Field Study's Man in E11 reports on an encounter with the night soils of his Utopian park life

Saturday 25^th October 2014 - After a long morning sitting at a table delving into an archive relating to the building of the A12/M11 Link Road I needed to stretch my legs and so I set out on a walk; one which would include some of the locations recorded in the various historical documents I was given by the archivist. There were a lot of documents and I did not have enough time to fully read through all of them. My initial visit was about getting a general idea of what was available rather than making a more detailed exploration of the archived local history.

In the three hours I spent at the archive I made a brief note of each document I looked at. One such document was a copy of a report made by the:

‘Remembrancer/Superintendent of Epping Forest’

Ref’ no. PD/MY/SEF55/92/REM/44

Date of Report – 5/10/92

Subject – City of London (Various Powers) Act 1990 – Exchange (of?) Land

The report, according to my brief reading and notes, concerns land exchanges made because of road developments. The building of the M11 Link Road required land belonging to the Corporation of London, Epping Forest. I believe the land in question was 5 acres of Bush Wood. The Department of Transport offered, in exchange for that area of Bush Wood, the site of Empress Sewage Works. The report details concerns about the residual toxicity of the old sewage works site and whether or not 18 inches of clean top soil deposited on the site would be sufficient to safely contain or cap the toxicity. ‘The Harwell Investigation’ is cited; this being a survey carried out by the Harwell Environmental Safety Centre. The name, Empress Avenue, seemed familiar to me yet I could not place it and I had forgotten to bring a map of the area.

Later, when setting out on the walk I did not have a fixed route in mind. I set off from Chichester Road and made my way via Cathall Road, Grove Green Road and Upper Leytonstone to the Green Man Roundabout and across to Overton Drive and down into Wanstead Park where, at its eastern edge, I found the River Roding and a riverside path. I walked along the path in the gloaming listening to the eerie twilight chorus of the rooks. I did not realize I was in the very same area covered by the Remembrancer’s report I had read briefly at the archive. I had walked in Wanstead Park only once before some 9 or 10 years ago and with the encroaching darkness I was in quite unfamiliar territory. I began to field a variety of fears about getting lost and, worse, being found by others, or rather, other things. 

I found myself hurrying with fear fueled strides along a narrow passage of a footpath between the main East Anglian rail line out of Stratford, and the City of London Cemetery. I was penned in between the high barbed wire defences of both. It was dark. No it wasn’t. It was though a late October evening and the various lights were insufficient to dispel a sense of darkness, gloom and isolation from this unnerving ‘in-between’ of places. There were impaled burger boxes, crushed cans, and shattered bottles glistening faintly amidst soiled and shredded garments making a trail of eviscerated remains leading me fancifully to a fairy tale ogre. How would the ogre devour me? What would be left of me by the end of this passage, if there is (or was) an end? By the time of this thought I was sweating coldly and struggling to avoid stepping on the fallen leaves, fearful that I would not be alert to the crunching steps of any super-feral predator stalking me from behind. I dared not look back. I was determined not to lose myself entirely to this gothic fantasy, or pretence of a walk, somewhere between the stygian zones of the super-feral and the supernatural although by the end of the passage, at Aldersbrook Road, I tried to fantasize that losing myself entirely was precisely what I could, if not should, have done. I contemplated returning to search for something I might have mislaid or forgotten. I acted out meeting myself coming the other way, being the natural and the feral, prey and predator; a grim coincidence, a gory Steppenwolf-like reunion glimpsed from a train bound for the east coast. No way was I going back into that passage; I was definitely the last person I would have wanted to meet.

Wanstead Flats, great reservoirs of bisected darkness, lay between me and home. I had had my fill of darkness for the evening and decided to walk around the Flats rather than straight across them. I walked along Aldersbrook Road and came across the junction with Empress Avenue and so I had unwittingly found one of the locations referred to in the archive. This chance discovery of the whereabouts of Empress Avenue triggered off a procession of horrors relating to the excremental heritage of, and connections to, the area through which I had just walked. What sort of night soil man was I? I imagined a heavy metal festival of mutant fruits and vegetables howling from the allotments adjacent to the park and the land which was formerly, Redbridge (Southern) Sewage Works. Lycanthropic cauliflowers snarled ominously from beyond the sleepy suburban streets between us. I dismissed my situating the allotments and the sewage works on the same site as silly paranoid conjecture. But still the serpent root of my viper’s herb reached deep down into the night soil of my imagination. I had to get a rational, objective, scientific grip on things. I had to trust the recommendation of ‘the Harwell investigation’ that 18 inches of clean top soil would create a protective layer against the risks of heavy metal residues. But if I were to peer into a microscope, or other scientific apparatus, I might only believe my eyes to be those of an early 19^th century field student scrutinizing some sort of monstrous chimera of an animal vegetable mineral soup, a menagerie of abominations characterized by cartoonists such as William Heath (Monster Soup, 1828), and other great artists of that era in London’s stinking faecal history. 

I was haunted by apparitions from previous field trips, one of them being this exquisite corpse (below). It emerged from the darkness at the end of Empress Avenue. As big as a house, the monster floated towards me snarling about the need for some sensible historical and geographical facts and enquiry.