Woden's Weekly

Lea Valley in peace and war – Desire paths and a garlic harvest on the Mighty Dollis – Shed tears and steam clean up: winners and losers in the heritage industry – A good walk hosed: crazy golf in Theydon Bois.

Wednesday (4th April) to Cheshunt for a circular walk via Monkhams Hall. The best view in the Lea Valley – especially since the last semi-wilderness areas of the lower valley are now covered in circus tents, lego and gulag fencing.

I first came across the walk in a Lea Valley Park leaflet. They no longer list it. Perhaps because no one in their right mind would walk along Waltham Road even for the 300 metres before a stile appears in the hedge and – with a sigh of relief – you escape through fields and climb to the wooded ridge. Still, various sites on the web publish a similar walk, including the AA. Although the half-way pub – The Coach and Horses – has sadly served its last pint. RIP.

I was reminded of the walk because I’d just read “In Search of the Zeppelin War,” by Dr Neil Faulkner and Dr Nadia Durrani, which is about the archaeology of the first blitz. I had often sat on the concrete remains of the anti-aircraft battery near Monkhams Hall to enjoy the fantastic view without ever thinking that it might have been in use in the first war as well as the second. The Lea Valley was the approach corridor of choice for Zeppelins which would navigate – not always accurately – to the metropolis from the East Anglian coast.

I did a double take when I reached the hill – there were several people there already with hi-vis jackets and hard hats. I thought the archaeologists had come back. It turned out to be contractors working for the MoD – at least, that’s what one of them told me. He said his name was Edward Thomas, which with hindsight I suppose should have rung alarm bells. The WW2 gun platform, he explained, had been protected with a plastic membrane and then covered with sand and gravel and a fresh layer of concrete. This was to be the site of an AA missile system for the duration of the Olympics.

“You can’t even see Stratford from here,” I protested. But he patiently explained that the site had been chosen to protect the air corridor from Luton.

“This is potentially route No 1. We’ll have guys in trees on Telegraph Hill and if Johnny Turk turns left at Leagrave we should be able to slot him before you can say “orbital motorway”.

“What’s the difference between a plane crashing in to Tottenham and a plane crashing into Stratford?” I asked.

He stared at me in blank incomprehension.

“We win, obviously.”

“Cool.”

His grandfather (his eyes became shiny at this point and he picked up a handful of earth from the ground) had lost a leg and an eye when the hill was recaptured from the Germans during the invasion of 1910.

Even today there was a very nearly 360 degree view from here apart from a few degrees in the north west obscured by trees.

There was a good view of the M25 and Sainsbury’s distribution centre sheds stretching for what must be a kilometre along side it – the other side of Waltham Abbey.

Smoke was rising from a big fire somewhere the other side of Pole Hill – a vacant DIY warehouse in Chingford, as it turned out – lending atmosphere to my research.

Good views too of Epping and the forest, some glass houses – tiny compared to the Sainsbury’s depot.

Smoke billowed across Canary Wharf, the Lea Valley reservoirs, Crystal Palace, the Shard, the London Eye in the West End, and the Northern Heights. Dramatic clouds alone would have been enough but the smoke and the slight orangey tint of the light on the panorama was sublime. Hope it was insured. That may of course have been the point as my friend uncharitably pointed out.

The field at my feet was of grass and scrubby young hawthorn. There was a trig point off to my right behind me. A row of half a dozen or so mature oaks marched across the field well separated. Beyond were wheat fields and rows of snowy hawthorn hedges.

Down to the right were the watery delights of Cornmill Meadows, cut by the Greenwich Meridian. This was my route back to Cheshunt, skirting what’s still called on my map the Government Research Establishment. Here strange brick structures and abandoned buildings loomed through the trees and perimeter fence.

Such places often have the feeling of having been recently abandoned in a hurry – there’s usually a door banging somewhere. But the occupants could return and straighten the number on the wall brush away a few cob webs and carry on whatever it was they were doing.

Today I had the slightly sinking feeling that the landscape around the pond – viewed through the high MoD fences – was just a little bit too tidy. When I first walked here fifteen or twenty years ago, the sentry box and barrier on the concrete track from the Crooked Mile (named because of its meander around the bottom of Monkhams Hall Hill?) were still standing.

I suppose a dredged pond is a more bio-diverse one. Left to its own devices the buildings would disappear altogether in the jungle. But still I can’t help feeling something is lost as well as gained in the transaction.

On Wednesday (11th April) a walk in proper April weather without the showers except a spot or two which I saw fall in to the Mighty Dollis before I felt them on my head.

I walked from High Barnet following the river all the way to Finchley. Almost all the way.

It was always going to be a battle today. My mind was a desert. I was not confident that the river would work its magic. It seemed to reflect my torpor. There wasn’t enough water to turn a stone let alone a mill wheel.

I was envious of the crows hunting worms near the Underhill stadium . They were tied to the rhythm of the earth and didn’t have to write drivel or play hooky on the river bank to make themselves feel alive.

I trod on last year’s conkers and listened to the song of the river in spite of myself. I drank tea and felt the sun on my back as the river wrapped itself around me.

Just before reaching a playing field a brand new wooden gate – locked – stood where there used to be just a bollard.

I was just turning round when I saw that you could still get round the side.

I retraced my steps anyway and followed the fingerposts through suburban streets, but noticed a couple of joggers cutting along the edge of the field I had just been turned back from.

At the far corner of the field the fence was only about knee high and with the water low the joggers didn’t even need to get their feet wet in the Folly Brook which joins the Dollis at this point.

Locals in the know (at least those whose weight or something else doesn’t prevent them squeezing like a fox round the gate) can enjoy their riverside without interruption along Route 22. Oiks from the town who long ago beshat and entombed their own streams in concrete must detour through suburbia to see how they too might have lived if only they hadn’t been so feckless and lazy.

The best part of the walk is the last section before the Mill Hill viaduct. It is “wilder” more unkempt and at this time of year banks of wild garlic – now just flowering – are at their best.

The allotments were busy. If sitting round chatting is busy. But I was surprised to walk past two Italian men arguing loudly. For some reason the scene brought to mind a quote from Richard Jefferies: “The wheat fields are beautiful but human life is struggle.”

Near the viaduct two Chinese women were harvesting garlic leaves – they had filled maybe a dozen carrier bags. Even so they had made barely an impression in the sea of garlic. I smiled at one of them and she smiled back.

I was once more a citizen of the world – the river and the sunshine had pulled me like the wild garlic from the void.

Friday (27th April) from Chipping Ongar to Theydon Bois under black skies and intermittent – trippy – sunshine in one of the wettest Aprils on record.

The peg that this bespoke walk hung on was half of a twin shed WWI aircraft hangar which was apparently rescued from North Weald Bassett Aerodrome and reassembled a few miles away in the Essex village of Moreton where it saw service as a barn and then a garage.

The trip began badly – the bus timetable I downloaded was out of date: the bus from Epping Station had gone. What I didn’t realise was that this was a theme that would re-echo over the entire 13 miles.

Much of the walk followed the Cripsey Brook, a tributary of the River Roding which rises somewhere and eventually finds its way to the Thames at Creekmouth, Barking.

With Ongar behind me, the rain and soon-wet feet didn’t dampen my spirits. I even felt a little smug.

Water meadows, horse pasture and soggy arable fields of new wheat and mellow yellow gangrape. Old oaks hollow as smugglers’ caves. Swallows – my first this summer. But only a handful – above one field – and not seen again.

I continually chased up larks from whatever they do silently in the wheat. They would skitter skyward in a flash of white tail feathers and erupt into song which outbabbled the brook.

The higher animals are the only things in the landscape not in a hurry. Even the dandelions seem to be competing for their day in the sun.

At Moreton the Roman Road crosses the Cripsey Brook. There are two pubs in the village – pretty good in an age where pubs are disappearing faster than hens’ teeth. Travellers may have taken a dram here 2,000 years ago. It would have been a natural place to stop and water the 4×4.

But the hangar had gone. Replaced by a housing development. The new wooden beams of the roofs rose naked above the Harras fencing – a strange echo of the hangar – and a reminder that these houses too will one day be old and unprofitable.

For a while the monument to the first Blitz will be preserved digitally in an energy guzzling concrete bunker somewhere in the Nevada desert and available for perusal at streetview on the personal communications device of your choice.

I approached the village of North Weald Bassett – still following the stream – by the side of a golf course and entered St Andrew’s Church through the lichgate. Part of the cemetery is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

My eye was caught by one date which kept cropping up – 23 January 1945.

It was the day a V2 rocket aimed at the capital and flying rather faster than the speed of the sound of loneliness landed in a barracks at the airfield in Stapleford a few miles to the south of here (twenty miles from Charing Cross). In the Second World War strategic bombing had become a lot more lethal.

