Riding The Roding.

"Ey ey ba day ba wadladie day, ay um ba day, ba day ba wadladie day, ey ey ba day ba wadladie day, ay um ba da, ay um ba da da da da wadladie day" - On A Ragga Tip, SL2.

 

Is the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, a huge fan of breakbeat hardcore? Did he spend the early nineties in warehouse raves around the capital's outer boroughs? Did he own 12" copies of The Bouncer's Kicks Like A Mule and Urban Hype's A Trip To Trumpton?

These aren't the questions I expected to be asking myself following yesterday's long awaited first London by Foot walk of 2024 but these are the questions that must be asked. A visit to The Papermakers Arms in Ilford (cheesy stadium house blasting out - as I'll come to later) and a Super Loop bus with the number SL2 have left me with no option.

Rather fantastically, Matt 'Slipmatt' Nelson (the S in SL2, the L is John 'Lime' Fernandez) was born in Loughton which is a few miles north up the Roding and yesterday's walk, as you can tell from its title - Riding the Roding, was all about the Roding. At least it was when we finally got to it.

The day, for me, had started early. I was up before 6am and out of the flat not long after 8. Much earlier than I needed to be. I took the P4 bus to Lewisham (the Overground was out of service in my area) and the DLR to West India Quay, change for Poplar, and change again for Beckton.

The stretch between Poplar and Beckton is serious fun. The train jerks about like a dodgem car, goes up and down like a rollercoaster, and you can sit at the front and pretend you're driving it. There's lots to see too (unlike on the underground). I saw the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, the meander of the river Lee, London City Airport, the docks, the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery (an old friend), and the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park.

On arriving in Beckton I had about an hour to kill. So I had a look around the giant Asda, visited a local park, saw a lot of squirrels, and thought, for some reason, about the Australian soft rock duo Savage Garden. I wasn't, of course, allowed to forget that the Euros were on and near the Asda I came across an advert for a well known gambling company featuring the smiling faces of John Stones, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Declan Rice. The way the team have played so far there's not that much to smile about. Except, I suppose, the actual results!

Pam and first time LbF walker Rodney arrived first and Mo and Katie weren't far behind (Mo remarking on the number Taylor Swift fans in London for her - Taylor's, not Mo's - remarkable eight night residency at Wembley Stadium) and that was the gang for the day - or at least most of it.

The first stretch was unremarkable as we wandered past THE LONDON INDUSTRIAL PARK and a vape shop called ROCK VAPER SCISSORS (I'd have plumped for Planet of the Vapes) and crossed the A13 (the "trunk road to the sea" as any Billy Bragg fan should know) and on the edge of East Ham's Central Park. East Ham notables including such names as Idris Elba, Vera Lynn, Kano, Noele Gordon, Jimmy Bullard, and Elizabeth Fry. The park was hosting a funfair but none of us were tempted. Instead we stopped, as planned, for brunch at the Parkside Cafe.

What a find. Proper old school greasy spoon, cheap and cheerful with massive portions (I had cheese omelette, chips, and beans with bread and butter and a can of Cherry Coke - in a new style of can) and plenty of tables. We all had a good chinwag and once we'd been fed and watered, a few of us remarked we needed a lie down more than we needed a walk.

But it was a walk we were having - like it or not. As we'd just left Beckton it was time for some Beckton spiel. It's named, rather unexcitingly, after Simon Adams Beck who was the governor of the Gas Light and Coke Company when work began on building Beckton Gas Works in 1868. Once known as the largest gasworks in the whole wide world, it's no longer there (it closed in 1976) but the ruins of it became, at one point, a popular spot for films and music videos.

The ruins of the gas works featured in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, the Pet Shop Boys It Couldn't Happen Here, and even stood in for Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Pop videos filmed there include Oasis D'You Know What I Mean?, Marcella Detroit's I Believe, and, best of all, Loop's Arc-Lite.

If you thinking having a massive gas works is a rather lame claim to fame for a place then Beckton can trump that. It is also famous for the Beckton Sewage Treatment Plant. That was probaly glamorous compared to the alley, dubbed by Mo as a "stabby alley", that we followed from the end of Flanders Road until we reached a bridge over the very busy A406/North Circular.

The bridge even had a little chicane on it which tickled me as it's not something you usually see. Once over the North Circular we were on the edge of Barking and in the second London borough of the day (Barking & Dagenham, we'd done Newham and we'd end up in Redbridge). A path took us briefly to the side of the Roding and then back to the side of the North Circular past a few hotels.

There was an ibis and an ibis budget (the budget was less than half the price of the other - which was massively overpriced - and it's hard to imagine how different they'd be) as well as a Premier Inn. Outside one of the hotels a group were sat drinking cans of Kronenbourg. I'm not knocking them. I spend my weekends walking down stabby alleys!

