THAMES: Prelude - Dark River

Dark River. That is one interpretation of Tamesa, the name (or something approaching it) by which this watercourse was known to its ancient Celtic inhabitants, thereafter called Tamesis by the Romans, Temes by the medieval English, and Thames by the English of today.

The Thames is the longest river entirely in England, whose capital London it birthed and has shaped ever since. And yet, the origin of its name is among the most mysterious in the country. The above is one of numerous possibilities, but it seems perhaps the most fitting. The Thames is very much a dark river: in the obscurity of its name; in the muddiness of its waters; and in the heritage of questionable human deeds committed upon it. ‘And this also,’ says Marlow famously in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ‘has been one of the dark places of the Earth’.

The river itself cares little what people call it, still less weighs the validity of one name against another. It surely recognises that Thames is not its final, settled name, merely its latest in an ongoing story. Indeed, it got a new one just this year on account of the intrepid Ugandan explorer Milton Allimadi:

The Samuel Baker he references did the same thing in the other direction, travelling from London to what is now Uganda where he ignored local names for geographical features and changed them to colonial things like Lake Albert. There is always a politics to names, which from the perspective of the features themselves – the Thames (or Gulu) is some 40-50 million years old – is mere imagination.

But the water itself is real enough, as is the material relationship it has shared with the people of its watershed for as long as they have crawled upon its banks. It is not a simple relationship. It contains not only water and fish but swords and shields thrown in as sacrificial offerings, flint tools and arrowheads, human and other bones, sewage, cholera, industrial effluents, dead bodies, state-of-the-art engineering and steamships stacked with a planet’s worth of colonial plunder. How many secrets must lurk in its darkness still…

It could be interesting to walk all the way along a river like that, couldn’t it?

The Thames rises in the Cotswold Hills and carves a path through the chalk escarpments of southern England, then gathers pace on the clay of the London Basin before spilling into the North Sea. (Map from Wikimedia Commons.)

This series follows an attempt to walk up the Thames and see how far we can go. It might have made sense to begin at its mouth, but its estuarine territory – the Thames Gateway, they call it these days – appears a land of industrial dereliction and crumbling infrastructure not designed for friendliness to walkers and in places dangerous or impassable.

So instead let’s begin near the border with Kent, where the river punches clear of the English capital and rampages on to the sea. The journey opens, then, on the bleak lower reaches outside the city limits. Here, as the warehouses rust and the silos stand empty, the ancient marshes creep round the edges, through the cracks, and know that this was always their land.     

Start: Erith (nearest station: Erith)

End: Thames Barrier (nearest station: Charlton)

Length: 12.8km (8 miles)

Region: Greater London – Borough of Bexley, Royal Borough of Greenwich

Topics: Erith; Erith Marshes industries; Crossness sewage treatment works; Thamesmead; Princess Alice disaster; Woolwich Arsenal; the Thames Barrier

(CORRECTION: ‘BARKING REACH’ should be slightly west of where it is on this map; where it is now should in fact be labelled ‘HALFWAY REACH’.)

London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP) - Other Worlds, Other Stories

This walk is not actually in London.

When you hear London, perhaps your internal atlas opens on a shape somewhat like this:

Officially, this is the present extent of what is tellingly titled Greater London: thirty-two boroughs bound within the eternal chain of the M25 motorway. And yet, this map and that concept of London would have been unrecognisable to anyone in it for most of the last two thousand years.

London has traditionally meant a nucleus upon the river Thames – the City of London. This was later supplemented with a second nucleus, the City of Westminster. Most of the rest of this territory was a mix of tiny villages, rolling farmlands, forbidding forests and bandit-ridden wasteland till the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was only then, in the living memories of present-day grandparents, that industrial urbanisation and suburbanisation flung out London’s tentacles of road and rail to seize chunks off its neighbouring provinces (or counties as the English call them, a word with Norman French origins). Middlesex, west of the city and north of the Thames, was completely devoured, while most of the remainder of this map was taken off Kent in the southeast, Surrey in the south, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire in the northwest, and Essex in the northeast. And it is those lands, now absorbed into the London amoeba but retaining stories, cultures, landscapes and accents that clearly belong to different worlds, that you will come into contact with if you attempt the so-called London Outer Orbital Path long-distance walking trail. better known by its acronym, the LOOP.