But no more accurate.

Another grave that drew my attention was decorated with a Czechoslovak lion – the symbol of the country which emerged in 1918 from the wreckage of the Hapsburg monarchy. Tomáš Kozák- a pilot – was killed when his night flying Hurricane, which had taken off from Stapleford Abbots, got caught up in the glare of multiple searchlights and crashed near Duxford on 14 June 1941.

I walked along Church lane past pill boxes and with views to the modern flight control tower and warehouses poking above the trees. Then through suburban North Weald Bassett where I was surprised to find the answer to a question that I didn’t know had been nagging me.

It was, I suppose, a heritage success to set against my earlier disappointment. The Epping Ongar Railway is about to take passengers again for the first time since the line was closed in 1994. The Harras fencing will come down the hanging baskets watered and the ticket office swept. The belle end of the Central Line reborn in heritage steam.

You would have to be a real sour puss not to be just a little excited by the thought of a ride on steam train. But the feeling of excitement is mitigated by the thought of the thousands of car journeys that would be saved if it was still part of the underground.

It also seems a shame that often what survives is dictated by what can – albeit with charitable help and a considerable amount of volunteer labour – pay for itself. From that point of view I suppose half a grotty aircraft shed was never really going to fly.

I enjoyed picking up the Roman road again a mile or so out of town (the same one that ran through Moreton) especially the bit just before it passes in a tunnel under the M25. Two streams meet here as well and share the tunnel in a metal cage. The road retains some pebble cobbling so is good walking even in rubbish weather.

Which is more than I can say for the last part of today’s walk into Theydon Bois across a landfill desert. Every step sank in sinister clag – I really did wonder, only half-jokingly, whether each step would be my last. I had visions of having to telephone for help and be dug out like a tourist trapped in Morecambe Bay.

It had been dumped by gangsters exploiting a loophole in the law. Three million tons of rubbish was dumped at the green belt site – undeveloped grazing land at Blunts Farm – on the ostensible basis of hard landscaping for a golf course and thus exempt from environmental taxes. The golf course was never built. The environmental damage of removing the blot on the green belt was deemed to be worse than leaving it where it was.

It is the sort of thing that gives perfectly reasonable golf entrepreneurs like Donald Trump a bad name.

 

On Wednesday 8th March I did a kind of broken loop from Kensal Rise to Willesden Junction. As if I hadn’t had enough of mortality on Saturday (Highgate West Cemetery in spring sunshine), my first point of call was Kensal Green Cemetery in the rain. It seemed as though the whole world had just come to London to die – it is a very different vibe to Highgate. More of a working cemetery and still in private ownership. Burials everyday, according to the company website. The foreignness is in the landscape as much as the name’s on the graves – the layout was inspired by Père-Lachaise in Paris, apparently.

It felt like a film set when I was there in the March rain, Wormwood Scrubs and Acton beckoning. I had the place to myself – though there was some landscaping going on near the canal which follows the cemetery’s southern border.

On the Friends website there is a long list of notable personalities buried here.

One name I noticed in the rain was Blondin who turns out to be a funambulist. Which to my shame I had to look up.

Dickens saw Blondin perform – he was scathing. But anybody that can cross Niagara Falls on a 3 1/4 inch dia. rope isn’t a duffer. He died of diabetes in Ealing on 22nd February 1897.

At Ladbroke Grove I left the cemetery and joined the canal heading west past Sainsbury’s and gas holders and the heroically named rail depot: North Pole International. This was the Eurostar depot before St Pancras opened and the operation moved east. The sidings in Willesden are so brightly lit that they can be seen from the Mir space station.

The depot was named after a local road and I wondered if there was an echo in the name of an old farm or field. Quite often places at a distance from a village or farm would be given “miles from nowhere” names – like Botany Bay – of which there are a fair few around London and one of which I mentioned in my last blog.

HS2 should reach the arctic circle by about 2050 – and might or might not level the railway cottages in Old Oak Lane for good measure. The cottages were built for railway workers by the LNWR in the mid nineteenth century. The case for fast travel north of Willesden hasn’t really been made convincingly to me – even to Harrow.

After cutting along the northern edge of Wormwood Scrubs – where meadow pipits nest – I negotiated various railways and roads, and crossed North Acton Playing Fields to enter Park Royal business park next to the Western Ave.

This was once the site of Acton Aerodrome which operated before the first world war. I suspected Walter Wilkinson – one of the subjects of my “book” – might have learned to fly here – just over a mile away from his home in Ealing. I doubt I’ll ever prove it. Later I climbed up Hanger Hill and imagined his family looking out across the Middlesex plain as Walter dipped a wing in salute above the Royal Mail depot and Acton Megabowl.

Chasing lost causes and hidings to nothing is a speciality here at Woden’s Weekly. Vapour trails. Walter, arguably, took a greater risk than Blondin when he enlisted as an infantry officer in 1915. Not for him the portland tubs of Kensal Green or even the unassuming family plot in St Mary’s Perivale where his parents are buried – now a weatherboard and wild oasis enfolded in a meander of the Brent before it winds through dull golf courses and urban parks, back gardens and allotments to the Thames and the sea.

Wednesday (14th) walked from Brookmans Park to High Barnet mostly along the Mimmshall Brook.

Near Brookmans Park the dry stream has been cleared of debris and fenced off which to me seems a shame – the fence that is, not the clearing of rubbish – it contributes to the feeling of a prison camp that walking the green belt so often provokes. It was never actually clear whether the rubbish had been carried down on a flood or dumped in situ. This stream only flows when the water table is high and the swallow holes are blocked.

Later in the walk I enjoyed the sandy banked meanders of the Mimmshall Brook – especially the section from Mimms Hall to Cecil Road. The A1M is intrusive obviously but it is possible to blank it out.

On Wash Lane Common (adjacent to South Mimms service station) the footpath and bridle way follows the line of the old coach road from London to Holyhead. Two highwaymen are buried in the churchyard at South Mimms.

Crossing under the M25 alongside the brook I continue up the orphaned lane to reach gated houses where I turned right down a narrow path which quickly becomes a sunken green lane. At the end of the lane the ornate gatehouse of Dyrham Park hoves into view across a busy roundabout.

In 1810 Captain Trotter hosted a Grand Tee-Total Gala here.

“Barnet, the town of inns, and the elysium of postboys,” was crowded – the papers reported – with cockney pledgers. Capt. Trotter “mounted on a splendid charger” oversaw the arrangements in the park.

Archery, oyster repasts, and donkey riding were among the highlights. As well as plenty of coffee and tea and “bulwarks of beef.”

There were over 500 vehicles in the cavalcade which was led by the Barnet Total Abstinence Society.

One banner read: “Inflaming wine pernicious to mankind/ Unnerves the limbs and dulls the noble mind.”

I once found an oyster shell in the green lane just outside the park. Perhaps its contents were eaten at the party. But speculation like this made me thirsty. I hurried up Galley Hill to Barnet and home and a couple of pints of large.

On Wednesday (21st) I walked from the Elysium of Postboys to Finchley Central in the sunshine.

At Totteridge, where the road bends left around another weatherboard church – St Andrew’s – I dived down a cart-wide footpath between two expensive houses whose long gardens backed on to fields.

The house on the right is built on the site of Copped Hall – once the heart of a park and lake which are thought to have been set out by Humphrey Reptile and are now managed as the Darlands nature reserve. To the right farmland with bad tempered signage of the “rat poison in tree” variety. To the left a defunct farm on land which had been part of a landscaped park in a previous incarnation and is now part of the nature reserve. I wondered if there was some kind of gentleman’s agreement not to advertise this fantastic green space from any of the possible entry points. The first couple of years I walked here I thought I was trespassing.

Today I lingered in the old barns, read some of the graffiti and wondered about the burnt mattresses. Where was the farm house? A field gate lay abandoned and rusting on a concrete floor colonized by nettles.

“The end is fucking nigh” read one piece of graffiti. But the end had been and gone.

Decorating the old farm track through the pasture field were the gold eyes on white stalks of pussy willow. An owl hooted from the woods around the lake. The ghost of Lord Lytton – who lived at the Hall – rang the bell for his tea. And I took blurry photos of bluebells and celandines, wild garlic leaves and wind flowers and the strange snake’s head fritillary that once earned the site an SSSI. It lost its listing because the flowers were deemed not wild enough. Ever since they have exhibited a kind of hang dog expression, as though reserving their inner world for creatures that really understand them.

Wednesday (28th) from Potters Bar to Cockfosters in the sunshine.

