Lockdown London
Aug. 16th, 2020 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millionreasonsYesterday, the weather was muggy and misty and we went for a walk around the Royal Docks. I was lured in by a new Perky Blenders coffeeteria in Expressway - this is a new thing, which has basically rebranded all the little studios, workshops, Husk brewery, and lock ups as one entity under the A road. We intended to walk the entirety of the docks but after a while you get kicked off and end up trudging down an unpleasantly busy road with no footpath but once back on the water, past the old dockhouses, past the glass fronted Newham council building complete with palm tree filled atrium and "breakfast bar" for its working-from-home staff, the grounded airport across the dock, and the eerie isolation of University of East London and its Teletubby houses back to Cyprus DLR and whizz back to Stratford in 10 mins, it was splendid. All the PR and branding exercises in the world can't create buzzy out of desolate - which is exactly why I liked it, of course. Gimme a bit of urban bleakness and I'm very happy. The towers of Canary Wharf looked like Monet had fetched up in the 21st century to paint them.
Recently, people have been talking about leaving lockdown London, citing lack of space, lack of things to do (what's the point of the expense and crowdedness and dirt of London if the things that make it worth it aren't happening). There is much talk of more home working, more people working from a home outside of London, big companies no longer choosing to have offices in London etc. Myself, I was a bit irritated by living so far out, reliant on a working and safe pubic transport system to ferry me about. I thought that if we still lived in Stoke Newington we could walk or cycle into the city, see what Oxford Street or Trafalgar Sqaure look like devoid of people (apart from the others turning up to look at the same thing) but Forest Gate is too far away (it was really in Essex until the 1960s) for that kind of thing.
In fact, some already have left; this week two of my colleagues were working from Scotland and Devon. I unfortunately don't have any relatives in picturesque places; indeed, at the beginning of lockdown, when a surprising number of people turned out to have second homes ("just a shack really"), I thought about what would happen if i decamped to my parents house? It's located in a nice village, but what would I do exactly, except argue with my parents? Walk around the village clockwise, walk around the village anti-clockwise, descend quickly into madness. It's not as if you can even walk to the next village as it'd be along a busy A-road with no pavements. I'd much rather be here with our parks (Olympic to the west, Wanstead Flats to the east, the smaller local parks, Forest Lane and West Ham, to the north and south, respectively) and with our cafes that have become food shops (shout out to Tromso, Wild Goose Bakery, Arch Rivals and Tracks) all of which reacted to the pandemic with fleet feet and amazing adaptability. When the queues for the Co-op were going down the street, we could go to Tromso and pick up flour, eggs, bread, and (importantly) cake within a few socially distanced minutes. As well as the parks, we've tramped the streets and spotted things i've never seen before: a tiny green plaque on the side of a house near us marking the parish boundary between West Ham and Leyton, a sign on a council estate urging residents to shut the gate to stop cows getting in, another boundary stone, this time in Stratford, indicating that south of the high street is Rotherhithe parish.
I've also fallen for Wanstead Flats in a big way. Beforehand, I thought it was rather a windblown open air space that we'd walk through on our way back from the bluebell woods of Wanstead Park, but it has wooded bits, lakes, WW2 army huts, large stretches of grassland and wild flowers, and unlike the fashionable booze-parks of Hackney, there are rarely many people about.
Even in the Olympic Park, I've visited bits that iId never seen before, for example, the hockey pitch, now a sort of amphitheatre for people to lounge in. Just down from that is the start of Hackney marshes and we used that route to cycle to Hackney rather than the towpath of the Lea navigation/Hackney cut. During the hot weather, teens in bikinis carrying inflatables risked Weil's disease to go splashing about in the river.
Other places:
We walked east of the City of London Cemetery, past the crematorium set up for the Covid dead, to the River Roding and passed nobody for about 1/2 an hour. Despite the constant buzz of the north circular, it was very peaceful.
Also along the Bow back waters to Cody Dock as much like the countryside as you can imagine, but with left over industrial bits:
And coming full circle, on the the first lockdown weekend of March, we decided to walk south, following the compass to see where we would end up (answer: the Royal Docks).
Recently, people have been talking about leaving lockdown London, citing lack of space, lack of things to do (what's the point of the expense and crowdedness and dirt of London if the things that make it worth it aren't happening). There is much talk of more home working, more people working from a home outside of London, big companies no longer choosing to have offices in London etc. Myself, I was a bit irritated by living so far out, reliant on a working and safe pubic transport system to ferry me about. I thought that if we still lived in Stoke Newington we could walk or cycle into the city, see what Oxford Street or Trafalgar Sqaure look like devoid of people (apart from the others turning up to look at the same thing) but Forest Gate is too far away (it was really in Essex until the 1960s) for that kind of thing.
In fact, some already have left; this week two of my colleagues were working from Scotland and Devon. I unfortunately don't have any relatives in picturesque places; indeed, at the beginning of lockdown, when a surprising number of people turned out to have second homes ("just a shack really"), I thought about what would happen if i decamped to my parents house? It's located in a nice village, but what would I do exactly, except argue with my parents? Walk around the village clockwise, walk around the village anti-clockwise, descend quickly into madness. It's not as if you can even walk to the next village as it'd be along a busy A-road with no pavements. I'd much rather be here with our parks (Olympic to the west, Wanstead Flats to the east, the smaller local parks, Forest Lane and West Ham, to the north and south, respectively) and with our cafes that have become food shops (shout out to Tromso, Wild Goose Bakery, Arch Rivals and Tracks) all of which reacted to the pandemic with fleet feet and amazing adaptability. When the queues for the Co-op were going down the street, we could go to Tromso and pick up flour, eggs, bread, and (importantly) cake within a few socially distanced minutes. As well as the parks, we've tramped the streets and spotted things i've never seen before: a tiny green plaque on the side of a house near us marking the parish boundary between West Ham and Leyton, a sign on a council estate urging residents to shut the gate to stop cows getting in, another boundary stone, this time in Stratford, indicating that south of the high street is Rotherhithe parish.
I've also fallen for Wanstead Flats in a big way. Beforehand, I thought it was rather a windblown open air space that we'd walk through on our way back from the bluebell woods of Wanstead Park, but it has wooded bits, lakes, WW2 army huts, large stretches of grassland and wild flowers, and unlike the fashionable booze-parks of Hackney, there are rarely many people about.
Even in the Olympic Park, I've visited bits that iId never seen before, for example, the hockey pitch, now a sort of amphitheatre for people to lounge in. Just down from that is the start of Hackney marshes and we used that route to cycle to Hackney rather than the towpath of the Lea navigation/Hackney cut. During the hot weather, teens in bikinis carrying inflatables risked Weil's disease to go splashing about in the river.
Other places:
We walked east of the City of London Cemetery, past the crematorium set up for the Covid dead, to the River Roding and passed nobody for about 1/2 an hour. Despite the constant buzz of the north circular, it was very peaceful.
Also along the Bow back waters to Cody Dock as much like the countryside as you can imagine, but with left over industrial bits:
And coming full circle, on the the first lockdown weekend of March, we decided to walk south, following the compass to see where we would end up (answer: the Royal Docks).
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Date: 2020-08-29 07:10 pm (UTC)