The route of the LOOP, as appears on its Transport for London webpage

Most of this route's 24 sections still cover farms, fields, woodlands, riverbanks, parks, or little villages that hold onto distinct identities. They are largely devoid of bandits now (the traditional kind at any rate – it does pass through the constituencies of several unsavoury Conservative Party MPs, among them Uxbridge and South Ruislip, seat of a certain Boris Johnson). It is very green, and people tend to greet you when they pass - itself a sign that London is far, far away.

Many of these locals might well be descendants of people who resisted the encroachment of London and fought to preserve their homes from its all-crushing notions of development. In the mid-twentieth century they managed to get that preservation formalised as the Metropolitan Green Belt: a ring around the capital where new construction has been heavily restricted, much to the consternation of the evangelical free-marketeers and property speculators who have taken over the English housing sector.

The ‘Happy Valley’ in deeper Croydon (Section 5). The ‘green and pleasant land’ is an important image in English national culture and has deep and historic significance for both its celebrants and its critics.

In the 1990s, an expanded London’s municipal officials started getting together with walkers’ organisations like the Ramblers to consider the creation of walking routes, to encourage people to get out and explore these surroundings on foot. The London LOOP was the most ambitious route to be proposed. Over the following years they worked improve its trails to be as safe, accessible and well-signposted as possible. The resulting quality varies, as many separate local authorities are responsible for maintaining it, but the overall outcome is a high-standard continuous route fully endorsed by the Mayor and Transport for London (TfL).

Still stranded in this city, I set out to roam these outskirts in January this year. I began its first section from the town of Erith, far to the east on the south bank of the Thames, and taking it section by section as time and weather made feasible, managed to complete the route on the opposite bank eight months later. But that's only one way to do it; with a dedicated effort you could probably do the whole thing in one or two weeks.

Whether to escape the city for more natural surroundings, to exercise, or to learn more about the English capital’s context first-hand, this is a walk I recommend. 

London in the distance from Havering Country Park (Section 20).

Deer in Bushy Park (Section 9).

Route Details:

Length: Approx. 242km (150 miles) total. Officially divided into 24 sections, which range in length from short 5-6km strolls to day walks of 17-18km.

Access: All sections can be reached by public transport, i.e. trains or London Underground (Oyster Card accepted with one exception), or buses for more remote locations. Most have convenient places to leave or return to the route part-way, so you can split up or combine sections and tackle it however works best for you. Because it is England, always check live transport service status before travelling.

All sections contain excellent picnic opportunities and most pass pubs, cafés and/or kiosks.

The best starting point is the official TfL London LOOP website, which contains maps, route guidance and further information for each of the 24 sections (here’s Section 1 for example). But if you would like to learn more about what you are walking through, or have more detailed directions that will help when the signposting is not so good, I strongly recommend walking with a guidebook as well; I found Colin Saunders’s The London Loop (Aurum Press) helpful.

(For those who would prefer a shorter walking project closer to the city, there is also the Capital Ring, which shares the same origins but is a more manageable 126km/78 miles. Alternatively, if you prefer a more ambitious and transgressive approach to walking, have a look at what the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair did in London Orbital.)

The chalky Farthing Downs over Coulsdon, actually a piece of the North Downs projecting towards the Thames valley (Section 5).

The London Monster as confronted from the Addington Hills, Croydon (Section 4).

Wetlands in the valley of the Ingrebourne, one of the Thames’s many tributaries, near Upminster, Havering (Section 23).

A flavour of this journey’s stories and creatures follows.

My Hong Kong Story

Hong Kong is probably the one place in the world where I felt closest to a sense of home.

That was more than twenty years ago. It was the mid-1990s, just as the curtain was coming down on more than a hundred and fifty years of British colonial rule. It was a time of tension, uncertainty, and fears for the future – which two decades on have surged back to the surface, raw and unresolved.