This was partly to revisit the museum in the Wyllyotts Centre. I didn’t take any notes when I was there last year. They have some Zeppelin bric a brac including a piece of Kaptlt. Mathy’s flying trousers. Trousers worn for flying, that is – if the trousers could fly the Zeppelin ace might have escaped death when he jumped from the burning Super Zeppelin which crashed in Potters Bar in October 1916, killing Mathy and all his crew.

Buzzards were circling above Dancers Hill Road when I reached the hamlet of Bentley Heath with its disused? chapel (built 1866) and fine 17th/18th century brick farmhouse.

Instead of heading for Barnet via Wrotham I turned east, soon going through the carpark of a small industrial estate to join Wagon Road which has fantastic views across the Lea Valley to Epping Forest on the scarp.

But no pavement. Although it does have a grass verge where you can escape oncoming traffic.
From Hadley Wood‘s (LB Enfield) expensive detached houses I joined a footpath through green belt fields never free of traffic noise from several roads. But green and open-feeling & pleasantly undulating with small streams – one or both of which may have been the Salmon Brook.

Reaching the Ridgeway I turned right on a pavement and struck out for Botany Bay passing a water tower in the process of renovation with a transparent viewing shelter on the castellated roof.

Through a layby I noticed a section of the old road had been preserved as a footpath so I relaxed along this for a while before rejoining the dieseled throng past working farms and derelict farms and a school. Views across Enfiled Chase to Edmonton and Lea Valley and later on misty Canary Wharf rising above the tree line.

Just after passing a footpath off left – which I bookmarked mentally – I turned right heading south and downhill to join the Loop by the Salmon Brook and so through Enfield Chase & Trent Park to Cockfosters & home.

Where the loop turned 90 degrees left away from the brook I stopped to look at the map and was approached by a weasel which didn’t see me until it was a couple of metres away. That makes … not very many. I’ve seen probably only half a dozen in fifty years – and only one in my north London rambles. That too was near a stream – the Folly Brook near Barnet.

I was half wondering whether there was a nearer train station but Hadley Wood wasn’t that much nearer and I was full of suburbia from earlier in the walk. I was glad I didn’t alter course: Enfield Chase and Trent Park are a good note to end on and peaceful too – not blighted by the road noise which accompanies pedestrianism in the south Hertfordshire borderlands.

Wednesday (25th January) short stroll from Elstree over the south Hertfordshire escarpment which is the border of the former county of Middlesex. I joined the London Loop footpath out of Elstree station and climbed through suburbia to the ridgeway. Noted brick air shafts in field on Deacon’s Hill and also noted that I just can’t help myself noting bits of useless information. No sign at all of Grim’s Ditch – but I wasn’t looking very hard and after a while forgot I was looking for it.

At a gap in the hedge on my left I walked through to see if there was a view and discovered from an information board that I was on Woodcock Hill – the site of a shutter or optical telegraph station circa 1800 which communicated with Hampstead to the south and St Albans to the north. I think I could just make out the tower of St Alban’s Abbey but global warming and the “springboard” effect of subsidence – or something – have caused Hampstead to sink below the horizon, scuppering sight lines and spilling St Albans’ latest in a pile of alphabetti spaghetti on the Barnet bypass.

Still following the Loop signs Scratchwood – once part of Middlesex Forest – looked worth an explore and a bit bigger than I remembered it – I think it is only the south east corner next to the A1 that is slightly scuzzy. My friend calls the low scrub – former hay fields between the golf course and the lay-by – Dogger Bank. The Dogger too was once a wooded ridge rising above marshy low lands. Everything changes. I liked the feel in the wood of the deep (for round here) clefts made by the streams. It occurred to me that the topography could actually be reflecting some thinly disguised sexually repressed desires on my part. But I quickly put the idea to the back of my mind.

The hay fields, the sign told me, once supplied the capital’s horses with food as well as supplying the first letter of the cockney alphabet.

Nick Papadimitriou has studied the topography of Middlesex – the ghost county whose borders once stretched from here in the Barnet hills to the Thames and from the Lea to the Colne.

He writes about the streams in Riverrun on the Middlesex County Council website. He is a kind of modern Richard Jefferies without the mysticism, a friend of Will Self, and the man who coined the phrase deep topography.

He is also the author of Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley & Hendon which does what it says on the tin for people who like their true crime through a sepia lens. That’s not a criticism. He also manages to sneak a not inconsiderable amount of topography below the editorial radar. The streams were telling stories long before Cain lost his temper with his sister.

I crossed the murderous A1 at Stirling corner (the loop sensibly takes a short detour to cross via a subway) before heading down a footpath to a view point across the London basin towards Harrow on the Hill. Police tape fluttered on a gate post in a field above Moat Mount where the Dollis Brook rises.

Nick Papadimitriou describes a particularly grisly murder at the ornamental lake here, Leg of Mutton pond – which reminds me I also had views of Clay Lane on the outskirts of Edgeware (another murder site – and fine walking) in the distance later in the walk. I hope reading his book doesn’t befug every walk I take in Barnet with thoughts of death and destruction. Then again if you’re contemplating the narrative of someone else’s grisly murder you’re not worretting about your own mortality – it reminds you if nothing else that you are alive under the sun, in the rhododendron after-glow of the temporarily arrested decline that is metropolitan wild.

On Wednesday (1 February) I walked from Hendon to Mill Hill East via Church End – Hendon’s old quarter – through Sunnyhill Park: which was not sunny enough to melt all the ice in the puddles and I was grateful for the wall which sheltered me from the east wind. Then I crossed the Great North Way via a footbridge and cut across Copthall Sports Centre playing fields heading for a path through the allotments, some long-abandoned old railway sidings (I think) and a green lane through a patch of unexpectedly delightful woodland squeezed between the sports fields and a golf course. Today the orange willows were fantastically gaudy against the wintry blue sunshine. Then down old railway to Mill Hill East. This branch line – to Edgeware – was opened by the G.N.R. in 1867. Plans to electrify it were abandoned with the start of the second world war when it was closed to passenger traffic. It closed completely in 1964 and parts of it are now a nature reserve.

On Wednesday (8th February) I walked from Hendon to home-don following a fancyfreewalks.org route from Hendon to Hampstead – 5 1/2 miles – except that I started at the railway rather than the tube station and finished at Kentish Town. The walk took me through Hendon Park past a holocaust memorial garden and a Japanese Maple to a very snowy Brent Park.

The River Brent rises near Arkley, Barnet and flows for nearly twenty miles to join the Thames at Brentford.

The lake here may have been built as a duck decoy by the Abbots of Westminster. Decoy Avenue, nearby, is another reminder of the survival of the rural nature of this part of the world in to the twentieth century. The lake is fed by the river Brent just after the confluence of the Mutton and Dollis brooks. Decoy Farm was one of many to disappear in the 1930s as new roads – the North Circular (1925) runs down the eastern edge of the park – opened the area up to housing.

Today the Abbot’s ducks had to drink from the river – the lake was mostly ice. With interesting patterns of bird walks, it looked like an art installation. Also there were interesting “eyes” where the ice had begun to thaw and refrozen.

An oil painting of Decoy Farm painted it in 1908 by Charles Paget Wade is in the National Trust’s collection at Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds. Wade was employed at the time as an architect by the firm Parker and Unwin, who were working on the Hampstead Garden Suburb. On the death of his father in 2011 he inherited an estate on St Kitts, and devoted the rest of his life to collecting. He filled Snowshill Manor with antiques (so many that he had to live in a cottage in the grounds) and entertained many celebrity guests including Graham Greene who described his host as “Bow-legged in knickerbockers and bedroom slippers … the thought of his thin walnut face and his open mouth laughing made my flesh creep.”

On the night of 8/9th September 1915 a bomb from a Zeppelin – possibly intended for the nearby airfield – landed in a field at Decoy Farm. It caused little damage. The airship’s commander, Heinrich Mathy, would later come to grief in a field in Potters Bar – an event witnessed by a 12 year old Graham Greene from the window of the school house in Berkhamsted.

Too much information. Probably. But I’m looking forward to visiting Snowshill Manor in the summer. Not specially to see the painting but to honour the unexpected inspiration of a cold walk in an urban park.

The amount of background information provided by the anonymous walk writer was just about right e.g. the date of Hampstead Garden Suburb – early 1900s and the trees in Little and Big woods – from 1800, though the Big Wood may be of ancient origin and contains some wild service trees. I did mark the guide down for not mentioning the origin of the “observation platforms” on the Brent. Nick Papadimitriou’s Riverrun put me right though – they are all that remains of the Brent Bridge Hotel, a local beauty spot and scene of another watery murder.

An advert for the hotel in The Times in July 1922 describes a terrace overlooking a rock garden with a fountain, and a sylvan paradise “less than 30 minutes from Picadilly Circus.”

