[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]

Let me get this out of the way first, lest I start to sound like a broken and grumpy record: I could not believe the mess. The entire grid square seemed to be strewn with lobbed litter, windblown plastic, and soggy fly-tipping. I don’t want these explorations to become one big moan, but nor do I ever want to not see these problems, or to accept them as normal. I want to see these things as a problem that needs solutions, rather than just the way things are.

“When you change the way you look at things,” said Einstein, “the things you look at change.”

One of the most eye-opening phrases I have ever learned was “Shifting Baseline Syndrome”. The day I was taught it (by Dr James Borrell) was a day I began to look differently at the world. Simply put, Shifting Baseline Syndrome is ‘a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition’. In this sense, what we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’. Without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing it to their own ‘normal’ baseline and not to historical baselines.

If we must throw things away (out of sight, out of mind, eh?) then it’s far better to load a skip. And that’s where I glimpsed my winning lottery ticket: an old masterpiece painting tossed out with the trash! When a leaky roof caused a homeowner in Toulouse, France, to open up a formerly sealed attic space for repairs in 2014, there was quite a surprise inside: a painting thought to be by Italian Baroque master Caravaggio. The work depicts the biblical scene of Judith beheading Holofernes, a dramatic subject Caravaggio covered in an already-authenticated painting from 1602. Though the jury is still out on the creator of the work, the French government placed an export ban on the painting, deeming it worth up to $136 million.

The housing estate of modern, unremarkable, rectangular homes and flats stood on the site of England’s first paper making mill. Apart from the name of Paper Mill Lane and an artificially straightened, constricted, neglected river there is no trace of the bustling riverside wharf, the waterwheels, boats, and the industry that stretched from 1588 until its closure in 2008, with the loss of 127 jobs. Today there are quiet residential cul de sacs and a massive supermarket transit depot.

I learned these things from an old fireman / Royal Marine / truant who saw me photographing the skip, said hello, and then poured forth a stream of proud facts about his neighbourhood. That the river here used to be 60 foot wide and full of boats. That the Elizabethan bricks were really small. That the site was dug out and filled with foundation cement overnight to prevent historians stopping the residential development being built. That the street here (he gestured to a row of smart brick semis) was for the mill managers. It was lined with trees ringed in wrought-iron fences that were removed in the war to be turned into munitions at the nearby factories. That he and his mates used to run across the road over there (now a noisy dual carriageway) until one of his mates misjudged a bit and was killed. Another of his classmates robbed an abattoir and was shot dead by the police. So he joined the Marines (“I arrived with my hair down to here; they gave me a Number 1 all over!”), climbed ropes, ran assault courses, and came home to his Mum on their first leave with muscles all over the place. “It sorted me out, the Marines did. There’s nothing for the kids to do anymore. No youth clubs, no sports fields, even the churches are locked six days a week. Anyway, good luck to you, son. There’s so much history for you to find round here.”

I caught a whiff of apple shisha from an open window. The smell of the sweet smoke whisked me back to Beirut, to warm dark evenings strolling under palm trees along the seaside Corniche. A long way from the cold, empty bowling club I was peering at over a high fence. The clean, green, neat lawn was appealing and I looked forward to being old enough to take it up as my exercise! Bowls has been played in England since the 13th Century.The game eventually came under the ban of king and parliament, both fearing it might jeopardise the practice of archery, then so important in battle. Even when, on the invention of gunpowder and firearms, the bow had fallen into disuse as a weapon of war, the prohibition was continued. By a further act of 1541—which was not repealed until 1845—artificers, labourers, apprentices, servants and the like were forbidden to play bowls at any time except Christmas, and then only in their master’s house and presence. 

Opposite ‘Fat Boys 95 – The Ultimate In Mens Outsize Clothing’ I cut down an alleyway through industrial units and a sewage works, out onto flat, empty wasteland by the dual carriageway. It felt like a damaged and now neglected and ignored land. There was nothing here, no nature, but no man-made purpose either. Soggy short grass stretched over a couple of fields towards the river embankment. I followed a large metal pipe that led from the water treatment place to the creek. There were skids and swerves from the tyres of kids’ dirt bikes. Crushed cider cans. A McDonalds Sweet Curry Dip (with ingredients beginning, ‘Water, Glucose-Fructose Syrup, Apricot Puree Concentrate, Sugar, Spirit Vinegar, Modified Maize Starch… etc.’) A fence wrapped with swathes of blue and white POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, flapping in the cold winter wind. Graffiti on a concrete barrier urged ‘Fuck Boris Big Up NHS’. Another cautioned ‘You aware Covid Bill Gates hoax +5G’. Even with the meandering machinations of these blog posts, I can’t bring myself to dive down the Google rabbit hole of these zany conspiracy theories.

