"See. I have taken England with both my hands" - William the Conqueror (aka William the Bastard)
"Then brothers, it came. Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all naggy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying open the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh" - Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange.
When I conceived the idea for a walk that took in the Brutalist architecture of Thamesmead with the ruins of the Norman conquest era Lesnes Abbey nearby we'd yet to enter our first lockdown. By the time the walk, finally, came round a lot had changed and I'd even heard rumours that many of the more ominous buildings of Thamesmead had been pulled down.
That certainly didn't feel the case when we got there but, to begin with, there were far more mundane concerns to deal with. I'd taken the 122 bus from Brockley Rise to Woolwich with the aim of meeting some of the other walkers in the Arsenal Gate Cafe on Plumstead Road, a breakfast location we had used a couple of times before and found to be highly satisfactory.
When I arrived it was (temporarily) closed. After scouting around a bit I met with Shep and we headed to a nearby Wimpy where we were joined by Mo for breakfast. I had a Coke and some beans on toast. When Michelle and Marianne arrived they had Marianne's dog, the adorable Pip, with them so they had to have a takeaway (from the Wimpy again) in a nearby, and windy, square.
On leaving the Wimpy we headed back to the station and met with LbF debutante Katie and that was to be our gang for the day. A good gang it was too, everybody - as ever - getting on brilliantly. Though I was disappointed to learn, later that evening, that Roxanne and Clive (who had joined our last LbF walk through the parks of Bushy and Richmond) had been at the station and that Roxanne had sent me a message on Facebook to let me know.
Facebook notified me of it nearly twelve hours later. Bad Facebook - and apologies to Roxanne and Clive. The six of us took the now familiar No 1 street down to the bank of the Thames, taking in the cannons and the Gormley sculptures and pondering gentrification as per usual, but, this time, we turned away from the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery and the Thames Path and headed easterly.
The sweep of the river is broad and impressive here and we continued along it until we reached the edge of Thamesmead and then, via a small lake (one of many) called Broadwater, we took a diversion through the surprisingly pretty Gallion's Park. Festooned with waterfowl and occasioning a brief conversation on the shape of a duck's penis.
You probably needed to be there. A few paths took us to Gallion's Hill (or, as I'd written in my spiel - a little harshly, the unimpressive Gallion's Hill). A manmade tor that gives 'unusual' views of London, a handful of us climbed to the top where Pip ran around with much happiness.
On descending into a playground that featured what appeared to be a climbing frame designed to look like 'lady parts', we managed to take a couple of wrong turns before returning to the riverside and following that into Thamesmead proper.
Which we'd soon discover is not the easiest of places to negotiate. The small, almost toytown like, town centre had an impressive clock tower and a decidedly unimpressive looking pub called The Cutty Sark. It was St George's Day but, still, the amount of flags depicting the St George cross hanging on bunting outside, and the lack of windows, soon deterred us from paying a visit.
We left the town centre, glamorously, through an ALDI car park and crossed the busy A2041 dual carriageway twice before finding a path that followed a man made canal that, of course, had an abandoned shopping trolley in it. Other than that, it looked quite nice in places even if it did take us through a couple of concrete tunnels that would probably not have been fun to walk through at night.
Avoiding, sadly, Twin Tumps, we passed through Hawksmoor Park (no known link to the architect of that name as far as I could see) and came out into a world of concrete. It was probably what I had expected and hoped for and although there were six of us and it was a sunny day it still felt pretty imposing. The graffiti that read 'WAKE ME UP WHEN IT'S ALL OVER' seemed to say it all.
The legend TADZ on a concrete bridge we'd pass over was not, I must insist, our handywork. The Lakeside Bar (which boasted of no real ale but a full range of Slush Puppies) appeared to have been closed down and though we'd found another pub option on our phones it looked none too inviting so we decided we'd had our fill of Brutalism and concrete and instead we'd head to Abbey Wood where a promising pub awaited us.
If we had gone to the Lakeside Bar we'd been enjoying those Slush Puppies in the Tavy Bridge area of Thamesmead where some of the famous scenes of A Clockwork Orange were filmed as well as Alan Clarke's The Firm and music videos for Aphex Twin (Come To Daddy), The Libertines (What Became of the Likely Lads?), and Skepta/A$AP Rocky (Praise the Lord (Da Shine)).
You probably get the idea. Thamesmead stands in, so often, for urban dystopia because there's so much concrete from when it was mostly built in the 1960s to provide social housing. But its history does date back further. There is evidence, in the form of flints, charcoal, and animal bones, of prehistoric human activity and pottery and tools from Germany have been found here from when, in Roman times, the Thames was considerably wider.
In 1812-16 convicts built a canal to take material from the Thames to Woolwich (not sure why they didn't just use the river). The estates built at the end of the sixties were inspired by similar schemes in Sweden and it was believed the calming influence of the waterways and lakes would reduce crime and vandalism. The walkways between the blocks started off looking futuristic but soon became full of litter and many considered them unsafe.