Sylvan Paradise is going it some today. But at the weir under Hendon Lane Bridge you are as likely to see a heron or a kingfisher as a human – almost.

On Wednesday (22nd February) I walked from Hendon to Kentish Town again. But not the pretty way. Although the first part had a wildish feel. I walked the eastern edge of Brent Reservoir – more popularly Welsh Harp. It was built in the 1830s at the confluence of the Brent and the Silk Stream to supply the Grand Union Canal. Here I disturbed a heron. Then, although there was a signed footpath in to the reservoir there didn’t seem to be one out of it – or rather there were several but they all lead to Staples Corner which perhaps surprisingly is negotiable for pedestrians though only at the cost of frayed nerves and lung fulls of diesel. It was a load of Ballards. I was bewildered, didn’t look at my map and ended up – instead of beating a path for Gladstone Park – the original plan – I found myself behind Tesco’s on the A41. So I set an unremarkable course via Golders Green and Childs Hill, Hampstead village and the bottom of the Heath to home. Too tired to write up a walk that was forgettable as well as useful for two reasons – it expanded in a small way my understanding of the place I call home and it made me appreciate fully the green corridors and open spaces that I often take for granted.

Saturday (7th) did Merry Lundow’s The Glass Sea. 9 mile circuit from Gordon Hill Station (Enfield) – across Clay Hill and golf club on King’s Oak Plain, down rather unpleasant Cattlegate Road – although there was a grass verge to perch on all of the way so not suicidal just unpleasantly busy with fast cars – across Turkey Brook & under M25 then through Cattlegate Farm views to Cuffley ahead, then bending right under Soper’s Viaduct – saw guilty looking couple with dog at edge of nursery plantation: what they were up to is anybody’s guess. My guess was burying kittens, but I could be wrong. The private woods and public tracks today were crawling with ‘untin’, shootin’, fishin’ types in Dad’s Army trucks, pheasants, still warm hung on poles on back of jeep. I – dressed in jeans and black hoody – was eyed, I thought suspiciously: a hunt sab. I had travelled 20 mins from Finsbury Park but had travelled back about a hundred and twenty years – I thought you had to go out to somewhere like Wiltshire to get such a country vibe – the Range Rovers had real mud on them! View S to London and the new pyramid on the skyline; then walking parallel to M25 before cutting north to Silver Street (interesting name) before turning back south past edge of glass sea and crossing M25 via a footbridge and through fields to the King and Tinker pub.

Wednesday (4th) 12km circuit from Elstree – bit of a yomp. Very gray and muddy. Light rain. From station joined Loop link across golf course to Aldenham Reservoir – there were wild garlic leaves through already in the wood from the main road. Round res finding notice boards annoying and still bristling at the parking charges – hopped fence to save a few hundred metres of pavement but not nice crossing at that point could have cut up even earlier and crossed field – there didn’t appear to be a fence. Said hello to fellow walkers doing loop from Stanmore and retraced path from few weeks ago to corner of Orthopaedic hospital. Here I set off N down abandoned footpath which became impassable and detoured as best I could to end by side of gypsy camp in lea of motorway – couple of kids playing w/ a Shetland pony. Hopped a fence, crossed under M way and cut down A41 for a short way before cutting up A5 on a pavement over Brockley Hill and front entrance of Orth hosp opposite which was sign in strip of wood alongside road (fields other side) saying site of Roman pottery at Sulloniacae.

Wednesday (11th) I walked from Gordon Hill to Cockfosters. Very mild. Took a left (following the Loop signs) before the golf club and ducked under railway past red house and Rectory Farm which appears to be defunct though there are some occupied farm cottages and a sign advertising clay pigeon shooting – all welcome. R along the busy Ridgeway past Hotel – wedding venue – with helipad. Then through unremarkable if gentle farmland mostly alongside Salmon’s Brook, a tributary of the Lea, which must have been named after a farmer not a fish. [John Salemon of Edmonton c. 1274? according to Wiki] Lots of bird song and very large crows which I thought were buzzards at first.

I didn’t take any photos and was happy not to. I was enjoying being in the moment and often, rather than take out the camera, got out the map instead and enjoyed working out what I was looking at on the spot, putting names to the farms and hamlets like Botany Bay on the ridge.

With Hotel in sight cut left uphill for obelisk in Trent Park – views back to big barns at Vault Hill – which is an interesting name. I crossed road and entered Enfield Chase at Moat Wood soon passing Camlet Moat – which made me think of Roger Deakin who used to swim round his moated house in Suffolk everyday. Then through Trent Country Park to Cockfosters Station. Job done. Or it would have been but I made the mistake of deciding to take a bus to Barnet which took about 40 mins – it was interesting infilling my psychogeographical map of north London, but not the quickest way from C to B.

More drama yesterday Wednesday 18th – lots of sirens and Hornsey Road closed – a hit and run the newsagent thought giving me change for a kit-kat – but of the drama, when I returned a few hours later, no sign. As though the afternoon tide had simply covered it up or washed it away – or like a blood clot, it had been removed and the blood was now flowing freely ’round the old corpse. Which is about how I felt when I started my walk at Welham Green, a couple of miles south of Hatfield.

The signs all said “No Incinerator Here” – emails were called for, health risks laid out in A4 plastic pockets on the bus shelter. Nothing I couldn’t agree with and anyway I was far too hot which meant I was doubly surprised to see at the swallow holes sheets of ice, ridged like tidal mud, oblivious to the ambient mildness of the vertical world.

I saw a red kite above Home Farm and gave way to two quod bikes as I joined the byway parallel to the A1 (M) which provided the soundtrack to the entire walk, punctuated by shooting from woods on the higher ground on the Mymms estate.

Where the footpath left the A1 at right angles, I kept straight on a concrete track to have a look at South Mimms Motte & Bailey Castle. The castle was built by Geoffrey de Mandible during the civil war between Stephen and Mathilda in the 11th century. Geoffrey – it is said – sold his soul to the devil and became convinced that he could turn flint in to Gold. When workmen found a seam of rare quality flint during repairs to his moat he ordered them to keep digging. The quarry is still in evidence today – as is the castle but you can’t see either from the path. Geoffrey never got to see the fruits of his labour – he drowned in a sink hole a couple of miles north of here at Water End. His body was never found but a gold ring turned up three days later in a spring feeding the River Lea, sixteen miles away. [see Corrections 24th February 2012]

I crossed back across A1 and Mimmshall Brook and through Home Farm – a fantastic building shame about the noise of the road – perhaps you get used to it – then via Warrengate Farm (bonfire and bungalows – big woodpile – egret) to join nameless stream through Potters Bar’s light industrial fringes. Just beginning to feel a bit scuzzed and muddied out when I was overtaken by a kingfisher which turned before reaching a concrete culvert and flashed past me again flying a few centimetres above the middle of the stream at great speed. An edgeland moment I suppose. A thrill anyway. I looked at the abandoned coffee cups and felt both a sense of relief – that I could measure out my Wednesday afternoons in ornithological delight – but also a sense of dull drudgery: this was after all work. Finding a reason to write – which is the same as saying finding a reason to exist in the vertical world. I fell asleep on the train home.

I overheard a conversation on the train up between a woman from Ilford and a couple of fellow passengers. I didn’t catch a glimpse of her but imagined her to look not altogether unlike Dot Cotton. “I don’t go voting,” she told her new friends in the tone of voice of someone saying “I don’t sleep around.” Her polling station was in the Moslem Centre.”What were they thinking of?” You can imagine the rest. “Nobody listens to us ordinary people … and they all have such big families … my Dad would think he’d come back to a different country … when I was a child we had a garden the size of a postage stamp. He spent so much time out there my Mum said, “Anyone would think you had fifteen acres!” … “I was going to move to Loughton, it’s nice out there – country – but it’s a bit out of the way.” … “Anyway, I says to her, “It’s lovely and hot where you were, what do you want to come here for?” She says, “I don’t like the heat.”"

Actually that’s a whole other trip – a walk I did on Midsummer’s Day 2005 shortly after the general election that saw Blair returned with a reduced majority the result, according to the Guardian, of “a pincer movement of working-class antipathy to immigration and middle-class opposition to the Iraq war.” A straw poll on the 10.15 out of Fenchurch Street would have supported this – at least the first part.

I mention this because I just found my notes for the walk. I didn’t write them up at the time and anyhow think a six year time lag not too bad in the dickosphere; where time is just as likely to be measured in rings as minutes and six years only represents about a centimetre and a half – and that’s average years – some of these, between you and me, were distinctly below par.

So. A breezy walk round Canvey Island on Sunday, 22 May 2011, in sun and cloud and just the edge of a squall blowing down the Kent side of the estuary – we put on wet gear only to almost immediately take it off again and bag it up more or less dry.

