by Nick Corble
The reservoir is over a hundred years old, the King George in question being the fifth, and it marks the eastern edge of Enfield. It is complemented by another to its south, named after the slightly less famous William Girling, Chairman of the Metropolitan Water Board at the time. I was only really interested in the most northerly of these two reservoirs, known collectively as the Chingford Reservoirs, and a barely used footpath following its edge. Making progress required some occasional hacking at undergrowth, something I hadn’t had to do for a while.
Whilst it was perfectly possible to pick a way along the path, I was, by now, openly defying the Met Office’s warning about daring to go outside on a lovely day. Later, I noticed the cover of that day’s Sun newspaper, never one for understatement, carried a warning triangle with the headline ‘Hazard Warning’, along with a skull and crossbones. The path was exposed and as it was around midday I was glad to be well supplied with water, as well as grateful for a gentle breeze at my back. Blackberries and elderberries, green earlier on this walk, had now ripened, and I found myself picking a few of the former to add some taste to the constant flow of otherwise tasteless liquid I was throwing down my throat.
A steep climb (which was bad) through woods (which were good) brought me into a fresh London Borough, Waltham Forest, before sending me rapidly downhill again, requiring baby footsteps such was its steepness and the weight of my rucksack on my back. Once again, I was taken by surprise by how open the land was, this being Chingford Plain, which even has a golf course. The London Loop, left behind at the reservoir, now re-joined my route and together we marched into the northern tip of Chingford.
The open spaces were largely down to the extent of another forest, that named after Epping, which was to be a defining feature of the next two and a half days of walking. This had been a royal hunting ground and I was about to come across evidence of this in the form of the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge. A white-painted building (including the beams, which gave it a strangely un-Tudor-like appearance), it stood on a brick plinth and extended over three stories with a tiled pitched roof. Surprisingly, it was open, and better still it was free. I entered and was rewarded with a great view out over the forest, as well as more history than I could handle from information boards and a chatty guide.
Epping Forest is known as the ‘People’s Forest’, a moniker it gained following a visit from Queen Victoria in 1882 in which she magnanimously declared how wonderful it was that she could dedicate the forest for the enjoyment of her people. It was, but somehow she omitted to mention how demonstrations against local landowners, who’d been slowly enclosing sections of the forest, had begun as early as 1799, and how it had taken until 1878 for the Epping Forest Act to be passed. Thus, the forest was placed under the care of the City of London Corporation and royal hunting rights ended.
I was grateful for these efforts, as the forest penetrates deeply into this section of London, greatly enhancing my route. I could have lingered at the lodge, but I had an appointment to keep and I needed to top up my water. I spotted a café called the Butler’s Pantry and headed towards it as I had a fancy for a slice of cake, or failing that an ice cream. Although the pantry was far from bare, the queue to get served was long and I needed to get on my way, so instead I filled up my drinking bottle from the fruit-infused supply, drank that, and then re-filled the bottle, all in the time it took one family to place their lunch order.
My tanks topped up, I tripped, stumbled and staggered through the woods of Hatch Plain, a warren of paths beside the River Ching, which I used as my guide. The going was tricky due to the confusion of paths and the way that ruts had hardened into concrete, combining with tree roots to create a formidable obstacle course. At one point, a tree branch caught hold of my hat, bent back and flung itself out, performing a magic disappearing trick. I stopped and looked for my missing hat, essential protection for my near-bald head, but it was nowhere to be seen. I wandered in ever-widening circles, wondering just how powerful the branch’s fling had been when it dawned on me that it might still be resting on the top of my rucksack. Anyone filming my cartoonish efforts would have captured YouTube gold.
Gordon Turpin, the Chair of the Highams Park Planning Group, was waiting for me at the other end of the woods. We’d communicated by email following some forward publicity on the walk, and he’d agreed to accompany me through the park and tell me a bit about the efforts of his group to bring it back to the centre of the local community. The park, along with its lake, were the remnants of a garden laid out by Humphrey Repton, the Capability Brown of his day, for the Walthamstow Manor of Highams. As is often the way, the park has had a succession of ‘big houses’ on it over the years. The most recent of these was built in 1768 and was subsequently acquired by a banker, John Harman, the man who commissioned Repton to create the park out of the surrounding forest. Incidentally, the house is now Woodford County High School for Girls.
As was often the way with these projects, penny-pinching wasn’t on the agenda. Repton wasn’t really in the game of adding the odd herbaceous border and painting a fence blue. No, nothing less than creating a lake would do, along with developing vistas, with the eye encouraged by the landscape to take in particular views. Later on, parcels of the estate were sold off for development, both for a suburb for artisans, and later on some housing aimed more at the middle classes. By 1936 only 28 acres of the original park remained, and a portion of this was sold to the council for public open space. This was added to the lake, which had already been sold to the good old Corporation of London in 1891 and subsequently opened to the public.
