The Green of East 14

I’ve done a lot of exploring in London. Sometimes it’s led me down some dubious roads. At others I’ve turned a corner into a blaze of visions historical, social, beautiful.

Much of this I’ve had to manage into hour-long lunch breaks. I pick up my 1990s vintage A to Z and set off from the office, fulfilling a “quest” such as a circumnavigation of the Isle of Dogs, or seeking out odd corners of the city. I once tracked down the remnants of Old London Bridge by the porch of St Magnus Martyr. I’m well aware that in the crevices of this urban space there’s a wildlife, making its own world through the distortions of space that humans create. I don’t know if it’s just me, but in recent years it’s felt as though this wilderness within concrete has suddenly been embraced.

Of course, the history of conservation in London goes back much further than my transitory view, but even so much of it has happened within the narrow scope of my adult life. For example, Bow Creek Ecology Park was established in 1997. It lies on the thumb of a peninsula created by the River Lea. At its last extremity this tributary doubles and doubles on itself, seeming thoroughly reluctant to throw in its lot with the Thames. From the Tube (briefly above ground) or DLR at Canning Town its winding waters reflect fractured ideas of cranes and warehouses. Its banks were the site of London’s greatest ironworks, and it’s overlain and undercut by the tracks and tarmac of London’s eastern spread into the suburban bed of south Essex.

I take what the website calls the western route into the park, over the blue bridge. This stands between a rusted, disused bridge patched and peopled by graffiti tags, and a bridge that no longer exists, its footings draped in buddleia and grass. Beyond that phantom the A13 takes infinite traffic out towards Southend.

Outside the gate, I have a look around. To my right, huge, almost windowless structures obscure the view to Canary Wharf (I’m not complaining about that), while on the left there’s a great plain of earth. Diggers and bulldozers move desultorily between the steel spikes onto which new buildings will be raised. Only the gull-filled width of the Lea separates this green from that brown.

It is green, but bisected by grey. The DLR runs on its high trail right through the park, and my wanderings are overseen at intervals by the passengers of the bug-like trains. They even warn of their arrival with a high electric whine, as if fizzing their wings against the breeze.

Every few yards signs educate and inform. They seem quite sad on a wintry Monday afternoon, as though missing crowds of eager children. For now it’s just me and a man with a large camera who keeps a suspicious distance – though I’m really no one’s idea of a threat.

Between the two of us and the Lea is a long strand of rushes. Following my nose, I wander from the carefully gravelled path and out among them, where they knock leaves with stubby hawthorns. They choke the water of a narrow pondway that is fed, according to the signage, by a sensitive pumping system. I can imagine them in summer filled with birds. But now they whicker together, a grim monoculture. Across the strait gap of the river their cousins gather in even greater numbers. They press against the revetted bank and disburse a few mallards into the current.

As the day nudges towards its end the sun emerges and at the same moment I find ragwort still in flower, and the leaves of some summer plants still hanging on. This land is being managed as a hay meadow, I am informed, just as it was before the steel buildings, the rails, the roads, the flats, the bombs, the docks. Faceless dock walls still run through these neighbourhoods, relics of ownerships past.

I daren’t jump the pond even at its narrowest part – I don’t fancy explaining a trouser leg covered in algae and whiffing of green mud to all my colleagues, so I have to go back to the gravel walkway. The sound of my footsteps mixes with those of a third visitor to the park – a man in his 50s, thick leather coat, woolly hat. The look in his eyes is haunted when he glances up. On instinct I turn off the main route toward a bench giving views over the water and the black patch of the city beyond. As the sound of the other man’s steps proceeds towards the gate I find a memorial stone. This fourth man was born the same year as me. He died the year I became a father.

*

I follow a flight of ducks back to the main path. Their silhouettes are clear against the sunsetting sky. In ungainly flight they show the width of their feet, their set-back wings and their dabbling beaks. I’ve always loved ducks. But I can’t follow them. I must arc around under the DLR.

This takes me into a new arc, from one pillar supporting the line to another. It’s not often you can call concrete delicate, elegant, but in this late sun it is, tinged with yellow. And this is wonderful despite the rattling of another train above.

I had hoped to get down the tip of the park, where it reaches out toward the A1020 across the Lea, but a tall fence blocks my way. On a previous expedition I’d taken the River Lea Walkway as far as the edge of the vast building site, and looked back at the reeds and trees from there. Mallards and greylags bobbed in the water, escorted by a couple of coots. In one hawthorn two herons brooded over the eddies below. I like to get into such places. But here stands the fence, as if to preserve the foot of the DLR pillar – a rainforest tree among shrubs.

The sign on the fence informs me that this is a wildlife area, made inaccessible to protect an otter holt and kingfisher burrows. These had apparently been made as part of the park’s design. But it isn’t clear if they are actually in use. A clever writer’s fudge, perhaps, to cover all eventualities.

An image of an otter’s head swimming through the pools lining the east side of the part comes with me as I move on. I stand on the platforms built for pond dipping – and is that a V advancing over the surface? It would set the seal on my vision of London as infinitely various if I were to see my first otter here in E14.

At least the chance was there, I suppose. The last part of the park is more municipal than ecological, with benches and short grass. It does have a spectacular view across the plain of the building site and industrial London, for which I stop and look. My photographer co-explorer sidles by, all prickled with suspicion. A lonely place in a city always has a touch of danger to it, but I think he’s overreacting. Soon after, I reach the padlocked, spiked gates where “ecology” ends and the working world begins. It’s marked by a long bridge of light steel, shuttered, bolted and locked at every visible exit. I loop back round the thumb of the park. Gulls group overhead. A blackbird startles. A robin firks among the stones of the path. On the other side of the blue bridge reeds move, while on the A13 traffic hazes the air over the city.

I take the longer, riverside route back to the office, making myself late. But the setting sun and the buildings between them colour the Thames silver and gold. Perhaps Dick Whittington misheard, I thought, half an idea. It’s not the streets. It’s the streams.