We walked anti-clockwise for a change – following the road over Benfleet Creek past the flood barrier and boat yard and then peeling off right along the sea wall. You don’t need a map for this walk: just stay on the sea wall and sixteen miles or so later you’ll be back where you started – if tireder and a little windblown.

It’s perhaps not an obvious walk – the first half is overshadowed in the middle distance by a landfill mountain that sometimes adds a ripe note to what the Victorian’s used to call ozone. And then there is the oil refinery that you skirt the other side of Hole Haven Creek. But it keeps the walk real, unfussy; not sterile like a Cotswold village, or geared up to elusive bank-holiday hedonism like Brighton. This is real London on sea. It’s even got legacy – at least there are a couple of fitness machines in a playground on the sea front and a distant view of the Olympic Mountain Bike track under construction next to Hadleigh Country Park – the modern definition of a good walk spoiled. Oddly enough it has been built on a farm owned by the Salvation Army. Lycra is the new dress code for heaven.

When hacks pull out the word liminal I normally reach for my gun – except when it’s the only word that will do. This really is a walk for attention-disordered biophiles, flitting between two worlds like swifts drinking on the wing. When you get bored with fennel and salsify and jack-go-to-bed-at-noon and dog rose and purple clover and photographing dead insects in the brown pools of water collected in spiny teasel cups (how on earth could you get bored with that?), you simply drop down to the foot of the wall (it’s actually a grass covered bank on the landward side of the island) and crunch sea purslane under your feet, and driftwood, drinks cartons with foreign writing on them, bladder wrack and cockle shells; your eyes constantly drawn out along the muddy creek floor where sinuous lines wind away into your imagination like they’ve been drawn with a stick by a bored giant. Occasionally you glimpse a movement in the purslane distance – black headed gulls perhaps or ducks; an egret or two – or was it the same one showing us our direction of travel?

I’d actually never noticed teasel in its green form – I thought of it as permanently dried – something to add romantic contrast and structural beauty to a church flower arrangement perhaps but not interesting in itself. But I’d been on the look out for it since reading Richard Jefferies’s description of the strange water-gathering properties of the plant quoted in Flora Britannica. He described how the leaves connect right round the stem forming “so many natural rain-gauges.” The water was once said to have healing properties and the power to remove freckles but I wasn’t altogether encouraged by its coffee colour or the dead insects floating in it. And I don’t have freckles.

Goat’s Beard

There has been some research to suggest that birds sing louder in cities to compensate for the noise of the traffic, the constant hum of the air conditioning, the rumble of trains and overflying planes, leaked ipods, mobile phone conversations etc. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if flowers produce more vibrant colour, the more challenging and gritty the surroundings. You want colour? Forget Chelsea. Here are purples to blow your mind, bending and billowing in the lush grasses in the lee of the oil refinery smoke stack which looms over the marshes like a permanent Olympic torch or a modern will-o-the-wisp. I noticed reading my old notes that I had been very impressed by purple salsify – Tragopogon porrifolius – and its smaller yellow relative … but what had impressed me most were the hairy seed clocks which are like a dandelion’s but much larger, about the size of a tennis ball, and brown rather than white. Tragopogon means “goat’s beard” apparently, which is about right. But today what most attracted me was the colour. It was for the deep purple flowers – according to the Oxford Companion to Food – that these Mediterranean plants were first introduced here. The root was quite commonly eaten in the eighteenth century. It resembles a long white carrot and is still eaten in Russia, France and Italy, “baked or boiled or made into cream soup.” It is supposed to taste like oysters (hence the other common name for the flower: “oyster plant”) which is particularly appropriate given the diminutive fishing fleet holed up in the creek in the shadow of a derelict jetty.

The first written record of the plant was by Albertus Magnus. Magnus was a thirteenth century scholar who wrote a recipe for gunpowder and would later kick start the Irish cider industry. (One of those facts may not be true). He was first mentioned in this blog on 1/9/04.

Canvey is famous for marsh orchids and marsh helleborine that thrive on former industrial sites. Dumped ash from power stations is alkaline and the soil which this produces as it weathers down, mimics that of a chalk downland grazed by sheep. The orchids colonized an old gas depot (since rebranded Canvey Wick) part of which has now been saved from development thanks to a campaign by environmental groups and local residents. The orchids, real life phoenixes, are something of an icon for a new generation of nature writers who take their biofix as they find it, shaken and stirred, sprouting from the wreckage of modern life. But we were too early by at least a fortnight.

A white weatherboard pub at Holehaven Point on the south westernmost tip of the island makes a good lunch stop. The Lobster Smack, according to A Dickens Dictionary, is the model for the inn which Magwitch was taken by boat from London in Great Expectations – according to the entry “any Thames pilot” could name the part of the river Dickens describes in the book [The wet end (Ed.)] and Dickens researched the journey himself, chartering a small steamer in May 1861 from Blackwall to Southend.

You could quite easily finish the walk here and wonder down Haven Road to The King Canute (20 minutes) from where you can get a bus back to the station – or indeed have another pint. This pub was renamed after the 1953 flood when it had been used as a headquarters during the clear up operation.

On a Friday night in January, 1928, old salts at Leigh noticed a sudden rise in sea level. A full moon and a south-westerly gale had combined to create a storm surge that, compounded by an already swollen river upstream, would bring catastrophe to the capital where fourteen people would drown, many trapped in basements. My parents have a set of chairs in their attic which were rescued from my Grandfather’s flooded home in Wharf Road, Wandsworth after the flood. Canvey on that occasion escaped with six inches to spare. Next time they weren’t so lucky. The storm surge of 1953 brought devastation to large parts of the coastline. The death toll in Canvey alone was 58. Measuring the height of the surge was not helped by the fact that it knocked out every tide gauge between the Tyne and the Thames estuary. But it was believed to have been eight or nine feet higher than any that had previously been recorded. The human cost is still being counted.

But if you do end the walk here you would be missing out. Highlights of the afternoon: well, the river is the star obviously unless you have a real and pressing interest in Calor Gas storage and distribution, or the changing design of fixed caravans since 1953 when the last lot and much else besides was swept away. You would be missing out on all the sea front attractions, toilets with needle bins, paddling pools, cafes, people and the like.

We didn’t make it out to Canvey Point on this occasion – a footpath stretches out almost to the Chapman Sands – home to the last of the Thames lighthouses which disappeared in 1958, two years after it had been decommissioned. Instead we took pictures of boats in the boatyard at Small Gains Creek – I love the name partly because is says much about the struggle between human beings and the sea which has defined the island at least since it was drained and reclaimed by the Dutchman, Joas Croppenburgh, in the seventeenth century. But also because it sounds like a Dickens character. It’s not difficult to imagine Mr Smallgains sitting in a dark corner of the bar at The Lobster Smack, wearing dead men’s shoes and dilating on Custom ‘Us men and foreigners from Ilford to anybody unlucky enough to be innocently waiting for the Hamburg steamer and the morning tide.

Skirting round a reclaimed landfill park rather grandly named Canvey Heights (an accurate description: there aren’t many places on the ground here that you can see over the sea wall) we headed into the home strait past one or two golfers fighting their own unequal battle with the wind. It seemed to chime with my feelings about Canvey in general, unsure whether it is a triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity, or an even worse disaster waiting to happen. The best book about the history of this part of the world’s ongoing struggle with the sea is The Great Tide. The author, Hilda Grieve, who was an archivist at Essex Records Office, points out that every inundation in history is always “the highest tide ever seen” and bad as the floods of 53 were it could have been even worse …

But listen, I wasn’t going to disasterize this week. We had a fantastic walk and finished in fine stile, past mountains of red valerian off to the creek side of the lichened sea wall, the clink of masts in the boatyard and views of the wooded slopes rising from the ooze, Hadleigh castle, and back towards Southend.

I had thought that I might write up our walk in Dengie Marshes on Sunday 15th May repeating my 2-fer-1 blog posted on May 21 (Bedford & Lincoln’s Inn). But I’ve run out of steam – and my “book” isn’t being written.

On Friday I joined Essex Libraries at Loughton – even though it is a bit out of the way. I joined to borrow Coastal Adventure by J. Wentworth Day “A book about marshes and the sea; shooting and fishing; wildfowl and waders and men who sail in small boats.” It was written at the end of the second world war by a writer who had a mindset that would have been teetering on the antique even in 1918 – but he has an easy conversational style, is thoroughly knowledgeable about these strange edgelands, and captures the living personalities as well as the bric a brac of historical curiosity. If you can get past the bluff and bloody – and sometimes bloody minded – tweed carapace he is your man in the metropolitan wilderness, particularly the part the train never reached – the bit that has more in common with the lowlands across the North Sea than the low lands of North London.

