in York Road just past the BP garage. I was a callow 18-year-old who had taken the BBC comedy programme The Young Ones as an instructional manual rather than a sitcom and was determined to ‘live the dream’ of pukey parties, farts, bad jokes and even worse music.
We did a fairly good job in our little three-bed terraced house with an outside toilet. The tone was set in the first week when one of my housemates took both his first taste of red wine and his inaugural spliff at the same time. Unable to negotiate the slide door to the toilet he projectile vomited over three days’ worth of dirty dishes in the sink. We elected him as next on the washing-up rota as a consequence and carried on quaffing the £1.99 litre bottle of Valpolicella.
Another night in the first term, a visitor to our humble home, a public schoolboy who’d fallen through the educational cracks decided to urinate in an empty wine bottle rather than traipse into the garden to use the lavvy. We corked this fine vintage of Château Piss and popped it in the fridge. When our regular Friday-night group feed came round my female housemate rolled in three sheets to the wind, grabbed the chilled bladder juice from the fridge and poured herself a large glass. I swear I did attempt to warn her but she just assumed I was protecting my stash. Upon the first sip she spluttered the urine all over the food I’d just prepared, which our guests decided to eat anyway because everyone was so hungry and my baked bean and cheese-topped toasties were legendary. All the people in those gruesome anecdotes now have responsible jobs, mortgages and children – apart from me. I just have the children.
We felt that we’d so successfully distilled the essence of the Scumbag Polytechnic student lifestyle that, like an ambitious shopkeeper, we expanded the next year to a five-bed house on the other side of West Ham Park. The Spotted Dog pub on Upton Lane became our regular haunt. To us provincials this was a remnant of home, a country pub nestled among the East London grime. We didn’t realize it at the time but the pub dates back at least to the 16th century. It was where the City merchants of the London Exchange conducted their business during the plague years of the 1660s. It was where we celebrated birthdays, exams, and Subbuteo victories.
Happy days. If nothing else my three years at Poly provided me with the cast-iron stomach that stood me in good stead on travels round India and South East Asia. This period also created a permanent connection to the area of London where I entered kidulthood.
In those two years traipsing along the Romford Road I have no memory of ever ducking down Vicarage Lane to West Ham Church. Shame then that I didn’t take the trouble to study the 18th-century map of the area that shows the original name of Vicarage Lane as being Ass Lane. If that hadn’t made us snigger, the Victoria County History records that, ‘the cartographer may have been misled by a rustic informant: the form Jackass Lane, also recorded in the 18th century, seems more authentic.’
Jackass Lane brings me to an old Roman trackway, the ‘Porta Via’ or Portway, that linked West Ham to the Roman camp at Uphall Farm in Barking. Groups of ‘rustic informants’ are sunning themselves on the benches outside West Ham Church. The foundations of this church date back to the Saxon era, the main body being rebuilt by the Norman Baron William de Montfichet in the 1180s. When the eyes of the world fell on the running and jumping on Stratford Marshes I doubt many cast their gaze towards this building with a heritage older than Westminster Abbey. It sits beneath the shade of the lime, yew and oak trees – not a tourist in sight.
I go to take a rest inside and a group of builders on a lunch break wave me through. In 1844 a large, colourful mural was revealed that covered the interior of the church but for some reason was hastily hidden again beneath lime-wash. However, an anonymous pamphlet was published describing the mural as depicting ‘the suburbs of Hell’. Parts of the mural were again revealed in 1865 during renovations, when it was examined ‘under the superintendence of the Rev. R. N. Clutterbuck of Plaistow’. The lurid descriptions of the anonymous pamphlet were debunked before the mural was deemed unworthy of preservation, re-whitewashed and the plaster removed. It has a hint of intrigue almost worthy of a Dan Brown novel, in which no doubt connections would be made between the martyrs burnt at the stake on Stratford Green and the land owned by the Knights Templar around the River Lea nearby. In the Dan Brown version the forbidden mural in this backwater church would have contained the secret of some heresy. At some point a beautiful younger woman would have to be involved – she can play me as the bumbling amateur researcher with a dodgy left knee – and she discovers that the Olympic Stadium has been built to cover a hoard of Templar treasure that includes the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Prepuce (Christ’s foreskin). That might bring the tourists in.
Who the artist was, we’ll never know. Was he a troublesome monk sent out from the nearby Langthorne Abbey to do good work in the community? Once confronted with a fresh white wall, a brush and paints, did he unleash the impulses repressed by ecclesiastical life? Was he some kind of Banksy character who wandered around East London daubing images of fornicating bishops on church walls. Somewhere within the West Ham mural was there a tag as identifiable as the signature on a Damien Hirst dot painting? ‘The Final Doom of Mankind’ that was painted here might have been as synonymous with this 15th-century painter as the Obama/Hope poster is with street artist Shepard Fairey. But then this was an era before artists had egos and dealers. When the mural was painted there would have been no Victorian squeamishness over images of cavorting naked sinners. Vivid, racy murals probably put bums on church seats in those days.
All the time that I’m studying Dr Pagenstecher’s account of the church’s history my ears are tuning in to the builders’ lunchtime banter. The tranquillity of this rare pastoral East London scene is being disrupted by one of the workmen who’d let me into the church giving his mates a detailed blow-by-blow account of a fight he’d had. The image he paints of his rumble would be a true vision of hell if it were rendered as a fresco on the whitewashed walls.
As I make for the door, trying my hardest not to attract the attention of ‘Bonecrusher’, I spot one of the last surviving relics of the great Stratford Langthorne Abbey that is the next stop on my Kubrick schlep. High on the wall of the north tower is a stone tablet carved with a sequence of human skulls dug up in the garden of the Adam and Eve pub. ‘Bonecrusher’ comments to his mates as I take a photo, but they quickly lose interest and return to tales of bust-ups in Barking boozers.
As far as I know, the tablet is all that remains of the great abbey built by Montfichet in 1135 by the banks of the Channelsea River. The Abbey of Stratford Langthorne put the area on the map in the Middle Ages in the way that Westfield Stratford City is aiming to do today. The building of the Eurostar terminal, Stratford International, continues the historic symmetry, as continental visitors would sail up the Lea and disembark at Queen Matilda’s bridge by the ‘Street-at-the-Ford’. The area’s French connection was sufficiently well known for Chaucer to make a sneering reference to the locals’ attempts to converse with the tourists in their mother tongue, referring to ‘French after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe’.
Stone tablet in West Ham Church
Heading down Abbey Road you’d need an active imagination to guess this was the way to a scheduled ancient monument. Where pilgrims trod a path through the marshes the route now reads like a history of 20th-century social housing, from its most enlightened pre-war phase, built by the London County Council, to the high-rise blocks being given a facelift. Straight ahead stand the Towers of Mammon at Canary Wharf and to the north you can just see the top of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture in the Olympic Park, which is about as close as most people from the area managed to get.
Turning into Bakers Row a hint of rurality reappears as poppies poke through the metal railings of Abbey Gardens. A sign invites you ‘to grow your things here’. The Cistercian monks of the abbey were known for their green fingers. The name ‘Langthorne’ was taken from the hedges of ‘long thorns’ that surrounded their gardens on this site. The present-day Abbey Gardens carry on the work of the monks, encouraging local people to use the ‘open-access harvest garden’ to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs in rows of raised beds.
Just inside the gate are the brick and flint foundations of a small building or room that would have been part of the medieval abbey.