Later, the park was pressed into service for pre-fabricated buildings to house those displaced by the heavy bombing during the war. These pre-fabs remained in the park as late as 1961. The foundations of these buildings were clearly visible, exposed in the grass by the dryness of the summer. Gordon took me through the woods, where a highlight was a four-hundred-year-old pollarded hornbeam oak he described accurately as like something out of Lord of the Rings. On reaching the newly opened café in the park, we were joined by his colleague Martin, and together they were able to share with me some of the achievements their group had brought about.
They offered a heartening story of local involvement and regeneration driven from the bottom up, rather than imposed from above. Empowered by the 2012 Localism Act, which sought to bring local planning back to the people actually affected by decisions in their area, Gordon come together with others to develop a Neighbourhood Plan. Apparently this is something any local neighbourhood can do to help define what a local population actually wants from an area.
In their case, they had the resource of part of Epping Forest as well as the park and lake around which to coalesce. In total, fourteen sub-committees were formed covering areas such as sports and the arts and a plan was put together and approved. This then gave the Planning Group the status of a statutory consultative body; in other words, they had to be consulted before anything was done locally. Through admirable perseverance, they achieved clout. The group has blossomed, and created some local momentum which has seen a flowering of local creative talent, as well as more tangible benefits such as the creation of the park’s café.
Just as importantly, the Group and its actions have brought people together. Martin told me how he regularly bumps into people he knows from his involvement in the Group. They also formed an amiable group called ‘The Snedders’. Snedding is the art of stripping away the branches of a felled tree, and the group, who were tasked with doing some of the manual labour required to control the part of the forest under their remit, had adopted this as their nickname. The community had been brought together, not just in snedding, but also through arts, music and events such as a picnic in the park. Martin suggested that this greater sense of community has also encouraged others to set up local restaurants and food stores in the area, making it more vibrant, and in the long term, viable. Not just another dot on the map, as I pu
t it to him.
The Highams Park story is an encouraging one and it was great to be told a bit about it. Martin interviewed me for his internet radio station HSpark Radio, and I in turn interviewed him for a podcast. Being more on the ‘been there, done that’ end of the spectrum, we mused on how what goes around tends to come around. We remembered the flourishing of the real ale and bread movements in the 1970s, and how these had echoes in the modern microbrewery and artisanal food movements, as well as trends towards vegetarianism and veganism. These were all examples of people taking the initiative, doing what they felt was right, rejecting the corporate machine. It was an interesting development in the internet age where, on the one hand, de facto monopolies such as Amazon and Google encouraged group-think, but at the same time offered opportunities to reach and create new audiences, like Martin was doing with his radio station. At the end of a long day, I found the Highams Park story uplifting, with an element of ‘parable for our times’ about it.
Our interviews over, Martin walked me through the forest, heading south on the outskirts of Walthamstow towards Leytonstone, where my final bed for this part of the journey awaited. First however, there were those final two elastic miles. These stretched through open land, a green (well, not that green) corridor separating Walthamstow from Wanstead, also a remnant of Epping Forest and one of those spaces that belie the idea of London as a mass of housing.
My hotel turned out to be more of a student dorm, although I was told I could upgrade to a room with a bathroom for a tenner, which I did, out of consideration for others as much as myself. Later, wandering through Walthamstow, it was clear that café society had yet to reach this part of London. Just as I was reconciling myself to choosing between another Indian meal or a picnic in my basic room, I chanced upon the King William IV pub. This turned out to be a real find. Not only did it serve local ales, but it was also able to provide a decent meal, all to an amazing soundtrack, although perhaps I should say playlist, rooted deep in my era: Roxy Music, Lou Reed, Bowie, The Human League, Talking Heads. I finished my meal just as ‘Perfect Day’ came on and took my empty glass up to the bar. Passing it over to the landlord I gave him a six-word review of ‘Great beer, great food, great music.’ In return, he gave me a look of thanks, or maybe it was one of shock, it was difficult to tell.
More classic East End accents were prominent on the streets as I weaved a way back to my room. That wasn’t surprising, although in reality theirs was just one of a chorus of accents including Eastern European, Asian and Caribbean. Something worth celebrating I thought, although any good feeling it engendered was punctured when, back in my room, I made the mistake of catching up on the news. Apparently the freshly-minted Foreign Secretary was as willing as his predecessor to bend his principles in order to further his own career, and had been spending the day haranguing his counterparts in Europe, telling them that the Great British Public would blame them if the by-now growing possibility of a ‘No Deal Brexit’ came about. I doubted the Great British Public was that naïve. In the meantime, the vision forming in my head was of a collective giant Gallic shrug before our previous partners carried on with their business, leaving us high and dry.
My route continued the next day along the Centenary Way, a fifteen-mile route through the forest named after the centenary of the passing of the Epping Forest Act. I followed the line set out by occasional white-tipped poles. I wasn’t sure these were to waymark the walk, but they were heading in the right direction. Along the way I had an encounter with two women walking their dog as we stared at a scene of devastation on the other side of the road near Wanstead Flats.
