TADS #73:Tilbury to Stanford-le-Hope (or Mucking About/About Mucking).

"The tide is high but I'm holding on, I'm gonna be your number one" - The Tide Is High, The Paragons

"We are the pigs, we are the swine, we are the stars of the firing line" - We Are The Pigs, Suede

 

Essex always proves to be an interesting place for a TADS walk. The walks are usually full of surprises - both pleasant and not - but they certainly seem to have their own very unique feel and that was certainly the case when eight of us yomped from Tilbury to Stanford-le-Hope on Saturday. It's not often you see wild horses and feral pigs on the outskirts of London but in Essex, it seems, they do things differently.

I'd risen early (unlike the recent TADS two dayer) and taken the Windrush from Honor Oak Park to Whitechapel and then the District line to Barking where I had a little explore before getting the C2C on to Tilbury Town via such exciting stations as South Ockendon, Grays, and, best of all, Chafford Hundred. The others were in another train about half an hour behind me so I had plenty of time to enjoy the toilet art of The Dock Cafe in Tilbury (imagine an Athena poster) before ordering cheese omelette and chips with bread and butter, a cup of tea, and a Coke.

What a glutton. It only marginally defeated me too. It wasn't long before the rest of the gang arrived and there were more of them than I expected too. Adam, Teresa, Shep, Pam, and James in one batch and then, a bit later, Roxanne and Clive who weren't partaking in brunchington. Yet again I was able to grab my sides in a camp fashion and declare a "good turnout".

We left The Dock Cafe, and Tilbury Town and soon passed a church with a Union Jack outside. Not the last flag of the day - sadly and predictably. Teresa went to have a look at the church and I said it looked like she'd joined Operation Raise The Colours. Flying a flag isn't racist but Operation Raise The Colours and the roundabout painting knuckle draggers that support it clearly are. Racist graffiti on Chinese restaurants, people sieg heiling, it's hard to argue that shit isn't racist.

I wonder why if these 'patriots' love their country so much they don't do something more worthwhile for it. Volunteer, donate to charity, help out, celebrate the incredible literary, musical, and artistic heritage of the UK, or even just learn how to correctly spell some English words. Don't paint roundabouts and put up flags. That's just not very British. Also don't throw McDonalds wrappers out of your car window in the countryside. I'd never seen so much rubbish despoiling the roads as I did between Tilbury and Stanford-le-Hope. An absolute disgrace and one that made me think, well - know, that none of this flagshagging shit is about patriotism whatsoever. Because if you were generally proud of your country you wouldn't want dumped fridges and lager cans on almost every inch of otherwise beautiful rural roads.

Tilbury, and around, has incredible history and history that should be celebrated (in places) and studied (in others) but you don't see a lot of tourists in the area. You don't see a lot of visitors in the area. Hell, you don't see a lot of people in the area. Eight curious walkers was possibly quite a sight if only there'd been somebody else to witness it.

Tilbury, like Gravesend we could see across the broad river, has much of its history tied to the Thames. There is archaeological evidence of Roman occupation there, in 1696 Daniel Defoe lived in the are and operated a brick and tile factory - he spoke of the "Essex ague" which we would now call malaria, and in 1588 Queen Elizabeth I reviewed her troops there in preparation of the invasion of the Spanish Armada.

It's where she delivered her famous ""I know I have the body of a weak and frail woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too" line. She's not the only royal to have links with the area. Tilbury Fort, which we passed, was initially built by (or, more likely, on the orders of) Henry VIII in 1539. It's original name was Thermitage Bulwark.

The Tilbury-Gravesend ferry operated continuously from 1571 until just last year when Thurrock Council withdrew funding. Kent County Council were willing to pay their share but couldn't cover the costs of Thurrock as well so, for now, no ferry runs. Broken Britain.

 

 

The World's End pub was closed - probably fortunately - but creating more of a problem was that the tide, as John Holt or Blondie would have it (or Atomic Kitten if you must) was high and there was no way we were moving on. It was peak tide. I check the routes of the walk thoroughly, I check the train times, the cafes, the Indian restaurants, the pubs, and the trains and now it seems I'll have to start factoring in tides as well - at least on estuary walks.