He also has a cracking recipe for heron: you need to discard the wings and legs apparently (too fishy) and wrap the breast in bacon to stop it drying out during cooking. He also adds thoughtfully that nobody in their right minds would shoot a heron nowadays – unless of course, he was on a trout stream.

I don’t think we’ve had our last coastal adventure this year.

15-mile round trip from Bedford yesterday in cloudy sunshine along the Ouse, past the backwater where John Bunyon was baptized, Viking long boats, marinas for argee bargees and noddy boats (with sheds), canoe slalom, business park. Then, having lost my reading glasses – it’s a long, & tedious, story – under a motorway past an 18C cross and over a Victorian bridge to the village of Cardington. We had a look at  graveyard where there is a  memorial to 48 people killed when the R101 airship crashed in France. The air ship sheds still dominate the landscape – the scale is pretty awe-inspiring to use a much overused expression – but think ocean-liner or, appropriately,Titanic of the air.

The walk was through mainly arable farm land often along old green lanes or drove roads full of blossom and flowers. We saw not a soul – or to be more accurate we saw a couple of dog walkers at a distance and the odd farmer, ditto, during the seven mile loop beyond Cardington. So the walk scored very high on the tranquility scale. No busy roads or flight path either just birdsong – the larks were, well, deafening. Also heard yellowhammers and saw martins collecting puddle mud for their nests. Saw swifts, herons, lapwings, goldfinches, rooks.
Cardington was once home to the UK’s airship programme it was from one of these hangars that the R101 set out on its trials and its last flight. The airship was 770ft long and 130ft diameter. It was covered in doped linen and filled with hydrogen gas which is lighter than air but highly flammable. Modern airships – Goodyear have a fleet of them for advertising and football commentary – use helium which has many benefits, not least of which is that it is not hydrogen. Especially as it is not entirely unknown for people to take pot shots at them from the ground, apparently. One of the Goodyear blimps was refurbished at Cardington at the beginning of the present century.

Power to the R101 was supplied by five diesel engines and the gondola, suspended from the airship contained fifty passenger cabins over two floors and included an asbestos-lined smoking room so that passengers needn’t be deprived of their post-prandial Havana by the small matter of being suspended ten thousand feet in the air from a balloon filled with highly explosive gas. Even before the disaster the airship programme was not without critics. A writer in the influential magazine, The Engineer, in 1929 speculated that the ships would be obsolete before they were even built. After the disaster there was speculation that the programme had been rushed to make a political deadline. The R101 may not have undergone enough test flights when it set out for India in October, 1930. The cause of the crash was never definitely established – though bad weather and human error may have played some part. The final message was relayed just after midnight. There was little sign of the fate that was just about to strike.

“To Cardington from R101. 2400 G. M. T. 15 miles S. W. of Abbeville. Average speed 33 knots. Wind W. S. W. 35 m. p. h. Altimeter height 1500 feet. Weather: intermittent rain. Cloud nimbus at 500 feet. After an excellent supper our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar and having sighted the French coast have now gone to bed to rest after the excitements of their leave-taking. All essential services functioning normally. The crew have settled down to watch-keeping routine”.¹

It crashed just south of Beauvais just after 2:00am on Sunday 5th October 1930, though not at any great speed. Most of the passengers are believed to have survived the impact but perished in the conflagration which was its inevitable result. It brought an abrupt end to the airship programme and to the lives of the forty-eight passengers and crew commemorated on the memorial in the quiet Bedfordshire churchyard.

Lincoln’s Inn - 6 May 2011

Forgot to mention that I went on guided tour of Lincoln’s Inn on Friday 6th (first Friday of month: £5). So got to see inside the Old Hall, and the Great (Victorian) one and the chapel, which I had seen before with its coats of arms (treasurers of the Inn) and fantastic stained – or to be pedantic as our knowledgeable guide informed us, enamelled glass windows, one by Abraham Van Linge depicting the Inn itself in the background – the undercroft of the chapel is clearly visible, as is someone walking a dog on the inn lawn (not one to try today, I’m guessing) –  sitting in the middle of an arcadian London.

The chapel is 17C, built to a model by Inigo Jones. John Donne laid the foundation stone in 1620 and preached at the Inn before going on to become Dean of St. Paul’s. The chapel bell is thought to be the inspiration for the famous lines “send not to know / For whom the bell tolls” as the bell traditionally was rung at midday on the death of a bencher of the inn.

Two windows were lost on October 13, 1915 when a bomb dropped by a zeppelin fell in the old square killing the steward of the common room of the inn, who had been there since 1886. “His head was blown from his body.” A detail not reported at the time, but helpfully supplied by the Guardian some years later. The raid accounted for the lives of 71 Londoners, mostly in the theatreland around Aldwych and the Strand.

At the back of the chapel is a book of remembrance for the dead of the Inns of Court Regiment in two world wars. During WW2 the surviving chapel windows were removed to a mine in Wales for safe keeping, though the Inn, miraculously suffered little damage.

Lincoln’s Inn has counted, according to a resident who was taking the tour with us, 15 Prime Ministers among its members, including Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair – there are portraits of both in Lincoln’s Inn. In fact it is the first official oil portrait of Blair – he’s wearing a poppy which is a nice touch for a PM synonymous with unnecessary and pointless military adventures: it’s by Jonathan Yeo, the son of the conservative MP- perhaps he had an axe to grind.

In the Great Hall there’s a rather more interesting art work – a mural by GF Watts – the Damien Hirst of his day – which took seven years to complete and depicts various law makers from history under the watchful eye of Truth. Truth is winking, which is apparently a bit of an inn-joke.  If you are called to the bar of Lincoln’s Inn, you are probably not going to the Blue Anchor in Chancery Lane: but here, to the top table under the mural: “Justice: a Hemicycle of Lawgivers.” It was completed in 1859. Hemicycle is not a collective noun – it refers to the horse shoe shape of the debating chamber.

The Old Hall is a fantastic 15C survival (though restored in 20C), now the backdrop to corporate events, weddings, barmitzvahs etc. it is sometimes used by students at the inn for mock trials and so on. There are several historical connections – most notably to Thomas More – but the most famous literary connection is Dickens. He set the opening of Bleak House here,  ”at the very heart of the fog” – it is where the court of Chancery sat in his day – the old gate house of the inn opens on to Chancery Lane – still the backbone of the legal quarter today.

This 15C hall was also where my Great Uncle and his friends – new recruits to the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps in September 1915 – undertook their Attestation swearing to serve King and Country. Nine month’s training later they would once again be at the very heart of the fog. A different fog of course but equally opaque, equally stubborn, equally all-consuming. The fog of war.

“A Safe Little Earner”

In the common room adjacent to the Great Hall where members might take coffee and mayhap a ferrero rocher after dinner or gaze at the street drinkers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are two particularly interesting portraits. One is Pitt theYounger  who became Prime Minister at the tender age of  24.  Pitt witnessed the Gordon riots whilst he was training for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in June 1780.  But the picture is not the one that originally hung here. The original, a Gainsborough, was stolen along with a Reynolds by a gang disguised as removal men who knocked the porter unconscious on a quiet Sunday in September 1990. (I’m beginning to get the impression that working at the Inn is a dangerous occupation if you’re not actually a barrister.) The paintings turned up at Sotheby’s a couple of  years later in a black bin-liner. An innocent antiques collector at Bermondsey market had paid £85 for the Gainsborough and £60 for the Reynolds. The deal was a goodun as they say. At that time the legal title to anything bought at the market (it was a market ouvert) between dawn and dusk could not be questioned. With the insurance pay out, the Inn bought back the Reynolds, but they were unable to agree a price for the Gainsborough. It now hangs in the National Museum of Havana. The Market Ouvert loophole was sadly closed in 1995. Today if you mention market and Southwark most people will think of Borough Market which doesn’t sell antiques or stolen art work although the prices are still defiantly criminal.

Note to self: I must try and get through a whole blog without mentioning violent fireballs or indeed zeppelins. It’s gonna be tuff.

Bedford

¹ ConstructionAndDestructionOfTheR101

http://www.bedfordshire.gov.uk/CommunityAndLiving/ArchivesAndRecordOffice

/CommunityArchives/Shortstown/ConstructionAndDestructionOfTheR101.aspx#

Lincoln’s Inn

www.lincolnsinn.org.uk

The air raids on london:hitherto unpublished details the streets and buildings that were hit The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959).  Manchester (UK):Dec 18, 1918.  p. 5  (1 pp.)Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1179155472&Fmt=10&clientId=90878&RQT=309&VName=HNP

Bargain-hunter finds stolen art with shrinking price tagJohn Mullin.  The Guardian (1959-2003).  London (UK):Mar 6, 1993.  p. 1  (1 pp.)Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1142448872&Fmt=10&clientId=90878&RQT=309&VName=HNP

A safe little earnerPeter Lennon Saturday March 15 2003 The Guardian Document URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/mar/15/heritage.art

 

In the spring of 1910 Sir Edward Grey and Theodore Roosevelt set out along the River Itchen in Hampshire to listen to birdsong. Last week we followed them. We didn’t set out on a pilgrimage – just a mixture of historical curiosity and the waking and scratchful urge of all hibernating animals to check the progress of the flowers after a cold winter. But the day became spiritualised, the walk became a wake. Perhaps all walks are pilgrimages of a sort.

