Bastard Countryside

‘With their heads lowered, they made their way along the well-worn path, amid the rumbling of factories. Then, after two hundred yards, without thinking, as if they had known the place all along, they turned left, still keeping silent, and came out into an empty terrain. There, between a mechanical sawmill and a button works, was a strip of meadow still remaining, with patches of scorched yellow grass; a goat, tied to a post, walked round in circles bleating; further on a dead tree crumbled in the hot sun. “Really,” Gervaise murmured, “you’d believe you were in the countryside...” ’

Vestiges of the underlying landscape survive in many gaps in the built fabric of the lower Lea valley, a swathe of formerly marshy ground which cuts through London’s East End. The valley is traversed by the meandering and diverging arms of the river, which converge into a single course at Three Mills before feeding into the Thames opposite the Greenwich peninsula. Wilderness maintains a slight but tenacious toe-hold there, side by side with a mix of industrial uses, from recycling, through light engineering and construction, to warehousing, wholesale storage and distribution. Whether you stumble across the clumps of willow near the scrap metal yard on Marshgate Lane, the silver birch and reeds around Bromley Gas Works, or the tidal mudbanks and scrubby river edge surrounding the food factory at Orchard Place, this vestigial landscape always has the same force of surprise as in Zola’s description.

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