I felt the path should have kept us to the side of the Roding but it didn't. At least not yet. On the upside if we hadn't been on the side of the busy road we wouldn't have seen the SL2 bus and the start (and end) of this blog would have been very different indeed.

Eventually we picked up the actual riverside path but it wasn't long before it started to get quite overgrown - and then very overgrown. Nettles and brambles taller than us and, just to add some extra jeopardy, the occasional rat (mostly alive but one dead one) appearing. Not everyone's keen on rats.

Despite how overgrown the path was (does anyone go on walks round that way?) it remained passable and for some it was even home. We saw a homeless guy's tent and another poor guy who didn't even have a tent and was sleeping in a sleeping bag on a rat infested path during a sunny Saturday afternoon. As my friend Shep once said, it's a very sorry story if a country can't treat its neediest people better than this.

Past memorial benches, pallets, industrial units, pallets, the odd glimpse of the Roding itself, some surprisingly pretty flowers, and more pallets we took a twisty path that occasionally promised to become less overgrown but never really did. At one point we had to clamber over a small concrete wall and at another we had to duck our heads as we walked on wooden boards underneath a bridge.

It was probably the closest we got to the Roding, the only time any of us were in danger of falling in. The Roding is not a spectacular river, at least not here, and it's not a particularly long one either. A Thames tributary it flows 31 miles from Molehill Green in Essex (near Stansted Airport) to Barking Creek and really that's all there is to say about it. It's a better river to walk along than to talk about.

Not long after we'd passed under the railway bridge the path was due to fork and we needed to take the left. It wasn't a fork as such, more a ninety degree left turn, so I went ahead and investigated before confirming to the others we were on the right track (my navigational skills weren't letting me down even if sometimes I started to fear they were) and then leading them all out to a residential area and in to the green and expansive Little Ilford Park.

After the stingers and rats it was nice to be in a manicured park. People were playing football or just catching some sun and we continued through the park until we reached the intriguingly named Sally Murray Close before taking Grantham Road to the A118/Romford Road. Which we took back across the North Circular into the thriving metropolis that is Ilford. A place I'd visited, I think, once before - when I was drunk and late at night. A very long time ago.

Memories of Ilford are both distant and a little blurred. We made our way, as I'd planned, to The Papermaker's Arm which, quite remarkably, has a 4.7/5 review on Google. It's not that it's a bad pub. It's just probably not to everyone's tastes. There was nobody in there except us and the staff. One screen was showing the football (Georgia and Czechia playing out a 1-1 draw in the Euros), another cricket (India beating Bangladesh in the T20 World Cup, very popular with the staff), and another screen showing a rugby match. I'm not sure which one.

The volume wasn't turned up on any of the screens and instead they were blasting out some of the cheesiest, yet surprisingly banging, stadium house you could imagine. With weird samples of Queen's We Will Rock You, 50 Cent's P.I.M.P., and virtually the entire theme tune of Pirates of the Caribbean (Hans Zimmer I think). 

It wasn't something anyone would choose to listen to but Mo seemed to be enjoying it, her shoulders were properly dancing. Rock fan Rodney less so. He had a lie down. There was a pool table with nobody playing and about two other people came in the whole time we were in there (we were, quite remarkably, running early so it was inevitable a 'two pint mistake' took place). My only conclusion was that the pub's owners had gone on holiday and left their kids in charge. It was as if they'd made Home Alone 5:Lost In Ilford.

We left the pub, said goodbye to Mo (who'd already walked further than she'd planned), saw some graffiti telling us to VOTE FIONA with a hammer and sickle (I looked up the candidates for both Ilford South and Ilford North and none of them are called Fiona) and turned into the Roding Valley Way. But not, of course, without a little bit of Ilford spiel.

Ilford, meaning "ford over the Hyle" -Hyle beig an old Celtic name for the Roding which means 'trickling stream', is where the only complete mammoth skull ever discovered in the UK was found (in 1864) but now you have to visit the Natural History Museum to see it. Maggie Smith was born in Ilford and it's also where a certain John Logie Baird worked on what would become his most famous invention. That's the television as I'm sure you already know.

The Roding Valley Way was a proper, and pretty, path and it wasn't overgrown. To the right of us the Roding gently meandered (there was also a golf course - standard) and to the left, behind a fence, the enormous City of London Cemetery and Crematorium which holds the ashes of England's World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore and the soft tissue of John Merrick (better known, sadly, as The Elephant Man). Even one of our own group has relations laid to rest there.

