What drew me back to Beckton the other weekend? Lured me out to the windswept marshy Thames level at Gallions Reach. When I think of the places I explored for my book This Other London – there were a few that cast a strange enchantment over my psyche that I still haven’t been able to escape. Beckton was one of those locations. From remote marshland where Neolithic people laid down a trackway across its waterlogged ground, to the enormous gas works that became the location for Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket. And there was the Alp – Beckton Alps that I still hadn’t climbed.
“Ah, but there was a fondly remembered mountain down here, the Beckton Alp, with a fully functional ski lift and a log cabin coffee shop – until, when they were considering, in advance of the Olympics, an iconic Antony Gormley piece to dress the A13 corridor, they discovered that the conical manmade hillock was largely composed of arsenic from the demolished Beckton Gas Works.” Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books
Here’s some footage from the walk I did for Chapter 2 of my book This Other London in the summer of 2012, just before the London Olympics – starting in Leytonstone then going past West Ham Church and the site of Stratford Langthorne Abbey onwards to the site of Beckton Gas Works where Stanley Kubrick shot much of his Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket.
I’ve been sitting on over 4 hours of footage shot on the 10 This Other London walks slowly filtering out a few short videos but much of it remains unseen. The video footage, photos and notes took on an almost entirely different form once processed into a book, they’ve served their purpose and can stay in the bottom drawer. But every now and again I’ll dip back into that archive and release some of those raw video notes back out into the world.
It was on the Refugee Tales walk that we ascended Stave Hill, Rotherhithe – a peculiar recently constructed mound in the centre of an urban park. Iain Sinclair remarked that we may be entering a new era of mound builders with Beckton Alp (a grass covered heap of arsenic) the Silbury Hill of this new epoch.
Taking in the view from the summit Iain says:
“The triangulation of the Shard, the Gherkin, and this new Omphalos – it’s trying rewire the psychogeography of London and undo the great energy lines and ley lines of Greenwich from the top of Greenwich Hill – this is the alternative thing and it’s deeply sinister.”
The London Hospital, Whitechapel: seen from the northern side Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
Iain then talks about the mound at Whitechapel beside the London Hospital.
“It was built up at the time of the civil war as a defensive mound against the Royalists and it stayed there until relatively recent times,” and although it was demolished “the sense of it is still there”.
He spoke of how the early foundations of London were based on the four principle sacred mounds of London as described by E.O Gordon in ‘Prehistoric London – its mounds and circles’, and the relationship between the mounds “and the geometric patterns that emerged. Now the Hawksmoor pattern that you could have seen from the top of Greenwich Hill has been obliterated by Canary Wharf someone’s got to set up a new system to replace it”, and the Stave Hill mound is part of that system. “So we’ll link this to Beckton Alp, which is a mound of arsenic and a few shells left behind by Stanley Kubrick after re-staging the Vietnam War”.
Iain had found traces of the palm trees Kubrick had planted around Beckton when using it as the setting for Full Metal Jacket. He was on a walk with film-maker Chris Petit from Aldgate Pump down to the sea and they found a strange park near Beckton Alp which had stubs and “dying remnants of the palm trees that Kubrick had imported from Spain to create a sense of Vietnam”.
He took Will Self to the gigantic Woolworths at the retail park at Beckton built on the site of the old gas works – apparently it reminded Self of America due to the scale of the store, “but yet you could actually could get a very good cup of coffee”, Iain laughs, “and a big collection of dvds, I liked it a lot, but then it disappeared.”
Set off from Leytonstone the other day on the second of a series of walks I’m undertaking for a book that I’m currently writing (published September 2013).
For all my planning and research I didn’t take account of the gates to East Ham church being locked. The Parish Church of West Ham will now get all the plaudits.
I also wasn’t prepared for Gallions Reach shopping colony.