The British and Chinese governments had negotiated the Joint Declaration – an international treaty to return Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while guaranteeing it a high degree of autonomy. Its political, economic and legal systems and way of life were to remain unchanged for at least fifty years – ‘one country, two systems’, as proposed by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The Hong Kong Basic Law would come into effect as its new constitution at the moment of the Handover on 1st July 1997. I arrived with four years left to go, just as the last British governor, Chris Patten, was shovelling in dramatic last-minute reforms aimed at making the electoral system more democratic – antagonising the Chinese and earning a battery of vicious epithets of which the politest was ‘sinner condemned for a thousand generations’ (千古罪人).

At seven years old it would be some time yet before I absorbed all this. That may be why Hong Kong retains so special a place in my memory. It is the last place where I remember an existence at least partly free of the alienation and conflicts with human society that have defined my journeys since. After the handover I would arrive in England as a teenager and it would all go horribly wrong. Hong Kong – the last place the world seemed to make some sense.

The Hong Kong handover ceremony, 30th June - 1st July 1997 (from South China Morning Post).

An innocence? Of sorts. Though it was beyond my consciousness at the time, I lived in an extremely privileged position in Hong Kong’s colonially-defined social geography. I was the son of a British diplomat installed in a comfortable apartment in Mid-Levels, halfway up the slopes of the Peak on Hong Kong Island and largely the preserve of white people with means or in government service. The windows that made up all of the north-facing wall commanded a panoramic view across iconic Victoria Harbour – the skyscrapers of Central, the museums of Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of Kowloon, and of course, at the centre of the view with its fluttering Blue Ensign, the white palatial Government House where my dad’s boss Chris lived.

Of Hong Kong’s history, socio-economic problems and broader international context I gleaned little. I had a basic awareness of course that Britain had got the territory off the Chinese a long time ago in dodgy circumstances and was now due to give it back. On a certain level this felt like justice, but it also gave people real anxieties in the wake of the 1989 Tiananamen massacre. My dad’s work occasionally brought me in contact with Chinese political dissidents and survivors of the crackdown, major characters in the struggle for a freer and more humane PRC who would leave on me a deep and lasting personal impression. Beyond that, most of it passed over my head – and in colonial bourgeois surroundings, attending an English-speaking international school in Pok Fu Lam (regularly butchered upon English tongues into ‘Pok Fulham’), it was not as though I would receive an impartial assessment of Hong Kong’s complex story, least of all the more notorious British behaviours therein.

Ramsgate to Margate, Isle of Thanet, Kent - The Waning Beacon

In the southeastern corner of England, right at the end of the Kentish peninsula, the Isle of Thanet reaches out for Europe. Whether it means to shake its hand or wring its neck is another matter.

So near to the mainland and blessed with rich alluvial soils, these fertile marshes have been farmed and settled since time immemorial and still are today. If you seek a walk in the tranquillity of nature this is not necessarily the place to go. With much of this coastline overtaken by the towns of Ramsgate, Broadstairs and Margate, there is little chance of having much of it to yourself.

Broadstairs

Margate

Instead it offers an immersion in physical and cultural landscapes shaped by Thanet’s distinct historical experience: sandy coves, chalky cliffs, lighthouses, cannons, ruins, and the harbours and holiday resorts of yesteryear petering on. Replica fire beacons attest to the Kent coast’s signal fire networks of old that are thought to give Thanet its name – from the Celtic root tan-, for ‘fire’, thereafter appearing as Toliatis in Ptolemy, Tanatos in Bede, and Tenet in the Domesday Book. This is a land of chalk and tar, bladder wrack, fish and chips and pink rock candy and dark clouds over a gunmetal sea, across which successive generations of the immigrants who became the English, ensconced beneath those flickering flames, have gazed out, proud and afraid, at whence they came.

