Читать книгу This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City - John Rogers - Страница 8

When I first moved east to Leytonstone I orientated myself by studying its position on a large fold-out A–Z map that I bought from the cabbies’ Knowledge Point on Penton Street. This map lived in my bag for about eight years until it finally fell apart into several strips. Leytonstone is just one fold away from the eastern edge of this black-cab driver’s universe – getting a taxi beyond the Redbridge Roundabout is about as easy as persuading a medieval sailor to head west across the Atlantic. Looking south I traced a straight line through Stratford across Mill Meads to the point where the River Lea empties into the Thames at Leamouth. Between Leamouth and Barking Creek lies the ancient manor of Hamme.

To fully embed Leytonstone’s alignment with the sacred Thames I’d have to walk the route, passing familiar territory at Stratford before lurching into the unknown lands along the Channelsea River and the Lower Lea Valley. As I researched the best path to take, my eyes kept being drawn along the embankment past the old Royal Docks to Beckton.

In my 1970s Greater London Atlas the East Ham Level is annotated with an outline diagram showing the Gas Works at Beckton and the beguilingly named Main Drainage Metropolis. A sewer city. This series of straight lines, circles and interconnecting threads resembles an X-ray image of a suspect package.

Beckton was lodged in a dusty corner of my brain as the unlikely location of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket. This film was a pivotal point in my cinema-going life. Its release in 1987 coincided with the recent opening of a multiplex cinema just outside High Wycombe and the first of my friends to pass their driving test. After closing time at the local pub I blagged a lift to the Wycombe 6 alongside my mate Darren Smith, and whilst the rest of our troupe took in some Tom Cruise fluff, me and Darren enlisted for Kubrick’s Vietnam nightmare.

We emerged from the cinema on to the M40 changed men – we’d never seen cinema like this before, we’d had an experience, felt like we’d been under fire ourselves. It took us a while to realize that the Tom Cruise mob had taken off and stranded us six miles from home at two in the morning. They clearly hadn’t adopted the US Marine code of never leaving a fellow soldier behind. We walked home through the pitch black, short-cutting across fields in the rain, enthralled and troubled by what we’d seen.

The film had caught my eye after seeing a short item on TV about this mad American director who was transforming a disused gas works in East London into the killing fields of Vietnam. Thousands of palm trees had been imported and planted in the Thameside marshes to recreate the landscape of South East Asia at Beckton.

Kubrick famously refused to travel – he hadn’t been back to America since the late 1960s – so the standard option of filming a Vietnam flick in the Philippines wasn’t available. By a stroke of luck not only was Kubrick given permission to blow up the gasworks, but they ‘uncannily resembled’ the French industrial architecture of the Vietnamese city of Hue where the film was set. The ‘Vietnamization’ of this windswept corner of East London would therefore not require such a great leap of the imagination as might be expected.

When the great director sent out his casting call and eager young American actors submitted their audition tapes they couldn’t have dreamed that their prize would be to spend seventeen months marooned on an industrial wasteland, serving four months longer than an official war-time tour of duty. Kubrick commanded them, rolling around in the cold Thameside mud with percussive explosions knocking chucks off the crumbling buildings, each retake requiring a hiatus of three days as the walls were repaired for a repeat of the same attack. The longer his raw recruits bunked down in Beckton, the more they came to authentically behave like a unit of Marines in a hostile foreign field dreaming of home.

Over the years I’d picked up rumours that some of the palm trees had been left behind and were thriving in the polluted alluvial mud. I saw snaps people had taken of fragments of wall on which the set designers had scrawled Viet Cong graffiti. The gasworks also played the role of a totalitarian future London in the film version of George Orwell’s 1984, the walls plastered in propaganda posters and the streets patrolled by jackbooted ‘Thought Police’. I had to go to Beckton to see what I could find of Kubrick’s Bec Phu, as it came to be known to the crew.

I set out on foot late morning one Friday in a fine mist of rain. The first section of my walk down through Leytonstone would be a preamble for a future detailed survey – eyeing up places en route that I’d later delve deeper into. Passing along the footbridge above the M11 link road I looked down to the Olympic Stadium by the Lea and to Canary Wharf in the distance – I knew that Beckton was on the far bank of the other creek. It was between those two tracts of water that I’d have to walk. I was consciously heading away from the Olympic jamboree taking place in the New Stratford that has been conjured up from the toxic earth on Stratford Marsh.

I pass the site of the childhood home of Alfred Hitchcock, a visionary director who made the reverse journey to Kubrick, heading west to Hollywood. When I’ve been out in Los Angeles on conscription writing trips, homesick for the streets of Leytonstone and daydreaming of a rainy night-time wander up to the Whipps Cross Roundabout and stopping for a pint in the Hitchcock Hotel, I’ve thought of Alf and wondered whether he ever pined for Leytonstone. Given the notorious anecdote of the young Hitch being sent to the police station over the road by his father with a note telling the officer to lock the boy in the cells for ten minutes, I’m not sure he had particularly happy memories of the place.

The excursion really starts as I enter Stratford. This stretch of the High Road is desperate, far enough off the beaten track to not have qualified for an Olympic makeover. If you peer along the streets of run-down terraced houses you can see the Olympic Village glistening on Angel Lane like a glorious Gulag. It seems to have been modelled on a despot’s palace.

