East London walk in search of a mystery
I love ‘following the scent of a clue’, to borrow one of Gordon S. Maxwell’s types of topographical rambles as described in The Fringe of London (1925). And this was an incredibly enticing clue sent via an Instagram DM. TimeWandererChris asked me what I knew about the holy well in Valentines Park, Ilford. What?, I thought. On all my countless walks through Valentines Park, and the reading for those explorations, I’d neither come across references to a holy well nor seen anything that looked remotely like a holy well. Not even when presenting a radio show on Ilford with Nick Papadimitriou for Resonance fm in 2011. This would surely be a wild goose chase.
The resulting walk a couple of weeks ago, in the video above, proved to be a revelation.