So - a diversion. But one that at least proved interesting - apart from all the aforementioned fly tipping. There'd been wild (or semi-wild) horses wandering around by the riverside already and they were very cute but I hadn't expected to see two feral pigs. Shep's phone told him the black and white pig was a KuneKune and the other pig looked more like a boar. As the KuneKune drank water from a muddy puddle the boar came over for a face off but it never came to anything. The horses seemed completely nonplussed but we were mostly impressed.

The next couple of miles were far less impressive as we had to walk along an unpaved road with the church of St James in West Tilbury looming over us. On Muckingford Road some bigmouths passing in a car shouted at us. I heard "get out the fucking road". Pam heard "rock'n'roll". I prefer her version of events but I rather suspect mine is more accurate.

 Who'd have thought those country boys would dump their fridges in the countryside?

 

 

 

 

Judging by the amount of fucking flags in East Tilbury, those shouting from us at cars may have been Farage supporters. So obviously they disapprove of people enjoying the English/British countryside which they see as somewhere to chuck their broken down freezers and chests of drawers. A far more interesting side of East Tilbury came in the view across to the modernist 1930s Bata shoe factory.

 

A building from an era when the UK celebrated its links to Europe and the wider world, the factory was designed by two Czechs - Frantisek Lydie Gahura and Vladimir Karfik - and predates other celebrated modernist British buildings like the Isokon flats in Belsize Park and Highpoint I in Highgate. Bata, the firm, operated a kind of "company town" (think also of Bournville and Port Sunlight) which had its own theatre, hotel, restaurant, grocers, butchers, post office, and even its own newspaper.

 

Roxanne and Clive had, in the past, done a tour of the factory but, on Saturday, our eyes were fixed on The George And Dragon where we enjoyed a brace of drinks in a pleasant. if unremarkable, beer garden. Shep announced he'd like to start marking the pubs out of ten on the walks and he deemed The George And Dragon a 4/10 which I thought a bit harsh. Although I wouldn't have gone above a six. Still, it was nice to soak up some late summer rays, chat bullshit in the garden, and raise a toast to my brother Steven who would have been 48 years old on the day.

From the pub, we turned into the splendidly named Gobions Park, took some pleasant country paths, went down a dingly dell, saw some jolly fishermen, didn't (alas) see any adders, and passed by the sides of lots of picturesque lakes as well as down the side of a railway track. Proper walking. Away from roads.

 

 

We did, however, see both a peacock and a peahen so that (almost) made up for the lack of snakes. We passed through Mucking itself, the Mucking Green, and the Stanford Warren Wetland but we didn't take the proposed diversion down to the Thurrock Thameside Nature Park and its various hares (Butterfly hare, Starry hare, and Sea hare) because it had been a hotter day than we'd imagined and we made a group decision to take Wharf Road into Stanford-le-Hope itself and The Inn On The Green.

 

Stanford-le-Hope with a population just shy of 30,000 looked a fairly unremarkable place although I used to work with someone from there (Danny Adams) and he was a nice guy. At that point, the nicest Millwall fan I'd met. More famous names associated with the town include Phil Jupitus, Rylan Clark, and Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad who presumably found it quite different to his birth city of Kyiv! The serving MP for the area is now James McMurdock. A man who is most famous for spending time in prison for assaulting his then girlfriend. Something Reform leader Nigel Farage was unconcerned about though McMurdock has since left the party of traitors and scoundrels of his own volition. He's now an independent but he's clearly also still a cunt.

Shep deemed The Inn On The Green worthy of a 6 or 7 out of ten and then went on to slag off the entire concept of slippers. We sat in the garden chatting and laughing over a couple of drinks and then all of us, bar Roxanne and Clive, repaired to Panahar Indian restaurant for, in my case, paneer tikka masala and paratha washed down with a Cobra or two. All except Pam and myself were gone by not long after 8pm and Pam and myself followed an hour later.

 

Thanks to Adam, Teresa, Pam, Shep, Roxanne, Clive, and James for joining me on this TADS adventure and thanks to Pam for snappage and Adam for mappage. I'm off to Sicily now but let's do it all again when I get back. Meopham to Swanley anybody?