I’d toyed with taking the trail along Leyton High Road into Angel Lane, following a route I’ve walked periodically over the last six years as the Olympic development evolved. But I’m keen not to lapse into a splenetic rant against land-grabs and property developers, frothing at the mouth about the breaking up of one of Europe’s oldest housing co-ops at Clays Lane, the horror of the state-subsidized shopping mall through which visitors to the Olympic Stadium have to pass – the way to the 100-metres final being via Zara, handy for a cheap Third World T-shirt but hardly the Wembley Way. Westfield Stratford City must be the only shopping mall in the world with its own running track, ideal if you’ve over indulged in the food court.

This description of the area in Dr Pagenstecher’s History of East and West Ham, published in 1908, struck me: ‘Turning down Angel Lane, you soon entered upon a country road, running between high banks topped with hedges. Now the fields are gone, and most of the land has gone into the hands of building societies or speculative builders.’

Dr Pagenstecher was passionate about what is today called Newham. He appeared to care deeply about the living conditions and opportunities for its mostly working-class inhabitants. I try to see through my cynicism to how he would have viewed what has happened in Stratford in recent years – progress for the local population and a chance for advancement, or a criminal waste of billions of pounds of investment that has by-passed the pockets of those who need it most. And this is me avoiding the venting of my ire.

In the end, I became resigned to what happened. My wife even bought tickets for the family to graze in the grounds around the stadium to soak up the atmosphere. I’d wandered around the Queen Elizabeth II Park site among the buddleia, Himalayan balsam, elderflower and fly-tipped fridges before the bulldozers crashed in and the security fences were erected. I also have to acknowledge I bought the boots I’m wearing from Westfield – I’m compromised from the ground up.

I need to change tack, and turn away from London 2012 across Maryland Point. Maryland really is named after its more famous North American cousin and seems to have benefited from the Games by obtaining a twisted silver clock tower, but not much else. On the other hand Maryland fell foul of a pre-Olympics brothel purge. Reading online message boards it appears that two massage parlours had been satisfying punters for a few years before the Met decided there was something untoward going on beneath the flannel-sized ‘todger-towels’ provided at the door. A Daily Star investigation proved that the moral crusade was unsuc’sex’ful. Stressed-out visitors to Stratford wouldn’t have to look further afield in search of a happy ending after all.

Water Lane carries me past the Manby Arms pub with its huge garden. This is the first real hint of the rural hamlets that studded the marshes and the levels. There are multiple references to groves in the area – The Grove that sweeps from Maryland into Stratford Broadway, Manbey Grove where the pub sits, and across the Romford Road there’s Barnard Grove – all of which lie around what is marked on old maps as Stratford Common. Add in the fact that they’re in the proximity of Water Lane, a pagan past could be imagined for the site, with oak groves and springs having sacred, pre-Christian significance.

An official book celebrating fifty years of the Borough of West Ham in 1936 states: ‘It is quite likely that the area was a centre of communal life of the (pre-Roman) period and that it saw Druid ceremonial at its best.’ Not only do the authors claim the presence of Druids in West Ham but they’ve made a critical judgement about how their rituals squared up against Druids from other areas. Not content with having the best public baths in East London, the grandees of 1930s West Ham boasted that even their Druids were better going back to time immemorial. Try matching that in Tower Hamlets or Waltham Forest.

I’m a sucker for this stuff and will by-pass the other meaning of a grove as a tree-lined suburban street and the fact that, from what I’ve read, most of what we think we know of Druidry is an 18th-century invention rather than a tradition handed down through the mists of time. Drifting the workaday streets as I do you need to embrace the romantic whenever you get the chance – it can’t be all Greggs the Bakers and tins of warm lager.

***

It’s warm lager that comes to mind on Romford Road. Not because this is the old Roman road that crossed the marshes into Essex – I don’t think lager had been invented at the time of Julius Caesar. The Romans brought hops to Britain as a vegetable rather than for brewing. The memory is of bad student parties in my first year in London when I moved to a terraced house in York Road just past the BP garage. I was a callow 18-year-old who had taken the BBC comedy programme The Young Ones as an instructional manual rather than a sitcom and was determined to ‘live the dream’ of pukey parties, farts, bad jokes and even worse music.

We did a fairly good job in our little three-bed terraced house with an outside toilet. The tone was set in the first week when one of my housemates took both his first taste of red wine and his inaugural spliff at the same time. Unable to negotiate the slide door to the toilet he projectile vomited over three days’ worth of dirty dishes in the sink. We elected him as next on the washing-up rota as a consequence and carried on quaffing the £1.99 litre bottle of Valpolicella.

Another night in the first term, a visitor to our humble home, a public schoolboy who’d fallen through the educational cracks decided to urinate in an empty wine bottle rather than traipse into the garden to use the lavvy. We corked this fine vintage of Château Piss and popped it in the fridge. When our regular Friday-night group feed came round my female housemate rolled in three sheets to the wind, grabbed the chilled bladder juice from the fridge and poured herself a large glass. I swear I did attempt to warn her but she just assumed I was protecting my stash. Upon the first sip she spluttered the urine all over the food I’d just prepared, which our guests decided to eat anyway because everyone was so hungry and my baked bean and cheese-topped toasties were legendary. All the people in those gruesome anecdotes now have responsible jobs, mortgages and children – apart from me. I just have the children.

