The quietly restless East End

Another London jaunt. An unusually quiet one.

The quietness really set in on the East London line – London’s newest stretch. I picked it up at Haggerston in Hackney having walked up the Regent’s Canal from Islington. Like the other stations on the line, as well as the trains, visual design here has been given a great deal of thought. More often than not, a difficult combination is achieved: things are both interesting and restful to look at.

A few examples: the lobby walls of the station here are tiled with different shades of abstractly-arranged, mellow, orange mosaic; exposed steel has been brushed to a muted sheen; the geometric fabric designs used on the train seats are a subtle adaptation of familiar old ones (orange is used again – the line’s signature colour on the Tube map – as well as a range of rich browns).

And, as I say, it was quiet – the restfulness of the design may well have been exaggerated by the lack of people. At 9.20am – so on the margins of the morning rush hour – I had a long stretch of the platform to myself and a wide choice of seats on the train. I can’t think of any other London line where this would be the case. But I suppose it will produce its own busyness in time.

The space to move about in the carriage meant I could have a good look out of the windows. The track is elevated until Whitechapel affording one snatched views down grey winding streets and into the kitchens, bedrooms, balconies and rooftop patios of what developers tend to describe as ‘luxury flats’. Disappointingly, nothing scandalous to report.

I got off at Wapping – just before the line plunges again, this time below the river to Rotherhithe – to pick up the Thames Path eastwards to Limehouse. Another strangely quiet experience. Most of the time I was accompanied solely by the river, which was brown, misty and full, slopping and steaming like a generous mug of builder’s. I passed just two joggers in a mile and a quarter.

Limehouse Basin promised a little more life (not that I was really looking for any). After all, it’s a spot in the heart of London’s Docklands that people have historically found difficult to avoid. A combination of commerce and geography tends to dictate our journeys and when a place combines enough commerce with enough geography things can get quite busy. Here, railway runs over road, which runs over waterway, which runs over road, one folded over another like geological layers; a confusion of confluences and crossings. Within not much more than the throw of half a London brick I could see (along with the River Thames, of course): the Limehouse Basin, the Limehouse Cut, the Regent’s Canal, the Docklands Light Railway, the Rotherhithe Tunnel, the Mile End Road, the Limehouse Link.

The DLR crosses the area on a pink-bricked Georgian viaduct, built for one of the country’s oldest railways, the London and Blackwall – a satisfying bit of re-purposing. But such an approach hasn’t been possible everywhere. The Limehouse Link is reputed to be the most expensive bit of road ever built in Britain. It runs below the Basin, whose waters during construction needed to be held back by a vastly expensive improvised dam. One gets a sense of the volumes involved when walking across the footbridge above the final lock: a standard lock gate is not adequate; rather, a pair of giant steel claws are clamped across the riverward side.

I turned away from the Thames, passing a sign for waterborne travellers: ‘Hertford 28 miles’, a reminder that the Basin is linked to inland Britain, including the metal-bashing Midlands via the Regent’s Canal. However, some of the Basin’s imported cargoes were mostly for local use: blocks of ice were landed here after a bi-annual journey from frozen Scandinavia, the majority bound for the cellars of London’s restaurants, hotels and grand houses. It seems remarkable that in an age before refrigeration just the two deliveries were deemed necessary each year.

But despite its thriving past the Basin was as peaceful as the rest of the places I’d travelled through that morning. This is mostly because it’s now entirely residential, apart from the odd restaurant and bar (and a large estate agent’s office, natch). Its redevelopment and improvement appears to have been so thorough it has sterilised the place. A bit of trade-related to-ing and fro-ing can be essential to an area’s life.

A shortish walk down the canal – past what I’d guess are some of the most striking new apartment buildings you can see in this country – brought me to Mile End Park, which I cut across to reach the nearby Bow Cemetery (whose existence I discovered through this post from the marvelous Spitalfield’s Life blog, which I referred to here). Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park (to give it its full and proper name) initially looked promising: not too kempt – if anything a bit ragged – and with intriguing patches of wildness.

However, I hadn’t got far when I encountered a bit of wildness I could have done without. A couple of groups of hooded junkies were sharing their gear or transacting some sort of business. I didn’t feel ashamed to skedaddle. On my own – and there was no-one around other than them as far as I could see – I may well have looked promisingly muggable. The quietness here had suddenly become threatening. It’s all very well to be critical of the blandness of redevelopment but there are worse things.

So it was back along the canal westwards, past Victoria Park, stopping just downstream from Haggerston to take a couple of photos. The view below seems emblematic of today’s East End, its abundant newness sitting rather self-consciously next to the old and sometimes downright rough: the architecturally intriguing building in the background is a new school; I haven’t visited Ron’s van on Hoxton Market to sample his fully-justified seafood product but I may do now I’ve seen his ad – put up as part of an art project (close-up, top); the broken windows of the derelict building it’s painted on probably afforded a bit of violent sport for midnight stone throwers; the ‘TYPE’ graffiti looks as if it’s been executed by some diligent, outsize-spectacles-wearing student of typography. Even when it’s quiet, the artful jumble of East London is rarely boring.

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7 thoughts on “The quietly restless East End

  1. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    March 22, 2011 at 08:23

    You appear Gaw, to be turning distinctly urban Wilfred Thesigerish with a dash of Betjeman and a side dish of Laurie Lee, interesting combination, interesting post, not since Babs Windsor did Sparrow’s Can’t Sing has the East End seemed so attractive.
    Does the Old Southend Road still exist, I ask from the comparative safety of my northern fastness.

  2. Worm
    March 22, 2011 at 08:40

    I really enjoyed this post, nothing like a bit of psychogeography in murky east london to get my imagination going! And I think that the street sign art project is actually pretty cool, especially as they didn’t twee-ify it. I would love to see something like that all over london, replacing the halogen-lit megastores’ enormous ads with hand painted signs for long-standing local shops instead; everything would seem more charming.

  3. john.hh43@googlemail.com'
    john halliwell
    March 22, 2011 at 09:20

    Gaw, I struggled to get to grips with the sense of quietude you were creating in those early paras. until I realised that Sky News is a rotten background companion when seeking atmosphere through the written word. After achieving quiet over here, I joined the journey over there. I’m glad you gave the junkies a wide berth; drinking water is best out of a tap, not the Regent’s Canal. But I’m left with a real concern: what happened to Ron? I hope he wasn’t standing close to those windows when the bricks came through. Was his smoked haddock that bad?

    Lovely piece.

  4. Brit
    March 22, 2011 at 10:38

    Yes, lovely piece…which looked promisingly like it might end in physical violence.

    You could of course have employed some Teenage Gang-Avoidance Pavement Panto (TM) to pass unharmed through the hoodies…

  5. ian@brollachan.com'
    Ian Buxton
    March 22, 2011 at 13:02

    Admirable stuff. I use this line if arriving into London City and it’s always a pleasure. As was reading the article.

  6. Gaw
    March 22, 2011 at 14:01

    I’m glad you all enjoyed it (Brit, in future I’ll try to work some ninja action into my strolls).

  7. Worm
    March 22, 2011 at 14:47

    yes please! more psycho, less geography!

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