This week John Rogers and Nick Papadimitriou head down the A13 to Tilbury led by geologist Dr Kate Spencer from Queen Mary, University of London and musician Andy Ramsay from Europa51.
They walk the foreshore of the windswept Thames Estuary between the two Tilbury forts, over the cracking surface of an historic the 1930s landfill site pushing up Shippam’s paste jars through the flaking clay cap which also sprouts poisonously hallucinogenic thorn apple plants.
Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers discuss a selection of their favourite London books with readings to music by Europa51. They delve into Montague Sharpe’s Middlesex in British, Roman and Saxon Times (1919); William Margrie’s The Diary of a London Explorer (1933); Gordon S. Maxwell’s Highwayman’s Heath (1935) and HV Morton’s London (1926).
This week Nick and John take a languid winter stroll along the arbours of the pleasure grounds and spa resorts of Finsbury and Pentonville.
Heading by way of a dank Saffron Hill with talk of Oliver Twist and the Sabini Gang they take in Coldbath Square, The Islington Spa, Bagnigge Wells, St. Chads and others mentioned in Old London’s Spas, Baths & Wells by S.P. Sunderland (1915).
They discuss the cluttered local history of the area now under the auspices of the London Borough of Islington and some of the more imaginative mythology concerning the Penton Mound.
With reading by Heidi Lapaine and music by Europa51
Inspired by Thomas Burke’s The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London, Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers explore the far-lying eastern suburb of Ilford. Burke , like other writers of the early 20th Century, was disdainful of Ilford. Writing in 1921 he said of ‘the Eastern Queen’ that, “After Walthamstow it comes as tepid soda-water upon an August noon. Ilford wears an expression of unfulfilled desire. It hungers for colour. Even the rush and turmoil about the Broadway have a frigid tone.”
Nick and John ignored his advice and headed out along the Romford Road to find a visionary landscape, optimistic and vibrant, ‘rising from alluvial Essex’. With reading by Heidi Lapaine and music by Europa51.