This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. John Rogers
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.
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 1st 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