So residents ignored official routes and created their own desire paths. The well intentioned ideas behind Thamesmead hadn't been fully thought out. When much of the area was built by the GLC for families moving out of overcrowded Victorian terraces in more central parts of London, flats were built with living accommodation at first floor or above because of the North Sea Flood of 1953 which affected the area.
The flood killed over 2,500 people (mostly in the Netherlands but 300 died across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire), 30,000 animals, and flooded 9% of all Dutch farmland. It inspired the building of the Thames Barrier but that was not until 1984, after Thamesmead. So now you have the rather strange condition of having houses whose garages face out to the road but whose doors and windows don't.
Other problems contributed to Thamesmead's reputation. The plans to extend the Jubilee Lane to include Thamesmead never happened and the area sits in a fifteen mile gap between the Blackwall Tunnel and the QE2 bridge so crossing the river to Barking or the City, for work, became expensive and time consuming. Alongside transportation issues, to begin with Thamesmead's design had an almost complete lack of shops, banks, or pubs. Even to get to Abbey Wood you had to walk across the railway line.
There's a bridge takes you easily over now but, more intriguingly, there are also a couple of random horses just hanging around. We think they were something to do with a nearby veterinary centre
As Thamesmead became Abbey Wood it became noticeably leafier. We stopped for a drink in the Abbey Arms which seemed a pretty pleasant pub although there was a man dressed as a St George's Cross with a very unfit looking bulldog on a lead in there. His face was as red as the red on the cross and, of course, this occasioned the use of the word 'gammon' but he was probably harmless enough and certainly didn't ruin our pleasant little, and by then - quite long awaited, pit stop.
One in which I got to address the crowd with some more local history. Though the area isn't great for pubs what it is good for is prisons. Belmarsh (notable inmates have included Abu Hamza, Julian Assange, Anjem Choudary, Jo Cox's killer Thomas Mair, the far right nail-bomber David Copeland and Lee Rigby's killers Michael Adebolojo and Michael Adebowale), the unfortunately named Isis (a young offender's institute), and Thameside - a private prison (!) owned by Serco!
We were here, now, to visit somewhere much nicer and it wasn't far at all from the pub to the rather lovely Lesnes Abbey Woods, great views of London - the centre of which now looked very far, more bluebells than I've ever seen, some lovely walks, the promise of smooth newts, and a peculiar statue of a monk.
The centrepiece is Lesnes Abbey itself. We had a brief explore. Following the Norman conquest of 1066 the area of Lesnes fell into the hands of Bishop Odo (half-brother of William the Conqueror and, then, second in charge). In 1178 the Abbey of St Mary and St Thomas was founded by Richard de Luci, Chief Justician of England (a kind of proto-PM) who had been involved in the murder of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
In 1381, Abel Ker of Erith led a local uprising (linked to Wat Tyler's Peasants Revolt) which forced the abbot to support them. They ended up marching to Maidstone and joining Tyler and his men. In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey closed the abbey (which then had less than seven 'inmates') and within ten years, following Henry VIII's Dissoution of the Monasteries, most of the abbey was pulled down. What's left is what you see now. You can quite easily speculate about how vast it must have once been and I couldn't help wondering how I'd never got round to visiting before.
As we crossed through the woods themselves (now sadly without Katie who had other engagements and had had to dash off) I read the brief spiel I'd prepared about Abbey Wood. Notables include Steve Davis (he went to school there), Kate Bush, and Tinie Tempah. A less celebrated local is Robert Napper, the Green Chain rapist who killed Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992 as well as a few others including children
On leaving the park, we wandered roadside for a short while to Belvedere to two pubs that were both rammed and looked quite unappealing. We'd had a good walk and nobody seemed to mind missing out on Plumstead Common (despite the promise of deposits of puddingstone - pebbles that apparently look like Xmas puddings) so we hopped on a bus and jumped out at Plumstead to see if there was another pub stop we could make before we arrived back in Woolwich.
There was nothing that looked inviting, the busiest place was the mosque and you can't get a drink there, but the outdoor launderettes in a garage forecourt were, to say the least, curious. It wasn't that long before we reached Woolwich and, there, we retired to a table outside the far more pleasant Dial Arch public house for another quick drink.
Michelle, Marianne, and Pip headed back from there and Mo, Shep, and myself headed to the Nepali/Tibetan eaterie Kailash Momo for more food (lots of pics below, I didn't know what half the stuff on the menu was but it went down well with Shep and Mo) and Kathmandu and Gurkha beer.
From there we all took the train home. It had been an unusual LbF walk (is there such a thing as a normal one?) but I'd enjoyed the day and found it interesting. Others told me they had too (I hope they weren't just trying not to hurt my feelings, the fact they - mostly - keep coming back suggests they enjoy these days). Thanks to Shep, Mo, Michelle, Marianne, Katie, and, of course, Pip for being such great companions (and, in some cases, providing snaps for this blog). LbF goes again on Saturday 18th June for Salus Populi Suprema Lex Pt 1 (a celebration of the Borough of Lewisham, this year's London borough of culture) but, before that, TADS are back with The Walk That Space Managed Time (Pangbourne to Reading) on the 7th May. Hope to see you all again soon.
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