Replica fire beacon in Margate

Map courtesy of Visit Thanet

This 11km route is straightforward enough – just follow the coast. There is usually a choice between soft-sand beaches, concrete promenades, or clifftop tarmac paths. Most walking is level apart from steep climbs up or down stairs when you switch between these. Two detours are of note:

a)       After Ramsgate and before Dumpton Bay, the clifftop King George VI Memorial Park may tempt you with its woods, spacious fields, coffee stalls and Italianate glasshouse. 
b)      There is an annoying stretch after Broadstairs where people with antisocial values and too much money have seized the clifftop for their private mansions, so till it erodes and dumps them in the sea a detour inland on roads is necessary.

More detailed route guidance is available here courtesy of Kent County Council.

VERY IMPORTANT: If you intend to do any walking along the beaches, be sure to check the tide tables (here) in advance. Many of the sands go completely underwater at high tide, which is extremely dangerous if it happens while you are on them.

Ramsgate, Broadstairs and Margate all have train stations and connecting buses with regular services, and there are many pubs, cafés and public toilets throughout the route.

Loch Lomond, Scotland - You Take the High Road

‘Twas then that we parted, in yon shady glen

On the steep, steep side of Ben Lomond

Where in purple hue

The highland hills we view

An’ the moon comin’ out in the gloaming

So runs the song of Loch Lomond, a traditional Scottish melody whose namesake is often synonymous with Scotland itself. Only fifteen miles north of Glasgow, this crystalline lake is the largest inland body of water in the United Kingdom and marks Scotland’s most significant geological and cultural divide.

Loch Lomond is both an anchor and a crossroads of identities and historical forces. Its still waters reflect stories of feuding clans and herds of swimming cattle; of islands where ancient monks studied and worshipped in seclusion; of still older, artificial islands that may be some of the oldest land reclamation works in the world; and of course, of that perpetual struggle with Scotland’s foil of a thousand years, the English.

Ben Lomond (974m), the most prominent mountain overlooking the loch and southernmost of the Scottish munros.

The Two Scotlands

Scotland’s two aspects, Highland and Lowland, are not entirely a human invention but rather date back over 450 million years.

In those distant days the north of Scotland was part of the great continent of Laurentia, along with much of what would become North America. Southern Scotland existed on a separate continent, Avalonia, with the rest of today’s Britain and much of Europe. These two continents collided during the Silurian period, crushing the earth of the two parts of Scotland together and raising mountains which, though now much eroded, once rose high as the Himalayas.

On the Lamentable Condition of Public Toilets in London

During recent walks in various parts of London, it has come to my notice that this city suffers from a distinct shortage of public toilets. On top of that, where these essential facilities happen to be present, such as in the central parks and major train stations, they almost always charge a significant entry fee. Many also lack stair-free access, while others still are dilapidated or closed altogether from obvious lack of maintenance.

Perhaps my attention is all the more drawn to this problem after five years in Tokyo, a city which for all its flaws is quite respectable on the question of free and accessible public latrines. Almost every station on the city’s rail and metro network has one in at least decent condition, as do the public parks, or if all else fails there is usually a department store or konbini nearby whose facilities you can use without fear or shame. The train station toilets are usually inside the ticket barrier, but even that is preferable to the situation in London where most stations have none at all, and thus the possibility that you will be able to pee after a long London Underground journey is a matter of hit and miss (usually miss).

Typical condition of a public toilet in a major London train station: locked behind a toll gate, wheelchair-inaccessible, and out of order so no-one can use it anyway.

The Politics of the Disappearance of Public Toilets

On further investigation this deficiency is not a coincidence. Last year (2016) the BBC reported that over 1,782 public toilets had been closed across the UK over the preceding decade. With no legal requirement for local authorities to provide them, they have apparently been one of the first things to go as the austerity movement eats into councils’ budgets.

It is an easy issue to joke about or trivialize – from a place of privilege, say if you travel by car or have private access to toilets in your place of work, and thus take regular relief of your bodily fluids for granted. But as with much of austerity, the greater your level of vulnerability or distance from mainstream norms and expectations, the less of a position you are in to treat this as a laughing matter. Consider for example women, who in general use the facilities to deal with more complex sanitary needs; people with bowel or bladder problems or other physical or mental health concerns which require more frequent recourse to the loo; people in wheelchairs or with otherwise limited mobility, who are often forgotten in the design of the facilities’ spaces; small children and elderly people; transgender people, who face discrimination concerning toilets that recent events in the US have made internationally notorious; and unemployed or homeless people, for whom 50p per use might not be an insignificant blow.

