Where Plaistow Patricia meets Vera Lynn

Wednesday’s walk was what you might call haphazard. I’d spent the morning doing some work on a tentative project with a friend and the time just spooled away from me. My head, when I finally raised it, was full of noise and I needed something of a palate cleanser. I didn’t have any clear idea of where I was going. I just needed to go.

The first port of call was easy. I popped in to my local deli and treated myself to a bottle of pop for the journey.

When I was a kid, I was a fiend for fizzy pop. Ice cold bottles of Coca-Cola sucked up in great, hiccuping gulps through a rapidly decomposing paper straw were a favourite. These would traditionally have been supplied to keep me quiet in pub gardens while the grown ups drank inside in forbidden territory. I don’t remember ever seeing the inside of a pub as a child unless we were going to push the boat out and have a meal at a Berni Inn. Those and bookies were off limits. You couldn’t go in these places in case you were corrupted by the sight of what usually turned out to be the ruined remains of a bunch of old men who had faces like a page of the A-Z and suspicious pockets which might contain livestock or worse. These would be marinaded in a fug of cigarette smoke and loom at you out of the ensuing clouds like gargoyles. A sure fire case of attraction over promotion there.

When you weren’t living high on the hog on a broken swing surrounded by nettles and the delightfully comforting smell of warm beer, there was the pop man. The pop man was like the milkman but better. My granny would get pop this way. My two, favourites were Corona Cherryade and anything made by anyone as long as it was dandelion and burdock flavour. Both flavours I still love to this day but they were sadly lacking at the deli. I went for a lurid bottle of orange pop which tasted like my childhood and had a picture of two men who looked like Gilbert and George on the front.

Suitably geed up by sugar and food colouring I set forth on my travels.

Almost immediately I stumbled on something called Republic. It sits on the site of what was the import house for the East India Company. The original, boundary wall is still in place, but when you walk inside it has been completely transformed. It badges itself as ‘London’s Next Generation Office Campus,’ which is super annoying marketing speak that makes my hackles rise. I was prepared to hate it but actually loved it.

I have a difficult relationship with regeneration projects. All around me I watch as multi-million pound businesses build massive, overpriced penis extensions that loom over the patchwork of housing estates below, waiting to jizz all over them until at some stage, everyone will live on a dinghy in the Thames and have to catch eels with their toes to survive. The theme in Canary Wharf is to build empires of plate glass in which thousands of feet of marble clad floor are troubled only by a potted fig and three, uncomfortable Japanese chairs which nobody is allowed to sit on. Wealth here is measured by how much space you can squander.

Having said that, time marches on. There are very few historic buildings left here thanks to the Blitz that flattened 25% of the buildings into rubble. Slums, which made up a considerable proportion of the housing stock that was left, were made more slummy by the devastation of the war and the housing that was thrown up so hastily after the war was often shoddy and makeshift at best. The estates that make up the lion’s share of regular people’s housing round here are many and varied and a living example of the failed dreams of better living through architecture. They are not places of beauty, but they are people’s homes.

As you walk by them it’s easy to discount these often ugly places, but the lives they contain are not ugly and home is important whatever it looks like to you. Lives are lived from the inside out, not the outside in. Regeneration is however, clearly needed. There’s no romanticising the grinding awfulness of living in a damp flat with black mould on the walls and the pervasive smell of urine in the stair wells. I’m no poverty tourist, but I do think that proper consultation has to happen for regeneration to be both successful and fair and there is a clear need to salvage the bits of the past that work if possible.

Republic, I think, makes a fair fist of this. For a start, it is built on the remains of dock buildings, warehouses and offices, not people’s homes. What can be conserved has been and done lovingly. The offices, shops and spaces that are modern are interesting and seem well thought out. I particularly loved the series of ponds and rills that run through the middle of the courtyard. They remind you this is still the river’s space. We’re just borrowing it for a bit. Here they have been planted with a wide variety of thriving water plants that were buzzing with insects. The water is punctuated by a series of pumps and small fountains that mean not only can you hear it, which is lovely, but it is alive. It beats through the middle of the space and out into a bigger, lake that is home to coots and ducks and, ruddy enormous fish. I know this because one jumped out the water as I walked past to snap up something delicious and scared me half to death.