The river was sedate, blue and calm today. Last time I was down this way, looking for a place to paddle my SUP, the tide was low, the water was murky and rushing, and the banks were sheer, slippery mud. I didn’t even unpack the SUP.

This area is a scrap of freshwater marsh, surrounded by industry. It has a derelict, forgotten atmosphere. Its complex of wet grassland and ditches, together with grassland and scrub, supports many breeding and wintering birds. Wildlife also includes scarce wetland plants and insects, and a key population of the nationally declining water vole. Areas of reedbeds provide home to marsh harriers, bearded tits and summer visiting warblers.

Quite a surprising selection of birds occur at this somewhat small area of degraded habitat, particularly during the spring and autumn migratory periods, although a good number of species winter here too. There is an abundant source of food for flocks of wading birds such as Redshank, Lapwing, Dunlin and Oystercatcher. Birds such as Graylag Geese and Shelduck can often be found grazing vegetation. In contrast to the open mud, the vegetation also provides shelter for roosting and breeding birds. Teal, Mallard, Widgeon, and Cormorants can often been seen drying their outstretched wings after diving for fish. 

Clouds of white birds (terns?) rose as one from the damp ground as I walked. They swirled in the wind and then settled again once they had sussed me out. I love birds but I can’t get interested in ducks, geese, and seagulls. I’m not sure why. I think my disinterest in seagulls comes, like pigeons, from associating them with too many of them swirling around to feed on human scraps. That made sense here for, after a couple of hundred metres of marshland I turned left up a different creek, and arrived at a council “waste reception centre and transfer station”: a tip in other words. I watched through a high security fence as men driving diggers shunted heaps of stinking bin bags around. Flocks of seagulls squabbled over nappies and pizza boxes. One gull was trapped in the narrow space between two fences, unable to take off vertically enough to escape. I watched it flap in panic but could not reach it to help. A heron then took flight from the bays of rotting rubbish, perhaps preferring its easy pickings to the creek on my side of the fence. Seeing that huge, prehistoric bird in the tip dismayed me. I watched it bend back its spindly knees, flap those 6-foot grey wings, and launch itself upwards to circle away over the marsh.

Moored near the tip was the Decima, a steel Thames sailing barge constructed in Southampton in 1899. She is, I learned, a notable “Historic Ship”. A Thames sailing barge is a type of commercial sailing boat once common on the River Thames in London. The flat-bottomed barges with a shallow draught and leeboards, were perfectly adapted to the Thames Estuary, with its shallow waters and narrow tributary rivers. The larger barges were seaworthy vessels, and were the largest sailing vessel to be handled by just two men. They sailed the Medway and Thames in a ponderous way for two hundred years; then in the 1860s a series of barge races were started, and the barges’ design improved as vessels were built with better lines in order to win. The Thames barge races are the world’s second oldest sailing competition, second to the America’s Cup. Thirty barges were part of the fleet of ‘Little Ships’ that rescued soldiers of the retreating British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkerque. The flat-bottomed barges could reach the beaches, and take off the troops, ferrying them to the larger vessels waiting off shore. These would make the Channel crossing. Twelve barges were sunk, but eighteen vessels returned.

Under the railway (over the creek) I scampered across the dual carriageway and back into streets of houses. A sign cable-tied to a fence offered a reward for a missing grey parrot (microchipped). A large billboard advertised a ministry where young and seasoned professionals are groomed to become urban missionaries in their careers and businesses. They display unique dimensions of divine excellency in the very heart of the marketplace. Another small sign directed “Danny killick funeral flowers this way”. And a naked plastic doll sat, arms outstretched, on the roof of a garden shed. I lifted the abandoned painting out of the skip and headed home for some lunch.