We felt that we’d so successfully distilled the essence of the Scumbag Polytechnic student lifestyle that, like an ambitious shopkeeper, we expanded the next year to a five-bed house on the other side of West Ham Park. The Spotted Dog pub on Upton Lane became our regular haunt. To us provincials this was a remnant of home, a country pub nestled among the East London grime. We didn’t realize it at the time but the pub dates back at least to the 16th century. It was where the City merchants of the London Exchange conducted their business during the plague years of the 1660s. It was where we celebrated birthdays, exams, and Subbuteo victories.

Happy days. If nothing else my three years at Poly provided me with the cast-iron stomach that stood me in good stead on travels round India and South East Asia. This period also created a permanent connection to the area of London where I entered kidulthood.

In those two years traipsing along the Romford Road I have no memory of ever ducking down Vicarage Lane to West Ham Church. Shame then that I didn’t take the trouble to study the 18th-century map of the area that shows the original name of Vicarage Lane as being Ass Lane. If that hadn’t made us snigger, the Victoria County History records that, ‘the cartographer may have been misled by a rustic informant: the form Jackass Lane, also recorded in the 18th century, seems more authentic.’

Jackass Lane brings me to an old Roman trackway, the ‘Porta Via’ or Portway, that linked West Ham to the Roman camp at Uphall Farm in Barking. Groups of ‘rustic informants’ are sunning themselves on the benches outside West Ham Church. The foundations of this church date back to the Saxon era, the main body being rebuilt by the Norman Baron William de Montfichet in the 1180s. When the eyes of the world fell on the running and jumping on Stratford Marshes I doubt many cast their gaze towards this building with a heritage older than Westminster Abbey. It sits beneath the shade of the lime, yew and oak trees – not a tourist in sight.

I go to take a rest inside and a group of builders on a lunch break wave me through. In 1844 a large, colourful mural was revealed that covered the interior of the church but for some reason was hastily hidden again beneath lime-wash. However, an anonymous pamphlet was published describing the mural as depicting ‘the suburbs of Hell’. Parts of the mural were again revealed in 1865 during renovations, when it was examined ‘under the superintendence of the Rev. R. N. Clutterbuck of Plaistow’. The lurid descriptions of the anonymous pamphlet were debunked before the mural was deemed unworthy of preservation, re-whitewashed and the plaster removed. It has a hint of intrigue almost worthy of a Dan Brown novel, in which no doubt connections would be made between the martyrs burnt at the stake on Stratford Green and the land owned by the Knights Templar around the River Lea nearby. In the Dan Brown version the forbidden mural in this backwater church would have contained the secret of some heresy. At some point a beautiful younger woman would have to be involved – she can play me as the bumbling amateur researcher with a dodgy left knee – and she discovers that the Olympic Stadium has been built to cover a hoard of Templar treasure that includes the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Prepuce (Christ’s foreskin). That might bring the tourists in.

Who the artist was, we’ll never know. Was he a troublesome monk sent out from the nearby Langthorne Abbey to do good work in the community? Once confronted with a fresh white wall, a brush and paints, did he unleash the impulses repressed by ecclesiastical life? Was he some kind of Banksy character who wandered around East London daubing images of fornicating bishops on church walls. Somewhere within the West Ham mural was there a tag as identifiable as the signature on a Damien Hirst dot painting? ‘The Final Doom of Mankind’ that was painted here might have been as synonymous with this 15th-century painter as the Obama/Hope poster is with street artist Shepard Fairey. But then this was an era before artists had egos and dealers. When the mural was painted there would have been no Victorian squeamishness over images of cavorting naked sinners. Vivid, racy murals probably put bums on church seats in those days.

All the time that I’m studying Dr Pagenstecher’s account of the church’s history my ears are tuning in to the builders’ lunchtime banter. The tranquillity of this rare pastoral East London scene is being disrupted by one of the workmen who’d let me into the church giving his mates a detailed blow-by-blow account of a fight he’d had. The image he paints of his rumble would be a true vision of hell if it were rendered as a fresco on the whitewashed walls.

As I make for the door, trying my hardest not to attract the attention of ‘Bonecrusher’, I spot one of the last surviving relics of the great Stratford Langthorne Abbey that is the next stop on my Kubrick schlep. High on the wall of the north tower is a stone tablet carved with a sequence of human skulls dug up in the garden of the Adam and Eve pub. ‘Bonecrusher’ comments to his mates as I take a photo, but they quickly lose interest and return to tales of bust-ups in Barking boozers.

As far as I know, the tablet is all that remains of the great abbey built by Montfichet in 1135 by the banks of the Channelsea River. The Abbey of Stratford Langthorne put the area on the map in the Middle Ages in the way that Westfield Stratford City is aiming to do today. The building of the Eurostar terminal, Stratford International, continues the historic symmetry, as continental visitors would sail up the Lea and disembark at Queen Matilda’s bridge by the ‘Street-at-the-Ford’. The area’s French connection was sufficiently well known for Chaucer to make a sneering reference to the locals’ attempts to converse with the tourists in their mother tongue, referring to ‘French after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe’.

Stone tablet in West Ham Church

Heading down Abbey Road you’d need an active imagination to guess this was the way to a scheduled ancient monument. Where pilgrims trod a path through the marshes the route now reads like a history of 20th-century social housing, from its most enlightened pre-war phase, built by the London County Council, to the high-rise blocks being given a facelift. Straight ahead stand the Towers of Mammon at Canary Wharf and to the north you can just see the top of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture in the Olympic Park, which is about as close as most people from the area managed to get.

