This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. John Rogers
of ‘Battling Ray’ Parer.
Only one aircraft successfully completed the challenge – a converted Vickers Vimy bomber captained by Ross Macpherson Smith. It travelled via fifteen locations before reaching Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory – a feat that will remain unequalled until Ryanair starts operating flights Down Under.
In 1920 London moved its airport to Croydon and the skies over the Heath remained peaceful for a few years, until a small airfield on the edge of the Hounslow by Heath Row was developed after the war to become one the busiest airports in the world. Passenger planes now buzzed down over the gorse bushes resplendent in bright yellow flowers at a rate of around one every ten minutes. I spot a Qantas jet arriving from Australia at the end of a flight of twenty-odd hours that the passengers will have found arduous. They should try travelling by Vickers Vimy next time.
Hounslow Heath matches the descriptions I’d read of an open scrubby land of low bushes and rough grasses. There are joggers and dog walkers, butterflies and moths flitting between the sand spurrey and brambles. What was dubbed ‘bad land’ by William Cobbett on his Rural Rides is now a treasured public open space.
This last remainder of lowland heath with its acid grasses and dwarf gorse is a vital habitat that maintains many plant and insect species rare in the London area. The bees, beetles, spiders, ring ouzels, red-backed shrikes and honey buzzards that make their homes here are a vital component of the world that also produced the Great West Quarter and the Sainsbury Local soon to open over the road.
Following the winding pathways just before sunset the smell of hawthorn is there again. I’d happily be accosted here by the faery folk. There is a lusty rendition of the evening nesting call from a gregarious portion of some of the 132 bird species that have been recorded amongst the bell heather, silver birch and pedunculate oak.
Two lovers canoodle on a bench; she brushes her hair over her face as I pass. A rabbit skips across the path in front of me. When my grandfather courted my nan he would catch rabbits for her by throwing his hat over them. That was the way to a country girl’s heart in the inter-war years, at the time that Bell and Maxwell wrote the books that guided me out this way.
I rest on a bench perched upon a mound almost in line with the approach run into Heathrow. I take a late tea of Stella and samosa, and survey the heath from this raised aspect. I try to evoke images and moods of the past life of this landscape – attempt to tune into its stories. People have lived in Hounslow for millennia – it’s an area of prehistoric settlement.
Hounslow Heath
Labourers working on the heath in 1864 uncovered a set of Iron Age figurines that gives us a glimpse into the world of the people who made their homes here. The ‘Hounslow Hoard’ consists of three small bronze boars, two other dog-like animals and a model wheel, possibly suggestive of some sort of solar cult.
The boar motif was popular in pre-Roman Britain, being found in tumuli around Colchester, on a shield in Lincolnshire and on numerous Celtic coins. One reading of the fascination with boars, according to Miranda Green, is that they represented ‘strength, ferocity and invincibility in a war-orientated heroic society’. On the other hand they might have been made by a craftsman who just happened to like boars and the two other animals were his failed attempts at dogs. Until we discover the secret of time travel we’ll never be completely sure.
An Iron Age village was excavated where the planes now skid across the airport tarmac of Runway One. A complex pattern of hut circles was unearthed alongside the remnants of a shrine or temple, implying that this might well have been the religious centre of the region. Where people came to worship in time immemorial, today they ascend into the sky.
The antiquarian William Stukeley believed that he had found a camp built by Julius Caesar on the heath during his campaign against the Britons. The gunpowder for one of the first cannon used in Europe, at Crécy in 1346, was made on Hounslow Heath, part of a military association that continues through medieval tournaments and pageants, the Civil War, RAF raids against First World War Zeppelins to the barracks that are still present. This is just a sample of the rich history associated with these 200 acres of scrubland.
As a map-illiterate walker, the fact that most tickled me was that it was across the heath that the base line for the first triangle of Britain’s original Ordnance Survey map was laid in 1784. The basis for all our modern maps was created across Hounslow Heath, a place now largely overlooked and ‘off-the-map’.
I continue my lap of the space in high spirits as I’d reached the end of the trek with my left knee still functioning. A ghostly, pale, gap-toothed lad approaches me from a stand of coppiced trees and asks for directions to the ‘forty acres’. I tell him I haven’t a clue but offer up my 1975 Greater London Atlas for reference. He takes a quick look, says thanks and heads off into the sunset. The Ordnance Survey had now become more of use to a pair of aimless wanderers than the military that General William Roy intended it for.
I think back to Maxwell’s story of the Nine Muses and contrast it with the world around me. Perhaps Maxwell found some magic mushrooms that morning in the ‘forty acres’ where the pallid lad was heading. Instead of following him to find out I slope back to the Staines Road. I considered a pint in The Hussar to round off the trip but as I was trying to work out if it was full of lagered-up squaddies a No. 237 bus pulled up bound for Brentford. Riding a 21st-century stagecoach along the old coaching road is a far better way to depart the scene.
From the top deck full of Saturday-night people I look out for ‘ripening gallows fruit’ and ‘dandy highwaymen’. But all I see are waddling girls with Tesco bags and boys in caps and hoodies bouncing along past ‘For Sale’ signs on new-build apartments. Whether they realize it or not, in their hands they hold Maxwell’s magic cord that connects our universe of iPhones and Nando’s to boar-worshippers and mad men in their flying machines and ‘passes over the old-time Heath of Hounslow’.
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.
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