photo walk – Where is Phil now?

A walk in the park

Wanstead – Saturday 08 February 2025

Every great adventure starts with a train journey. Though, it’s fair to say today’s adventure wasn’t great, and neither was it that adventurous, but it did start with a train journey. All 15 minutes of it.

For the past few months, I’ve had some discomfort/mild pain in my groin. I thought it might be a hernia so my doctor referred me for a scan at the Loxford Polyclinic in Barking, 15 minutes along the Suffragette Line from home followed by a 10 minute walk from the station. There are an awful lot of signs advising that the reception area I was sent to (1b) didn’t have a receptionist; this didn’t stop every person who arrived after me asking if there was a receptionist on today. I did get seen quite quickly.

I wanted to make this visit a little more enjoyable and “adventurous” so mapped out a walk home via the large heath/common area that I just lump into the generic name of Wanstead Flats, though there are official names for all the chunks of open land that is carved up by busy edge of London roads. One of those bit is Wanstead Flats, I just have no idea where is starts or ends.

I was expecting a grey old day but I wasn’t expecting to walk for 90 minutes with cold drizzly rain as my constant companion. However, the rain and very low cloud kept the people away and muted the noise of the traffic to a dull hum. It also blanketed any buildings on the flats’ edges making the walk feel endless and isolating and I really enjoyed the solitude. I walked without headphones and just ‘was’. It was nice. Cold, wet, but nice. My working week just seems so full of noise and I’m starting to appreciate quiet when I can get it, and this means listening to less music than normal. I’m finding this change quite liberating. Music has been with me for decades, and is critical to my wellbeing and I’m not giving it up, just slowly releasing it as a crutch, and allowing myself time in my own head has it’s own rewards.

Other than getting some miles into my legs before we go to New Zealand in four weeks (less three days; and I’m very excited), I’ve been wanting to photograph some garage doors that back onto a dirt path on the edge of the health for quite some time. I know that ‘garage doors on the edge of a heath’ is quite a ‘Phil’ thing to want to photograph, but I’m interested in these luminal spaces where human-made things butt up against natural things. Admittedly, the heath is hardly natural, particularly at this particular point as it’s just football fields, but you (hopefully) get what I mean.

On Thursday I bought myself a new 27mm lens for the Fujifilm xt2 camera I use and wanted to test it out before we go on holiday. It’s a very small lens and makes the camera a little less obvious, something I wanted for when I go to Delhi where I hope to try some street style photography.

Many of these garage doors are blocked by scrub, some are graffitied and some are pristine and obviously used. It’s also kinda weird that these garages back onto parkland that is part of Epping Forest, I’ve no idea how that happened.

I started the nicer second half of the walk just inside the A406, the dreaded North Circular road that slices through a large portion of northern London and is just a constant traffic jam. I’d just walked from Barking to Ilford so it was a relief to not be walking on the pavement of a busy road. I entered the ‘flats’ at the end of Forest View Rd, and it must be the most southern point of Epping Forest. There is not much forest at this point.

I walked past Alexandra Lake before cutting around a couple of football pitches with kids’ matches going on before I headed north west towards the ‘garages’.

I kept local landmarks Fred Wigg and John Walsh Towers as an earthly North Star as I walked. I’m trying to plan walks before I leave home so I rely less on the maps app on my phone. I feel like my memory is waning rapidly as I just rely on technology too much another thing I want to practise before I go away; though I suspect mobile phone theft is less endemic in Delhi than it is in London.

The heath is a mix of football pitches; mostly unused today, and small patches of bramble and scrub, with the occasional clump of trees tossed in for good measure. It’s criss-crossed by roads though both the heath and roads were quiet today.

It took about 40 minutes of weaving and wandering to get to the ‘garages’, and to be honest I was a little surprised I found them, my vague plan had worked! I’ve only ever walked to them from the other end and then taken a sort of random path back towards home. I’d never approached from this angle before so it was a confidence boost to know that my brain hasn’t fully atrophied with constant mobile phone use.

The new lens was perfect for these conditions; a narrowish tree and scrub lined path between fields and houses, the low, dull sky and drizzle needed a crisp and ‘fast’ lens and I’m happy with the results. The weather suited the subject material as well. This is a not-quite grotty bit of east London edgeland, it shouldn’t be photographed under a warm blue sky. Today’s conditions were perfect.

Fred and John stayed as my marker beacons as I cut across the deserted football pitches back towards a warm and dry home. It’s hard to believe it’s only 1pm.

When I woke up this morning I’d intended on making a full day of today, Eleanor is out with friends and I’d wanted to get a really long walk in, but after two hours out I was cold and my trousers and boots were wet from the long grass so I went home, put music on, edited photos and wrote this instead. No regrets, I’d had a good day, and not just because I bought chips from Leytonstone’s best chippie on the way home

The brutal buildings of Poplar, East London

Saturday 16 September 2023 – Poplar, London.

