Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The Lee Valley Regional Park was established in 1967, the year I moved to Hackney. We had slightly different agendas. The Park planners wanted to transform areas of neglect and desolation, the very qualities I was intent on searching out and exploiting. The first argument we had was over the name. I favoured (homage to Isaac Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double ‘e’, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of Burroughs: Sewardstone. ‘Stone’ added to the author’s middle name.

The Lea/Lee puzzle is easily solved. The river is the Lea. It rises in a field near Luton, loses its identity to the Lee Navigation, the manmade canal, then reclaims it for the spill into the Thames at Bow Creek. The earlier spelling, in the River Improvement Acts of 1424 and 1430, was ‘Ley’, which is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any given morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir embankments, scrubby fields with scrubbier horses, pylons, filthy, smoking chimneys.

Without the Lea Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. The Lea is nicely arranged, walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an Edwardian sense of excursion, pleasure, time out.

Dr Jim Lewis in his affectionate tribute, London’s Lea Valley (Britain’s Best Kept Secret) , promotes the Lea as cradle and forcing-house of the ‘post-industrial revolution’: water power facilitated flour mills, shipbuilding, the manufacture of porcelain; then came armaments, gunpowder, chemicals, furniture, bricks; until we arrive at Lewis’s golden age, the moment when entrepreneur and investor get it together in a landscape nobody notices, or wants to protect. Settlers moved into suburbs, before there were suburbs; they cosied up to a working stream. In the same way that a wealthy Victorian brewer, picking out an estate in Enfield Chase, might marry one of his barmaids.

Everything starts in the Lea Valley, all the global franchises; electricity, TV, computers, killing machines. Forget Silicon Valley, this is Ponders End. Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, attended the Revd Stephen Freeman’s school at Enfield. As a sickly boy he was interested in ghosts. He made a pact with a friend that whoever should die first would return. Seances in a cold bedroom. No word from the corpse.

Jim Lewis tells us that, at Ponders End, Joseph Watson Swan ‘demonstrated a crude form of electric lamp almost twenty years before the American Thomas Alva Edison had registered his own version’. But the Yank was a sharper operator and put in for the patent. Rather than become involved in costly legal wrangling, an early corporate monster was formed, the Ediswan Company.

John Ambrose Fleming, like a minor alchemist, joined Ediswan to investigate the causes of ‘blackening on the inside of light bulbs’. Swan filled his laboratory with experimental models, lamps with an extra electrode. He became a consultant with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, where he worked on improving methods for the detection of radio waves. By the turn of the century, alliances between shifting trade associations who would be given favoured status by government, lavished with defence contracts, were in place. And that place was the Lea Valley.

The military/industrial complex, demonised in the USA by Sixties radicals, was well established around Waltham Abbey before the First World War. Dr Chaim Weizmann, first president of the state of Israel, began his working life as a biochemist. In March 1916 he was approached by Sir Frederick Nathan, head of the Admiralty Powder Department, who was trying to cope with a serious shortage of acetone, a solvent used in the manufacture of cordite. Winston Churchill had demanded 30,000 tons of the stuff. So Weizmann, using the Nicholson gin distillery (on the site currently known as Three Mills) at Bow, obliged. Contacts were established and favours returned. Sir Arthur Balfour declared his support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Another figure championed by Jim Lewis is Sir Jules Thorn, founder of Thorn Electrical Industries, who is praised for his ‘courageously entrepreneurial spirit’ in importing lamps from Hungary. With a base in Angel Road, Edmonton, Thorn began flogging domestic radio receivers from a rental shop in Twickenham. He bought up the Ferguson Radio Corporation Limited and acquired a factory in Lincoln Road, Enfield — ‘on the site of a former nursery’.

Thorn’s activities, his way of operating, fit quite snugly with my conceit: that the Lea Valley aspires to the condition of the supermarket (wide aisles, every product showcased in its own area, cheap and cheerful). Ex-rental TV sets heaped into pyramids, at South Mill Fields. Coffee stall alongside the Navigation beyond Tottenham Marsh. Fruit and veg at the roadside, as you approach Epping Forest.

When Ferguson decided to move into colour, Jules Thorn asked his engineers to design and develop a dual standard, large screen receiver (VHF/UVF). A junior technician was sent to the local Woolworth’s to buy up their stock of plastic butter dishes. Fetishised in silicon rubber, the dishes were transformed into EHT (extra high tension) multipliers.

‘Dangerous radiation levels within the receiver,’ Lewis explains, ‘had to be carefully and expensively screened.’ This too, radiation, carcinogenic leakage, the sour aftermath of entrepreneurship, was to be a defining element in the Lea Valley. History recovered through stinks and scummy water, smoke you can taste.

On 9 December 1997, a group of former Thorn employees met, on the site that had once been the engineering laboratories of the Euro-conglomerate Thorn EMI Ferguson to witness the dedication of a plaque paying homage to the late Sir Jules. The plaque is now positioned in the foyer of the Enfield Safeway superstore.

Best Value. We, East Londoners, support the Lea, as it supports us, marking our border, shadowing the meridian line. It is enjoyed and endured by fishermen, walkers, cyclists who learn to put up with the barriers, the awkward setts beneath bridges. We pay our tithe. Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan was a visionary document: ‘every piece of land welded into a great regional reservation’. The Lee Valley Recreational Park. A perimeter fence around a Sioux reservation. Compulsory leisure. The Lea would lose its subversive, grubby culture of contraband, villainy, iffy businesses carried out beyond the fold in the map.

Way back in 1961 Lou Sherman, Lord Mayor of Hackney, got together with representatives of seventeen other local authorities, and with the support of the Duke of Edinburgh, to realise Abercrombie’s vision. A levy was introduced for councils in Essex, Hertfordshire and London. Grander plans, with the passage of time, required more complex financial structures, ‘partnerships’. Local authorities, UK government, Europe: more executive producers than a Dino de Laurentiis epic. The Lea Valley was a future spectacle. Water was the new oil. Housing developments required computer-enhanced riverscapes as a subliminal backdrop.

There would be funds for decontamination, a ‘precept on council tax’, unnoticed, except by readers of the small print. Representatives of thirty boroughs had their places on the council of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. Regeneration was the theme, the green lung. A ten-year strategic business plan: ‘It firmly embraces the principles of Best Value in pursuit of enhancements of service delivery.’ Management-speak for the open air supermarket. Best Value. Never knowingly undersold. Eco-bondage. ‘A unique mosaic of farmland, nature reserves, green open spaces and waterways.’ The ideal brochure: god’s eye maps, photographs with jagged, painterly edges, bullet points, heavy print. Best Value.