Читать книгу This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City - John Rogers - Страница 9

On evenings between walks I decamp to my local pub with a clutch of old walking guides, odd municipal publications and various maps I pick up in charity shops and on eBay. It’s here in the Heathcote Arms, slurping down pints of cheap bitter and decorating my belly with a sprinkling of cheese and onion crisps, that plans are made for future expeditions.

I scan the tables in The Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London 1957–60 as if they hold secrets of the magnitude supposedly encoded in the Mayan Long Calendar. I pore over the columns of Metropolitan Boroughs, Urban and Rural Districts and Parishes. A globule of Marston’s Pale Ale falls on the acreage of Heston and Isleworth. In my reverie I consider whether this is a sign other than that I need a shave.

There must be something in these figures: Acreage, Est. Population June 1959, Rateable Value on 1^st April 1960, Estimated Product of £1 rate per head of population – it’s a kind of Domesday Book for London. The report tells us that this ‘sea of figures, statistics and administrative detail’ is to be given great attention as ‘the ways and means are of the utmost importance’ and should be ignored ‘at our peril’. I’d better get my head around it if I’m to gain any understanding of Greater London at all.

One August evening I was sitting there, staring at an Ordnance Survey map, searching for the high ridge of hills that I’d seen from the Greenway on the walk out to Beckton. My guess that it was Abbey Woods was not far off; it had most likely been the edge of Plumstead Common and Bostall Woods.

Scanning across the map I started to tentatively plot a journey beyond those hills that would take me down to the Thames at Erith. My finger slid further east across the map to the Dartford Salt Marshes. The more I looked at the blank area on the map criss-crossed with thin blue lines of streams and drainage ditches, the more it formed in my mind as somewhere exotic and remote.

The Greater London Atlas showed a wide red line marking the border of Greater London cutting right across the marshes – the south-eastern frontier of the city. I had no other tangible reason to place Dartford Salt Marshes on my itinerary, it was just a feature on a map and I can’t really read maps – they’re fairly useless to me as wayfinding aids but I derive so much pleasure from just looking at them, reading them as a pictorial document, a codification of the landscape. Experience has taught me that the reality on the ground is significantly different from the cartographic expression of a place – if that could be captured in a document it would rival the mad living texts of the library at Hogwarts. I felt compelled to go out there.

When I was having my mind blown on the Sir Steve Redgrave Bridge, I’d promised that I’d return to ride the Woolwich Ferry south – this would be the ideal departure point. Working out the route through Abbey Woods with its ruined Lesnes Abbey and around the shoreline at Erith to Crayford Ness took me over the 12-mile point where my post-operative left knee hands in its resignation. I started to experience what I’ve heard Iain Sinclair call ‘range anxiety’ – more commonly felt by drivers of electric cars who fear their batteries won’t take them to their destination.

The path I plotted took me across commons, through ancient woodland and finally to a windswept tract of marshes on the edge of an industrial zone. It looked so remote on the map, I started to think that I’d be starved of human interaction – even of the few words shared with shopkeepers as I purchased my beer and samosas. I’d just have my own voice for company for at least eight solid hours. It reminded me of the difficulties I experienced travelling alone in Borneo enveloped in the rainforest. In the context of my current odyssey, this walk to the Dartford Salt Marshes had become the equivalent of the journey I took up the Rejang River to stay in an Iban longhouse. It was these fears that spurred me on and made this walk irresistible – this was the kind of challenge I had been after. How many strolls in the city can induce a fear of headhunters and hillbilly hijacks?

In preparation I started reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a classic of the wilderness-living genre that gave rise to legions of soft-skinned city types heading into the woods to live in a shack by the labour of their own hands. The possibility that it might in some way have inspired Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage TV series of rustic food porn would surely have Thoreau thrashing around in his grave.

I started to find Thoreau too pious and picked up Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan – A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in the Oxfam bookshop on Kentish Town High Road. It’s the kind of book you expect to find in the fag end of Camden – no doubt originally purchased in the early 1970s when Castaneda’s tales of ancient Mexican Indian wisdom gained by getting whacked on hallucinogenic plants was all the rage. I imagined it at the centre of a weekly discussion group held in a basement flat in Patshull Road, hosted by a sociology teacher at the Polytechnic of North London, where they experimented with jimson weed purchased from a roadside shaman outside the Camden Roundhouse.

My friend and fellow-traveller Nick Papadimitriou, a man steeped in both plant lore and roadside shamanism, once told me that thorn apple plants found on the Thames marshes contain a powerful hallucinogenic toxin in their spiky pods. The eastern flood plains would be the ideal place for an urban mystic to dwell.

In an attempt to engage with a more local form of ancient wisdom I picked up a copy of The 21 Lessons of Merlin – A Study in Druid Magic and Lore by Douglas Monroe. I learnt the Rite of Three Rays to potentially perform in Abbey Woods, where the godfather of modern Druidry, William Stukeley, had led the initial excavations of Lesnes Abbey. After passing Stukeley’s grave at East Ham I felt that perhaps I owed him some sort of tangible tribute.

Just the thought of doing this walk was becoming a mind-altering experience. I needed to get out there on the road to Erith Pier before I stopped existing as a viable human being and fully transformed into the living cliché of a man not coping with entering his forties. My long, straggly hair was bad enough; if I started talking about tripping and mysticism a vortex could appear at any moment and I would disappear completely into my own rectum.

I left home uncharacteristically early, keen to give myself time to explore Woolwich before pushing on into the wilderness. My nine-year-old son was still slumbering in the top bunk whilst my seven-year-old was immersed in an alternative reality via the Xbox. He barely registers my final preparations as I give him a kiss on the head and he mows down several onrushing zombies with a machine gun.

It took a mere fifteen minutes on the DLR from Stratford to retrace the walk I’d done down to North Woolwich. It’s a surreal journey, floating through the air past the giant golden syrup tin of the Tate & Lyle factory at Silvertown, gliding past the mothballed Pleasure Garden that didn’t even make it through the first Olympic fortnight to the Paralympics before it went into administration, and then past cable cars drifting over industrial land between the Millennium Dome and the Excel Centre. The thirty seconds of video that captured this on my compact camera would need a soundtrack borrowed from a dodgy 1980s sci-fi TV series, or the sound of the wind that I once recorded blowing down the neck of a milk bottle on the beach near Tilbury Power Station.

North Woolwich is a windswept relic, left behind by the big-money redevelopments that have swallowed up the surrounding docks. Heavy trucks thunder through, heading for the free ferry service that I’ll travel on as a foot passenger. The only other pedestrians lining up to make the journey are a family. The young boys are excited, asking their mum and gran how long they’ll have to wait. All the old accounts I’ve read of the Woolwich Ferry report that the boats played host to scores of local lads who spent their summer days and weekends travelling back and forth, enjoying the free ride and the passing slideshow of river traffic. The only other moving vessel I see today is the ferry service heading in the opposite direction.