of the rusting Lea Delta but little else in the way of infrastructure unless you plan to commute by coracle. A channel of the river around the site has become clogged with weeds – a metaphor perhaps or am I trying to look too hard for signs and meaning. It’s what this landscape does to you.

I land on the western shore of the Lea at Tottenham Hale. My reaction to ‘North’ as I forward more cautiously is to want to head home – to be back in my local by closing time, impossible on foot without tracing my steps and even then unlikely. I’m tempted by the train at South Tottenham but am not ready to leave the ‘fugue’ and so force myself on – but to where? I hadn’t thought this far ahead – I hadn’t thought much at all. I’m simply following instinct now.

The High Road climbs a steep incline of churches that will soon fade into the synagogues of Stamford Hill. I could turn north again here – for Finsbury Park and beyond. It is 9.40pm and as I stand at the crossroads of Amhurst Road I pledge to get back to my local by 11pm closing. Can’t be done I think, but I won’t give up until I know it’s impossible.

Clapton Common has a dream-like midsummer air with Hassidic Jews strolling across the grass and beneath the hanging boughs in the last light. Large groups of men congregate on the pavements intensely conversing in what I assume to be Hebrew.
Downhill past the Krays’ Evering Road and gyro the roundabout onto Lea Bridge Road.
It’s after 10pm.
I up the pace.

Half-way along Lea Bridge Road my right knee goes. Tendons go taunt and menisci grind against bone – it becomes reluctant to perform its primary function as a joint and bend. This is sure to sabotage my mission – I’m swinging lead in the dark as I cross back over the river.
I hobble to a corner shop and seek medicine in the form of a can of Stella Artois hastily necked. I’m moving a bit more freely now. It took me 40 minutes to reach this same point on the way out. It’s 10.30 – no chance of making last orders.

Down Church Road, into Capworth Street which is surreally blocked bumper to bumper rush hour style as two drivers lock horns in argument, “So I can be this ignorant and drive”, one menacingly reasons whilst leaning through the window.

In Francis Road at 10.49. The pain returns. To seek more Stella would surely sink me – have to grit my teeth.
A final burst and I break through the swinging pub doors 1 minute before the bell rings. Marge is behind the bar. I recount my quest as I order my pint.
“You made good time then”, she says.
“Not really, it’s just before 11” I reply.
“I know, but we close at 11.30 on a Sunday.”

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Through the ‘Urethra of London’

Weston’s map showing the Philly Brook

“Geographically Leytonstone is just a case of in one end and out the other. It’s not the end of the road like Whitechapel, nor is it the beginning of the end like Southgate. Leytonstone, if it’s like anything it is the urethra of London.”
Lenny’s Documentary, Ian Bourn (1978)

I came across the above quote from a film by Leytonstone film-maker Ian Bourn not long after I moved to the area. I quickly became aware that previous repeated viewing of the films of fellow Leytonstonian, John Smith, had left such a powerful imprint upon my psyche that they may well have influenced my decision to move out here to E11. I decided to further research what I then termed the ‘cinematic topography of the north eastern frontier’.

Leytonstone at one point had the largest population of artists of any place in England. The building of the M11 Link Road was both the cause of this Left Bank blossoming out east, through the empty properties it produced after compulsory orders were served, and then the construction of the road some years later brought about its end. The artists only moved on after a protracted stand-off with the road builders and a prolonged eviction. The M11 Link Road Protests loom large in the psyche of the area and have luckily been well-documented.

underground stream near Wood Street

But this was not the subject for our Ventures and Adventures expedition through Leytonstone and Leyton. We chose to chart a less contentious and mythologised feature of the landscape – a small, underground stream running a course of just under two miles beneath the streets. The Philly Brook seems to have been virtually forgotten and is recorded merely in the name of a street, Fillebrook Road, and that of a house near the Leyton Orient football stadium, Brook House. The stream can be heard gurgling through the street irons on Southwest and Queens Roads. Otherwise the only clue lies in the valley it has carved out of the local terrain.

