This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. John Rogers
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beside the railway bridge. The backpacker trail had been as congested as the rush-hour M25, whereas the pavements above a submerged watercourse running through the centre of one of the biggest cities in the world were deserted. If I’d taken an afternoon stroll in the Costwolds I’d have been tripping over ramblers at every field stile, but here I had the streets to myself, the only other people I saw were the snoozing security guards gazing into banks of CCTV monitors. This walk, inspired by an old photo I’d seen in a book bought in a junk shop of a set of wooden steps leading down from Dowgate Hill, had led me to a land twenty minutes away from my front room more mysterious than anything I’d encountered in Rajasthan or the Cameron Highlands.
Randomly flicking through the pages of an old Atlas of Greater London a new world revealed itself. The turn of a wad of custard yellow pages and there was Dartford Salt Marsh reached by following the Erith Rands past Anchor Bay to Crayford Ness. Skirt the edge of the Salt Marshes inland along the banks of the River Darent, down a footpath you find yourself at the Saxon Howbury Moat.
This atlas of the overlooked was richly marked with names written in italics that would be more at home on Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings than in the Master Atlas of Greater London. Hundred Acre Bridge should be leading you to a Hobbit hole in The Shire rather than to Mitcham Common and Croydon Cemetery. Elthorne Heights and Pitshanger sound like lands of Trolls and Orcs but where the greatest jeopardy would be presented by my complete inability to read a map or pack any sustenance beyond a tube of Murray Mints.
I set out to explore this ‘other’ London and pinned a One-Inch Ordnance Survey map of the city to the wall of my box room. It felt unnecessary to enforce a conceit onto my venture such as limiting myself to only following rivers, tube lines or major roads. I also didn’t fancy the more esoteric approach of superimposing a chest X-ray over the map and walking around my rib-cage. I wanted to just plunge into the unknown – ten walks, or what now appeared as expeditions, each starting at a location reached as directly as possible with the fewest changes on public transport, then hoof it from there for around ten miles, although it’d be less about mileage and more about the experience. I’d aim to cover as much of the terra incognita on the map as possible, spanning the points of the compass and crossing the boundaries of London boroughs as I had done borders between countries.
It was essential to embark on this journey on foot. For me walking is freedom, it’s a short-cut to adventure. There’s no barrier between you and the world around you – no advertising for winter sun and cold remedies, no delayed tubes or buses terminating early ‘to regulate the service’. Jungle trekking in Thailand and climbing active volcanoes in Sumatra were extensions of walking in the Chilterns with my dad as a kid, and wandering around Forest Gate and Hornsey as a student. Through walking you can experience a sense of dislocation where assumptions about your surroundings are forgotten and you start to become aware of the small details of the environment around you. At a certain point, as the knee joints start to groan, you can even enter a state of disembodied reverie, particularly with the aid of a can of Stella slurped down on the move.
When you walk you start to not only see the world around you in a new way but become immersed in it. No longer outside the spectacle of daily life gazing through a murky bus window or ducking the swinging satchel of a commuter on the tube, on foot you are IN London.
The explorations I’d carried out over previous years had taught me to expect the unknown, to never deny myself an unscheduled detour, and that even the most familiar streets held back precious secrets that were just a left-turn away. Most of all I knew that the more I gave in to the process of discovery the more I’d learn.
I’d initially been inspired to head off travelling round the world by reading the American Beat writers who gallivanted coast-to-coast across America looking for a mysterious thing called ‘It’. After finally landing in Leytonstone I wondered if enlightenment was just as likely to be found on the far side of Wanstead Flats as at the end of Route 66.
I’d been coaxed into buying a copy of Walter George Bell’s Where London Sleeps by the sheer banality of its title. Surely a book that sounds so boring must be brilliant, as if it were a kind of code. Bell must have thought that if the title reflected the sizzling content inside the cloth-bound cover then readers would shy away for fear of overload. I’d suspected that the real action was out in the dormitory suburbs and now here would be the written proof.
Bell recognized that lying latent beneath the newly built suburbs of 1920s outer London there was a history as rich as that celebrated in the City and Westminster. He writes of monasteries in Merton, physic wells in Barnet, a world-famous Victorian astrophysicist in Tulse Hill and Jewish mysticism in Mile End. But it was the chapter on the highwaymen of Hounslow that captured my imagination.
Hounslow was not a place that resonated much within my psyche. It was a series of back gardens and rooftops that you passed through on the Piccadilly Line heading to and from Heathrow. A sketch show I wrote for and performed in used to rehearse above a pub on the High Street. A gloomy bunch of struggling comics and actors gathered once a week, attempting to master the art of savage satire too early on a Sunday morning, hungover, with nostrils saturated in the odour of last night’s stale beer and vomit. These were my only associations with Hounslow, but then I’d never been to the Heath.
You can pass through Hounslow today and not notice the Heath, reduced as it is to just over 200 acres, roughly a third of the size of the Square Mile of the City of London. But in the 17th century it was a vast and dangerous waste on the western edge of London spanning over 6,000 acres. ‘Time was when the heath seemed illimitable, stretching north and south across the old Bath Road far out towards the horizon,’ Bell tells us. To head west out of London towards Bath and Bristol meant a hazardous journey across this land that was so infested with highwaymen and footpads it was dubbed the most dangerous place in Britain. Compared with the level of crime in North Manchester, the current holder of that dubious honour, 17th- and 18th-century Hounslow Heath was more like Mogadishu.
On the rare occasions the highwaymen were apprehended a great show was made of their executions outside Newgate Prison, then their bodies were hung from gibbets that lined the Heath roads, ‘gallows fruit that ripened along their sides’, each rotting corpse marking your journey like zombie lampposts. Bell gives us a macabre vision of the scene that a Georgian traveller would have encountered: ‘Not unseldom a wind blew over the heath, sharpening at times to a gale, and then these grisly phantoms would take unto themselves movement, though denied life, swaying to the creaking of chains in a dreadful death dance.’
How could I not follow in Bell’s footsteps out to the badlands of the Wild West on Hounslow Heath?
***
Where London Sleeps was the inspiration, but short on the kind of detail I’d need for an exploration of the area. In my hunt for materials I found a battered old copy of Highwayman’s Heath by Gordon S. Maxwell, published by the Middlesex Chronicle in 1935.
Discovering Maxwell’s The Fringe of London (1925) had been an epiphany for me, realizing that there was some sort of heritage for this odd practice of wandering around neglected streets, following the city’s moods, tracking myths and retracing old paths. It’s somehow more acceptable to be engaged in an activity that pre-dates TV and jukeboxes. Just look at Morris dancing and basket weaving: nobody questions these, because your granny probably knew someone who did them (thankfully this doesn’t apply to marrying your cousin or cooking Starling Pie).
I’d worked out the simplest route to get within reasonable walking distance of the Heath – to skirt North London on the Overground train from Stratford to Gunnersbury and hoof it from there. But the territory between Gunnersbury and Hounslow Heath was completely unknown to me, aside from journeys along the A4 in my sister’s groaning white Vauxhall Cavalier as she ferried me back to