This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. John Rogers

Walden, a classic of the wilderness-living genre that gave rise to legions of soft-skinned city types heading into the woods to live in a shack by the labour of their own hands. The possibility that it might in some way have inspired Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage TV series of rustic food porn would surely have Thoreau thrashing around in his grave.

      I started to find Thoreau too pious and picked up Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan – A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in the Oxfam bookshop on Kentish Town High Road. It’s the kind of book you expect to find in the fag end of Camden – no doubt originally purchased in the early 1970s when Castaneda’s tales of ancient Mexican Indian wisdom gained by getting whacked on hallucinogenic plants was all the rage. I imagined it at the centre of a weekly discussion group held in a basement flat in Patshull Road, hosted by a sociology teacher at the Polytechnic of North London, where they experimented with jimson weed purchased from a roadside shaman outside the Camden Roundhouse.

      My friend and fellow-traveller Nick Papadimitriou, a man steeped in both plant lore and roadside shamanism, once told me that thorn apple plants found on the Thames marshes contain a powerful hallucinogenic toxin in their spiky pods. The eastern flood plains would be the ideal place for an urban mystic to dwell.

      In an attempt to engage with a more local form of ancient wisdom I picked up a copy of The 21 Lessons of Merlin – A Study in Druid Magic and Lore by Douglas Monroe. I learnt the Rite of Three Rays to potentially perform in Abbey Woods, where the godfather of modern Druidry, William Stukeley, had led the initial excavations of Lesnes Abbey. After passing Stukeley’s grave at East Ham I felt that perhaps I owed him some sort of tangible tribute.

      Just the thought of doing this walk was becoming a mind-altering experience. I needed to get out there on the road to Erith Pier before I stopped existing as a viable human being and fully transformed into the living cliché of a man not coping with entering his forties. My long, straggly hair was bad enough; if I started talking about tripping and mysticism a vortex could appear at any moment and I would disappear completely into my own rectum.

      I left home uncharacteristically early, keen to give myself time to explore Woolwich before pushing on into the wilderness. My nine-year-old son was still slumbering in the top bunk whilst my seven-year-old was immersed in an alternative reality via the Xbox. He barely registers my final preparations as I give him a kiss on the head and he mows down several onrushing zombies with a machine gun.

      It took a mere fifteen minutes on the DLR from Stratford to retrace the walk I’d done down to North Woolwich. It’s a surreal journey, floating through the air past the giant golden syrup tin of the Tate & Lyle factory at Silvertown, gliding past the mothballed Pleasure Garden that didn’t even make it through the first Olympic fortnight to the Paralympics before it went into administration, and then past cable cars drifting over industrial land between the Millennium Dome and the Excel Centre. The thirty seconds of video that captured this on my compact camera would need a soundtrack borrowed from a dodgy 1980s sci-fi TV series, or the sound of the wind that I once recorded blowing down the neck of a milk bottle on the beach near Tilbury Power Station.

      North Woolwich is a windswept relic, left behind by the big-money redevelopments that have swallowed up the surrounding docks. Heavy trucks thunder through, heading for the free ferry service that I’ll travel on as a foot passenger. The only other pedestrians lining up to make the journey are a family. The young boys are excited, asking their mum and gran how long they’ll have to wait. All the old accounts I’ve read of the Woolwich Ferry report that the boats played host to scores of local lads who spent their summer days and weekends travelling back and forth, enjoying the free ride and the passing slideshow of river traffic. The only other moving vessel I see today is the ferry service heading in the opposite direction.