This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City - John Rogers

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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

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