What London Makes

     Absolutely no shade if you're from a chocolate box town, a financialised city or (god forbid) the countryside. Thing is, we can't all be so lucky. Astride rivers and seafronts in every corner sit towns that have seen better days, home to dastardly half-empty high streets that die at 5 o'clock sharp, eerily quiet industrial estates, suburbs with no character and few amenities save the Harvester. On a bad day, you could tar most towns (and even some cities) in England with this brush. It is an immediate experience, and it's not hard to find; every time I go home, I can find the canal always more brown than green than blue, I can find the shopping trollies and cans and needles, I can find the streets you don't go down because the streetlights have already been switched off.

    And yet! Living in London, the city with something for everyone, you start to forget these images in favour of this gleaming cosmopolitanism, pedestrianised streets and pocket parks. Look! Look at this city that runs on ingenuity, absent of local authority horrors and absolutely packed with Lime bikes. It's easy to lull yourself into thinking that the whole city is like what's inside the N and S circular roads - seeing as that's where almost all the young professionals wax their lifestyle. Of course, that is a huge lie. And Section 18 of the London Loop is a reminder of that lie. It is the price paid out in the scarp for inner-ring-road cosmopolitanism, the price paid for 16 years of in-cahoots financialisation. It is the liminality of market failure in the richest city in Western Europe. It is what London makes. 

1. A GOLF COURSE

    I leave Chingford station and witness this beautiful procession, like something out of Fantasia: as each day tripper leaves the station, they pull their hood up: I linger and play about with my coat. It is about three degrees shy of the temperature in East London but here come the golf guys in their trackie shorts and baseball caps. They have lingered on the Overground train among a group of people completely unlike them, completely unable to buy a set of clubs or god forbid a club membership. Everyone else muddles into the fields or back into Chingford town for a nail salon or a vape shop or whichever other business survives the high street. 

    Walking up into Chingford Plain, the forest is busy with ramblers and dog walkers but absent, otherwise, of any variable life. The flora is unremarkable; all the berries have gone picked or wilted after an uncharacteristically wet summer and warm autumn (but what is characteristic when the climate is increasingly subject to change?). The wind performs the ventriloquist call for Storm Darragh; I turn off into the western edge of the forest, where there is no one else around. This plot ends abruptly in the south to yield to the golf course, overwhelmingly empty not just in bad weather but, unsurprisingly, most of the time. As green spaces go, it is wildly inefficient; it doesn't allocate leisure fairly and leaves a green space there in principle but selectively privatised in practice. Those golfers - at home in a Clapton backstreet - don't consider what they deprive of Chingford, a place barely in remission.

2. A PLACEWASHED VILLAGE

    I climb the muddy hills to the north and reach Yates Field, an open space at the very corner of Waltham Forest. The London Loop guide suggests there is a viewpoint in this field, so I turn around. What I see is underwhelming: the muddy hills previous and, off to the east, the town of Sewardstonebury. Sewardstonebury is an invention, a construction, a distortion of the existing village of old Sewardstone and its associated amenities down the hill. Sewardstonebury is, by comparison, a dormitory town in linear settlement form with one particularly giant house at the end of the street, carrying all the pretense of a local Edwardian boozer. This is most of what you see from Yates Field: an impersonation of a village using its name to appeal to tradition. Sewardstone is ancient in origin: Sewardstonebury was invented in the late 20th century for oligarchs and new money looking to lend their gains an air of legitimacy. It is an inauthentic identification with place: it is placewashing.

    Okay, but then I walk a little further east across Yates Field and see Sewardstonebury wasn't the view at all: over the western hill now lies a plain stretching all the way to the City. But you can't see one from the other. Sewardstonebury exactly denies the financialised system that made it what it is to appeal to some rural idyll, entirely detached from the material history that such an idea implies. 

3. A CEMETERY

    Next comes Gilwell Park, home to the scout contingent over the border in Essex. I see a muntjack and a deer barely half a mile from one another, both too far from their forest habitat and trapped in polluted halfway house verges of mud and grease. Gilwell Park, in name only, attracts of SUVs and discarded tinnies. I try and pursue the next part of the walk, but hit a snag because it is underwater, and the water is foamy today, like it tends to be when the storm comes, when Thames Water make like their upper management and pour pure shit upon everyone else. Just above the flood and foam lies the Sewardstone Park cemetery, raising interesting but also perverted questions about the degree of inadvertent desecration invited by the best bedfellows of climate breakdown and corporate negligence. 

