This walk follows the first section of the walk in Chapter 1 of my book This Other London which starts at the majestic Gunnersbury Park in West London. The Park was originally the grounds of Gunnersbury House, a Georgian mansion built for King George III’s aunt Princess Amelia. Today it’s home to Gunnersbury Museum and the house is open to the public.
We then walk along the ‘Golden Mile’ – a strip of the A4 Great West Road running through Brentford that from the 1920’s became an industrial centre for a number of household names and famous for its Art Deco architecture. Some of the companies based there included Smiths Crisps, Gillette, Currys, Beachams, and Firestone Tyres.
Our walk ends at the Gillette Building on Gillette Corner.
This London walk takes us to the City of London looking for the lost rivers and streams of Roman London on the western edge of the old Roman City. A number of channels were excavated at 7-10 Old Bailey that indicated this area was a major tributary valley of the River Fleet. Our Roman London walk starts at the top of Ludgate Hill near St Paul’s Cathedral then turns into Old Bailey, from here we go across Limeburner Lane into Old Seacoal Lane and along Farringdon Street. We turn into Bear Alley and then return to follow the course of the tributary back to its source just to the north of Newgate Street. From Greyfriars Churchyard we then follow the ‘western stream’ down across Paternoster Square to its confluence with the Thames near Puddle Dock. Source: London Archaeologist Summer 2014
Map of the western stream in the City of LondonFarringdon Road / River Fleet
Once one of the medieval Cinque Ports and an important harbour, changes to the coastline and the course of the River Rother altered not just the landscape but the town’s fortunes and it became a haunt of smugglers. Many of the buildings in the town centre date from the 15th and 16th Century, including the charming Mermaid Inn which was rebuilt in 1420. The video includes Mermaid Street, Rye Castle and Ypres Tower, the River Brede, Romney Marsh, the River Rother, Martello Towers, WW2 pill boxes, and Rye Harbour and Beach.
St Mary’s ChurchViewing platform Rye Castle, Ypres TowerMermaid Street
Last night at midnight, Sunday 13th October, Time was called for the final time at The George, Wanstead, as a Wetherspoons pub. There was a sense of occasion from the time we arrived at 10pm. It was packed and stayed that way til midnight when drinks were no longer served. The George Orwell portrait went missing at some point. I wondered what would happen to the maps and paintings of Wanstead Park with the local history information. I ended many a Wanstead Park stroll in the George. And although the pub will re-open under new ownership it will be as part of a more upmarket chain which will price out many of the regulars who had a second home at The George, particularly the older people who could sit there for a few hours with unlimited tea refills for a pound, or enjoy a cheap meal. Wetherspoons get a lot of stick (mainly for their owner’s support for Brexit) but their pubs provide a valuable community resource which will be sorely missed in Wanstead. It felt like a true end of an era. And good luck getting a pint at midnight on a Sunday in Wanstead now.
The Black Path is published by Three Imposters as part of the London Adventures series.
The shades of long-dead writers in the London streets, random meetings, quests and journeys striking lines across the city, the past seeping through the pavements, the unexpected erupting through the fabric of everyday life, glimpses of the fantastic in the ordinary: London Adventures can be any or all of these. John Rogers’ contribution to the series is a psychogeographical ramble along the Black Path, an old drovers and porters road from Walthamstow to the markets in the City, featuring pie and mash shops and pubs, Francesca’s Cafe and the Battle of Broadway Market, the London bodysnatchers, the violent origins of Haggerston Park and much, much more from the colourful history of an ancient route. Previous writers in the series include Iain Sinclair and Xiaolu Guo. Limited numbered edition of 250 copies. Price £10.00 Published by Three Impostors
London Adventures launch London Welsh Centre 29th March 2023
In February 1957 (On the Road was published in September 1957) Jack Kerouac boarded a ship from Brooklyn to Tangier in Morocco. He traveled back to the U.S via France and England. An account of this trip was published in Lonesome Traveler. Below is his record of his few days in London waiting to catch the boat train to Southampton.
“Outskirts of the city in late afternoon like the old dream of sun rays through afternoon trees. – Out at Victoria Station, where some of the students were met by limousines. – Pack on back, excited, I started walking in the gathering dusk down Buck-ingham Palace Road seeing for the first time long deserted streets. (Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.) – Past the Palace, down the Mall through St James’s Park, to the Strand, traffic and fumes and shabby English crowds going out to movies, Trafalgar Square, on to Fleet Street where there was less traffic and dimmer pubs and sad side alleys, almost clear to St Paul’s Cathedral where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.
Site of the King Lud pub on Ludgate Circus
I called my London agent on the phone, telling him my plight. ‘My dear fellow it’s awfully unfortunate I wasnt in this afternoon. We were visiting mother in Yorkshire. Would a fiver help you?* ‘Yes!’ So I took a bus to his smart flat at Buckingham Gate (I had walked right past it after getting off the train) and went up to meet the dignified old couple. – He with goatee and fireplace and Scotch to offer me, telling me about his one-hundred-year-old mother reading all of Trevelyan’s English Social History. – Homburg, gloves, umbrella, all on the table, attesting to his way of living, and myself feeling like an American hero in an old movie. — Far cry from the little kid under a river bridge dreaming of England. – They fed me sandwiches, gave me money, and then I walked around London savoring the fog in Chelsea, the bobbies wandering in the milky mist, thinking, Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?’ The dim lights, the English soldier strolling with one arm around his girl and with the other hand eating fish and chips, the honk of cabs and buses, Piccadilly at midnight and a bunch of Teddy Boys asking me if I knew Gerry Mulligan.
Finally I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed. And on Good Friday afternoon a heavenly performance of the St Matthew Passion by the St Paul’s choir, with full orchestra and a special service choir. – I cried most of the time and saw a vision of an angel in my mother’s kitchen and longed to go home to sweet America again. – And realized that it didnt matter that we sin, that my father died only of impatience, that all my own petty gripes didnt matter either. – Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble basrelief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages. Outside as I walked in the dusk around Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece and saw the gloomy overgrown ruins of Hitler’s blitz around the cathedral, I saw my own mission. In the British Museum I looked up my family in Rivista Araldica, IV, Page 240, Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany. Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.’ I could have known. At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvelously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music, Enobarbus noble and strong, Lepidus wry and funny at the druken rout on Pompey’s boat, Pompey warlike and harsh, Antony virile, Caesar sinister, and though the cultured voices criticized the Cleopatra in the lobby at intermission, I knew that I had seen Shakespeare as it should be played. On the train en route to Southampton, brain trees growing out of Shakespeare’s fields, and the dreaming meadows full of lamb dots.”
