The spin doctors, post-literate and self-deceiving, had no use for subtlety. Best Value. They hammered the tag into their inelegant, overdesigned freebies. These glossy publications, sweetheart deals between government and private developers, political correctness in all its strident banality, existed to sell the lie. Best Value.
Government-sponsored brochures are got up to look like supermarket giveaways. Strap headlines in green. Articles flagged in blue. Colour photos. Designed not composed. That’s how the planners (the strategists, the salaried soothsayers) see the Lea Valley. As an open plan supermarket with a river running through it. The valley is a natural extension of the off-highway retail parks springing up around Waltham Abbey; exploiting the ever-so-slightly-poisoned territory yielded by ordnance factories, gunpowder mills, chemical and electrical industries.
The documents put out by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority are more impressive than any inner-city PR sheets. Lee Valley Regional Park Plan, Part One: Strategic Policy Framework runs to 180 pages — with charts, illustrations, maps. Statements of intent. Best Value. Whatever turns you on, the Lea Valley has got it. A media-friendly zone (close to Docklands). A recreation zone for Essex Man (easy access to the M25). An eco-zone for butterflies, deer, asylum-seeking birds. The nice thing about no-go, Official Secrets Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick woods, screening the concrete bunkers and hunchbacked huts from the eyes of the curious, will provide an excellent habitat for shy fauna, for monkjacks. It’s gratifying to learn that, at a period when sheep and pigs and cows, all the nursery favourites, are being taken out by snipers and bulldozed into a trench on a Cumbrian airfield, the threatened Musk Beetle is thriving and multiplying in the Lea Valley wetlands. Twenty-one species of dragonfly on a good day. The regional park is a safe haven for grass snake and common toad. The Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey can claim the largest heronry in Essex, a ‘wildlife watchtower’ with ‘panoramic view’. The 175-acre site should have opened to the public in the spring of 2001, but the outbreak of foot-and-mouth led to an inevitable postponement.
The Lee Valley Regional Park was established in 1967, the year I moved to Hackney. We had slightly different agendas. The Park planners wanted to transform areas of neglect and desolation, the very qualities I was intent on searching out and exploiting. The first argument we had was over the name. I favoured (homage to Isaac Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double ‘e’, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of Burroughs: Sewardstone. ‘Stone’ added to the author’s middle name.
The Lea/Lee puzzle is easily solved. The river is the Lea. It rises in a field near Luton, loses its identity to the Lee Navigation, the manmade canal, then reclaims it for the spill into the Thames at Bow Creek. The earlier spelling, in the River Improvement Acts of 1424 and 1430, was ‘Ley’, which is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any given morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir embankments, scrubby fields with scrubbier horses, pylons, filthy, smoking chimneys.
Without the Lea Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. The Lea is nicely arranged, walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an Edwardian sense of excursion, pleasure, time out.
Dr Jim Lewis in his affectionate tribute, London’s Lea Valley (Britain’s Best Kept Secret), promotes the Lea as cradle and forcing-house of the ‘post-industrial revolution’: water power facilitated flour mills, shipbuilding, the manufacture of porcelain; then came armaments, gunpowder, chemicals, furniture, bricks; until we arrive at Lewis’s golden age, the moment when entrepreneur and investor get it together in a landscape nobody notices, or wants to protect. Settlers moved into suburbs, before there were suburbs; they cosied up to a working stream. In the same way that a wealthy Victorian brewer, picking out an estate in Enfield Chase, might marry one of his barmaids.
Everything starts in the Lea Valley, all the global franchises; electricity, TV, computers, killing machines. Forget Silicon Valley, this is Ponders End. Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, attended the Revd Stephen Freeman’s school at Enfield. As a sickly boy he was interested in ghosts. He made a pact with a friend that whoever should die first would return. Seances in a cold bedroom. No word from the corpse.
Jim Lewis tells us that, at Ponders End, Joseph Watson Swan ‘demonstrated a crude form of electric lamp almost twenty years before the American Thomas Alva Edison had registered his own version’. But the Yank was a sharper operator and put in for the patent. Rather than become involved in costly legal wrangling, an early corporate monster was formed, the Ediswan Company.
John Ambrose Fleming, like a minor alchemist, joined Ediswan to investigate the causes of ‘blackening on the inside of light bulbs’. Swan filled his laboratory with experimental models, lamps with an extra electrode. He became a consultant with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, where he worked on improving methods for the detection of radio waves. By the turn of the century, alliances between shifting trade associations who would be given favoured status by government, lavished with defence contracts, were in place. And that place was the Lea Valley.
The military/industrial complex, demonised in the USA by Sixties radicals, was well established around Waltham Abbey before the First World War. Dr Chaim Weizmann, first president of the state of Israel, began his working life as a biochemist. In March 1916 he was approached by Sir Frederick Nathan, head of the Admiralty Powder Department, who was trying to cope with a serious shortage of acetone, a solvent used in the manufacture of cordite. Winston Churchill had demanded 30,000 tons of the stuff. So Weizmann, using the Nicholson gin distillery (on the site currently known as Three Mills) at Bow, obliged. Contacts were established and favours returned. Sir Arthur Balfour declared his support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Another figure championed by Jim Lewis is Sir Jules Thorn, founder of Thorn Electrical Industries, who is praised for his ‘courageously entrepreneurial spirit’ in importing lamps from Hungary. With a base in Angel Road, Edmonton, Thorn began flogging domestic radio receivers from a rental shop in Twickenham. He bought up the Ferguson Radio Corporation Limited and acquired a factory in Lincoln Road, Enfield — ‘on the site of a former nursery’.
Thorn’s activities, his way of operating, fit quite snugly with my conceit: that the Lea Valley aspires to the condition of the supermarket (wide aisles, every product showcased in its own area, cheap and cheerful). Ex-rental TV sets heaped into pyramids, at South Mill Fields. Coffee stall alongside the Navigation beyond Tottenham Marsh. Fruit and veg at the roadside, as you approach Epping Forest.
When Ferguson decided to move into colour, Jules Thorn asked his engineers to design and develop a dual standard, large screen receiver (VHF/UVF). A junior technician was sent to the local Woolworth’s to buy up their stock of plastic butter dishes. Fetishised in silicon rubber, the dishes were transformed into EHT (extra high tension) multipliers.