It was two months ago now, on the 11th June, that I set off across Wanstead Flats for a long planned walk through the ancient Borough of East Ham. The regrowth from last year’s fire was evident (as noted before on this blog) and I exited the flats near Manor Park Station. I passed the Earl of Essex pub on Romford Road, now closed and waiting for a new life, hopefully as a pub. The old Coronation Cinema is now The Royal Regency banquetting venue, opened in 1911 as the Coronation Electric Theatre, the last film flickered onto its screen in 1968.

I was thinking of Dr. Pagenstecher’s History of East and West Ham published in 1908 as I made my way along High Street North;

“East Ham is perhaps the most remarkable example of rapid transformation from a rural to an urban community. Its marvellous growth and development is absolutely without parallel in the history of the United Kingdom.”

It was sad to see The Ruskin Arms boarded up. Jimmy Winston, one of the founder members of Small Faces told me the band used to rehearse in the pub when his Dad was the landlord. It’s a pub with a lot of history.

I stopped for a cracking £4.95 veg buffet at Annpoorna Indian Restaurant on the High Street before pushing on past the opulent Town Hall to search in vain for the grave of Druid and antiquarian, William Stukeley in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene. Stukeley had been buried at St. Mary’s in 1765 at his request after visiting Rev. Joseph Simms the vicar. Perhaps it was the antiquity of the site that caught Stukeley’s imagination, with Roman burials being excavated by workman. Or the maybe the New Age theoritsts and neo-psychogeographers were correct about St. Mary’s being a nodal point in the London earth grid, a plum location on a ley line. It’s a beautiful peaceful location in any case and the perfect place to end a walk through the ancient borough of East Ham.