The Park That Lost its Name

Patrick Wright is a writer and broadcaster with an interest in the cultural and political dimensions of modern history.  Having started writing A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London while working for the National Council for Voluntary Organizations, he is now a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.  A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the Britain through the unexpected prism of everyday life in East London. Below is an excerpt about London Fields.  If you will be in London this summer, perhaps you should pick up a copy of Wright’s book and read about your surroundings as you travel.

Hackney was once a place of pastures and market gardens.  Samuel Pepys practised archery here.  Even today there is a public park in the borough known as London Fields.  It is a place of modest attractions: some fine old plane trees, a new community centre, an open-air lido that, were it not for local objectors, the council would already have demolished.  In the early morning, before the dogs come out, it is often full of seagulls.

Trains rattle by overhead.  London Fields borders on the Cambridge line, and it’s not a bad spot from which to observe passing academics.  They stare back glumly, thanking their lucky stars for Grantchester Meadows and mistaking the figures on the ground for woebegone residents of the Victorian East End.  It’s easy to imagine them adding those contemporary asides that keep turning up in scholarly studies of Dickens, Dore, or life as it was in outcast London: ‘Even today, one only has to take the train from Liverpool Street Station…’.

London Fields certainly has its dismal aspect.  There have been vicious assaults.  Huge and unattended dogs run free.  Young children from the nearby travellers’ site invade the infants’ playground in a terrifying and unbelievably foul-mouthed pack (not for them the clip on the ear with which Richard North once hoped to improve the area).  As I walked out on Sunday afternoon I came across a Ford Cortina parked up against the railings: it was emitting grunts and rocking.

But despite the malevolence that sometimes drifts across it, London Fields also clings to an understated respectability.  On most days of the year, it is an uneventful and slightly melancholy place.  If it has a message for the world it is no longer the progressive Victorian one about the uplifting and civilizing effect of open spaces-green lungs as they used to be called-on the nation’s most down-trodden souls.  These days the park promises nothing so ambitious.  It merely points out that people can be poor without always being beastly; that, no matter what writers like Tom Wolfe may suggest, the inhabitants of the inner city can get by without raping, mugging and insulting each other at every encounter.

The park remains uncelebrated, but its name is too good to be true.  ‘London Fields…’.  It doesn’t take a master class in poetry to reveal the contemporary resonances of that archaic conjunction.  In these ecological days ‘London Fields’ has come into its own as a prime piece of nomenclature, a movable asset that is far too good to be squandered on an obscure dog-patch in Hackney.

The estate agents were the first to act.  Assisted by the usual clutch of lifestyle journalists, they went out one night in the early Eighties, levered the name up from that tired stretch of municipal ground, and humped it half a mile down the road.  No longer confined to the park or the dishevelled part-industrial part-Bohemian zone around the railway arches on its east-side, ‘London Fields’ was now the new name for Mapledene-a pleasant and, as we know, relatively unbroken area of Victorian terraced housing that, through this act of renaming, was now being pulled away from the abysmal Holly Street Estate at its western edge. ‘London Fields’ was still a place of leafy respite, but it had become one that could be bought and sold: a rediscovered ‘village’ within walking distance of the city.

John Milne was the first writer to offer us London Fields, the novel.  He had grown up in a council flat in the area and though his story, issued by Heinemann in 1983, was shy of highbrow presumptions, his publishers were still serious enough to adorn it with somewhat patronizing recommendations from David Lodge (Mr Milne has talent’) and Auberon Waugh (‘Mr Milne seems to represent a new development in the English novel’).

Milne is good on detail, but at heart his London Fields was a conventional fable of working-class male endeavour.  Its hero was determined to break away from the poverty of his circumstances: the string of wretched jobs, the dismal estates, the cruelly observed pregnant wife with her nylon dressing-gown and her stifling need for security.  He turns to athleticism, and then, via an exotic inter-racial affair (‘She was ebony, pure shining carved ebony’), to the underworld of drugs, black clubs and serious crime.  Milne’s London Fields is a place of confinement and stunted prospects.  The escape route is enticing but it leads inevitable to gaol.

Then, in 1989, Martin Amis came along with the book that swept John Milne’s effort into oblivion.  By the time Amis has finished with it, London Fields isn’t a place at all.  Instead it’s a monstrous condition, a post-modern pile-up at the end of another millennium.  London Fields has become the immortal void where the time-expired allegories of British life go to mutate.  There’s suicide and murder.  There’s imminent nuclear catastrophe and a dark collapsing sky.  There are gross couplings, and they’re not discreetly hidden in a Ford Cortina either.  At one point in the performance, an unprecedented gale bursts into fell thirty-three million trees: all in a single stroke of the Ring Master’s hormonal, mid-Atlantic prose.  People round here may well wonder what Martin Amis thinks he’s doing to their park.

The Nasty Young Man of English letters grows apocalyptic with age.  These days he creeps into London Fields like repentant mugger and practises being human.  He’s achieved some results through these exertions: an abstract devotion to the planet, for example, and a fatal softness for babies.  Nevertheless, he’s still doing horrible things to women and children.  Amis’s American narrator is less of a worry.  He flew into London saying ‘I want time to go to London Fields’, but he died on the way through.  He’ll never know that, despite all his millennialist huffing and puffing, the plane trees in Hackney’s park are still standing.  It’s unlikely anyone in the area will miss him.