    At the apex here, after the water but before the cemetery, lie two houses - one built, one just a steel frame. The finished work faces the reservoirs to the northwest, the Edmonton incinerators new and old, and a long, every-extending column of industrial estates between the North Circular and its bigger, scarier cousin. This house seems to have a gate, a guard dog and multiple sports vehicles, but no curtains: inside what appears to be a bedroom, the only visible furniture is a shoe rack entirely filled with snow white running shoes. The skeleton, meanwhile, faces rural Essex, and thus wilfully ignores the networks and systems that are the only way it could reasonably see its construction completed.

4. POLICE AWARE

    What follows is a descent into exactly the view of the finished house, which it sees but nonetheless ignores through a steep ascent and walls on all sides. At the bottom, I find the Sewardstone Road, horrible in any weather, but rancid today. The rare pedestrian here is in despair, and it's quickly clear why. The isolation of this neighbourhood, with only one road running north-south and no connection to the areas west or east, makes it an easy target for crime - here's it's hotwiring, badge stealing or both. The ancient history that Sewardstone has is obscured by a geographical stroke of bad luck. One would expect a border village between nations to be forgotten and neglected, but between local authorities? Sewardstone suffers while others reap the benefits. It's dormitory too, but with fewer Mcmansions and more roadside debris than Sewardstonebury. So, not only is it spatially isolated, but it's usually empty; perhaps that's why every car in a dire state on the road to the Lee Valley Park carries a sticker reading "Police Aware". It's as if the public needed a reminder; if not for the signage, you'd assume that the police - like everyone else - had forgotten about this place.

5. THE MOST POLLUTED RIVER IN THE COUNTRY

    I cross through Sewardstone Marsh - a rare pocket of land around here that hasn't been selectively claimed for one particular private use or another - and, upon crossing the Lea, count myself back in London, Brimsdown exactly. Not much of a consolation, though; the culvert left is just as scuzzy as the culvert right. Except here there are ponies, and a man, walking opposite me, who is throwing the ponies bananas. A strange relic of what one assumes is early 20th century land use, frozen out by 1948 and now hemmed in by suburban estates and waterworks, is an old farm. The ponies canter for a while, around crashing sewage outflow from Walthamstow and buzzing pylons from Edmonton. It's properly alien, the natural and human interface here making among the clearest arguments for why never the twain should meet. Here, in Brimsdown, I am nary minutes from Amazon UK DIG1, DPD North London, Evri Enfield. Manufacturing happens between the road and the river just as much as logistics, but there's no prizes for guessing which individual warehouses are the largest. Maybe the golfer's great big bags were sent to their Clapton conservatory flat from up here; certainly umpteen Sewardstonebury residents enjoy the fast deliveries. Yet anyone who lives in Brimsdown is separated from a semblance of green space by a blanket of corrugated roofs, and exclusively offered local employment opportunities that promise insecurity, pay pennies, and rarely provide time for a piss.

6. INWARD FLOW

    The simplified point is that inner London exists at the expense of the outer. The more complex one is that outer London eats itself, too. Between Chingford and Brimsdown are multitudinous contradictions, folks who see Land Rover mobility as their cardinal right while their passengers chuck Coke out the window. These communities prize proximity to green space while disrespecting it, both directly and indirectly (every time they flush). These communities prize low density green belt exurbs, while exacerbating housing crises across the way and mounting more pressures on the warehouse workers who must deliver goods to thinly-spread "hamlets". This is not some rail against the working man; these areas are incredibly wealthy, even on onerous Sewardstone Road. In spite of the crime, these people are taking advantage of all the liminality the edge of London grants them, floating around in their big vehicles like the ULEZ were a pale baleen. When these faux-country zones transition into the city, we see all the industry that was unambiguously kept out of them - or rather, what that industry has become, in the face of a city that demands all but forges remarkably little. That's not to say the inner Londoners are exempt of blame; they're just less directly denialist. In a service economy reverberating sphere, the denizens of Zones 1 and 2 are given to believe that their city-state is self-sufficient, because it makes their jobs in marketing, marketing and (it is always) marketing more palatable; it gives them socially conscionable ideas of what the knowledge economy is. But the knowledge economy doesn't come without its costs. Everything has to come from somewhere, and that coming-from has a footprint of its own. In the absence of really making anything, this is what London makes.