The day will be remembered by us for ever. But not for sunshine and catkins as we had hoped. Although there were plenty of the latter and we had a little sunshine – at least for the first hour, before heavy and persistent rain showers, hail like polystyrene balls, thunder and – well I suppose that was about it, but it did get tedious and, after standing in the hail at Sir Edward Grey’s cottage at Itchen Abbas, drawing no warmth from the bricked-up chimney (the footings of the cottage and the chimney survive), we never really escaped the damp or the feeling that the spring celebration of the babbling, translucent chalk stream, liquid larks and green spikes hadn’t been snatched from us like a Pre-Raphaelite Proserpine drugged, gang-raped and dragged by her willow-golden hair back into Hades.

To be fair, the day was never really going to quite recover from the journey down, the sudden instinctive sense that something was not at all right, the plume of smoke rising above the trees, the debris in the road – perhaps a bumper or something – but why are there cars parked on the hard shoulder? Why people running back up the motorway and now the sudden realisation that the burning bush, half-way up the bank is in fact a car and that no one in it is any longer alive and that the smoke that now mingles with the smells peculiar to our own car – dampness, walk-mud, screen-wipe and stale sandwich crumbs – is mixed with eternity. I turn the music off. There are, I think, ten or twelve cars already stopped to help. We drive on for twenty minutes in silence. I turn the music back on.

Sir Edward Grey’s brother, George, was killed by a lion in Africa back in the days when hunting lions was a mark of thoroughgoing good blokehood – like speeding today, or making jokes about Mexicans. Some of the lions found their way back to workshops in Piccadilly where Rowland Ward, the most famous taxidermist of his day would arrange them in exhibition cases “as though in the middle of deadly combat,” fashion into trophies for proud sportsmen or jewellery for the ladies.¹

Theodore Roosevelt met Rowland Ward several times when he visited England in 1910 after his famous sporting invasion of East Africa.² Less than a month after leaving office (he was the 26th President of the US and served from 1901-1909), he and his son, the unfortunately-named Kermit, invaded the dark continent with nothing more than a handful of sportsmen and scientists and a wedge of cash to pay the several hundred or so local porters and guides who would grease the wheels of their Olympic ambition. They also carried four tons of salt to cure the skins. The total bag, when the smoke settled, was a thousand specimens, over half of which were shot – or at least claimed – by Theodore and Kermit themselves. It included 164 different species, 500 big game including nine lions, eight elephants and thirteen rhino.

Theodore’s passion for the natural world developed in childhood – he had, like Walter Rothschild, his own museum in the childhood home in New York, and he might well have become a scientist had his life not taken him in another direction. He was also an avid reader and a travelling library accompanied him on the African pilgrimage. Sixty books, bound in pigskin because the books needed to be hard wearing:

“They were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with me, either in my saddle-bag or in the cartridge-bag …. Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle bag looks.”³

I imagine him poring over In Memoriam – Tennyson was an early favourite – resting under a tree whilst the blood drained out of a 15,000lb bull-elephant into the dust of the Athi Plains, it’s hide destined for the American Museum of Natural History, or perhaps to be shipped to London to be made into Wardian Furniture.

“Elephants do not at first glance seem to lend themselves as articles for household decoration, and yet I have found them most adaptable for that purpose. The head is, of course, preserved and mounted separately, but the skin may be converted into innumerable amber-like articles of domestic utility. The thick slabs of the hide can be turned into table-tops, trays, caskets, and other articles. An elephant’s foot will make an admirable liqueur stand.”⁴

Sir Edward Grey, who history remembers as the Liberal Foreign Secretary who’s watch coincided with the start of the First World War (it was he who said the often quoted lines: “The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”) was also a keen fisherman and bird watcher and a knowledgeable writer on those subjects. For many years he and his wife had a holiday cottage in Itchen Abbas in the valley of the Itchen, a wide, multi channelled and fast flowing chalk stream that rises near Alresford in Hampshire and runs through Winchester to Southampton. Before setting out on his sabbatical, Roosevelt signalled, via the US ambassador, his desire to walk in spring with someone who could introduce him to the songs of the birds English countryside. This was communicated to the Foreign Secretary who realized that he needn’t call in any outside help – he knew just the man for the job.

So it was that in the spring of 1910 the two men met under the clock at Waterloo Station ⁵ and travelled alone to a country station where a car was waiting to take them to the start of their walk at the village of Tichborne. One hundred and one years later we were following, more or less, the Centenary Walk ⁶ downloaded from the internet though we started at Alresford, where the bus dropped us off, and finished at Winchester where we were parked. We followed the river several miles through water meadows, detouring up the valley through unremarkable farmland – and the ubiquitous golf course – where the river past through private land. It could have got tedious but the river more than made up for the detours – the water meadows saved from the plough by the marginal nature of the land. One crop that was thriving was watercress – we had past a number of farms and farm shops on the bus ride from Winchester: Hampshire is the centre of UK watercress cultivation and Alresford (pronounced Arlsford) is the watercress capital. Grey was impressed not only by Roosevelt’s knowledge of natural history but also of literature and especially poetry. He quickly saw that the ex-President knew all about English birds (Grey could not say the same about American) he simply wanted to hear them. He was particularly impressed with the blackbird’s song, which he rated higher than the thrush. It had, Grey would later quote the US ornithologist, Frank Chapman, a “spiritual quality.”After a few miles, – the Centenary Walk finishes at the village of Easton – the car picked them up and took them to the New Forest for a different song menu and from there Roosevelt travelled on to Southampton and from there to America. We heard rooks and jackdaws, larks, woodpeckers – we even saw an egret – but – I have no claim to expertise – and looking back their voices are strangely muted; drowned out by the rush of the water over the weir and, beyond Easton, by the bass tinnitus of the motorway. From here the landscape is marginal in a different way: blighted with out of town offices and warehouses, dark underpasses, where an outdoorsman could hide out with a .22 rifle and never be found, feasting royally on rats and watercress, discarded mackerdees from the dogging lay-by, bathing once a fortnight in the warm diesel run off from the slip road.

Just under a year after his pleasant afternoon with the Colonel on the banks of the Itchen, Sir Edward Grey’s brother was dead, mauled by a lion which he was stalking near the Athi River in British East Africa (now Kenya). “The lion,” it was reported in the Times, despite having already been shot twice by Grey, “flung his victim to the ground and commenced to worry him just like a dog would a mouse.”⁷ Pluck notwithstanding – he was according to witnesses “perfectly collected” after the attack and able to advise his rescuers how best to help him – he died of his wounds at hospital in Nairobi a few days later.

In September the same year the skin and the skull of the lion that killed George Grey was duly sent to Rowland Ward’s workshop at Piccadilly by Sir Alfred Pease ⁸ “who gave the animal [presumably the lion rather than George Grey, though this isn't clear from the text] his coup de grâce at one yard’s distance.” What Ward did with them is not recorded. I can’t imagine them decorating the cottage in the valley of the Itchen where the Foreign Secretary and the Colonel had taken tea and discussed the spirituality of the blackbird’s song whilst butterflies brushed the honeyed bower with immortality and the crystal water babbled like an echoey playground its crystal waters not trapped in concrete once, not once on its concreteless unmolested journey to the jelly green sea.

And it struck me that a modern Rowland Ward would work with scrap metal and rubber rather than skin and bone. The car, not the lion, is the object of our desire and the engine of our destruction. A taxidermist could make a killing from an artfully arranged energy-absorbent polymer-based bullbar (wall-mounted or free-standing), windscreen bead necklaces, tyre bath mats (bald as a condom – they were never going to stop), skid-pattern wallpaper – lifted direct from the road with a steam iron and transferred to a premium paper of your choice.

