newham bookshop Archives - the lost byway

Two suggestions in a recent Q&A video led to great East London day out.

I started with a walk from the Gurney obelisk on Stratford Broadway to the Black Lion pub in Plaistow to meet Tweedy Pubs, an 18th century coaching inn. It is indeed a great pub, an authentic London boozer as had been suggested with excellent cask ale. After our pint we started our stroll and Tweedy pointed out a couple of lost pubs – The Coach and Horses, and The Greyhound. I’d passed another lost pub on the way to the Black Lion, The Railway Tavern opposite Plaistow tube station. Tweedy talked about Plaistow resident Luke Howard who came up with the naming convention for clouds, although in the comments people are very keen to point out that Howard is claimed by Tottenham with a blue plaque to seal the association.

We then walked through Plaistow Park and discussed some of the history of Plaistow from Thomas Burke’s enthusiastic description of Plastovians in the 1920s to the grand houses that once marked this marshy lowland including homes of the Earl of Essex and the Duke of Cumberland. Our meander took us to the site of a former tramway garage just off Tunmarsh Lane. Then we parted company on Barking Road where I signed copies of my new publication The Black Path at Newham Bookshop.

From the bookshop I walked through the backstreets of Plaistow to West Ham Park where I delved into the history of this fantastic London park which is celebrating its 150 year anniversary this year. Once the home of Dr Fothergill at Ham House, it was bought by the Gurney family from Norwich in the 18th Century and then eventually purchased by the Corporation of London in 1874 to be preserved as a public park. The park keeper’s whistle ended my autumn stroll around Plaistow and West Ham Park and I made my way over the railway tracks and up Odessa Road for a pint in Leytonstone to round off a fantastic day.

Watch @TweedyPubs video here

Last week at the Wanstead Tap I had the great pleasure to talk to Iain Sinclair about his new book The Last London.

He read a passage about a walk along the Barking to Gospel Oak branch of the London Overground, a walk that I accompanied him on for a short section through Leytonstone, on the morning of Donald Trump’s US election victory.

“My theories at the time of Lud Heat, deriving from E.O Gordon, Alfred Watkins, John Michell, Nigel Pennick, were about lines of force connecting the churches, making patterns, and provoking crimes, rituals visitations, within an unregistered sphere of influence. What I now understood, in steady rain, on this morning of political madness, tracking an inoperative railway to a place nobody wants to go, is that the walks we are compelled to make are the only story. Walks are autobiography with author.”

photo by Keith kandrphoto.com

Iain Sinclair’s work has had such a profound influence on London writing over the last 30 years at least, an influence that has stretched into film and visual arts. He synthesised a way of understanding the city and helped codify a new form psychogeography, distinct from its intellectual French roots. He expanded on the background to his hugely influential book Lud Heat:

“There was a period when you were able to absorb so many eccentric influences from all over and it goes back for me to a kind of collision for me between cinema and poetry which were my twin obsessives when I was very young and coming to London to be in film school and beginning to do long rambles and wanders and generally just to find one cinema to the next, whatever it was, and later as a gardener realising that the structure of these churches were enormously powerful and were in some ways, if you looked from the top of Greenwich Hill, connected. London was an irrational city but with rational plans put on top of it at various times generally doomed to fail in their own way but to become part of the story of the city.

I got very intrigued by that and from those kind of interests emerged a hybrid form of writing that was live day-to-day reportage of what I was doing as a gardener in an exciting part of London that I was only beginning to discover. And secondly then having the time to research the churches and their history in places like the Bancroft Road Library, which is sort of more or less gone now, which is a huge resource of local history and the librarians were so knowledgeable, they’d open up dusty boxes and show you all this stuff. It all fused together into a kind of writing that combined wild speculations, satires to do with the awful way the workers were treated down there and the idea that these jobs would disappear and that the landscape itself would disappear because we were treading on the ghosts of the future Docklands, ghosts come from both sides you know, ghosts of the things you find in the past, the ‘scarlet tracings’, but there were also ghosts of the future and they met in that landscape.”

Listen to the full audio of the conversation above.