Turning into Bakers Row a hint of rurality reappears as poppies poke through the metal railings of Abbey Gardens. A sign invites you ‘to grow your things here’. The Cistercian monks of the abbey were known for their green fingers. The name ‘Langthorne’ was taken from the hedges of ‘long thorns’ that surrounded their gardens on this site. The present-day Abbey Gardens carry on the work of the monks, encouraging local people to use the ‘open-access harvest garden’ to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs in rows of raised beds.

Just inside the gate are the brick and flint foundations of a small building or room that would have been part of the medieval abbey. Around it grow lavender, wild geraniums, cabbages, lettuce and spring onions. An old signal box finds new life as a tool shed and a wind turbine provides whatever power is needed. I think the monks would approve.

The remains of Stratford Langthorne Abbey

Before the Cistercians and their impressive abbey, old Hamme was divided into two manors. There is a map of the area at ‘Ye thyme of Edward ye Confessor’. I’d guess from the spelling that the map was Victorian; those ‘Ye’s’ speak of a longing to connect with a halcyon past. It shows the Manor of Alestan with his eight hides of arable and sixty acres of meadow in West Ham. On the other side of Ham Creek is the Manor of Leured with only one hide of arable and fifty acres of meadow. There is also a parcel of land for Edwin the Free Priest, who sounds too much like a Monty Python character. Out here in the marshes, unshackled from the Church hierarchy, he probably ran around naked with a beard down to his knees. What comes to mind is the scene in Life of Brian when Brian accidentally jumps on a hermit’s foot, making him break his vow of silence as he exclaims in pain. Although back in the 11th century it’s unlikely Edwin would have been disturbed by anyone, let alone a reluctant messiah.

There is an even earlier record that Offa, the 8th-century King of the East Saxons, gave two hides of land in East Ham to the Monastery of St Peter in Westminster. The men of Westminster have again got their beady eyes on the region but they aren’t thinking in terms of hides but office blocks and riverside housing developments.

When Ken Livingstone was campaigning in Leyton in 2011 during the mayoral elections he spoke of the real legacy of the Olympic Games being the ‘vast potential’ of the land ‘from the Olympic Park south to the River Thames … between Stratford and the Excel Centre a vast amount of brownfield site … we’ve got enough land there for 40,000 homes and 50,000 jobs.’

Not-so-Red Ken was referring to the Manor of Alestan, which in Alestan’s time was valued by how many hogs could be supported by feeding on the acorns and beech masts of the woodland. When this area is being sold off to the corporations of the ‘dynamic’ economies in China, Brazil and India, they will be talking in hundreds of millions of pounds rather than the hundred swine that could be sustained by whatever fell from the trees. The ancient rites of ‘pannage’ will be omitted from the prospectus sent out boasting of West Ham’s ‘development potential’.

Old Hamme, from The History of East and West Ham by Dr Pagenstecher, 1908

***

Passing over the bridge at Abbey Road the pavement is streaming with men departing Friday prayers from Canning Road mosque, heading for the Docklands Light Railway like a procession of pilgrims. The traffic is intense for such a quiet backwater, and this is before the proposed ‘Mega Mosque’ has been built. The plans for the 9,500-capacity religious centre are being opposed by a MegaMosque No Thanks campaign group among fears that it will turn West Ham into an ‘Islamic ghetto’. I’ve seen a few mosques before but not even the mighty Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri in India calls itself a Mega Mosque. I have to take a look where this potential new landmark will emerge.

Given that the group behind the scheme have been accused of being ‘extreme and isolationist’ I don’t fancy my chances of getting very far. But in fact I am able to amble through the open gates into the grounds unopposed. At present the Mega Mosque is no more than a series of portacabins laid out among the long grass. I try to cross the overgrown meadow to access the banks of the Channelsea River but find the way blocked by an aluminium fence. I seem to be free to wander the site at will. A man in Islamic dress emerges from the kitchens, passes me by with a slight smirk and goes about his business. There could almost be a heritage argument for building a religious centre near the site of Langthorne Abbey; the Cistercian monks could possibly have been described as ‘extreme and isolationist’.

From the mosque I step up onto the Greenway – a path built on top of the Northern Outfall Sewage Pipe that cuts a straight line across the levels to Beckton. This is the most direct route for the unadventurous. It forms a kind of ramblers’ highway above the rooftops, screening out the realities of metropolitan life with a surface optimized for soft-soled dog walkers and commuting cyclists. To confirm this jaundiced assessment my way is soon blocked by a party of about thirty ramblers being led by an enthusiastic guide pointing out the landmarks (I attempt to hear if she included the Mega Mosque). A cyclist in a hurry approaches and it takes the guide too long for the cyclist’s liking to manoeuvre this bloated python of a walking party to one side.

Despite the pedestrian traffic jams the Greenway is a great vantage point from which to take in the course of Alfred the Great’s Channelsea River. It’s believed that the ingenious Alfred cut a series of channels to drain water from the River Lea, stranding a hostile Viking fleet that had moored further along the valley. The skeleton of a Viking longboat was excavated on Tottenham Marshes, lending weight to the story.

It’s funny the way history accords these great accolades to a few individuals. It’s unlikely that Alfred mastered such a feat of civil engineering whilst supposedly single-handedly rewriting the laws of England. According to his chronicler, a pithy Welsh monk called Asser, he had a raging libido and a terrible case of haemorrhoids. It’s more likely that an unnamed group of people put their heads together and devised the scheme to create the Channelsea River, and Alfred approved the idea whilst some unfortunate maiden applied a balm to his throbbing piles.