The solitary reference in literature I could find was in The Story of Leyton and Leytonstone by W.H. Weston published in 1921 which has two hand-drawn maps showing the course of the stream. So I decided to have a rummage in the archives at the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow.
The Vestry House staff greeted my research enquiry enthusiastically and when I arrived, there was a small pile containing all their references to the Philly Brook, or Fille Brook. One was cream envelope marked ‘Uncatalogued Ephemera L13.7 The Fillebrook’, and inside was a photocopy of an article from the local newspaper printed in 1994.
The other direct references in text came in the form of series of handwritten notes and cuttings made sometime in the interwar period by local antiquarian Frederick Temple.

Nick looking for the source

It was with these clues that Nick and I set out to follow the course of the Philly Brook. To add an element of genuine erudition to the walk we arranged to meet local historian David Boote half-way along the route. David has also researched the stream and had a fairly solid idea where it runs.
I met Nick at Leyton Midland Road overground station and it was clear that the journey from Gospel Oak had seduced him to the charms of this beguiling train-line. I recently found a great article by Bruce Jerram and Richard Wells published in 1996 passionately defending the significance of the then “much derided” North London Line. Fourteen years on and it is now a vital part of the transport infrastructure feeding into the new city arising around the Olympic Park at Stratford.

I’d got the idea from one of the newspaper articles at the Vestry House that the Philly Brook rose, not near James Lane as it commonly assumed, but further north near Wood Street in Walthamstow. So there we headed.
Two hours later and after the exciting discovery of an underground stream running between some garages and a 19th Century cricket ground, and Nick broke the news that what we had found was a quite different, but unmapped, water course that most likely ran through Walthamstow to link up with the Dagenham Brook or Coppermill Stream further towards the Lea Valley.

Source of the Philly Brook near St Andrews Church

And so we effectively restarted our walk and ambled across the edge of Epping Forest to where the Philly Brook rises at the end of James Lane near Whipps Cross Hospital.
I ducked into the cafe at St Andrews Church to grab a cup of tea. When I told the ladies working there what we were doing they said that the building of some flats behind the church had caused a spring to come up in the basement or crypt. The Philly Brook lives! I thought. Apparently, flooding of basements was common in the area until the building of the Link Road, which seems to have displaced not only the E11 avant garde but also tamed the rising waters of the stream.

We made our rendezvous with David Boote a mere two hours late and then took a walk through the valley of the Philly Brook that meandered as the stream once did – taking a whole three hours to complete the final mile-and-a-half. Much verbiage was spilled along the banks of the brook, plenty of it highly entertaining but unbroadcastable on the radio show (due to time and not inappropriateness).

looking down the course of the stream

Finally at the end of the walk, and after forgetting to pay homage to composer Cornelius Cardew who had lived and died not far from the river’s run, we reached what we thought was the end. But as the stream no longer appears above ground we would have to be content to leave this to conjecture. And then Nick squinted through the gloom at his Village London atlas and proclaimed that the Brook met the Mill Stream right near where we were stood on a traffic island near Dunedin Road. He disappeared into some undergrowth and then yelled out – here was the stream. And there we believe it was, running meekly through a concrete culvert beside the allotments, still unseen and unheralded.

Download the podcast of this episode here

Some links and further reading

Platform’s work on London as a city of watersheds

Cornelius Cardew’s Great Learning Performed in Leytonstone

Leyton and Leytonstone Historical Society

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Lea Walk

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Headed out for a wander beside the Lea in the late afternoon sun. They’re building a whole new world over the road – the pace of building of the Olympic Park is startling. We duck down away from the madness and into the quiet shade of the willow trees.

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On a section of the bank that looks prone to flooding the boys spot a dead hairy crab washed up with piles of rubbish. The eldest suggests that the pollution must have killed it and he then returns the decaying crustacean to the water.

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We pass through dense thickets of pink flowers catching the sun. Using my 1950’s wildflower book I posit that these may be Himalayan Balsam, that this tattered tome tells me are commonly found by rivers and streams.

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The boys can’t resist the pull of the open sea of pitches on Hackney Marshes and they sprint across. We follow the water again along the Hackney Cut past the barges, joggers and fishermen and reach Lea Bridge Road at the magic hour of last light.