Then there are the memorials themselves:-

Readers will know that I am deeply enamoured of Tower Hamlets Cemetery – the last of the local wildernesses, with layer upon layer of east end history lost in an overgrown jungle.   They are trying to clear it up now, make open spaces for people to sit and play like any other municipal park, but there is a big risk that it will lose its mystery.   Of course, I know why they are doing it.   It will be safer.   The wildflowers will be documented.   It will be tamed.   But there will be a corresponding loss of wildness, of nature rampant, of imaginative fecundity:-

Although I walked right past it yesterday, I did not spot St. Andrew’s, Plaistow, James Brooks’s monumental Victorian church which, in 1870, brought Anglicanism to an area notorious for its dissent, alongside an equally fine, if not finer, high Gothic vicarage, slightly later in date, but also by Brooks:-

In discussing the characteristics of eighteenth-century East London – or Essex as it was before boundary changes in 1965 – I was reminded that William Stukeley, the great eighteenth-century antiquarian and freemason, was buried at his request in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene, East Ham.   So, we went in search of it – and found, just to the north of the roaring A13, a perfectly preserved Norman country church and surrounding churchyard:-

To complete the narrative of my walk from West Ham to Abbey Woods – rather further than I planned – I am posting a few miscellaneous pictures of the route, which is empty and along a bit of the Thames I didn’t know.

The tunnel at Woolwich (it’s actually only used for cycling):-

One of the deserted piers on the north side:-

And on the south side:-

At Tripcock Point, where the Princess Alice sank on 3 September 1878, with devastating loss of life, there are good views east:-

West:-

And north:-

But it’s hard to see it as an area for pleasure steamers and to imagine Turner on a boat travelling downriver to Gravesend.

I had been encouraged to go to Thamesmead before it is too late and the dream of 1960s social housing which turned into the nightmare of 1970s dystopia is finally demolished.   In truth, it looks as if it hasn’t long to go, with the Lasdun-like ziggurats by the lake all now boarded up.   I liked the surrealism whereby the streetnames are called after leftist heroes – Octavia Hill, Lytton Strachey and, more unexpectedly, Raymond Postgate:-

Since it’s the last day of my holiday (and the first of September), I thought I would go on a walk to explore the territory which I left out of my book.   Beyond the River Lea.   It’s a set of towns which I scarcely know at all because the River Lea acts as a psychological, as well as physical barrier, as it did in the eighteenth century, although I’m intrigued to find that Defoe described Plaistow as ‘a town in which there had been much new building as well as repairs to existing building since the Revolution’.

I started at West Ham Station in order to join the track which runs along the top of the Northern Outfall Sewer.   It’s a long, straight path with occasional glimpses to tower blocks and playing fields on either side:-

Across the railway tracks:-

Past the cemetery:-

Eventually, one gets to Beckton – a landscape of empty parks and 1980s housing.   Through the Docklands campus of East London University, one reaches the Thames, an area of wide expanses of water and extreme desolation, once an area of gasworks admired by Ian Nairn, now an area of new housing:-