It had been my original intention to paddle my way down the river to the mouth of Bow Creek, then head overland with the 7kg dingy on my back. I’d walked around this section of the riverbank back in November when the water was high. Looking across the muddy banks sprouting phalanxes of swaying reeds the age of Alfred, Alestan and the Vikings didn’t seem so distant.

The current state of the dried-up July watercourse clogged with dumped car tyres would have left me as marooned as the marauding Danes. Some plans work far better in the imagination.

***

I’ve been on the move now for three hours and still have some distance to go on my loopy route to Bec Phu. I want to follow the journey the monks of Stratford Abbey took after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century when they retired to a mansion in Plaistow. This would have been a traumatic event for the monks, kicked out of their home by Henry VIII once he assumed the role as Supreme Head of the Church in England after his split from Rome. Although there’s nothing to suggest the monks of Stratford were wholly guilty of the crimes levelled at monasteries and abbeys – of exploiting dubious religious relics for financial gain and of growing rich, fat and lazy thanks to donations from pious simpletons – they had built up a substantial annual income that Henry wanted to get his lecherous mitts on. But to some extent theirs was a walk of shame from the wealth of their abbey to the relative modesty of the Plaistow retreat. As I’m wondering how far from the spiritual path the mucky monks of Stratford had strayed, I see another mob of recreational walkers and descend from the Greenway straight to the door of a café.

At this stage any café would do and I don’t pay much attention as I enter. Inside, the walls are coated in a tiled layer of Polaroids that the owner tells me are of ‘friends, enemies and events’. Standing before them is a mannequin dressed as an American Indian squaw but he says, ‘She needs a change, really, for the summer.’ This is more than a café; it’s a project. The menu holders on the tables contain books, enticing you as much to read a few pages of Paulo Coelho as order a slice of cake with your cappuccino.

I take the chance to survey my options; I’ve already by-passed Abbey Mills – the pumping house and surviving Templar mills now converted into a busy film and TV studio. Where Joseph Bazalgette engineered the sewage system that sits beneath the Greenway, his great-great grandson returned to stage the original series of the reality TV behemoth Big Brother at what is now called 3 Mills Studios. I’ve heard it remarked that where one Bazalgette pumped the shit out of London, his descendant devised a way to pump it all back in. But whereas the sewage system still remains a vital part of our daily lives, Big Brother has faded into irrelevance. Abbey Mills is now better known for its association with the strange animated creations of Goth prince Tim Burton.

Ploughing onwards to Plaistow I pass East London Cemetery after stopping to note down the Bronzed Age tanning salon by the gates. Maybe people become conscious of their pallor when visiting dead relatives. I’d planned to pay homage to Dr Pagenstecher, who was buried in the cemetery in 1926. People leave strange mementos on the graves of the famous but I think my perambulation through the Hammes is tribute enough to this Prussian immigrant who formed a deep attachment to the area.

I soon realize that the chances of finding the plot of Dr Pagenstecher are remote – the cemetery is a vast necropolis of headstones dedicated to Mum, Dad, and Granddad. There’s a large marble dartboard for BILLY and fresh flowers in West Ham colours. The notorious East End singer and actress Queenie Watts lies resting here somewhere as well. She starred in one of the great London films, Sparrers Can’t Sing, filmed around Limehouse and Stratford, reprising the role she played in real life as the landlady and lounge-bar chanteuse of the Iron Bridge Tavern in East India Dock Road. She also appeared in Alfie, providing the soundtrack for Michael Caine’s pub brawl. But I start to feel as if I’m intruding with this tombstone tourism and move on.

I’ve never been sure how to pronounce Plaistow – whether to give it a flat ‘a’ or to round it into a provincial, potentially poncey-sounding ‘ar’. I’ll go with whatever Ian Dury spits out in his bawdy ballad ‘Plaistow Patricia’. Dury opts for the rounded ‘ar’ but growls through it with such venom that even Johnny Rotten would have told him to tone it down a bit.

The approach into Plaistow via Upper Road hints at the well-to-do rural past when this was a prosperous village favoured by City merchants and Old Money. Pagenstecher noted how in 1768 only four people in Plaistow were eligible to vote and they had to walk to Chelmsford to cast their ballot. In 1841 the population was eerily recorded as being 1,841. The building of the Victoria and Albert Royal Docks saw the population surge to over 150,000 by the early 1900s. The grazing meadows of the Plaistow Levels that produced the infamous monster ox on Tun Marsh, weighing in at 263 stone and sold at Leadenhall Market in 1720 for a hundred guineas, sprouted rows of terraced houses. Pagenstecher wrote that it was ‘the most remarkable transformation from a rural to an urban community … without parallel in the United Kingdom’.

I’m partly following the footsteps of Thomas Burke in his 1921 book The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London. Burke was an early champion of overlooked London. Eighty-something years before Iain Sinclair mapped the city’s outer rim with his celebrated epic millennial yomp round the M25 in London Orbital, Burke was chronicling the changing face of what it is now fashionable to call ‘edgelands’. He saw wonder in the new suburbs where the cement was still fresh on the redbrick villas. He was the original poet of the new commuter class, clerks and salary men, their aspirational wives and burping children, and was Edwardian London’s psychogeographer.

