The Black Path – launch events

I’m doing two events to launch my new publication – The Black Path

24th October 7pm – The Broadway Bookshop, Hackney – RSVP books@broadwaybookshophackney.com

21st November 7.30pm – The Wanstead Tap – book via the Eventbrite link below:

Register on Eventbrite

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

Author John Rogers at the London Adventures launch, London Welsh Centre 29th March 2023
London Adventures launch London Welsh Centre 29th March 2023

Secrets of the East: along a Hidden River to a Medieval shrine in Ilford

This January walk takes us once again back into the past, where the landscape reveals the deep history of this area and tells us its stories. We start by exploring two Possible Prehistoric ditches on Wanstead Flats near Centre Road/north of the Jubilee Pond and running Southeast to Centre Road.

You can read the archaeological report here: https://bit.ly/2KLv5ZG

Then we pass through the uncanny suburb of Aldersbrook to pick up the River Roding. We follow the Roding as it runs beside Ilford Golf Club and find the mysterious little Alders Brook, a beguiling rivulet that for some of the year is little more than a muddy ditch hidden in the undergrowth. The dramatic January floods and the high tide filled the Alders Brook with water and revealed it as a flowing river. We follow the Alders Brook as it passes beneath the railway bridge at the Butts (possibly named after the rifle butts on adjacent lands in the 19th Century) and then runs parallel to the Roman Romford Road and returns to the River Roding at Ilford Bridge beneath the North Circular flyover.

The final stretch of our walk takes us up Ilford Hill to the Hospital Chapel dedicated to St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury. The Chapel was established around the year 1140 by the Abbess of Barking as a leper hospital. It became a stopping place for pilgrims and medieval travellers passing through the area. It’s a wonderful hidden location.

The Leytonstone Beer Mile

Leyton Food Market

Signature Brew at Leyton Food Market

Now that Waltham Forest has followed Bermondsey and launched the Walthamstow Beer Mile, may I propose another ale stroll for the Borough – the Leytonstone Beer Mile. I mean it might be marginally longer than a mile and extend into Leyton, but that just makes for a better walk between venues.

The Walthamstow Beer Mile

Firstly let’s take a look at the Walthamstow Beer Mile. It’s based along Blackhorse Road with its most southerly end starting in St. James Street (a continuation of Blackhorse Road). The first venue is Pillars Brewery The Untraditional Pub at the Crate Building at 35 St James Street. Pillars are based on Shernhall Street, E17 so the beer has just rolled down the hill to this taproom so should be lovely and fresh. Next up heading north are three close together around Uplands Avenue just off Blackhorse Road and Priestly Way. East London Legends, Trumans, have their Trumans Social Club in Priestly Way. Exhale Brewery are in Uplands Avenue. And the brilliant Signature Brew, who were formerly based in Leyton, relocated to Uplands Business Park. From here it’s a socially responsible stagger along Blackhorse Road to another local stalwart, Wildcard Brewery in Lockwood Way. And nearby is Forest Road Brewing Co. – although their taproom seems to be in Hackney.

That all seems like a fine day out – and there’s plenty of food along the way from supermarkets to chicken shops and probably a few stalls catering to drinkers.

 

The Leytonstone Beer Mile (inc. Leyton)

Leytonstone Beer Mile

The Wanstead Tap

May I now propose the Leytonstone Beer Mile (which extends into Leyton). All but one of these beer emporiums is situated within the arches of the Overground railway. This beer trail would start at the fantastic Wanstead Tap, which although most people would consider this Forest Gate, it is within the Borough of Waltham Forest so is technically considered Leytonstone. This amazing venue has the most fantastic selection of beer and also sells merch for Clapton CFC and even books from time to time (mine was on sale there at one point). From here we move along the Overground a short distance to the Pretty Decent Beer Co. – which is far more than a pretty decent microbrewery and tap room.

You could leave the railway and stroll across the corner of Wanstead Flats to pick up the route by Leytonstone High Road Station, cross the Link Road and in a railway arch on the other side you’ll find the Solvay Society, who brew their Belgian beers not far away in Ilford.

Leytonstone Beer Mile

When you get to Grove Green Road (resisting the temptations of the Heathcote and Star) a few yards up on the right is the beguiling and already essential Filly Brook newly established in a fine black wooden hall. They serve up a great selection of locally brewed beers and you can line your stomach with some delicious Yard Sale Pizza. Making your way back along the railway, past Norlington School, and just before Leyton Midland Road Station is the transcendental Gravity Well – who are worth visiting not just for their cosmic beers but the names are out of this world as well. And this is where the Leytonstone Beer Mile (and a half) ends.

Filly Brook Leytonstone Beer Mile

Filly Brook – taken in February 2020

Hopefully I’ll bump into some of you doing the Leytonstone Beer Mile this weekend.

London Overground Walk – Leytonstone to Barking

A walk along the London Overground Railway Gospel Oak to Barking Line (GOBLIN) from Leytonstone to Barking.

This was a walk I first planned as an episode of Ventures and Adventures in Topography with Nick Papadimitriou on Resonance fm, back in 2010. Although it would have followed the whole of the line from Gospel Oak to Barking. Then I walked a very short portion of the route with Iain Sinclair when he passed through Leyton and Leytonstone following the route for his book The Last London, which was flatteringly recorded in the text, “John was the animating spirit of Leytonstone. When he was in attendance, streets from which I felt a double alienation (theirs and mine) came to life.” So the continuation of the lockdown felt like the perfect time to actually walk the Overground from Leytonstone to Barking at least (it’s still advised to only use public transport for essential journeys).

I started my walk by the railway bridge on Grove Green Road, Leytonstone outside the Heathcote and Star. From here I made my way past Leytonstone High Road Station with a nod to the ground of Leytonstone F.C. Then I traversed that curious geographical anomaly, The Wanstead Slip. The Pretty Decent Beer Company, located in a railway arch, were building a bar in the brewery doorway to prepare for the weekend opening of the tap room. It made me realise I had to pick up some draft ale from the brilliant Wanstead Tap nestled in another of the arches. Departing the Tap with a couple of pints of Long Play IPA and some Clapton CFC stickers in my bag, I continued along the railway into Forest Gate.

 

Barking

Barking

Barking

Crossing Woodgrange Road, famous for its association with Jimi Hendrix at the Upper Cut Club, I head into Sebert Road, named after King Sebert of the East Saxons ( 604-616), the first Anglo-Saxon king to convert to Christianity. The rain started to fall as I walked those fine streets of the Woodgrange Estate and breached a rainy Roman Romford Road. When the railway line opened it ran across open fields on this side of the Romford Road. The streets of Manor Park sprouted from that marshy ground, many of them seemingly named after poets. This route provides a dramatic entrance to Barking: the gasometers rising from the tall grasses of the North Thames Gas Board Sports Ground, the pylons, the North Circular, and the industrial estate. Classic edgelands. I cross the River Roding, the towers of the new London looming all through Barking and out to Dagenham. The terminus of the railway where face-masked communters pour out into the streets.

 

 

The Last London – in conversation with Iain Sinclair

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.”

Iain Sinclair the Last London

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.

Iain Sinclair and John Rogers

photo by Keith kandrphoto.com

 

Photos by Keith Event photos by Keith www.kandrphoto.com
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