Blasts from the past
18th February 2022
Riding on the Crayford Marshes
The bike is propped up against a chain link fence, which separates a muddy track from a wide expanse of rough pasture. Scattered in the grass are pools of mercury coloured water and grazing horses with long, scraggy tails. The colonisers of the city’s edgelands - brambles, elders and thorn trees - are preparing for their spring offensive across the path. A weak winter light picks out the white hulls of the ships docked on the other side of the Thames and traffic silently crosses the giant QE bridge.
Slade Green Filling Factory
I stand for a while, bathing in the silence of London’s most southeastern point, before pulling from a pocket a folded black and white photograph of a small group of women. They are having a break from work, their dresses dirty, their caps askew and they are laughing at something said just as the shutter clicked. Within days of the photo being taken, six of the women would be dead. Ninety-eight years ago today, in the Slade Green Filling Factory which stood in this field, these laughing women were extracting gunpowder from unused Verey light cartridges. There was a spark and an explosion. Six of the women in the photograph along with another five, were killed. A funeral was held, the procession was a mile long, and a memorial was erected beside the grave in which they were buried.
Kestrels and blackcaps
A kestrel hovers over the former site in the field. Nothing now remains other than perhaps a field mouse breaking its winter dormancy. In summer, I’ve sat here and listened to the chorus of whitethroats, blackcaps and stonechats, but today all is quiet save for a light wind which wheezes asthmatically through the rushes bordering the river. Further down the path, there’s a hint of green leaf exploding free from its bud on a hawthorn branch. A dandelion has burst into flower and a hungry buff tailed bumblebee drones above it. The views are wide, the sky huge.
The bombing of Dartford and the marshes
This is a bruised land, which nature is restoring. More bombs were dropped in Dartford and around these marshes than in the whole of London. German bombers, unable to make it to the city’s docks, discharged their loads and fled back home, chased by the tracer bullets of the anti-aircraft guns which were placed all around here. As I bump along the top of the sea wall, I see their last remains; rough concrete stumps standing isolated in the grass.
Wells Fireworks Factory
Some three metres below me, the river Darent slips off the muddy banks and slides towards the sea. The area, being low-lying has always been prone to flooding. I’m riding towards the 1980s flood barrier at the mouth of the river, where it joins the Thames. It looks like an enormous guillotine. They could have done with that in 1953 when the famous tidal surge swept across the marshes, over the sea wall and into the Wells Fireworks Factory, resulting in a massive explosion which blew out 500 windows of a nearby hospital. The twisted skeletons of the buildings are still seen across the river; pieces of asbestos hanging limply from iron girders, walls caved in like puckered cheeks.
Scrap merchants
Where the path joins the Thames, the mood and pace change. There’s noise from the industry which lines the Thames and people are walking along the river path. Behind a wall, scrap metal is piled high and a magnetic claw pulls screeching pieces from the pile into the back of a truck. In the river two huge barges move quietly, their holds filled with waste from the city, destined for the aptly named Mucking landfill site further downstream.
The bewitching land
The bike seems to know this path well; it’s been here many times. It bounces along, passing the 8,000 year old tree stumps now emerging from the Thames, and together we pass the pony which is always tethered to a post just off the path. Soon, I will have to negotiate the fly tipping by the barrier and I’ll return to the city. But, just before I do, I turn once more to marvel at the silver pools of water in the rough mounded grass and enjoy the sight of the wild ponies with their heads down tugging at the grass. Despite the many tragedies that this part of remote London has experienced, it is a bewitching land; beautiful, complex and wild.
Link to the ride here