Adventures in the East

I have designed a new tour of London for people who really have seen everything in every guidebook on offer. Our staycation outings are planned through a list of places we have ever had any scintilla of interest in going to visit. Then I sort the listed items into geographical clumps and decide whether we still have any interest in seeing these places. The list ended up with several places in Barking and in Dagenham. Once upon a time they were not joined, but they are now united as the Borough of Barking and Dagenham, and for us virgin territory.

Last evening I discovered all the sites to be visited were connected by the Tube's District Line, so we set off this morning for the District Line and the long journey into the eastern wilds of London.

First stop was Barking where one of our 1000 Best Churches is located. I also knew there was an abbey ruin connected to this church. What an incredible way to start the day. St Margaret's, the parish church, was open and old and filled with lovely things. The Abbey is a ruin, but once so important.

Here is the existing gate. The Abbey was founded in 666 by King Erconwald for his sister Ethelburga, who was the first Abbess. The Abbey was rebuilt in the 9th century, and in the 10th century William the Conquerer travelled here on the day he was crowned King of England, and waited for the Saxon lords to swear fealty to him.

The Abbey was enormous. Here is tiny Bob standing within the Abbey's walls.

Another view across the width of the Abbey

Later in the day, at the local history museum, I saw this model of the Abbey which gives a better idea of what existed at the time of the Dissolution which for Barking came on 14 November 1539.

But not all is lost!

The Abbey Retail Park across the road will sell you your fitted carpets!

Back to the Tube and one more stop to Upney for the National Trust's Eastbourne Manor House, the last manor house left in Barking, and once a manor owned by the Abbey of Barking. 

The house was built in the 1570s, by a wealthy businessman who bought the manor from the Crown which had cleverly taken title to all the land formerly owned by the wealthy abbeys. The house reopened earlier this year after a full renovation. There isn't much in the house, but the building is very interesting, and the displays focus on the alterations made by subsequent owners in succeeding centuries. For example the wing to the left in the picture was so dilapidated in the 19th century, the farmer turned the ground floor rooms into his stables, and the upper floors of the wing into a storage and hay loft. The coolest feature is the original oak spiral staircase that winds through the right hand wing from ground floor to roof. 

My favourite feature was this incredible quilted wedding scene

designed to surround the hearth where the house is licensed to hold wedding ceremonies.

Back to the Tube for Becontree and the local history museum at Valance House. Another new museum display in an old manor house. This one dates back to the 13th century, is the only remaining manor house in Dagenham, and yes it also belonged to the Abbey at Barking. The Becontree Estate is the Levittown of London, 27,000 council houses built between 1921 and 1932 by the London County Council as "homes for heroes" returning from the First World War. The houses had all the mod cons of the 1920s.

A sample kitchen is set up at the museum with the modern gas stove, but it only had two hobs so the clever green handled pots are three wedges that fit together in a circle so the cook can heat three items over the same burner!

The gallery devoted to old Dagenham included some beautiful samplers,

And this exquisitely embroidered shirt.

Dagenham was the site of a huge Ford auto plant employing some 24,000 workers at its peak. It opened in 1931 and ceased production of cars in 2002, although engines are still made there, so another community coping with deindustrialisation in the blink of an eye. Barking, we learned today, was once the center of London's fishing industry from the 14th century to the mid-19th century when cheaper fish could be sent by train from more northerly ports where the water was not as badly polluted as the Thames estuary. Industries vanishing in the blink of an eye is not limited to our own era. Perhaps the difference then was that new industries were in the wings to take on the dislocated and unemployed. And then we can sympathise with the inhabitants of those Tudor monasteries and abbeys who also lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their vocations overnight at the whim of the king. 

What Barking and Dagenham has been most associated with in recent years is the rise of the British National Party, the BNP, the current manifestation of Britain's flirtation with fascism dating back to Oswald Moseley's Brown Shirts in the 1930s. The sad decline of my native country can be illustrated by saying the BNP's platform is close to the Republican Party's platform in the States: immigrants go home and low taxes to reduce services. The difference between the two countries is that the BNP is considered to be a fringe party of nutters, loathed by nearly everyone in Britain, right and left, Tory and Labour, and their platform roundly derided in newspapers of all political persuasions (including the reactionary Daily Mail, if you are wondering), not as in the States where the nutters are the second party in a two party system. That last statement sadly did not apply to the Barking and Dagenham Borough Council where the BNP won 12 seats in 2006 and became the official opposition party.  In May, the Borough redeemed itself, and the BNP lost all 12 seats.

Between Eastbury Manor and Valence House, we took the Tube to Dagenham East where we had lunch at the Eastbrook, a pub that  CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) lists in their Heritage Pub guide as one of 10 not to miss because it is the best example of 1930s pub design preserved in London. We ate in the Walnut Room modeled on the lounge of a gentlemen's club — paneled in wood, leather arm chairs (a sign posted said, people in soiled clothes were not to sit in the leather chairs), stained glass windows — but there for the workingman. What the CAMRA guide did not mention is that the pub is where the BNP holds its local meetings. Now I feel terrible that I didn't know to boycott the pub, but at the same time, the pub interior obviously is a mirror of a world the BNP, and the Republican Party, believe they can magically conjure back to life. A world where immigrants and people of colour can be kept out or kept away if they are already in residence, but I can't help wondering if the racism that shames these parties whose members are overwhelmingly white and working-class is a cover, an excuse, for their real fears as they face a future with no jobs or low wage jobs, for them and for their children in a globalised world beyond their reach. 

The BNP's other outpost in Stoke-on-Trent, perhaps the Detroit of England with the closure of the pottery manufacturing industry in the city, also did not return BNP candidates in the May election. Stoke's newly elected Labour MP is a pretty-boy TV presenter and Oxbridge urban historian. Perhaps he will be able to focus attention on the need to reintegrate the marginalised white working class into the economic fabric of the nation. Sadly I find I have little hope for anything positive to happen in the States where the nutters have been normalised as the mainstream.