Burke was scathing about places he disliked – Ilford gets a real pasting in The Outer Circle. Moving round into the High Street it speaks volumes of how badly the area must have suffered in the Blitz that Burke wrote glowingly of the ‘Plastovians’ and their neighbourhood. Any notion of Plaistow as a quaint village in the marshes fades away with the grubby Costcutter hugging the corner. It’s a landscape of uninspired post-war blocks. Although there is still a buzz around the place, it has a feel of grim determination rather than the people ‘full of beans’ whom Burke described.

There is a poignant record of the bomb damage inflicted on Plaistow on the night of 19 March 1941. The Metropolitan Police kept detailed inventories of the losses of each night’s raid, often short entries of a few sentences. But the roll call of destroyed properties and fatalities this time runs to over two pages. It was the worst night of bombing London had seen since the Battle of Britain. This is a sample, neatly typed out with administrative simplicity:

1 HE. Bomb at Rivett Street. 50 houses demolished. Tidal Basin Railway Station, 2 P.H.’s, and 20 houses damaged.

It records how ‘about 1,500 Incendiary bombs fell on the section’. A convent and a furniture depository were logged amongst the buildings ‘completely destroyed’, along with Leyes Road School and numerous other houses and pubs.

If March 1941 wasn’t bad enough, later in the war German V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets fell from the sky. One ward alone lost 85 per cent of its houses. It’s a miracle anything pre-war is left standing. It’s too easy at times when bemoaning the state of certain parts of London to forget that only sixty years ago some of them were still lying under piles of Blitz rubble. Consequently, I don’t look too hard for the fragment of the mansion where the Langthorne monks retired, which was supposedly in the back garden of a Methodist chapel opposite the Black Lion pub.

I’ve been carrying my rain jacket most of the way and haven’t needed it since Leytonstone. It’s got hotter as the walk has progressed and my feet are starting to ache. I feel the heat coming off a No. 69 bus stuck in traffic. I’d seen that bus many times lumbering through Leyton and always wondered where it went. Now I know – it goes to Beckton. I could have just got a No. 69 straight to Kubrickland rather than hoofing it all this way. But where is the adventure in that?

Into Balaam Street, which, despite its Anglicized pronunciation of Bale-ham, is a reference to a character with occult powers written about in the Jewish Torah’s Book of Numbers. Dan Brown would be having kittens by now – the martyrs burnt on Stratford Green, the destroyed mural in West Ham Church, monks driven from their monastery on Templar land, Christ’s foreskin buried beneath the Olympic Stadium that I made up, and now a character from an ancient Hebrew text open to multiple interpretations. Even I’m intrigued.

It seems Balaam was a Gentile prophet from Babylon who rode a speaking ass. We are now far beyond the Pythonesque world of Edwin the Free Priest. From what I can glean, when urged by the hostile King Moab to predict the doom of the Israelites, Balaam instead sung the praises of the wandering Jews in search of the Promised Land. However much pressure Moab put him under, Balaam continued to produce prophecies of a glorious future for Israel. But after that heroic moment he introduced prostitutes and bacon sandwiches into the Israelite community, causing God to inflict a terrible plague upon them that killed 24,000 people, including Balaam himself. What this has to do with Plaistow I have no idea but rather than showing the way to the Promised Land, Balaam Street leads to the Barking Road. And you don’t need a Princeton-educated semiologist to work out where the Barking Road takes you.

Another nod to Eastern influences is the ‘Byzantine-style’ Memorial Community Church just past Michelle’s American Nails and Tooth Diamonds. It rises from the levels on the Barking Road, a majestic, cathedral-like structure built in 1921 to commemorate the dead of the First World War. The names of the fallen soldiers are cast into the bells that ring out from the east tower.

The building of the Barking Road in 1807 effectively killed off the marsh men who earned their living as cordwainers, potato growers and graziers. The road brought city clerks and dock workers. In 1963 it carried the Beatles to chaotic gigs at the Granada Cinema, East Ham. On the second occasion, their manager Brian Epstein told them the news that their forthcoming single ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had sold over a million advance copies. Hanging around backstage pre-show, munching takeaways that had to be delivered by the police, this could have been the moment the mop-topped Scousers realized that they were seriously big news.

The Granada Cinema survives as a Gala Bingo Hall and I consider popping in to try my luck and see if I can access that hysterical moment in pop history. Perhaps there’ll be an old dear crossing off numbers who was there at the gig that night. With the first twinges of pain in my left knee it could prove a detour too far, so I stay on track.

I do however allow myself to wander into Cumberland Road where the Duke of Cumberland lived. One of the dukes of Cumberland had the cheerful nickname of the ‘Butcher of Culloden’, which I don’t think was meant ironically. He makes a peculiar appearance in the local version of a mummers folk play particular to the village where I grew up. The play was common all over the country and had a set of stock characters, but for some odd reason in the version played out in Wooburn Green, Bold Slasher or Saladin was replaced by the Duke of Cumberland. There lies a genuine historical conundrum and however much I allow myself to drift on flights of fancy I don’t really expect to find the answer along this neat row of terraced houses.

I chat to a local resident walking his dog and mention the bomb damage the area suffered during the war. He cheerily tells me the roof of his house was blown straight up into the air and landed back firmly in place. He also tells me that this land was originally covered in market gardens.

I’m drawn across the road to a bright-red tin hut with emerald-green trim around the roof, doors and windows. Above the entrance it reads ‘Gospel Printing Mission’ on a small, black plaque. It looks curiously out of place. The man tells me that he’s never seen anybody go in or out of the building. When I check online I discover that the mission was led here from its previous home in Barkingside after receiving word from God obtained through ‘urgent prayer’.