In his memoir Rowland Ward singled out one or two of the more curious items that had been sent to him – though a sensitive reader might find many of the objects that arrived at the workshops in Piccadilly a little strange: the adult gorilla sent from the Congo in a cask of rum, a seal shot by a bargeman near Woolwich, Lady Flora, the celebrated shorthorn heifer, or London Jack, the famous collecting dog of Waterloo Station who collected money for the orphans of railwaymen killed at work during the early days of steam. ⁹ Ward himself singled out, as well as a plover caught by a mussel and the regular occurrence of larks hit by flying golf balls, the case of “a rook which had been hung up for a “scare-crow” and became the home of a wren’s nest.” This last example caught my imagination. It spoke to me about resilience and survival. It also seemed to provide an unflattering metaphor for a certain type of life writing. Then the penny dropped. It wasn’t anything to do with writing at all. It wasn’t a metaphor; just something we all do, some of us every day, others at weekends and holidays. Without so much as batting a fraction of an eyelid – not even the slightest quiver of the tip of an eye lash. We climb into our cars and turn on the ignition.

But enough. I’m ranting like a cornered dictator. The last few days have been cold in this part of the world. The drive back from Winchester took four hours. We were stuck behind another accident. Two accidents, in fact. At the first firemen had lifted the roof off one of the crashed cars like a crow prizing open a fat juicy mussel. At the second, a few hundred yards away, a car had spun off the roundabout into a ditch like a severed pony from a fairground ride. Looking up I thought I saw a riderless horse wheeling, smoking, powering across the grey starless reservoir.

We will go back to the Itchen when I’m less fragile and bitter; when winter has arced and shattered into flower and perhaps some sad-eyed poet can bring a harp and hymn a ballad to the brightening moon. ¹⁰

Notes:

¹ I must admit it came as news to me that lions are still being hunted, perhaps to extinction, particularly by a small but influential clique of – mainly American – hunters who have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for lion-based furniture and jewellery products. See:

“African lions under threat from a growing predator: the American hunter”; Suzanne Goldenberg; The Guardian, Tuesday 1 March 2011

² Ward’s friend, the professional hunter R.J. Cunninghame, led the Roosevelt expedition.

³ http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/pigskin.htm, [07 March 2011].

⁴ A Naturalist’s Life Study in the Art of Taxidermy, Rowland Ward, F.Z.S., Lon. Rowland Ward Ltd., 1913, “For Private Circulation”

⁵ Edward Grey recounted his walk with Roosevelt at an address delivered at the Harvard Union on 8 December 1919, after Roosevelt’s death in January that year, and published in essay form in Fallodon Papers, Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, woodcuts by Robert Gibbings, Constable, 1926. The essay, “Recreation,” is also online at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17956 [07 March 2011] PS – They may not have met under the clock per se. I’m not sure of the protocol for serving Foreign Secretarys meeting ex-US Presidents at London rail termini for semi-official birding expeditions.

⁶ The Grey-Roosevelt Centenary Walk is described on Hampshire County Council website at http://www3.hants.gov.uk/walking-country/grey-roosevelt.htm
where a PDF map of the walk route is also available to download.

⁷ “The Late Mr. George Grey.; Story Of His Fight With A Lion.” The Times Feb 27, 1911

⁸ Sir Alfred Pease, a Liberal politician and MP from 1895-1902 “owned” an ostrich farm near Nairobi and entertained many hunters there including Theodore Roosevelt on his gap year safari.

⁹ Now in Tring Museum.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2008/april/victorian-fundraising-dog-comes-to-museum-at-tring18492.html [07 March 2011]

¹⁰ “In Memoriam,” Alfred Tennyson, Online at The Tennyson Page
http://charon.sfsu.edu/tennyson/inmemoriam.html [07 March 2011]

LXXXIX

“Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest, or happy sister, sung,
Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.”

I was in an appropriately grim mood on my last ditch or to be more accurate ditches as I navigated both the Dollis and the Brent and the headwaters of the Fleet in the misty hills of Kenwood. I felt caged, irritable, locked down, like a zoo animal vainly seeking reassurance on a well-beaten path, a Tourette’s trail of muzzled prayer and self-flagellation. I knew I wouldn’t see a kingfisher catch fire – might as well tickle for trout in a puddle or look for otter spraint in an abandoned dog shit bag hanging in an osier thicket on the newly clipped bank. I was an old testament prophet walking through a valley of desolation. Which is perhaps why the graffiti spoke to me with the voice of prophesy. WANKERS! I assumed that it wasn’t a personal vendetta against the occupants of the houses whose long gardens sloped steeply down to the stream. I assumed too that it wasn’t simply the moniker of a gang with self-esteem issues (though I could empathise with that) – the exclamation mark was too jaunty, upbeat. Perhaps it was directed at Barnet Council who spent thousands of pounds on CCTV to prevent graffiti on a whitewashed bridge just down stream over a river so poisoned with diesel run-off from Henley’s Corner that it hadn’t seen so much as a stickleback in over half a century. Perhaps it was directed at the Mubarak regime, Chechen terrorists or Kremlin boot boys, Richard & Judy, motor journalists with their shit-in-a-blanket prose and big hair, natural history cameramen, two-for-one supermarket offers, Tony Blair, Armstrong & Miller … I’ll probably never know. Maybe none of the above. Perhaps it was simply a nod to what is after all a national pastime. At least in my house.

But what depressed me most was an incident by Highgate Ponds. An altercation (I think about dogs) of which I caught the aftermath, a spectacularly angry man hurling invective back at his opponent: “Act your age not your shoe size.” Strangely weak, and, in a slightly different context, a teensy bit camp, but – believe me – he looked like someone capable of knifing his own daughter. It made me feel embarrassed, anxious – it would have been carnage if the other hadn’t backed down and walked away quietly. I didn’t photograph a pair of cormorants on the island in the pond.

Next day however I came across Edmund Blunden’s poem, “Incident in Hyde Park, 1803.” Plus ça change, I thought, plus c’est la même chose. It is mock heroic, echoes of Alfred Noyes’s highwayman and Alfred Tennyson’s light brigade, pre-echoes of Dylan’s “Hurricane,” about two gentleman, strangers, one a Colonel in the Life Guards and one a Royal Navy Captain who have an altercation about their dogs (both Newfoundlands) whilst riding in Hyde Park. They agree to meet at Primrose Hill a couple of hours later:

“Primrose Hill on an April evening
Even now in a fevered London
Sings a vesper sweet; but these
Will try another music. Hark!”

Shots ring out. The army man is killed and Captain Macnamara wounded. The coroner’s report in the Times a few days later is graphic in its description of the fatal wound. EB doesn’t use the detail in the poem – it doesn’t fit the (bloodless) heroic style which he is satirizing – but it certainly does inform the poem’s indignant tone. Echoes of the butcher’s shop that was the first world war are, one feels, never very far away from the poet’s mind. They aren’t far away in any of his work – even the report of a cricket match written about the same time as this poem in 1930 described the batsman, Duleepsinhji’s, careful examination of the pitch during pauses in play as like a tunneller listening “under the trenches for minute messages of danger.” In its exploration of violence and the way that violence is justified and codified and idealized the poem is certainly applicable to the first world war. It is also very thought provoking today. For all the costume drama and toffee accents, and supporting cast of one-armed servants, coach drivers and dog grooms, it is essentially a story about a gang fight – about as prosaic as a supermarket paddy or a cricket club disco ending in multiple homicide. Captain Macnamara is tried for manslaughter at the Old Bailey. But Captain Macnamara has friends in very high places indeed. Lord Hood and Lord Nelson (“Macnamara has never offended, and would not,/Man, woman, child.”) both step up to the witness stand to provide character references as do “a spring-tide of admirals.” The good captain is, unsurprisingly, found not guilty. Life resumes its ordinary course. Justice is satisfied and, in the last words of the poem, “Honour rides on.”

Or, as the Brent Irregulars might express it, wankers.

Highgate Pond.
Gules, three seaxes fessewise points to the sinister proper, pomels and hilts and in the centre chief point a Saxon crown.
Wankers!
Alder catkins.
! (?)

Nazis im Weltraum

Steigen sie nicht auf den felsen deckwerke
Ich sprang von fels zu fels
Wie ein Weihnachtsbaum fee
Bis die dame aus dem tee hütte
Kam vorbei und beschuldigte mich,
Von der rückkehr nicht meine Tasse

Ein lokaler dummkopf
Setzen sie in seinen zwei Euro wert ist:
“Ich sah ihn werfen den becher in die
Deutsch Ozean.”
Wir werden natürlich alle Kosten bezahlen
Sagte meine Frau
Er ist unter großem druck gestanden
Und PD James zurückgekehrt sein manuskript
Ungelesen

(WC Kobold)

On Southwold Quay

Do not climb on the rock revetments
I leapt from rock to rock
Like a Tyrolean shepherd
Until the lady from the tea hut
Came over and accused me
Of not returning my mug

A coastguard officer
Joined in:
“I saw him throw the mug into the
River Blyth.”
We will of course pay all expenses
Said my wife
He’s been under a lot of pressure
And PD James returned his manuscript
Unread

(WC Kobold, Trans: RWS)