I’m drawn across the road to a bright-red tin hut with emerald-green trim around the roof, doors and windows. Above the entrance it reads ‘Gospel Printing Mission’ on a small, black plaque. It looks curiously out of place. The man tells me that he’s never seen anybody go in or out of the building. When I check online I discover that the mission was led here from its previous home in Barkingside after receiving word from God obtained through ‘urgent prayer’.
The printing presses inside this tin shack send out Christian literature worldwide in several languages. The clatter of the Rotaprint press must echo around the metallic structure, making a hell of a din. I didn’t find a clue to the Butcher of Culloden question, but here was a parallel between Balaam acting directly on the word of God and the Gospel Printing Mission being instructed by the Lord to set up a publishing operation in an old shed off the Barking Road not far from Balaam Street. As God directed Balaam from the Plains of Midian to the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, he guided the GPM to Plaistow – no less epic a journey in its own way.
If God were speaking to me now he would probably tell me to get a bloody move on. The sultry weather has clearly befuddled my brain. I urge myself onwards by paraphrasing the Beastie Boys, singing to myself ‘No Beer till Beckton’ to the tune of their rap-rock smash ‘No Sleep till Brooklyn’. It’s probably not a deity feeding me this line but perhaps the spirit of recently deceased Beastie Boy Adam Yauch.
Tunmarsh Lane sets me on a direct track across the marshes to Beckton, except that here the wetlands have been tamed by housing. I almost instantly break my Beastie Boys pledge and suck down a can of Stella as a medical precaution against a seizure of the left knee. A good friend familiar with the workings of painkillers informs me that where codeine caused me anxiety and nightmares, my metabolism clearly responds well to beer-based palliatives. In an ideal world this would be a few pints of real ale supped in a comfortable pub. When I’m on the hoof I need something a bit more direct.
The Bobby Moore Stand of West Ham United’s Boleyn Ground at Upton Park is visible above the rooftops. Legend has it that the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII resided in a castle here that survived into the 20th century. With West Ham soon to relocate to the Olympic Stadium, that element of their mythology will be left behind. The Hammers carry forth the memory of the dockyards in their nicknames – when the 35,000-strong Upton Park crowd bellow out ‘Come On You Irons’ they sing back into being Thameside Ironworks FC, which the club first played as when set up by the owner and the foreman of Thameside Ironworks and Shipbuilding Co. in 1895. They changed their name to West Ham in 1900 and then promptly moved their ground from Plaistow to a corner of East Ham.
There is an intense sense of belonging around Upton Park on match days. Football thrives on its tribalism, but as the claret and blue hordes filter along Green Street it has more the air of a regional clan gathering, an extended family of tens of thousands assembled for a folk moot.
This communality is also evident in the civic pride of the old municipal publications. I’m reminded of this as I pass the New City Elementary School in Tunmarsh Lane, built in 1897. When not boasting about the quality of West Ham’s Druid ceremonies in times gone past, Fifty Years a Borough (1936) shows us photos of the ‘latest motor ambulance’, pupils sitting down to lunch at the open-air day school, the first electricity dynamos at Canning Town, the Turbo Alternator at the West Ham Generating Station, and children being met by their parents as they are discharged from Plaistow Fever Hospital. The first paragraph on local history states, ‘Local history is the cradle of true patriotism, and local patriotism is the best stimulant to efficiency and progress.’ Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, writes in the introduction that ‘the New Society of social and moral responsibility combined with the new ideals of communal ideas is moving in the Borough.’ It’s stirring stuff.
It feels appropriate now to take advantage of another civic utility and jump back aboard the Greenway. The straight path that I was so scornful of earlier now opens up like a songline leading directly to the centre of my destination. The can of Stella Artois becomes my ayahuasca, a potent tribal brew that opens up channels of enlightenment. Amazonian Indians drink this hallucinogenic draught as part of a shamanistic initiation ceremony. Through the ritualistic imbibing of Belgian lager I see the Greenway as a ley line marked out in turds that takes me to the locked gate of the ancient East Ham Church.
This small flint and stone building dates from the early 12th century and claims to be the oldest church in London still in regular use. The site dates back much further, though. During the laying of the sewage pipes in 1863, Roman funeral remains, including two complete skeletons, were excavated in the churchyard. Of more relevance to me is the burial place of the antiquarian William Stukeley, laid to rest here in 1765. Through his celebrated accounts of Stonehenge, Avebury and ‘the Curiosities of Great Britain’, Stukeley is responsible for making a link between the Neolithic stone monuments of Britain and the Druidic religion. Aside from being a Freemason (do I even need to make the Dan Brown reference? – the church is also called St Mary Magdalene), he referred to himself as a Druid.
When I come over all pagan, as when speculating on a Druidic past for the Groves of Stratford, it is largely down to Stukeley’s revival of the indigenous religion of Britain. There are now thought to be at least as many pagans in the UK as Jews and Sikhs. Upwards of 30,000 descend on Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice each year. The man buried somewhere in the churchyard beyond the bolted iron gate is in no small way responsible for this.
As I pass under the A13, Billy Bragg’s ‘Trunk Road to the Sea’, Beckton is now firmly in my sights. I stop for a rest in the pub tacked on to the end of a Premier Inn. The place is buzzing with Friday-evening drinkers and diners. A lady sitting behind me says to her husband in a tone of complaint, ‘I’m a lady who likes quality.’ This must have been in reply to him bemoaning why they couldn’t have saved a few quid and stayed at a Travelodge instead.
When I order my second pint (and get overly excited about the fact they sell Worcester Sauce crisps), I mention Full Metal Jacket to the young lad pulling my ale. ‘Great movie,’ he says. I tell him it was filmed at Beckton Gasworks and he does a comedy double-take. His eavesdropping colleague nearly drops the two glasses of rosé he’s handing to a punter. I explain how the place was condemned and Kubrick was permitted to blow it up, and throw in that there would have been helicopter gunships fizzing over the roof of the pub during filming. The rest of the thirsty crowd at the bar don’t seem as interested in this nugget of cinematic history as they are in placing their order, so I leave them with that vignette and return to the important task of lubricating my knee joint.
Heading back out into the bright early-evening sun I look for the grimy ‘marginal’ rows of workers’ cottages that Kubrick’s scriptwriter, Michael Herr, noted on their drives to set each day. According to Herr, Kubrick compared the proximity of the cottages to the gasworks to the Hollywood studio system keeping labour close at hand and dependent. This indicates how much Kubrick had fallen out of love with Hollywood – that he came to compare his lot in glamorous Los Angeles to that of a poorly paid London industrial-plant worker.
A generic modern housing estate has spawned upon this area once noted for its large population of sailors. Press gangs were common here in the 18th century, as were smugglers who sailed up Barking Creek with their contraband before stealing across the wetlands.
The environment may have been tamed but it still presents an uncanny landscape. To stand on the Sir Steve Redgrave Bridge with passenger jets parting your hair as they come in to land on the runway of City Airport is one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had in twenty years of travelling. When I made my way up the steps of the great temple complex of Borobudur in Java, one of many candidates for the Eighth Wonder of the World, I was a person who had just seen too many temples. My flabber had been gasted. That was until I sloped along this section of the Woolwich Manor Way.
Watching the jets take off from the tarmac, surrounded by water, into the dark clouds hanging low over Canary Wharf, then looking