River Ingrebourne Walk from Harold Wood to Rainham

London Loop Sections 22 + 23 – Harold Wood to Rainham

The Ingrebourne River is a walk that’s often suggested in comments on my YouTube videos. It rises somewhere on South Weald Common and runs through the London Borough of Havering to the Thames at Rainham. The Romford Recorder reports that the “earliest mention comes in a charter of the boundaries of Upminster Hall manor from 1062, four years before William the Conqueror.
There it’s called “Ingceburne” – probably the river of somebody called “Inga”

Setting out to walk the Ingrebourne the other week, I noticed that the London Loop sections 22 & 23 follow the course of the river from Harold Wood to Rainham. It’s a walk that would combine the revelations of a suburban river walk with the joys of the London Loop. And it was a walk that delivered on all points – parklands, riverscapes, pylons, country parks, pillboxes & tett turrets, an over-enthusiastic cow, and a beautiful sunset over Rainham.

Tett Turret Ingrebourne

Tett Turret on site of RAF Hornchurch

WW2 Pillbox Ingrebourne Valley

WW2 Pillbox on site of RAF Hornchurc

Music in this video from the YouTube Audio Library
Nevada City by Huma-Huma
Fresh Fallen Snow by Chris Haugen
Tupelo Train by Chris Haugen
Little Drunk, Quiet Floats by Puddle of Infinity
Pachabelly by Huma-Huma

The South Bucks Way – Chalfont St Peter to Great Missenden

I first stumbled upon The South Bucks Way in the summer of 2018 when embarking on an unplanned walk heading west out of London. Taking a rest on a bench in Chalfont St Peter, I saw the path arcing along the course of the River Misbourne to Amersham and beyond higher into the Chiltern Hills. Munching on my chips that day I vowed to return and continue my walk along this beguiling trail.

The South Bucks Way runs for 23 miles from Coombe Hill, Wendover to the Grand Union Canal at Denham. I set myself the modest target of reaching Amersham with anywhere beyond that a bonus. Catching the train from London Marylebone to Gerrards Cross I walked the short distance to Chalfont St Peter to pick up my trail from two years previous.

South Bucks Way

It was a beautiful late summer afternoon. Groups of walkers discharged from footpaths onto the streets around Chalfont St. Giles Church. Couples set off into the hills along the paths that spread out from the town that was once dubbed the ‘Gateway to the Chilterns’.

With my expectations of distance low, I was able to enjoy being back out in the Chilterns for the first time since we’d laid my mother to rest in Wooburn Cemetery back in January. Those hills had been calling me all throughout the lockdown and it was pure therapy to be back walking through the shade of beech trees and passing brick and flint cottages and churches.

 

 

David Graeber on Democracy

It was very sad to hear the news of the death of David Graeber, the brilliant anarchist academic, on 2nd September 2020.  David Graeber was professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, and the author of multiple books including, Debt, the first 5000 years, The Democracy Project, and Bullshit Jobs. I was fortunate to film this footage of David speaking to a group of people gathered in Parliament Square, London at Occupy Democracy on 1st May 2015.

Here’s a transcript of the video:

David Graeber

I come from United States where everybody is taught that democracy, you know, comes from the Founding Fathers who created the constitution, the declaration of independence constitution. And you know, the amazing thing is if you actually look at the declaration of independence, the constitution doesn’t say anything about America being a democracy, no one ever talks about this. And if you look at it and you figure out why, you read the original documents, you realize that actually those guys hated democracy. They said so all the time.

I actually saw the opening speech of the constitutional convention, where all the people gathered together to create the American constitution and the first speech is by a governor of Virginia, he says, ‘we’ve got a real problem in this country. There’s a real danger of democracy breaking out. There’s democratic elements in a lot of the local constitution, you’ve got to do something about this. What are we going to do to prevent democracy? We need to create a federal system’, so forth and so on. So the entire constitutional project is an attempt explicitly to suppress democracy.

Now, what did they mean by democracy? Well, they meant this. They meant people sitting around in squares, publicly discussing what to do and brainstorming ideas and, and resolving their own problems in an equal fashion. And why were they against it? They said very blatantly. I mean, John Adams, who was, I think the third president wrote said, ‘one man, one vote, that’s insane. You can’t have democracy. We have, you know, we have like 10 million people with no property in 1 million people have property. What do you think is going to happen? If you give these guys the vote, they’re going to, appropriate us right away.’