I enjoyed the third #brutaldayout photo walk today. I’m familiar with the core of the group, though today twelve set out from the coffee shop outside Blackwall Tube station. There were thirteen in the group for a moment and we either lost someone before we set out or this person accidently joined in as we assembled then realised it was the wrong bunch of people. Either way, it was the largest group we’ve had on a walk. Herding photographers is like herding cats, and we managed to lose two people over the five hours. It was a good group though and there was a lot of chat going on.

Boe and Irony mural outside All Saints DLR station.

Poplar is an area of East London that I don’t know well, though it is home to the first king of brutalist housing, the Balfron Tower and there will be more on Balfron in a later post. Poplar is proper London east end, it’s a working class area with a post-war mix low and high rise estates. It’s a multi-racial suburb and has, in parts, been allowed to rot, though I’m not necessarily saying race was a factor in allowing that decay. There are too few loud voices here nor enough of those willing to risk standing up to push the case for the borough. Poplar is part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and let’s just say the council is not unafraid to make decisions very unpopular with its citizens, though seemingly very popular with developers.

Poplar should be fortunate as it rubs up against the global financial centre of Canary Wharf, whose shiny glass towers stand proudly over, but maybe casting disapproving shadows over its rundown neighbour. You would hope the wealth would roll on down to its immediate neighbour, but, as always, that is not the case. Poplar is being gentrified, and not in a ‘nice’ way. Social housing residents are moved out and those who have bought their home in ex-council properties are ‘encouraged’ to sell. The estates are flattened and ugly new shiny things are built in their place; of course there is the promise that tenants can move back in, or new housing will be built for them nearby, but as we all know this rarely happens. ‘Cost over runs’ or other excuses means the developer can never quite meet their social housing commitments. Councils just roll over and let their expanding tummy get stroked and accept the heartfelt apologies from those poor developers. The worst part is a lot of those shiny new flats are left empty, unsold or with absentee owners, almost taunting those who were dispossessed. More on this with my post regarding Balfron Tower.

Our first visit was Robin Hood Gardens Estate, or what is left of it anyway. The estate was completed in 1972 and comprised two low rise blocks, one seven storey and the other ten, with a large green space between them. It was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and was their only housing estate to be constructed. The London Borough of Tower Hamlets was the landlord. After a battle to get the estate listed failed developers demolished the seven storey West Block in 2017 and new flats are now under construction.

The East Block is now empty and awaiting the same fate as the West. 213 families lived here, now there are none.

After taking a photo of the scaffold surrounded front door I tried the door handle and remarkably the door wasn’t locked…

All the doors to the ground floor flats were covered in steel, so to be able to access the stairwell was a real surprise. A surprise too much to resist for some of us, so we took a quick foray into the building. Ignoring the ‘no trespassing’ sign. Bad I know. We didn’t go far, up a flight of stairs to the first balcony. All the flats are blocked off and we didn’t do anything other than take a few photos and then exit. It was a cheap, no harm, thrill; and no security or police turned up (phew).

There is a short row of terraced houses at the end of the estate and those are all boarded up ready to be knocked down as well. I wonder what monstrosity will be built on this site and when? All these empty properties and we have a major housing crisis in this country. I shake my head sometimes.

From a small, litter strewn and slowly overgrowing hillock in the gardens we could get a glimpse of our next stop; Balfron Tower in the Brownfields Estate; a 10 minute walk away. My first proper view of Balfron was through this filthy graffiti smeared window. I was quite excited; this is a major work of brutalist architecture in the UK, though maybe not from this angle.

Anyway as I said above, Balfron gets its own post later. The Brownfields Estate also has the much shorter Carradale Tower situated at right angles to Balfron. Unlike Balfron, Carradale is still very much lived in. Though here is a sneak preview of why Balfron so cool.

The entire area around Balfron is fenced off, including the, possibly, excellent play area. We could only see if from afar.

The towers were both built to complement each other and to create ‘communities in the sky’, by the Hungarian design genius (and inspiration for the name for the Bond villain) Erno Goldfinger. They were built between 1965 and 1967 and (thankfully) listed in 1996, else I’m sure someone would have tried to knock them down. Goldfinger lived onsite for a few months on completion and spoke to residents about what did and didn’t work and incorporating their ideas in his next project of similar design, the Trellick Tower, which I walked past back in August last year.

As Carradale is a lived-in block there was some space to wander around the perimeter, while I don’t support taking photos of people in or near their homes, I also think it is important to acknowledge that there are certain buildings that are important works of art and need to be preserved for what they are. One way to do that is to take and share photos.

Glenkerry House sits over the road from Carradale and is also part of the Brownfields Estate. It was designed by the Goldfinger practice to mirror its predecessors opposite. Construction was completed in 1977. It’s supposedly the pinnacle of brutalist design and was the final brutalist tower constructed in London. The building is owned and run by those that live there.

