Angela Lansbury, The Clangers and the Battle of Cable Street

Thursday’s walk was taken at a much slower pace than the day before. By the time I got home on Wednesday evening I’d managed to rack up 20,000 steps and was really feeling it, so I set out for a meander rather than a route march.

Poplar is my home turf, so I am spending quite a lot of time just figuring out how one piece of it links to another. What I find really strange is that Poplar High Street isn’t actually the centre of Poplar. I expect it might have been, once upon a time, but now apart from a Tesco Express, a greasy spoon (on my list to try) and an extremely large plant shop, it is distinctly lacking in both hustle and bustle.

I headed out to find out where it’s at in the hood. Definitely not in the church yard. There is a very impressive church which looks like a cross between a ship and a wedding cake. It had a huge poster by the front door, ‘Everyone is Welcome,’ it said. The door was firmly locked. A glum man chugging Monster on the steps looked like he’d been waiting to be welcomed for some time. I left via a gateway festooned with an upturned plastic laundry basket, feeling somewhat shunned.

The heart of Poplar, it appears, is Chrisp Street. Which, if you ever need to get there is directly opposite All Saints DLR station. Poplar DLR station is somewhere near Canary Wharf, just in case you were wondering.

Chrisp Street’s claim to fame is that it was the first, purpose built, pedestrian shopping area in the country. The computer generated images on the website bear no resemblance at all to its current state of repair. These are the images that the architect has conjured up to show what it will look like once it has been regenerated. Right now, if I was being kind I would say it was ‘well lived in’. There is a lot of concrete, a brutalist square clock tower and to employ another euphemism, a lot of ‘local colour.’ This translates as a lot of fried chicken shops and a library that has been rebadged as an ‘Ideas Centre.’ I think the idea is that you don’t get panicked by the thought of books. As a girl who grew up in the arse end of the East Midlands in the Seventies, I don’t mind the vibe. It feels quite familiar to me in a way that takes me back to my childhood. It has two, eccentric charity shops, and that’s good enough for me.

I moved through into a throng of housing estates through the ages, quite a few of which are being regenerated. Linking a lot of them together was a sprawling parkway that moved from wildflower meadow to playground to field and was clearly an important and well used space. I spent quite a long time watching a flurry of starlings grazing their way across the grass, occasionally rising in a puther of feathers to skim across to another, exciting looking foraging space. Kids from local schools appeared from time to time to race and jump and generally expend seemingly endless amounts of energy. Mums and their smols swarmed over the play equipment and life was lived noisily and busily by all.

At the edge of the park I found a plaque that informed me that it was called Bartlett Park and that Angela Lansbury’s grandad, George was the man the estate next to the park is named after. He was famous as the first Labour mayor of Poplar and incited rebellion when he challenged unfair poor laws in the area. He was also a champion of women’s rights and seemed to be a bit of a legend altogether. I am extra fond of him because he was also Oliver Postgate’s grandad. Who doesn’t love the man who was inadvertently responsible for bringing the Clangers to this earth?

I found a marvellous building called Poplar Union shortly afterwards. It’s a community and creative hub where you can do everything from line dancing to hiring a canoe. More interestingly to me and my increasing girth, it’s also got a fantastic cafe and community bakery, where you could go in and watch all the bakers working. There were tall racks of baskets full of plump dough rising and a pleasing sense of industry. I couldn’t leave without having tried something so I tested the apple cake, which was delicious. It was just what I needed to energise me for the next leg of my walk.

From the side of the park you can drop down onto the canal tow path, which I promptly did and walked along to Limehouse marina, where we nearly bought a boat. I came up into the basin to spy on all the boats and make sure that my boat is still the best boat and I wasn’t going to have to live with boat envy. Satisfied, I dropped back down onto the path and walked along as far as Cable Street where I came back up to street level again.

As I was waiting to cross at the lights I saw a rather anxious bride, her bridesmaid and her dad, all milling about on the corner, presumably waiting for the groom and/or anyone else in the bridal party. I nearly hung about to see if any drama was going to unfold as nobody looked particularly happy to be there but I thought better of it. I decided in the end that it was these three that had run away, not the groom. In my version, they were waiting for the getaway car to take them to whatever the antithesis of Gretna Green is. Swindon, maybe.

I decided to walk down Cable Street because I knew I had heard of it, but I had only vague recollection of why. I thought there had been a riot, possibly to do with the General Strike. It turned out to have been much more satisfying than that. It was the site of several pitched battles that ensued after Oswald Mosley decided to march his fascist Brown Shirts through the streets in 1936 and people didn’t like it. Protesters included trade unionists, anarchists and socialists alongside the Jewish people of the East End. They created barricades at several key points along Cable Street and when the police tried to remove them, they got pelted with cabbages, furniture and the contents of chamber pots. Resistance was so successful, Mosley had to retreat to Hyde Park. Oh dear, what a shame.

It was much more peaceful on the afternoon of my walk. I am glad to report that nobody pelted me with any vegetation or excrement, although it may have been because they didn’t know I was coming. Perhaps residents will be better prepared next time.

I ended up in Shadwell, poking about in Watney Street market where I bought a sewing kit and a roll of bin bags, because I’m nothing if not extravagant. I also bought a rather unwieldy painting in a charity shop, which meant getting the tube home, because I’m not a masochist and had no desire to sail home borne aloft by the wrong sort of canvas.