The printing presses inside this tin shack send out Christian literature worldwide in several languages. The clatter of the Rotaprint press must echo around the metallic structure, making a hell of a din. I didn’t find a clue to the Butcher of Culloden question, but here was a parallel between Balaam acting directly on the word of God and the Gospel Printing Mission being instructed by the Lord to set up a publishing operation in an old shed off the Barking Road not far from Balaam Street. As God directed Balaam from the Plains of Midian to the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, he guided the GPM to Plaistow – no less epic a journey in its own way.

If God were speaking to me now he would probably tell me to get a bloody move on. The sultry weather has clearly befuddled my brain. I urge myself onwards by paraphrasing the Beastie Boys, singing to myself ‘No Beer till Beckton’ to the tune of their rap-rock smash ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn’. It’s probably not a deity feeding me this line but perhaps the spirit of recently deceased Beastie Boy Adam Yauch.

Tunmarsh Lane sets me on a direct track across the marshes to Beckton, except that here the wetlands have been tamed by housing. I almost instantly break my Beastie Boys pledge and suck down a can of Stella as a medical precaution against a seizure of the left knee. A good friend familiar with the workings of painkillers informs me that where codeine caused me anxiety and nightmares, my metabolism clearly responds well to beer-based palliatives. In an ideal world this would be a few pints of real ale supped in a comfortable pub. When I’m on the hoof I need something a bit more direct.

The Bobby Moore Stand of West Ham United’s Boleyn Ground at Upton Park is visible above the rooftops. Legend has it that the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII resided in a castle here that survived into the 20th century. With West Ham soon to relocate to the Olympic Stadium, that element of their mythology will be left behind. The Hammers carry forth the memory of the dockyards in their nicknames – when the 35,000-strong Upton Park crowd bellow out ‘Come On You Irons’ they sing back into being Thameside Ironworks FC, which the club first played as when set up by the owner and the foreman of Thameside Ironworks and Shipbuilding Co. in 1895. They changed their name to West Ham in 1900 and then promptly moved their ground from Plaistow to a corner of East Ham.

There is an intense sense of belonging around Upton Park on match days. Football thrives on its tribalism, but as the claret and blue hordes filter along Green Street it has more the air of a regional clan gathering, an extended family of tens of thousands assembled for a folk moot.

This communality is also evident in the civic pride of the old municipal publications. I’m reminded of this as I pass the New City Elementary School in Tunmarsh Lane, built in 1897. When not boasting about the quality of West Ham’s Druid ceremonies in times gone past, Fifty Years a Borough (1936) shows us photos of the ‘latest motor ambulance’, pupils sitting down to lunch at the open-air day school, the first electricity dynamos at Canning Town, the Turbo Alternator at the West Ham Generating Station, and children being met by their parents as they are discharged from Plaistow Fever Hospital. The first paragraph on local history states, ‘Local history is the cradle of true patriotism, and local patriotism is the best stimulant to efficiency and progress.’ Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, writes in the introduction that ‘the New Society of social and moral responsibility combined with the new ideals of communal ideas is moving in the Borough.’ It’s stirring stuff.

It feels appropriate now to take advantage of another civic utility and jump back aboard the Greenway. The straight path that I was so scornful of earlier now opens up like a songline leading directly to the centre of my destination. The can of Stella Artois becomes my ayahuasca, a potent tribal brew that opens up channels of enlightenment. Amazonian Indians drink this hallucinogenic draught as part of a shamanistic initiation ceremony. Through the ritualistic imbibing of Belgian lager I see the Greenway as a ley line marked out in turds that takes me to the locked gate of the ancient East Ham Church.

This small flint and stone building dates from the early 12th century and claims to be the oldest church in London still in regular use. The site dates back much further, though. During the laying of the sewage pipes in 1863, Roman funeral remains, including two complete skeletons, were excavated in the churchyard. Of more relevance to me is the burial place of the antiquarian William Stukeley, laid to rest here in 1765. Through his celebrated accounts of Stonehenge, Avebury and ‘the Curiosities of Great Britain’, Stukeley is responsible for making a link between the Neolithic stone monuments of Britain and the Druidic religion. Aside from being a Freemason (do I even need to make the Dan Brown reference? – the church is also called St Mary Magdalene), he referred to himself as a Druid.

When I come over all pagan, as when speculating on a Druidic past for the Groves of Stratford, it is largely down to Stukeley’s revival of the indigenous religion of Britain. There are now thought to be at least as many pagans in the UK as Jews and Sikhs. Upwards of 30,000 descend on Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice each year. The man buried somewhere in the churchyard beyond the bolted iron gate is in no small way responsible for this.

As I pass under the A13, Billy Bragg’s ‘Trunk Road to the Sea’, Beckton is now firmly in my sights. I stop for a rest in the pub tacked on to the end of a Premier Inn. The place is buzzing with Friday-evening drinkers and diners. A lady sitting behind me says to her husband in a tone of complaint, ‘I’m a lady who likes quality.’ This must have been in reply to him bemoaning why they couldn’t have saved a few quid and stayed at a Travelodge instead.