So they made very clear that there’s no way you can have real democracy if you have vast inequalities of wealth without people actually undoing the great inequalities of wealth. Now what they have done over the last 200 years is figure out a way a) to take these institutions, which are basically created to stop democracy and convince everybody they are democracy and b) to get people more and more involved in the system. Since gradually, they did expand it to one man, one vote and still somehow not have them do the thing everybody was afraid that they were going to do in the beginning, which is expropriatie the wealth. I mean millions and millions of very ingenious people have been working on how to do this for years. It’s one of the greatest feats of propaganda ever done, but it’s ultimately backed up by force and the moment you really seriously challenge it. Well, we all see what happens.

David Graeber

 

Question from the audience

Perfect. Thank you. And so I just want you all to be aware that we need to acknowledge that the wealth and the deep intelligence and deep understanding what true democracy is, comes from the native people of what’s. I only called the USA because you can’t call it because America’s a huge continent.

 

David Graeber

One thing I would add to that, which people don’t acknowledge is most of the actual democratic elements that did end up in the American constitutional system originally come from native Americans. I mean, the federal system is borrowed from native Americans directly. The story of what actually happened historically has really not been told, because we have this idea that we have these people who have just always been sort of these nature people that don’t have politics of their own, but actually when European settlers showed up in North America, what they really encountered was the result of hundreds of years of democratic movements within native American society. There were these vast kingdoms in the Mississippi, Mississippian civilization they were called, with cast systems which were hierarchical, human sacrifice. Those things were overthrown and they were overthrown by popular movements. It’s only now we’re beginning to understand what happened within indigenous societies, which then created a remarkably individualistic and egalitarian democratic system. And a lot of the enlightenment was actually borrowed from native Americans directly.

 

Question from the audience

What do you think of systems like liquid democracy and other sort of internet based democratic systems, if you know any like delegative democracy, things like that.

 

David Graeber

Should I answer your direct answers? Okay. In this case, I don’t have much of a direct answer. I haven’t really studied them. I mean in my experience social media, internet based forums of democracy they’re really useful for spreading information and coordinating things, but I’ve yet to see a really good way to frame and make decisions collectively that doesn’t involve at some point, people sitting down together. And I think that the technology is really useful to get people into the spaces where they can sit down together and we can’t have enough of that, but at some point people have to look at each other’s eyes.

 

Cycle-In Cinema at Pimp Hall Park, Chingford

Cycle-In Cinema

Marcus from Stow Film Lounge, producers of this wonderful event, commented that the hills of Chingford glittered like medieval villages in Tuscany. And there was magic, as well as mosquitos, at work in Pimp Hall Park on Sunday evening. It was the final night of Stow Film Lounge’s run of Cycle-In Cinema screenings at Pimp Hall, and they were screening the film they’d commissioned me to make about the park.

Cycle-In Cinema

There were a smattering of familiar faces amongst the socially distanced audience allocated a marked area on the grass. Plenty of people had indeed Cycled-In to the open air cinema. The Friends of Pimp Hall Park and Nature Reserve served popcorn in paper cones. There was delicious food from the Urban Turban. It was a truly wonderful evening.

Cycle-In Cinema

My son and I grabbed some samosas and onion bajis as the main attraction, The Personal History of David Copperfield, came onto the screen. Pole Hill loomed in the distance, looking on approvingly.

Walking the Capital Ring from Richmond to Horsenden Hill

A walk along sections 7, 8, and part of Walk 9 of London’s Capital Ring

This glorious walk feels a long time ago now. It was early March and looking for ideas for a walk I found the leaflets for the Capital Ring I’d picked up in Islington Libraries about 20 years ago. I was feeling a bit under the weather, so the walks being divided into roughly 5-mile sections was handy. In the end I walked Sections 7, 8 and the first half of Walk 9 which took me to the top of Horsenden Hill for a Glorious sunset.

Walk 7 – Richmond Bridge to Osterley Lock. This route takes us along the Thames Path to Isleworth, then through Syon Park to Brentford Bridge where we pick up the Grand Union Canal to Osterley Lock.

Walk 8 – Osterley Lock to Greenford. Continuing along the Grand Union Canal we then follow the River Brent beneath the Wharncliffe Viaduct at Hanwell and on to Greenford.

Walk 9 – Horsenden Hill and Sudbury Hill. With the light fading I continued to the summit of Horsenden Hill before continuing in the gloom to Sudbury Hill.