The remains of Stratford Langthorne Abbey
Before the Cistercians and their impressive abbey, old Hamme was divided into two manors. There is a map of the area at ‘Ye thyme of Edward ye Confessor’. I’d guess from the spelling that the map was Victorian; those ‘Ye’s’ speak of a longing to connect with a halcyon past. It shows the Manor of Alestan with his eight hides of arable and sixty acres of meadow in West Ham. On the other side of Ham Creek is the Manor of Leured with only one hide of arable and fifty acres of meadow. There is also a parcel of land for Edwin the Free Priest, who sounds too much like a Monty Python character. Out here in the marshes, unshackled from the Church hierarchy, he probably ran around naked with a beard down to his knees. What comes to mind is the scene in Life of Brian when Brian accidentally jumps on a hermit’s foot, making him break his vow of silence as he exclaims in pain. Although back in the 11th century it’s unlikely Edwin would have been disturbed by anyone, let alone a reluctant messiah.
There is an even earlier record that Offa, the 8th-century King of the East Saxons, gave two hides of land in East Ham to the Monastery of St Peter in Westminster. The men of Westminster have again got their beady eyes on the region but they aren’t thinking in terms of hides but office blocks and riverside housing developments.
When Ken Livingstone was campaigning in Leyton in 2011 during the mayoral elections he spoke of the real legacy of the Olympic Games being the ‘vast potential’ of the land ‘from the Olympic Park south to the River Thames … between Stratford and the Excel Centre a vast amount of brownfield site … we’ve got enough land there for 40,000 homes and 50,000 jobs.’
Not-so-Red Ken was referring to the Manor of Alestan, which in Alestan’s time was valued by how many hogs could be supported by feeding on the acorns and beech masts of the woodland. When this area is being sold off to the corporations of the ‘dynamic’ economies in China, Brazil and India, they will be talking in hundreds of millions of pounds rather than the hundred swine that could be sustained by whatever fell from the trees. The ancient rites of ‘pannage’ will be omitted from the prospectus sent out boasting of West Ham’s ‘development potential’.
Old Hamme, from The History of East and West Ham by Dr Pagenstecher, 1908
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Passing over the bridge at Abbey Road the pavement is streaming with men departing Friday prayers from Canning Road mosque, heading for the Docklands Light Railway like a procession of pilgrims. The traffic is intense for such a quiet backwater, and this is before the proposed ‘Mega Mosque’ has been built. The plans for the 9,500-capacity religious centre are being opposed by a MegaMosque No Thanks campaign group among fears that it will turn West Ham into an ‘Islamic ghetto’. I’ve seen a few mosques before but not even the mighty Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri in India calls itself a Mega Mosque. I have to take a look where this potential new landmark will emerge.
Given that the group behind the scheme have been accused of being ‘extreme and isolationist’ I don’t fancy my chances of getting very far. But in fact I am able to amble through the open gates into the grounds unopposed. At present the Mega Mosque is no more than a series of portacabins laid out among the long grass. I try to cross the overgrown meadow to access the banks of the Channelsea River but find the way blocked by an aluminium fence. I seem to be free to wander the site at will. A man in Islamic dress emerges from the kitchens, passes me by with a slight smirk and goes about his business. There could almost be a heritage argument for building a religious centre near the site of Langthorne Abbey; the Cistercian monks could possibly have been described as ‘extreme and isolationist’.
From the mosque I step up onto the Greenway – a path built on top of the Northern Outfall Sewage Pipe that cuts a straight line across the levels to Beckton. This is the most direct route for the unadventurous. It forms a kind of ramblers’ highway above the rooftops, screening out the realities of metropolitan life with a surface optimized for soft-soled dog walkers and commuting cyclists. To confirm this jaundiced assessment my way is soon blocked by a party of about thirty ramblers being led by an enthusiastic guide pointing out the landmarks (I attempt to hear if she included the Mega Mosque). A cyclist in a hurry approaches and it takes the guide too long for the cyclist’s liking to manoeuvre this bloated python of a walking party to one side.
Despite the pedestrian traffic jams the Greenway is a great vantage point from which to take in the course of Alfred the Great’s Channelsea River. It’s believed that the ingenious Alfred cut a series of channels to drain water from the River Lea, stranding a hostile Viking fleet that had moored further along the valley. The skeleton of a Viking longboat was excavated on Tottenham Marshes, lending weight to the story.
It’s funny the way history accords these great accolades to a few individuals. It’s unlikely that Alfred mastered such a feat of civil engineering whilst supposedly single-handedly rewriting the laws of England. According to his chronicler, a pithy Welsh monk called Asser, he had a raging libido and a terrible case of haemorrhoids. It’s more likely that an unnamed group of people put their heads together and devised the scheme to create the Channelsea River, and Alfred approved the idea whilst some unfortunate maiden applied a balm to his throbbing piles.
It had been my original intention to paddle my way down the river to the mouth of Bow Creek, then head overland with the 7kg dingy on my back. I’d walked around this section of the riverbank back in November when the water was high. Looking across the muddy banks sprouting phalanxes of swaying reeds the age of Alfred, Alestan and the Vikings didn’t seem so distant.
The current state of the dried-up July watercourse clogged with dumped car tyres would have left me as marooned as the marauding Danes. Some plans work far better in the imagination.
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I’ve been on the move now for three hours and still have some distance to go on my loopy route to Bec Phu. I want to follow the journey the monks of Stratford Abbey took after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century when they retired to a mansion in Plaistow. This would have been a traumatic event for the monks, kicked out of their home by Henry VIII once he assumed the role as Supreme Head of the Church in England after his split from Rome. Although there’s nothing to suggest the monks of Stratford were wholly guilty of the crimes levelled at monasteries and abbeys – of exploiting dubious religious relics for financial gain and of growing rich, fat and lazy thanks to donations from pious simpletons – they had built up a substantial annual income that Henry wanted to get his lecherous mitts on. But to some extent theirs was a walk of shame from the wealth of their abbey to the relative modesty of the Plaistow retreat. As I’m wondering how far from the spiritual path the mucky monks of Stratford had strayed, I see another mob of recreational walkers and descend from the Greenway straight to the door of a café.
At this stage any café would do and I don’t pay much attention as I enter. Inside, the walls are coated in a tiled layer of Polaroids that the owner tells me are of ‘friends, enemies and events’. Standing before them is a mannequin dressed as an American Indian squaw but he says, ‘She needs a change, really, for the summer.’ This is more than a café; it’s a project. The menu holders on the tables contain books, enticing you as much to read a few pages of Paulo Coelho as order a slice of cake with your cappuccino.
I take the chance to survey my options; I’ve already by-passed Abbey Mills – the pumping house and surviving Templar mills now converted into a busy film and TV studio. Where Joseph Bazalgette engineered the sewage system that sits beneath the Greenway, his great-great grandson returned to stage the original series of the reality TV behemoth Big Brother at what is now called 3 Mills Studios. I’ve heard it remarked that where one Bazalgette pumped the shit out of London, his descendant devised a way to pump it all back in. But whereas the sewage system still remains a vital part of our daily lives, Big Brother has faded into irrelevance. Abbey Mills is now better known for its association with the strange