One of them was from Toxteth and we shared our experiences. They were interested to know that I’d gone to look at the £1 houses and we discussed how the experiment was progressing. We then got onto the desolation opposite and they related how there’d been a major fire which had taken three days to get under control. The firefighters had only just prevented it reaching a petrol station, and the road in front of us had been closed throughout. Opposite, everything above the ground was very black, underpinned with a mass of grey ash. Incredibly, the paths had survived, so thankfully I was okay to proceed. Closer up, a few green shoots could be seen through the blackened bracken, no doubt encouraged by the tsunami of water used to quench the fire.
Wanstead Flats constitutes the southern edge of the seemingly endless Epping Forest, which on that day looked more like Epping Wasteland. I stopped to write some notes and take some photos when I sensed myself being approached by a man, probably in his thirties, with clothes so dirty it looked as if he’d slept in the scalded ruins of the scrub (maybe he had). He was moving quickly, mumbling as he went, and I suddenly realised how vulnerable I was. With my iPhone on display and camera round my neck I must have been a tempting target. A rush of blood infused my head and I quickly moved away, well, as quickly as my load and legs would allow. I’m sure he could have taken me out if he wanted, but I suspected he was being more opportunist than that. As I half-ran, half-stumbled away he shouted at me in what sounded like Russian, slightly slurred, as if he’d been drinking. He may only have wanted to bum a cigarette off me, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.
It took a few minutes for my heart rate to get back to normal. I felt safer in open ground, but the incident offered a reminder to stay on my wits. As if to add to the feeling of near-disaster, crows gathered around me, cawing loudly. The nearest human beings were around a quarter of a mile away, young lads bravely playing football in the heat. Back to normal, I noticed strange U-shaped bits of metal about thirty inches high dotted around the common. These turned out to be tethering posts for the barrage balloons which had encircled the East End of London to deter low-flying aircraft during the war, a reminder perhaps of what can happen when nation states stop working together.
Over to my left stood a large lake, much shallower than normal judging by the stain-like marks around its rim, the water having receded like a middle-aged man’s hairline. I walked through the long grass, aiming for the edge of the forest, keen now to sample the variety of streetlife, when an attractive young black woman jogged past me wearing headphones the size of small salad bowls. She was singing at the top of her voice, dancing as she jogged, which isn’t easy, not that I’ve ever tried. Her complete lack of inhibition lightened my otherwise-darkening mood.
The Centenary Walk had been perfect for my needs, but it was time to head east again and regain the diagonal. I left Epping Forest at Manor Park, and was greeted by an eclectic range of shops selling, in turn, hi-vis clothing, Islamic Books and a 98p shop, a cheeky competitor to Poundland. Unlike many other places on my walk, the retail scene here was thriving, less with recognised chain stores and more through small independents. Romford Road was particularly exotic, and enlivened by a magnificent and ornate bronze-brick Carnegie Library. Now no longer a public library, it has become an arts space and a focus for community and creative endeavour, which was good to see.
Although predominately an area occupied by Muslims (I passed the UK headquarters of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), the political party, which as I passed by was in the process of losing a general election in that country), a vibrant, amplified service was taking place at the Celestial Church of Christ nearby. I then passed under the North Circular Road, London’s true boundary according to Gordon from Highams Park, rather than the M25. I was now leaving the London Borough of Newham and passing into Dagenham and Redbridge, with its distinctly unloved River Roding and mini tower blocks. Two office workers with NHS lanyards emerged from one of them and lit up cigarettes.
The environment was getting more built up now, and the Redbridge Library proved a convenient stop to take on and discharge liquid, sitting opposite the monolithic grey Kenneth More Theatre. I paused for a moment to reflect on immortality. I just about remembered the actor Kenneth More for his role as Douglas Bader in the World War Two classic Reach for the Sky, but I wondered how many residents of Redbri
dge and Dagenham did. Maybe it didn’t matter, at least there was a theatre.
As I was contemplating this a small man with a tired look and only two bottom teeth (both of them tobacco yellow) greeted me: ‘All right Jim?’
I looked behind me. There was no one there.
‘You’re Jim ain’t yer? Police officer down Canary Wharf way?’
I disabused him, at the same time feeling a tiny bit sorry for Jim, wherever he was, if he looked as I did at that moment.
‘Fifty years I’ve been in this manor,’ the man declared. ‘Never forget a face.’
He was having nothing of my denial, perhaps reasoning I was working undercover, but luckily at that moment he was himself approached by an older man wearing a white vest and a dirty blue cap, who wanted to buy a cigarette off him. My new friend gave him one and waved away any suggestion of payment, receiving a fist bump in return.
I felt a momentary twinge of remorse at my reaction to the man on Wanstead Flats, but remained convinced I’d done the prudent thing. My Russian had been decidedly more menacing.
Along Green Lane, east of Ilford, I passed a stall selling mangoes. Just that. Mangoes, by the box and sorted according to variety and country of origin. There must have been around thirty different types and I wondered where the stallholder sourced them. Fruit and veg stalls were popular in this neck of the woods, or perhaps I should say manor, the wares always immaculately laid out. Some of the vegetables were new to me, with enough colours and shapes to keep Esther Rantzen in innuendoes for months. Meanwhile, over the road a takeaway offered ‘Fish and Shish’ in a wonderful example of multiculturalism.
