Posts Tagged ‘North Circular’

Epping Forest Centenary Walk

Thursday, August 31st, 2023

Epping Forest Centenary Walk 2009: London is in some ways a ‘green city’ with over 3,000 parks of varying sizes within the boroughs which make up Greater London. These range from pocket handkerchief areas to large commons and royal parks such as the roughly 2500 acre Richmond Park.

Epping Forest Centenary Walk
Wanstead Flats

London Mayor Sadiq Khan supported London being designated as the world’s first National Park City in 2019 and announced plans to increase the amount of ‘green space’ to 50%. This isn’t a huge target as according to the capital’s environmental records centreRoughly 47% of Greater London is ‘green’; 33% of London is natural habitats within open space according to surveyed habitat information and an additional 14% is estimated to be vegetated private, domestic garden land.”

Epping Forest Centenary Walk
One of the Montague Road Estate flats had misssiles on its roof for the Olympics

In order of size, starting with the largest they categorise this as Other Urban Fringe, Parks And Gardens, Natural And Semi-natural Urban Greenspace, Green Corridors, Outdoor Sports Facilities, Unknown and amenities with other minor contributions. Some 22% is classified as Green Belt which gives some quite strong protection against development, though my borough is currently proposing to build on a little of it.

Epping Forest Centenary Walk
The walk goes on a bridge across the North Circular Road

The protection of green spaces in and around London has a long history, back to the Norman conquest when kings set up royal hunting grounds convenient to their palaces in Westminster and further afield. These were called forests, though most were mainly open land rather than full of trees; the name was a legal term meaning only the king had the right to hunt deer in them. One of the larger areas, established by Henry II in the 12th century was Epping Forest, part of an even larger Forest of Essex.

Epping Forest Centenary Walk
Memorial to a famous evanglalist Gypsy Rodney Smith born in a bender here

Enclosures began to threaten the future of the forest at the start of the 19th century when around a third of the remaining forest was allowed to be privatised for building development and farming by the lords of various manors in the forest. By 1870 around two thirds of the forest had been enclosed.

Warren Pond

By this time many people had become worried about the loss of the commons, particular after neighbouring Hainault Forest had been sold off by the Crown, the trees removed and the area turned into poor agricultural land. More and more people were coming out from London during their free times to enjoy the green spaces in the outskirts and preservation societies were set up.

Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge

The City of London became involved after it bought land at Manor Park for the City of London Cemetery. Traditonally the city had organised Easter Monday stag hunts in the forest, but they now became commoners with the right to graze animals, and began legal actions agaimst lords of the manor who had enclosed forest land. Eventually Acts of Parliament allowed them to purchase the forest manors and an court in 1874 ruled that all enclosures made since 1851 were illegal.

Under the Epping Forest Act 1878 the forest ceased to be a royal forest and became managed by the City – as it still is. The Crown lost its right to venison and commoners lost some of their rights too, but the City Conservators were obliged to “at all times keep Epping Forest unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the people.”

The preservation of Epping Forest was the first major victory in Europe for the modern environmental movement. Four years later it was endorsed by Queen Victoria, who although it was no longer royal but in the hands of the City of London, nevertheless stated “It gives me the greatest satisfaction to dedicate this beautiful forest to the use and enjoyment of my people for all time“.

On the 100th anniversary of the Epping Forest Act in 1978, the Friends of Epping Forest began a annual series of anniversary walks from along a route they established from Manor Park Station to Epping. The Friends were originally formed to oppose the routing of London’s orbital M25 through the Forest, leading to it being put in a tunnel. But they have been less successful in opposing some other breaches of the 1878 Act, and in 1989-94 a large section of the south of the forest was lost to build the M11 link road, and during the London 2012 Olympics a temporary police station was allowed to be built on Wanstead Flats.

Epping Station at the end of our walk

I walked the Epping Forest Centenary Walk with some of my family and a friend on Bank Holiday Monday 31 August 2009, and you can download a leaflet including a map (though I’d advise also having the OS Explorer 174) of what has now been renamed the Epping Forest Big Walk. According to this it is 14.1 miles (22.7km) but we managed to walk rather further, possibly partly because we got a little lost at times. Of course you can do the walk in stages rather than all on the same day. If you want to walk with others you can join the free Big Walk this year on Sunday 17th September 2023 to be led by experienced guides!


Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel

Sunday, May 28th, 2023

Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel: I had an interesting and varied day at events and places across London on Sunday 28th May 2006, taking rather a lot of photographs. Appropriately for a Sunday I covered two religious events.


Pagan Pride – Beltane Bash – Holborn

Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel

My working day began at Holborn, having caught a fairly early train into London. Now I like to relax a bit on Sundays, but for many years I often came up by the first train to take photographs. Though it wasn’t that early on Sundays, departing around 8am.

Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel

I took a bus from Waterloo to Holborn and walked the few yards to the Conway Hall at the north-east corner of Red Lion Square.

Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel

Here (with corrected capitalisation) is what I wrote about this event on My London Diary in 2006.

The Pagan Pride Parade in Holborn is now a regular annual event, a part of the Beltane Bash that takes place in the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. Mostly it was the same people as last year, but I found it hard to get into the mood to take pictures.

Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel

As usual the parade was led by Jack In The Green – a dancing bush – the Green Lady and the Bogies. The Giants included the Morrigan (in green and flowers to welcome summer) with Black Ravens, Old Man Thunder and Old Dame Holder, along with the rest of it.

Beltane, Chariot Festival, Barking & Whitechapel

Dancing round the fountains was energetic, but somehow for me the event didn’t really get going, and lacked any real climax, people just slowly began to fade away.

My London Diary – May 2006

Chariot Festival, Sri Mahalakshmi Temple – East Ham

Those taking part in the Pagan Pride parade began to make their way back to Conway Hall for the rest of their day of events, but I rushed to Holborn underground station to take the Central line eastwards, changing at Mile End to get to East Ham. But I had stayed too long with the pagans.

The Sri Mahalakshmi Temple had been built in 1989 and opened and was almost opposite the station. Before that Hindus and worshipped at a converted shop on the corner of Kensington Avenue and High Street North, around 300 yards north from the station.

Unfortunately I had arrived too late and the procession on the streets had ended, though I was still able to photograph the chariots outside and a few of the people. I made a mental note to come back and cover this event another year, but although I photographed other chariot festivals including one in Manor Park, East Ham, I’ve never returned for this one.

My London Diary – May 2006


Barking and River Roding – Barking

I was in East Ham and the afternoon lay ahead; it was a fine day and I decided this was a great opportunity to take a walk a little further to the east by the River Roding. I took a few pictures of the chariots, then went to walk along by the River Roding and to photograph a new development by the railway in Barking.

The half-mile walk along unkonwln was rather uninteresting. It’s a long suburban street lined with terraces of working class housing from the early twentieth century on both sides, named for the family who once owned the estate on which it was built. As Stephen Benton points out in his London Postcode walk it has one small claim to fame, and almost every famous pop guitarist from the the 70s and 80s – including those from the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, The Who as well as musical failures like me will have started with Bert Weedon’s ‘Play in A Day – Guide to Modern Guitar’, first published in 1957. Weedon (1920-2012) was born here, though he had probably moved away long before he became famous.

The path led on to Watson Ave, with a view of the Leigh Road gasholder in what is now the derelict Leigh Road Sports Ground. The Barking Gas Works opened here in 1836 but was purchased in 1912 by the Gas Light and Coke Company, who closed it as they had the much larger and more economical works they had opened at Beckton in 1870. But the holder remained and was I think still in use by the North Thames Gas Board possibly until the change from coal gas to natural gas. The area around it became their sports ground.

At the end of Watson Ave is a long footbridge which took me over the North Circular Road, from which I took a few pictures before going through an industrial estate.

I made quite a few pictures in the Tanner Street area, where a considerable amount of new development was taking place.

I told myself I would return here later, but I don’t think I’ve done so yet.

My London Diary – May 2006


Whitechapel

I think I had travelled back from Barking on a Hammersmith & City line train and needed to change soemwhere to the District Line. Having got off the train I decided I had time for a short walk around on before needing to continue my journey. I only taok a few pictures, perhaps making 20 exposures, and there are only four pictures on My London Diary.

My London Diary – May 2006


Meridian 3

Friday, August 28th, 2020

Following the Greenwich Meridian is rather easier since the Ordnance Survey helpfully added it to their 1:25000 maps in 1999, but these pictures were made five years earlier in my project in preparation for the Millennium. I’d had to draw my own pencil line in their maps, which fortunately did show in their outer margins the Longitude at one minute intervals, including 0°00′, so it wasn’t hard to add the line.

I’ve never quite understood why the National Grid doesn’t quite align with this, the Prime Meridian, but presumably there were good reasons for choosing another starting point and working very slightly at an angle. The street maps which I needed to work out my actual route as they had the street names follow the National Grid, though they rather hide this behind their own system of letters and numbers based on half-kilometre squares.

For the northern part of my walk, the Meridian ran roughly down the gap between two pages of my Master Atlas of Greater London, a book too large and heavy to carry on my walks, and I marked out my route with highlighter pens on illegal photocopies of its pages.

There are several crossings of Southend Road, the North Circular Road at this point close to the Meridian which I think was actually a few yards to my east as I took a picture looking roughly west. But the road layout had changed a little from that since my OS map had been revised. It was a view which made a better picture – and close enough to the line for me, as was the level crossing at Highams Park – where again the actual line is a few yards behind me – to the west.

The view of Mapleton Rd and Stapleton Close (wrongly titled Mapleton Drive in my notes) is perhaps a hundred yards west of the Meridian, but close enough for me. The war memorial at the junction of The Ridgeway and Kings Head Hill is spot on target, while Woodberry Way is perhaps around a hundred yards to the west.

Finally, Pole Hill has two markers; the obelisk, set up by the Astronomer Royal to align his telescope in Greenwich due north is on the old Meridian, but the trig point to its left is on the version adopted internationally (except by France) in 1884. Nowadays we use GPS based on the International Terrestrial Reference Frame which has its zero meridian 102.478 metres further east.


All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.