When I order my second pint (and get overly excited about the fact they sell Worcester Sauce crisps), I mention Full Metal Jacket to the young lad pulling my ale. ‘Great movie,’ he says. I tell him it was filmed at Beckton Gasworks and he does a comedy double-take. His eavesdropping colleague nearly drops the two glasses of rosé he’s handing to a punter. I explain how the place was condemned and Kubrick was permitted to blow it up, and throw in that there would have been helicopter gunships fizzing over the roof of the pub during filming. The rest of the thirsty crowd at the bar don’t seem as interested in this nugget of cinematic history as they are in placing their order, so I leave them with that vignette and return to the important task of lubricating my knee joint.

Heading back out into the bright early-evening sun I look for the grimy ‘marginal’ rows of workers’ cottages that Kubrick’s scriptwriter, Michael Herr, noted on their drives to set each day. According to Herr, Kubrick compared the proximity of the cottages to the gasworks to the Hollywood studio system keeping labour close at hand and dependent. This indicates how much Kubrick had fallen out of love with Hollywood – that he came to compare his lot in glamorous Los Angeles to that of a poorly paid London industrial-plant worker.

A generic modern housing estate has spawned upon this area once noted for its large population of sailors. Press gangs were common here in the 18th century, as were smugglers who sailed up Barking Creek with their contraband before stealing across the wetlands.

The environment may have been tamed but it still presents an uncanny landscape. To stand on the Sir Steve Redgrave Bridge with passenger jets parting your hair as they come in to land on the runway of City Airport is one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had in twenty years of travelling. When I made my way up the steps of the great temple complex of Borobudur in Java, one of many candidates for the Eighth Wonder of the World, I was a person who had just seen too many temples. My flabber had been gasted. That was until I sloped along this section of the Woolwich Manor Way.

Watching the jets take off from the tarmac, surrounded by water, into the dark clouds hanging low over Canary Wharf, then looking back to the hexagonal concrete pumping station sitting on a traffic island like a stranded UFO, I found myself in a state of incomprehension. To add to the craziness, DLR trains glide through the air along a concrete rail doing a waltz around the flying saucer. What was this place?

For the duration of the Olympics it was home to the US Olympic Team, who had shunned the official Olympic Village in Angel Lane due to fears over security. The danger here is not terrorism, but sensory overload.

The bridge leads to the Woolwich Ferry across the Thames. It’s a journey I need to take at some point – south across the river. I’ll return here later in my quest, but for now I need to find a corner of East London that is forever Vietnam.

Atlantis Avenue leads me from the UFO pumping station into Armada Way and on to the set of Full Metal Jacket. Fittingly, the Beckton-shot part of the film opens to a soundtrack of Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Were Made for Walking’. It’s an expansive landscape of long, swaying grasses adorned with pylons. There’s not a soul around – the remote London of Thomas Burke who passed through here in 1921, walking from Barking to Cyprus.

It’s such a barren stretch of road that at first I forget to look for visual references to the film. But then the sequences in which red flares drift through the brush become recognizable. The chainlink fencing around the energy plant recalls the perimeter fence of the landing strip as a Westland helicopter, repainted US Marine green, comes in to land. I see the formation of M41 tanks and Marines working their way across the misty East Ham Level as they come under fire from the old gasworks buildings.

Armada Way snakes through to the Gallions Reach shopping complex that appears more stranded than Kubrick’s unit of shell-shocked recruits with their ‘thousand-yard stares’. From comparing various old A–Zs and my Greater London Atlas, this stands over the site of the buildings that feature in the film.

Beckton

Shoppers depart this retail outpost down a road that strongly resembles the highway flanked by ditches along which Vietnamese evacuees flee from the battle scene. Army trucks lumbered where delivery lorries today bring supplies to the consumer garrison.

The squad at the heart of the film gets lost near Tesco and comes under fire from a sniper that I’d place somewhere between WH Smith and Sports Direct. As Matthew Modine’s troops snaked around the back of the Hue/Beckton building harbouring the markswoman, I slide round the back of Tesco and rest on the grass beneath the pylons, where rabbits frolic in the evening sun.

The only physical remains of the gas plant are the gasometers, which naturally don’t feature in the movie Beckton. I concede that it was fanciful to entertain the notion that I might find a brick fragment, discarded ordnance or even a thriving imported palm tree.

I go to head off towards the River Roding but am scythed down as if a Viet Cong sniper had been left behind to continue the fight. My left knee cramps up and I stagger into the fence around the sewage works. There’s no point radioing for a chopper to airlift me out; I’ll have to haul this useless lump of flesh clear of the war zone via the service road.

Maybe it was the heightening of my senses caused by the jolt of pain but I’m drawn to a high grass bank on Royal Docks Road. It catches the amber early-summer-evening sunlight on the tall stalks of cow parsley. In one last effort I clamber over into a secluded, overgrown enclosure. It’s littered with odd dumped garments – single abandoned shoes are always more disturbing to find than a pair. Poking through the weeds are broken lumps of brick and concrete sporting blotches of orange lichen. Huge lengths of pipe lie beneath ferns and brambles. Are these the ruins of Kubrick’s Bec Phu?

Full Metal Jacket ends at a similar time of day, what cinematographers know as the ‘golden hour’. The Marines make their way across this same rough ground of Thameside Marshes drained by the Romans. Matthew Modine’s character Joker narrates the closing lines: ‘We hump down to the Perfume River to set down for the night.’

It had been my intention to set down for the night by the River Roding but I’d never make it. Instead of humping ‘down to the Perfume River’, I hobble to the Docklands Light Railway and home to Leytonstone.