I resisted the urge to wander in and sign up for parkour classes in one of the buildings. I feel my Spiderman days are far behind me now. As I walked through to the end of the development I noticed that all the roads are named for the herbs and spices that the East India Company would have imported, which was very pleasing. It’s not a special place. It’s got nothing for landmark thirsty tourists to snap, but it is a nice addition to an area where ordinary people live. I appreciate not everyone in the surrounding area is going to want to do Parkour lessons but the open spaces are welcoming to everyone, which is lovely.

From there I followed a signpost to the river Lea. I was nerdily excited by this because I am a huge fan of the Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London series of books in which, unsurprisingly, the rivers feature heavily. The river Lea flows from the Chilterns through to meet the Thames at Bow Creek, which is where I met it. In the books, Lea is a powerful goddess, second only to Mama Thames in authority. I didn’t bump into her but I did follow the river for a bit, just in case. There’s an ‘eco park’ on one bank, where efforts are being made to sympathetically rewild the land. Judging from the noises in the hedgerows, I’d say it’s having an effect.

I have a whole new respect for the urban wild since reading Alys Fowler’s, Hidden Nature, in which she explores the canals of Birmingham in a tiny coracle. She looks at the natural rewinding of the industrial landscape and how plants like the ever present buddleia and rose bay willow herb are crucial, first responders in areas of man made damage and pollution. They are able to stabilise the soil and make it friable enough for other, more fragile plants to move in. Brambles form safe havens for birds and other wildlife and mosses and lichens do wonders in sopping up heavy metals and other pollutants. What looks overgrown is often just nature clearing up the mess we have left behind. Walking through these semi-industrial landscapes I am reminded of this time and time again and it allows a little more hope to spread in my soul.

I crossed over into Canning Town and walked up through Canning into Plaistow, Newham and finally East Ham by following the Barking Road until my feet ached. There were other, more tantalising roads to veer down, but some days you just need to ‘go there and back to see how far it is,’ as my grandad used to say.

It was a low lying melee of the usual suspects when towns, like weeds, are left to their own devices. Hundreds of fried chicken shops, my favourite of which moved on from the ubiquitous Chicken Cottage to brand itself as Chicken City. The tag line: ‘Welcome to the city of Dreams,’ pleased me enormously. Imagine if your greatest ambition was Chicken City?

I shot through Plaistow (pronounced Plaah-stow) plagued by Ian Dury and Plaistow Patricia: ‘Keep your eyeballs white and keep your needle clean’. I feel I did it dirty. I need to go back with a less jaundiced view.

Randomly, on a road populated by betting shops, chicken shops and unlock your mobile shops, there was an extremely large shop dedicated to all things Dr. Who. It claims to be the only authorised Dr. Who shop and has been going for 25 years. I saw no Whovians in there, but that’s not to say it’s not thronged with people wanting that ever elusive, Ood costume the rest of the week.

I found an independent bookshop in Newham opposite a large and ugly statue that celebrates Britain’s World Cup victory in 1966. It’s called The Champions and whoever sculpted it needs suing for defamation of character. It looks a bit like I made it out of lumps of chewed gum. If that was a true likeness, those men wouldn’t have made it to the end of our road and back in one piece, let alone won a World Cup.

Inside the bookshop, a man desultorily shelving books on what were shelves so full they were bowing, told me all about his recent trip to Vancouver and the fantastic bookshops he had visited there. The owner came to tell him off for talking to me because it was closing time and then talked my ear off for the next twenty minutes about the fact that she had gone to The Central School of Speech and Drama back in the day. Grants were still a thing then, but you not only had to audition for a place at the school, you also had to audition before the local authority grant allocators. Luckily, whatever piece she treated them to, it sealed the deal and she got a full grant. I’m imagining it probably wasn’t Strindberg.

I saw a tiny woman in a voluminous black and white hijab, who, as she passed me, also turned out to have a tiny black and white cat amongst the folds, because it popped its head out from her armpit and eyed me with great suspicion.

I saw the road where Vera Lynn grew up, before she took up warbling ballads in a reedy voice to sustain the morale of our troops. I saw a man in an estate car pulling out of a side road without looking and nearly totalling an ambulance coming the other way. They stopped, about an inch from each other and the man in the estate car was so traumatised that he couldn’t move, so the ambulance had to wearily go round him. I saw the Sri Mahalakshmi, Hindu temple in East Ham. It looks like a huge cake and apparently has the largest Hanuman statue in Europe. I’m partial to a monkey god and I didn’t have time to stop, but it’s on my list of things to go back and see.

For a walk that didn’t really ‘go’ anywhere, I had a thoroughly lovely time, although it took an hour for my feet to stop throbbing when I got back.