Starting from Leyton I headed out for a walk with no destination in mind in the spirit of a classic dérive or drift following my nose and being guided by my feet.
Filmed 22nd August 2024
“So make up your mind to be bound by no programme, to travel with complete irresponsibility, to start nowhere in particular, and the odds are that you will catch a glimpse of England that is vouchsafed only to the privileged few.”
SPB Mais, England’s Character (1936)
Walking Roman London
Stane Street was the Roman road that linked Londinium to Noviomagus Reginorum (Chichester). In use by AD70, It starts its journey at the southern end of London Bridge and ran for 57-miles. I decided to walk the first 10 miles from Borough to Tooting. Stone Street led me through Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Stockwell, Clapham, Clapham Common, Balham, ending at Tooting in the Trafalgar Inn.
A collaboration with the brilliant Young’s Beer.
Chrisp Street, Limehouse Cut, Bow Locks, River Lea, Stratford
Last summer I recorded a podcast with sound recordist Joel Carr with the intent of capturing the environmental sounds experienced on a walk along with my usual natter. This recording was broadcast on Resonance Fm as ‘Sonic Perambulation: Chrisp Street Market to Stratford’. I also shot around 15 minutes of video of the walk which I finally got around to editing to Joel’s soundscape.
This walk starts at Chrisp Street Market in Poplar as the market traders pack up for the day. It’s one of London’s older street markets and is currently caught up in a regeneration project. We then walk through the streets to the Limehouse Cut and follow this to Stratford via the River Lea.
In a recent video I repeated a statement I’d been told by a Freeman of the City of London, and somebody who’d worked in the Lord Mayor’s office. He’d declared that there are ‘no roads in the City of London’. In the comments of that video several people countered that in fact the lower section of Goswell Road was inside the City and therefore rendered that statement factually incorrect.
So I set off on a stroll down the length of Goswell Road, starting at the Angel Islington, to explore the story of the road itself and find the point at which it crossed the border into the Square Mile. It was a fascinating journey into the past of this storied thoroughfare. As to whether in fact it is the City’s only ‘Road’ is ever so slightly inconclusive as can be seen in the comments, with recent boundary changes bringing the Golden Lane Estate into the City of London, and the question of whether the City of London Police or the Metropolitan Police have jurisdiction over the road itself.
The City of London continues to be a source of endless curiosity.
Writing starts with a photograph, W.G Sebald said on a German TV arts magazine programme about the publication of his book The Emigrants. This clip was played under the looming 15th Century timbered roof of the Dragon Hall in Norwich on Wednesday at the launch of Shadows of Reality – A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials
(Eds. Clive Scott & Nick Warr). The event also marked what would have been Sebald’s 80th birthday, in the city where he worked for much of his life and made his home. I decided to make the trip to Norwich to attend the event, meeting a friend there who had been taught German literature by ‘Max’ Sebald at UEA in the 1980’s. My walk from the station to meet Duncan passed through the Art Nouveau Royal Arcade, built in 1899. Such arcades are intimately connected with strolling poets, flâneurs, through an association with Baudelaire and described at length by German philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. Sebald was himself a notable strolling poet and would have passed through the Royal Arcade on many occasions.
Duncan and I looped round the narrow medieval streets of Norwich in the hours before the event at the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall. Along with a group of Sebald’s former students, Duncan had reprised the Austerlitz walk from Liverpool Street to Alderney Road in Stepney that I’d filmed with artist Bob and Roberta Smith in 2019 using notes provided by Iain Sinclair, who’d been taken on the walk by poet Stephen Watts. It was Watts who’d led W.G Sebald on those original Austerlitz research walks through the East End. The UEA alumni walk of Max’s former students was carried out on the 18th May 2024, the day that would’ve been Sebald’s 80th birthday. There’s an account of the walk on the University of East Anglia website, where W.G Sebald taught for thirty years.
With still some time to kill we admired the exterior of the Music House in King Street, the oldest house in Norwich, built in the 12th Century.
As a writer of unclassifiable prose, Sebald drew heavily on photographic images and was notable for embedding them within the text in intriguing ways. The Shadows of Reality book collects Sebald’s photographic materials together into a single catalogue with commentary and presented in chronological order. Friends and former colleagues read from Sebald’s works, often in German – the language Sebald wrote in. The conclusion to the evening was its most impactful. An audio recording of W.G Sebald reading from the Emigrants in English at an event at UEA in the 90s that reverberated around the packed medieval hall. It was a poignant and magical event.
W.G. SEBALD: Shadows of Reality – is published by Boiler House Press
The event took place on 12th June 2024
“Every town on the multiverse has a part that is something like Ankh-Morpork’s Shades. It’s usually the oldest part, its lanes faithfully following the original tracks of medieval cows going down to the river, and they have names like Shambles, the Rookery, Sniggs Alley …”
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
A walk to find a location from best-selling author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of books nestled in the Chilterns countryside close to where Pratchett grew up – and also my childhood home. Sniggs Alley is a place in Ankh-Morpork on the Discworld. It’s also an ancient footpath that runs from Loudwater to the village of Penn in Buckinghamshire. Our quest to find Sniggs Alley starts in High Wycombe and we walk along the A40 London Road to Loudwater before walking into the Chiltern Hills. We then turn towards Forty Green, near Beaconsfield, where Terry Pratchett grew up. At Lude Farm we pass the field where a B17 bomber crashed on 12 August 1944.
At Forty Green we stop for a pint on the Royal Standard of England, which is the oldest free house in England and has existed for over 900 years. The final part of the walk takes to Beaconsfield Library where Terry Pratchett spent much time reading and studying.
A couple of weeks ago I returned to the border of Greater London to walk the Mardyke Way. This ancient river has followed the same course for over 30 million years. Today it carves a path through the Essex countryside on the edge of London. The route I took from Purfleet was around 11-miles followed by around another 3 miles to West Horndon Station. This is great walk through fields, meadows and fens.
I started at Purfleet to capture the point of the Mardyke’s confluence with the Thames. It has an impressive wide mouth, partly marked by the huge brick 18th Century gunpowder magazine. From here there’s a path beside the river for a relatively short distance before I needed to embark on a wide detour along Tank Hill Road to the village of Aveley. The Old Ship Inn marked the start of Ship Lane with its impressive St. Michael’s Church, the oldest parts of which date from the 12th century.
A mile or so along Ship Lane from Aveley you can find the start of the Mardyke Valley path to Stifford. From here the route closely follows the course of the river passing through fields and fringing woodland.
It appeared that the walk had two sections – from Aveley to Davy Down then Stifford Bridge to Bulphan but there’s a walkable path the entire way with only short overgrown areas. There were vast expanses of farmland to the East of the river leading up to Orsett Fen and then beyond into Bulphan and far fewer walkers and cyclists in these upper reaches. It was blazing hot, my neck and calves toasted in the sun.
Harrow Bridge at Bulphan marks one end of the Mardyke Way but it did appear possible to follow the river little further north along the roadside. The promised footpath across fields to West Horndon Station didn’t manifest in reality on the ground despite signs at either end (or at least I could’t find it), meaning I had a precarious at times 2.5-mile walk along Dunnings Lane. An incredible walk that has added to my understanding of the landscape around the fringe of London.