We stopped at the pie and mash shop in Chrisp Street Market for lunch and a short rest, Chrisp Street is the oldest purpose built pedestrian shopping area in the UK. It’s the heart of Poplar and thankfully is yet to be ‘regenerated’, though you can see it’s coming. It was busy. A lot of the flats around the market are empty, including a nearby tower block. The market has a marvellous clock tower, designed in 1951 for the Festival of Britain delays meant it wasn’t finished until the following year.

St Marys and St Josephs Catholic Church was our next stop, a magnificent building, completed in 1952 to replace the original church that was heavily damaged during the Second World War. It definitely has a mosque vibe to its construction and wouldn’t be out of place as a Christian church somewhere in Asia.

This was followed by the equally impressive, for its amazing tower, Calvary Charismatic Baptist Church.

We completed the walk at another post-war church, St Pauls at Bow Common. Built in 1960 it has been voted the best post-war church in Britain. It was certainly different with its pulpit in the centre of the building and the parishioners sat around the minister. I quite like it.

Actually we completed the walk at a pub near Mile End station where we stopped to refresh after a hot afternoon of walking, talking and photographing modernist and brutalist architecture. It was another enjoyable outing and if you’re interested in joining the next one then let me know via a comment, we don’t have a date or a location yet; though it will probably be around Kilburn.

MeetUp Barbican photo walk

Saturday 11 March 2023 – Barbican, London.

We’ve been back from the sabbatical in New Zealand for just over a year, and the year seems to have completely disappeared. I haven’t shared a lot of news over that time, in some ways it felt like not much happened that was worth reporting; however, when I put everything down on ‘paper’ it was a very busy time indeed. In no particular order we’ve;

· Both had at least one (thankfully) mildish dose of Covid.
· Eleanor sold her house of 26 years in Walthamstow and bought another one in Leytonstone.
· We’re in the middle of having the kitchen replaced and have been microwaving and air-frying dinner in the sitting room and washing dishes in the bathroom for the last three weeks.
· There has been a lot of work being done on the building my flat is in and as director of the residents association it was a very busy, and stressful time.
· I’m trying to rent my flat so I can save some money when my mortgage goes up in June.
· I’ve got a new job that I start in May.
· Eleanor’s one year contract has been made a permanent position.
· I turned 60, (sad-face).
· We’ve taken two short and enjoyable breaks in Europe.

We want to do more of the European thing; and if I can rent the flat and save some money then European holidays will be definitely be on the plan over summer.

In the meantime, other than being busy with house related things and going to concerts I’ve been trying to beat my lethargy and get out and do more photography. I’m also keen to meet some new people and expand my friendship group a bit beyond the group we mainly hang out with now.

With those things in mind I signed up for a MeetUp Photography walk in the Barbican, which I think is one of the best places for brutalist architectural photography in London. I was hoping to be shown some new spots to take photos and had my fingers crossed I would meet some other photographers interested in walking round taking photos of buildings and things while not talking about camera kit as we go. I’m not that sort of photographer; I like the exploring and act of taking photos rather than all the technology that goes with it.

The Barbican Estate was constructed between 1965 and 1976 and comprises of some 2,000 flats and houses across three towers and some low level blocks. There is also the Barbican Centre mixed usage venue which has a fabulous mid-century interior. I’m planning on going back just to take some photos of the interior, a lot earlier in the day.

The whole thing is comprised of lovely concrete and to my constant surprise is mostly open to the public and the security guards don’t stop people taking photos. I hope this never changes.

It was an enjoyable three hour session, there were about a dozen of us photographers led by Alex from the London Centre for Photography who shared a few ideas and things to look out for to make the most of the environment we were in. We had 20 minute sessions across a number of zones in the Barbican precinct and I was shown couple of places I hadn’t been to before. Objective one met. I can’t believe I missed this place before.

While objective two was to meet more photographers I pretty much spent the three hours shooting on my own, which is I must confess, absolutely my preference. I chatted to people when we all got together between assignments and I did share Instagram names with a couple of people, one who I got on well with and had similar photographic inspirations to me. The rest of the group were really nice, but I didn’t specifically click with anyone. I will do one of these again though as it was fun and interesting and most of the things I wanted from the day.

After the session ended I went off with a couple of photographers to a nearby parking area to take these two images. we were so lucky this taxi was there and the driver was more than happy to move and stop under the light well. This is my favourite from the day.

I was really pleased with my photography though, liking most of the images I took. I am a fairly selective photographer and tend to shoot like I was still using film and rarely taking more than one photo of any given subject. I have been very happy with the standard of photo I’ve been taking lately and I take that as a good thing.

Here are the rest of the images I took. I’ve converted most to black and white as that format perfectly suits 60s and 70s architecture.