By Dan Carney:
Snaresbrook Road is a perfectly straight 800-metre stretch, bisected by the border separating the outer London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Redbridge. At the road’s western end, there’s the scruffy ambiguity of Walthamstow Forest, alternately idyllic and unsettling, the start of a narrow passage of woodland that leads to the widening of Epping Forest at Chingford Plain. To the east lies the suburban village of Wanstead. An affluent and comfortable place, but also one with a recent history of radicalism and subversion, the location of a series of noisy public protests in the mid-1990s against the construction of the nearby M11 link road. Now, however – at a glance, anyway – Wanstead is all boutiques, tasteful cafes, and posh second hand shops. A place of satisfaction and prosperity, tethered and tiled, declared one of the capital’s top ten places to live by The Sunday Times in 2018.
This contrast between the two ends of Snaresbrook Road, between unpredictability and conformity, also runs side-to-side. There’s regimentation and structure, represented by the public school Forest, Snaresbrook Crown Court (housed in an imposing Elizabethan-style mansion designed by the famous Victorian Gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott), and the concentric functionality of the adjacent Hermitage housing estate. On the other hand, the numerous woodland paths leading to Hollow Ponds, as well as the debris-strewn Eagle Pond - which separates the eastern end of the road from the court building on its oak-lined southern bank - embody nature, improvisation, and secrecy. The area directly behind the pond is Epping Forest’s most active homosexual cruising site, an eastern Hampstead Heath analogue, where tissues, used condoms, and other sexual debris can be found strewn in thorny undergrowth. It’s played host to these activities since before World War II, when gay sex was yet to be legalized, and the existence of homosexuality yet to be acknowledged in any widespread form. Now, the forest authorities accept that it happens here, with keepers working alongside LGBTQI organisations in order to promote good littering practice.
Snaresbrook Road thus takes you from the panoptical to the concealed, from the administrative to the unrecorded, in the space of a few dozen strides. It’s a syncretic centre line, a starting point for any possible tangent, where high court judges deliver verdicts of public record a few yards away from furtive, fleeting woodland liaisons. Footfall is, however, sparse, and even with the opulence of the court building, as well as Eagle Pond’s considerable size and appeal, Snaresbrook Road’s in-between status ensures it never quite feels like an actual place. Semi-fluorescent joggers, returning dog walkers, and waterfowl enthusiasts – the latter eager to inspect the mute swans, moorhens, tufted ducks, and Canada geese that gather at the water - trudge a thoroughfare that seems to have been implemented only as an afterthought. A connective in search of a destination; a lonely, infinite corridor, laid in the absence of other planning initiatives.
This unreality frequently induces a dreamlike lull through which thoughts emerge unhindered and unanticipated, free to idly swirl and reform, fluid and spontaneous. This fuzzy ambience can, however, quickly harden into something sharper and more hostile. Sometimes, in the half-light of dusk, when the clouds hang low and still, and there is a lull in the traffic hum, the fronts of the flats and retirement homes opposite the water can appear as two-dimensional facades, fabricated or adapted for the concealment of something undesirable behind. Flattened imitations intended to mask and deceive, like the two “houses” comprising 23-24 Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, which hide an uncovered section of railway line, or the brownstone-cum-subway vent on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. The fact that there is nothing which might need concealing, or ventilating, behind the buildings here does very little to lessen the paranoia. When it hits, one is left disconcerted, keen to wander around the backs of the buildings to seek reassurance amidst the car parks and the gardens.
Eagle Pond, unprotected from the road by railing or wall, stands as testament to our relentless appetite for the arbitrary division and allocation of land. Its banks are owned by different entities, with the City of London Corporation, Her Majesty’s Court Service, and the London Borough of Redbridge each responsible for a particular section of the surrounding grass or concrete. The water body itself, which has likely existed in some form since the eighteenth century, was adjudged part of Epping Forest, and thus the responsibility of the Corporation, in 1882. When you stare across it as you walk, it’s not hard to conjure the sensation of floating serenely across the surface, like an overfed waterfowl or even a piece of fetch-driven litter. Sometimes, even on an overcast, uninviting afternoon, the urge to dive gleefully into the water can be momentarily overwhelming. Although the pond is covered in islets of green algae, it would likely provide an excellent place to float or wade, separate from everything but still visible and contactable from the pavement twenty metres away. This may be the standpoint from which Snaresbrook Road is best experienced; present but not completely involved, removed but vigilant, with a watchful eye on all sides. Even if the buildings don’t quite feel real, the birds seem happy enough. You’d probably get used it as well, given time.
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Dan Carney is a musician/writer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.
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