Wantead Flats midsummer

I was in the Weatherspoon’s on Leytonstone High Road last night and read a framed nugget of local history about the Royal Hunting Lodge that sat opposite Davies Lane and the residence of Nell Gwynne, The Cedars that was on the corner of Ferndale Road. Apparently there was an underground passage that linked the two so Charles II could slip across to his mistress unnoticed, although I can’t imagine there were many people around that end of Leytonstone in the C17th who could have spotted him.

So this evening I went out looking for traces. I didn’t really look very hard to be honest and ended up carrying on down Davies Lane and across Wanstead Flats.

 The gorse really catches the setting sun – it’s worth coming over just to see it.

There was a slightly forlorn fair parked up between ditches, a few people drifting through getting their pockets emptied.

Building London’s airport at Heath Row

This is a fascinating newsreel of the building of London Airport in the fields on the edge of Hounslow Heath at Heath Row.
There’s something slightly terrifying about watching the coming of the jet age to London, “And the landscape was changed and the past obliterated”, the voice-over declares in a cold, officious tone. The past wasn’t really obliterated as much as they’d like to think, the rivers Crane and Colne will continue flowing through the terrain long after we’ve moved onto teleportation as the best way to get to Marbella.

It’s interesting that no mention is made of the archaeological finds of neolithic settlements excavated during the construction of Runway One. Maybe they were too high on jet fumes to notice.

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Jubilee on the Thames

I think those people were waiting for the Sex Pistols barge to float by in a re-enactment of one of the great cultural moments in the history of the Thames during the last Jubilee – I know I was. Although, the London Symphony Orchestra did make a brilliant racket and the conductor flailed around in a manner redolent of Johnny Rotten before the butter adverts – not a bad subsitute

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Hitler Passed This Way

Found this brilliant, poignant little book the other day

It contains before and after photos of areas bombed during the Second World War. Like these of Paternoster Row devastated by a bombing raid in December 1940.

The introduction states that the photos “present the aftermath of the new kind of war Hitler thrust upon mankind, the war in which non-combatants were to be killed off like insects, and their homes, hospitals, schools and churches were to be smashed to pieces.”

I’ll place it next to William Kent’s equally haunting Lost Treasures of London, Kent being a great guide to the city dutifully logging the artifacts, and relics, as well as buildings lost in the Blitz.

Thankfully I also have the wartime optimism of the County of London Plan (1943) to perk me up – a reminder that whilst the bombs rained down on London there were a group of people in a nissen hut somewhere planning new open spaces, hospitals, and fly-overs.

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