Ford ‘Mad Dogs‘ Brown used to walk out to the mighty Dollis to paint – and walk back to Kentish Town. To be fair I took the tube one way. I was in a gloomy apathetic mood which seemed to be shared by the people in my carriage who were mostly asleep. It may have been the unnecessary heating of course and their dreams may have been as sunny as the glossy magazines I later photographed where they had been carefully ripped and placed like votive offerings in the river echoing the colours of the Himalayan balsam and Virginia creeper on the bank.
Enfield Lock-Clapton-100921
Another temperature traverse of the Lea Valley. I’m reading Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out For The Territory, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Richard Holmes’s Footsteps. But reading them with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees: Terry Pratchett’s advice to aspiring fantasy authors (or author-fantasists) in 2010’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.
All I can see at the moment though is hornbeam, tears and broken jigsaws.
But I loved the hop hedges on the bank and remembered how the Enfield malt men, who plied their trade by road, set fire to the locks at Waltham when transport on the improved river threatened their business in 1581.
… More London Bridge-Stoke Newington-100915
Leagrave
Woodsmoke and limes. A strange thing to note down considering the lower Lea valley has changed beyond recognition since I last walked this way in the first weeks of the New Thatcher experiment. Now the ODC has turned the river, like an olympic gymnast, on its head. The grave is at the bottom. Apartments and studio flats spread out along the tow path from Limehouse like colonising triffids. Each property boasts 2.4 Moorhens, 10 cubic centimetres of abbatoir greased polyethylene and a view over a cordon sanitaire into a pre-abandoned future.… More