Swedenborg's Yurt

On Saturday one of the less delightful jobs of boating life had to be done. Our poo had to be pumped.

Boats have a variety of toilet arrangements. Our toilet has various buttons that you press, depending on the nature of your offering. After a few seconds the effluvia whooshes away. If you were in a house, you would never think of it again unless fat bergs make the news. If you live in a boat you need to check a worrying dial that pings from empty to full to arooga. We were only at nearly full of shit, but were told by old boating hands that it is very, very easy to get from there to totally full of shit and then you have a problem.

The solution to this is to take your boat to the poo pump, which works like a reverse petrol pump and sucks all the poo out of your holding tank and puts it somewhere where you don’t have to think about it. Only of course, I do, and wonder why this is why there are big notices all over the marina prohibiting you from diving in because it’s too dangerous. Maybe it’s poo dangerous.

Our tank nearly runneth over and Jason and I had agreed that as we know absolutely nothing about navigating 70 foot long, many tonned boats around marinas, that we would pay a man who used to work on trawlers to come and de-poo us.

I decided that it would be in everyone’s best interests that I left the boat while this happened. The boat was swarming with men arguing about boaty things and I had nothing to add except lame poo jokes and a supernatural ability to stand in the way at all times, no matter how many times I move.

I ran away to Wapping Wall on the bus. I had gone through there on the way to Bethnal Green and decided it looked ripe for investigations and poo day was the day. It was bright and sunny when I got off by the Prospect of Whitby pub. It was too early for a drink or for lunch, so I earmarked it as somewhere to come back to and investigate. It was built in 1520, claiming the title of London’s oldest riverside tavern. It has been in all kinds of films and telly from D-Day to Only Fools and Horses and I bet it smells exactly right of warm beer, polish and river water.

Wapping is largely docks and wharves where the buildings have been converted into luxury flats. There is a plethora of shiny suited estate agents and a lot of urban barista joints, which differ hugely from their wild and feral rural counterparts. It’s easy on the eye but it’s a sort of in between place now. There were lots of people out walking and following the Thames path. One child I passed seemed aggrieved at the nothingness of it all and said rather plaintively: ‘What even is a Wapping?’ Shortly afterwards, two hipster men who were much surer of things were conversing. One said: ‘Is this Wapping, do you think?’ The other said: ‘This is very much Wapping,’ in quite vehement tones. I’m not sure I believed him.

I walked along the river as far as St. Katherine’s Dock. I discovered the marine police headquarters, which was a very fancy affair that looked rather like a Bauhaus leisure centre. I found a small park which commemorated all those who had lost their lives in the docks during the Blitz, which was quietly charming and full of elderly rich people walking dogs that looked like someone had found a bag of pom-poms in the back of the craft cupboard and didn’t quite know what to do with them.

I walked back by way of Swedenborg Gardens. It’s a green space that is being re-wilded by Tower Hamlets council and wasn’t in itself particularly thrilling but I was intrigued by the name. Emanuel Swedenborg was a mad, Swedish theosophist who created a pluralistic religion of a highly mystical nature of which William Blake was a fan. Blake is probably best known for the hymn Jerusalem but I like him because he was an anarchist who invented his own religion and liked to hang out naked in cherry trees a lot. There’s going against the grain and then there’s William Blake. He got all his best ideas from Swedenborg, who the gardens are named after. There used to be a Swedish church next to the gardens and Swedenborg was buried in the crypt there. Nothing but the name exists anymore, but it was enough to get me all excited about a patch of grass.

I wandered on through Tobacco Dock, which is a stunning space which was built to be the Covent Garden of East London but was hit by recession and is now largely empty. You can see a beautiful courtyard through the locked gates and two replica pirate ships moored in the canal that runs alongside it, but all you can get to at the moment is a pop up rooftop bar space where you can drink tequila while you play golf. There’s nothing wrong with doing either or both of those things but I wish it was more alive.

From there I followed the canal alongside some housing developments where they have decided to make the canal more ornamental and installed a series of stepped platforms. Some of them are well looked after and the water burbles and drops back to the main canal. Others are drying up and look far less appealing festooned in baked on weeds and pools of stagnant water. Moving on, I found myself in Brussels Wharf right by the Prospect of Whitby again. The wharf was hosting a buzzing artisan food market amongst piles of canoes. Everyone but me was very excited by sausages and sunshine, but I kept moving, sticking to the water. I only ran out of water in the King Edward Memorial Park, where the Thames Path is boarded off so that Thames Water can build a ‘super sewer’ next to the one laid out by Bazalgette all those years ago. It won’t be half as pretty. I navigated back to the road via a very fancy rotunda with gorgeous wrought iron panels, which turned out to be a vent for where the road nearby turns into a tunnel. It was the most glamorous vent I have ever seen.

Coming back towards Limehouse Cut I saw a sign for a yurt cafe which was something a friend on Facebook had recommended, so I hot footed it there for my lunch. Tucked between the railway line and the end of Cable Street, it looks more like you should find a used car lot or a murderer’s den there. Instead it’s a lovely wild garden and meditation space that is owned by the Royal Foundation of St Katherine. It was founded by Queen Mathilda in 1147 and has been offering spiritual succour and now snacks to pilgrims ever since. It also does the best veggie breakfast I have had in a living age and finally allowed me to research the question: ‘Is there such a thing as too much halloumi?’

Replete and sun drunk, I fully intended to go home in a straight line but found myself inexorably drawn into a nearby church yard because a) it had a pyramid gravestone and b) the door of the church was open. It turned out to be St. Anne’s Limehouse, one of the twelve London churches by Nicholas Hawksmoor, which were on my list of things I need to see. There were two, lovely ladies inside the church who showed me all the fixtures and fittings while we chatted about psycho-geography, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore and Jack the Ripper with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

As I was leaving, one of the ladies recommended a nearby cafe/gallery if I was feeling parched and in need of art and life. I was, so I made my way to the delightful Three Colts Gallery where I saw some terrific artworks, drank some top notch kombucha and had a great chat about angry swans and Adrian Mole with the owner of the gallery who, it turns out, also lives on a boat but in Limehouse.

From there, I wandered past The Grapes pub, owned by Gandalf (aka Ian McKellen) and featured in my favourite Dickens’ novel - Our Mutual Friend. I found a way to visit the Anthony Gormley figure on the shore nearby and watched a very relaxed seagull making its head a home and finally, exhausted beyond belief and fairly sure that all poo related issues would have been resolved, I made my way home.