The film had caught my eye after seeing a short item on TV about this mad American director who was transforming a disused gas works in East London into the killing fields of Vietnam. Thousands of palm trees had been imported and planted in the Thameside marshes to recreate the landscape of South East Asia at Beckton.
Kubrick famously refused to travel – he hadn’t been back to America since the late 1960s – so the standard option of filming a Vietnam flick in the Philippines wasn’t available. By a stroke of luck not only was Kubrick given permission to blow up the gasworks, but they ‘uncannily resembled’ the French industrial architecture of the Vietnamese city of Hue where the film was set. The ‘Vietnamization’ of this windswept corner of East London would therefore not require such a great leap of the imagination as might be expected.
When the great director sent out his casting call and eager young American actors submitted their audition tapes they couldn’t have dreamed that their prize would be to spend seventeen months marooned on an industrial wasteland, serving four months longer than an official war-time tour of duty. Kubrick commanded them, rolling around in the cold Thameside mud with percussive explosions knocking chucks off the crumbling buildings, each retake requiring a hiatus of three days as the walls were repaired for a repeat of the same attack. The longer his raw recruits bunked down in Beckton, the more they came to authentically behave like a unit of Marines in a hostile foreign field dreaming of home.
Over the years I’d picked up rumours that some of the palm trees had been left behind and were thriving in the polluted alluvial mud. I saw snaps people had taken of fragments of wall on which the set designers had scrawled Viet Cong graffiti. The gasworks also played the role of a totalitarian future London in the film version of George Orwell’s 1984, the walls plastered in propaganda posters and the streets patrolled by jackbooted ‘Thought Police’. I had to go to Beckton to see what I could find of Kubrick’s Bec Phu, as it came to be known to the crew.
I set out on foot late morning one Friday in a fine mist of rain. The first section of my walk down through Leytonstone would be a preamble for a future detailed survey – eyeing up places en route that I’d later delve deeper into. Passing along the footbridge above the M11 link road I looked down to the Olympic Stadium by the Lea and to Canary Wharf in the distance – I knew that Beckton was on the far bank of the other creek. It was between those two tracts of water that I’d have to walk. I was consciously heading away from the Olympic jamboree taking place in the New Stratford that has been conjured up from the toxic earth on Stratford Marsh.
I pass the site of the childhood home of Alfred Hitchcock, a visionary director who made the reverse journey to Kubrick, heading west to Hollywood. When I’ve been out in Los Angeles on conscription writing trips, homesick for the streets of Leytonstone and daydreaming of a rainy night-time wander up to the Whipps Cross Roundabout and stopping for a pint in the Hitchcock Hotel, I’ve thought of Alf and wondered whether he ever pined for Leytonstone. Given the notorious anecdote of the young Hitch being sent to the police station over the road by his father with a note telling the officer to lock the boy in the cells for ten minutes, I’m not sure he had particularly happy memories of the place.
The excursion really starts as I enter Stratford. This stretch of the High Road is desperate, far enough off the beaten track to not have qualified for an Olympic makeover. If you peer along the streets of run-down terraced houses you can see the Olympic Village glistening on Angel Lane like a glorious Gulag. It seems to have been modelled on a despot’s palace.
I’d toyed with taking the trail along Leyton High Road into Angel Lane, following a route I’ve walked periodically over the last six years as the Olympic development evolved. But I’m keen not to lapse into a splenetic rant against land-grabs and property developers, frothing at the mouth about the breaking up of one of Europe’s oldest housing co-ops at Clays Lane, the horror of the state-subsidized shopping mall through which visitors to the Olympic Stadium have to pass – the way to the 100-metres final being via Zara, handy for a cheap Third World T-shirt but hardly the Wembley Way. Westfield Stratford City must be the only shopping mall in the world with its own running track, ideal if you’ve over indulged in the food court.
This description of the area in Dr Pagenstecher’s History of East and West Ham, published in 1908, struck me: ‘Turning down Angel Lane, you soon entered upon a country road, running between high banks topped with hedges. Now the fields are gone, and most of the land has gone into the hands of building societies or speculative builders.’
Dr Pagenstecher was passionate about what is today called Newham. He appeared to care deeply about the living conditions and opportunities for its mostly working-class inhabitants. I try to see through my cynicism to how he would have viewed what has happened in Stratford in recent years – progress for the local population and a chance for advancement, or a criminal waste of billions of pounds of investment that has by-passed the pockets of those who need it most. And this is me avoiding the venting of my ire.
In the end, I became resigned to what happened. My wife even bought tickets for the family to graze in the grounds around the stadium to soak up the atmosphere. I’d wandered around the Queen Elizabeth II Park site among the buddleia, Himalayan balsam, elderflower and fly-tipped fridges before the bulldozers crashed in and the security fences were erected. I also have to acknowledge I bought the boots I’m wearing from Westfield – I’m compromised from the ground up.
I need to change tack, and turn away from London 2012 across Maryland Point. Maryland really is named after its more famous North American cousin and seems to have benefited from the Games by obtaining a twisted silver clock tower, but not much else. On the other hand Maryland fell foul of a pre-Olympics brothel purge. Reading online message boards it appears that two massage parlours had been satisfying punters for a few years before the Met decided there was something untoward going on beneath the flannel-sized ‘todger-towels’ provided at the door. A Daily Star investigation proved that the moral crusade was unsuc’sex’ful. Stressed-out visitors to Stratford wouldn’t have to look further afield in search of a happy ending after all.
Water Lane carries me past the Manby Arms pub with its huge garden. This is the first real hint of the rural hamlets that studded the marshes and the levels. There are multiple references to groves in the area – The Grove that sweeps from Maryland into Stratford Broadway, Manbey Grove where the pub sits, and across the Romford Road there’s Barnard Grove – all of which lie around what is marked on old maps as Stratford Common. Add in the fact that they’re in the proximity of Water Lane, a pagan past could be imagined for the site, with oak groves and springs having sacred, pre-Christian significance.
An official book celebrating fifty years of the Borough of West Ham in 1936 states: ‘It is quite likely that the area was a centre of communal life of the (pre-Roman) period and that it saw Druid ceremonial at its best.’ Not only do the authors claim the presence of Druids in West Ham but they’ve made a critical judgement about how their rituals squared up against Druids from other areas. Not content with having the best public baths in East London, the grandees of 1930s West Ham boasted that even their Druids were better going back to time immemorial. Try matching that in Tower Hamlets or Waltham Forest.
I’m a sucker for this stuff and will by-pass the other meaning of a grove as a tree-lined suburban street and the fact that, from what I’ve read, most of what we think we know of Druidry is an 18th-century invention rather than a tradition handed down through the mists of time. Drifting the workaday streets as I do you need to embrace the romantic whenever you get the chance – it can’t be all Greggs the Bakers and tins of warm lager.
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It’s warm lager that comes to mind on Romford Road. Not because this is the old Roman road that crossed the marshes into Essex – I don’t think lager had been invented at the time of Julius Caesar. The Romans brought hops to Britain as a vegetable rather than