Thus it seems difficult to summarily dismiss the cynical view: that the collapse in public toilet provision in London, and in the UK more widely, is but one more component of the established belief system and political agenda of the day: that society should not exist, that the public sphere should be ruined for private profit, and that life should be made as miserable as possible for those who are vulnerable or seen as different.

Can we imagine a strike directed more perfectly (and literally) below the belt? Perhaps there is no topic on which the distance between privilege and oppression more starkly divides between reflexive, comfortable amusement on the part of those least affected by this problem, and the distress and utter collapse of dignity suffered by those it impacts the most.

Public Toilets as a Human Right and Public Interest

Who could dispute the case for free, accessible and clean public toilets? In the first instance, because our nature as human beings carries with it the frequent imperative to relieve both the greater and lesser calls of nature, the safe and hygienic means to do so should be considered a basic human right, and was as much as recognized as such by the UN General Assembly in 2010.

But even supposing we come at this issue from perspectives that for whatever reason reject human rights, we would be hard-pressed to deny that having this means available is much in the public interest. The thing about the aforementioned imperative to release our waste products is that it is ultimately going to happen anyway whether there is a safe and hygienic place to do it or not, and certain cities around the world whose embarrassment we shall spare here are well familiar with the consequences of failing to cater for it.

However, the prospect of monied, international London joining their ranks might be quite shocking to some. Many of its most overcrowded tourist destinations lack any toilets at all, including Underground stations such as Tower Hill, serving the single most popular attraction in the country, where one account has it that ‘visitors to the Tower brave a filthy concrete tunnel that reeks of urine at night’. Not only does this suggest how we all pay the cost of inadequate latrines in the form of a deeply unhealthy and unpleasant common environment (excepting perhaps those individuals who take a rare prurient interest in the substances in question), but it also perhaps ought to lead Londoners to wonder how many thousands of those visitors later return to, say, Paris or Beijing, to regale friends and families with stories of their experiences whose effect is that the very mention of London is from then on linked in their minds with the stains and odours of human excreta.

To avoid conflicts about whose responsibility it is to resolve this, perhaps we should all take on a share of it. On the surface it appears simple. On the one hand, a legal requirement should be introduced for local authorities to provide a bare minimum of free, accessible and hygienic public toilets, and the necessary resources be allocated them to do so. On the other, there should also be some manner of legal obligation on businesses and private organizations – restaurants, cafés, pubs, department stores – to offer the facilities, and these should be usable without shame or cost by anyone, regardless of whether or not they be paying customers.

As ever, the real challenge is the politics of this: it is hard to imagine responsibility being accepted either by a government which disdains human rights and the public interest in principle and is ideologically committed to their destruction, or by those businesses which operate to the same belief systems and insist that as businesses they have no obligations whatsoever other than to their own profit. We might predict then that the international image of London will become ever more drenched in urine until a substantial shift away from free-market capitalist culture is achieved, towards more socially responsible paradigms of what it means to be either a government or a business.

In the meantime there seem numerous efforts emerging as frustrated citizens go out of their way to pick up the burdens of these structural failings. Among them, the British Toilet Association has been campaigning for more and better public loos for almost twenty years, while researchers at the Royal College of Art have published both a design guide for publicly accessible toilets (very clear and illustrated, well worth a look) and a ‘Great British Public Toilet Map’, an open-data project which attempts to chart locations and information about public toilets in the UK. Also commendable are those local authorities and businesses which really have been making an effort: certain train stations which used to charge a fee for using the toilet, such as Victoria and Fenchurch Street, have now scrapped it and allow free access for anyone, while councils and businesses in some areas together operate Community Toilet Schemes by which the public can use the toilets on the premises of any of their participants.

This still falls short of the standard expectable of a global centre like London of course, but perhaps not all is lost. Once the more general free-market abolition of society has been reversed, these existing civic movements could become a valuable launchpad for the restoration of a public toilet network worthy of a respectable city.