The Roding Valley Way brought us to a field with a couple of horses in it. Rodney fed one of the horses an apple which it ate like a human would eat a Tic-Tac. The horse looked a bit disappointed there was only one apple. We admired its fringe before following another path into the incredibly beautiful Wanstead Park. The sun was properly out and it was starting to get very hot. Pam was applying the factor fifty and Rodney was finding shade.

Wanstead Park is more like a common than a park. Forested areas, long grass, and lots of water features. There's a Heronry Pond, a Perch Pond, a Shoulder of Mutton Pond, and another pond simply called The Basin - and, of course, the Roding flows through it. There's a second golf course to the north of it (Wanstead - the other one belonged to Ilford) and the Reptiles Etc; roadshow had rocked up and kids, small and big, were enjoying time with bearded dragons and owls.

An unexpected boost for the walk. Deciding against an ice cream, we had a look at the 'temple' and slowly made our way across the park, through a thoroughly pleasant - and very possibly quite moneyed - area into Wanstead proper and its Art Deco tube station designed by, as Pam and I guessed, Charles Holden. He surely has to be the theme of a future walk.

Wanstead is a place I didn't know at all (even if part of it looked strangely familiar) and it impressed me. It's obviously quite a middle class place (there's a branch of Jojo Maman Bebe and even their local Wetherspoons - boringly called The George - looked decent enough) but a nice middle class place. That did mean the drinks we had in The Bull pub weren't cheap but it was a nice pub so we only had a brief grumble.

A huge beer garden with a TV screen showing Portugal beat Turkey in Dortmund to secure their place in the last sixteen) and lots of happy and fresh faced punters. Inside there were impressive prints of the likes of Frida Kahlo, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, and, er, Snoopy going to a fancy dress party as David Bowie. Well, why not?

It was the sort of beer garden you could easily waste an entire afternoon and evening in but we did need to eat (and that's the rules anyway) so we soon found our way to the nearby India Garden. I've often remarked on how Indian restaurants never have outdoor eating areas and I genuinely don't think I'd ever seen one before arriving at the India Garden to see people sat outside eating, drinking, and looking for all the world as if they were enjoying a very lovely holiday.

No seats left outside but they found Pam, Rodney, and myself a seat (Katie had left after the pub) and soon the poppadoms and Cobras were out. Main courses followed quickly. I had a garlic chilli paneer concoction that was just the right level of spicy but bloated, still, by my massive brunch - and probably the beer, I struggled to finish it. What I did have tasted pretty good and the complimentary Baileys (of which all three of us partook) was a nice touch too.

Of course it was time for Wanstead spiel (which nearly didn't happen as I lost my sheet of A4 in the loo, Rodney bravely retrieved it). Wanstead Park is administered as part of Epping Forest (bloody hell, Epping Forest is huge) and was formerly a deer park. The name Wanstead has a Saxon origin but the meaning is unclear. It's of astronomical significance because James Newton, once rector of Wanstead, observed the five then known satellites of Saturn from here inspiring both Halley and Newton in their later work.

Wanstead notables include Winston Churchill (who was the MP for the area from 1924 to 1945), William Penn (the founder of Pennsylvania), Tom Watt (Lofty from Eastenders), Harry Roberts (an infamous, and celebrated (by some) cop killer), as well as the Brutalist architect Rodney Gordon whose famous creations include Trinity Square in Gateshead (if you've seen Get Carter you'll know it) and Portsmouth's now demolished Tricorn Centre. Nothing in Wanstead though. It's not a brutal sort of place.

We managed to resist Wetherspoons and the three of us jumped on the Central Line together. Rodney and I chatted amiably with some Foo Fighters fans who'd just seen them play at West Ham's stadium (I couldn't resist boasting that not only had I seen Dave Grohl play in Nirvana but I'd seeing him play in Scream - supporting Conflict at Camden's Electric Ballroom). We changed again at Canary Wharf only to be reminded that the Overground south wasn't running.

Back on the Jubilee Line, I made my way to London Bridge. Missed my train by one minute to so had a quick pint in The Shipwrights Arms and got a later one. On the train home I noticed the guy in front of me, wearing a Scotland football top, was holding a signed Bluebells LP. I love The Bluebells so I simply had to engage him in conversation and it turned out he'd just seen them at The Lexington. I wish I'd gone to that but I wouldn't have swapped it for my lovely day out, with lovely people, on the banks of the Roding. A day that made me feel very young at heart indeed.

Thanks to Pam, Rodney, Katie, and Mo for joining me for this fun and surprisingly varied trek along the Roding and thanks to Pam, also, for some of the snaps I've included here. I enjoyed the Roding, and Wanstead particularly, so much that I'm already making plans to return. Perhaps heading up to, or maybe from, Loughton. If I can't walk by then I'll get the SL2 bus and go on a ragga t(r)ip.