Endnote

I started writing my Walthamstow Notebook blog back in January 2015, in fact on the second of the month, so it may well have been a new year's resolution. As I wrote at the time, things in Walthamstow were changing fast and there were always things to write about: a period of transformation with gentrification and redevelopment just beginning to pick up pace. It's still going on of course - some places are now completely unrecognisable - but there are fewer surprises, even when we see planning applications for ever-taller towers, or yet another coffee shop opens up. The blog was a bit of an obsession for a while, but as usually happens with blog-writing the number of times I felt inspired to write something tailed off - regular posts up to 2017, then just one post in 2018 and one in 2019. I guess that's it for now. I still pay a tenner every year for web hosting, in the hope that it’s still an archive of interesting stuff that people would like to look back on.

Just one of many rainbow window displays during Covid-19 lockdown, June 2020.

Bell corner

The first thing I noticed was this striking portrait, painted big on a gable end facing Forest Road. Then it hit me - the giant scrolling advertising hoarding that's been there forever is missing. And about time too. Hoardings might in reality be less intrusive than Facebook, but they are much more visible, making the streetscape around them feel like a tawdry left-over, second-rate place. Waltham Forest council, if you're behind this - I can think of three more advertising sites offhand that could use the same treatment.

London award for Mini Holland?

Apparently Mini Holland is one of the contenders for the London Civil Engineering Awards 2018. Actually the award is for the engineers, not the Borough of Waltham Forest. The voting website asks the public to ‘pick the engineering project they believe has inspired and delivered a positive impact for London’. Our local entry is Enjoy Waltham Forest, widely praised and derided as Mini Holland. Part of the voting is a People's Voice poll, which will give all concerned a chance to show what they think, even if it won't change anything.

The strange thing about the shortlist is the disparity between the projects. This is the competition shortlist:

- The entire Crossrail line, massively disruptive but something that will make life easier for millions of commuters.

- The new Victoria and Albert Museum extension.

- An eco-friendly water treatment plant in Highworth, somewhere near Swindon.

- Two very big tunnels, one for gas and one for electrical cables, useful but unexciting.

- Two more unexciting entries, the maintenance programme for London's flood defences, and a temporary 'marine facility' whatever that is.

- London's ‘first plastic road’, experimental recycled plastic road surfacing in Enfield.

- Enjoy Waltham Forest, £27 million worth of road surfacing and bollards. And aspiration to reduce the dominance of cars of course.

We recently got a Copenhagen crossing at the end of our street, at least it's nearly finished. No fancy planters or street furniture yet, but I live in hope, and I did happen to mention it to the Labour councillors who came round canvassing a couple of weeks ago. It's not really making a huge difference to be honest, the street drinkers still hang out there and leave their debris for the street sweeper. There is no bin so that's not really surprising. But I did vote for the local entry anyway. There are no actual prizes, just the prestige of winning the award. In a way it will be surprising if Crossrail doesn't win, as it's easily the going to have the most positive impact for London as a whole. But Enjoy Waltham Forest could be in with a chance. The voting is here.

Footnote - Enjoy Waltham Forest was one of nine finalists. No overall winner.

Urbo bike road test

It took a while to get my hands on one of the new Urbo hire bikes, even after I downloaded the app and signed up. That’s because there are only 250 of them in the whole of Waltham Forest, so the chances of finding a bike when you want one are low. The app seems quite erratic too. I came out of Blackhorse Road tube looking at the map and it told me there were no bikes in my area. But across the road there were two of them, highly visible with their signature bright green wheels. Getting the bike to unlock was the first hurdle. The bikes just have a European style demobilisation lock on the back wheel. I messed up somehow and lost 50p, but the second attempt was successful. On the app, you click on ‘unlock’ then scan the QR code on the lock, and after a bit of a wait the lock pings open and you’re ready to go.

I had a good look at the bike first. Like a Boris bike, it is very heavy, has three gears and a kickstand, mudguards and lights. It doesn’t look as vandal-proof as the Boris bikes, with quite a few accessible bolts. It has a handy front basket with a sheet of brown plastic which turns out to be a photovoltaic panel to charge the electronics. I found the kickstand was half unbolted, and more seriously the saddle does adjust but although I’m not that tall, just six foot, the highest setting is not quite high enough. A Boris bike saddle will extend a good 10cm higher. Getting on the bike, I was immediately worried because it felt unstable, like riding with a flat tyre. Perhaps I should go to a petrol station and pump them up to a decent pressure? But there are no valves - the bikes have solid tyres, puncture-proof because they are filled with some kind of foam rather than air. You get used to it but there is a sideways wobble whenever you go over anything uneven in the road. Plus I’m riding with my knees slightly bent because the saddle is too low.

I rode my Urbo to the high street, left it unlocked outside a shop (but keeping it in view) while I bought a few things, and rode back with my purchases in the basket. Locked the bike and left it in the street outside my house. Two hours later it was still there so I made another short shopping trip, about 15 minutes for 50p. You are supposed to leave them in a designated spot which is all very well, but cycling is not like driving a car and then walking from a parking space, your journey is likely only short and adding a ten minute walk is not the way you want to use a bike. This time I left the bike on the corner by the main road where a lot of people could see it, and a short walk from the tube, but it was still there 24 hours later.

To summarise, these are not bikes that proper cyclists will like much, but they get you from A to B if you can find one available. The scheme is currently just £1 to join and you get £2.50 credit to start with, which is up to two and a half hours of riding, so you can join without any long-term commitment, on the chance that it will come in useful. It’s interesting that Urbo chose Waltham Forest out of the many areas that don’t have a bike sharing scheme, presumably because of Mini Holland. But the joining fee will go up to £30 eventually, which will not be worthwhile unless you can use it on a regular basis. At the moment this is an unreliable service, and it will not be much practical use unless they bring in a lot more bikes. Even then you will be restricted to the borough and any other areas Urbo might decide to colonise in future. It would be a lot more useful to have the London-wide Santander docking stations extend out to Waltham Forest and other outer boroughs, and I wonder if all the commercial bike sharing schemes make that more or less likely?

A bit of a shock

Now the reservoirs are officially open as Walthamstow Wetlands, there is nobody guarding the gates and you can just walk or cycle right in. It seems to have made a big difference. I've visited the reservoirs a few times over the years, and got used to being often the only person there, or the only person not fishing or having a job to do. So it's a bit of a shock to find the place suddenly full of people. The last few weekends have been spectacularly busy, the influx of urban hipsters, families with toddlers and even the odd bird watcher drawn by the opening publicity, and perhaps the sense that the site was a bit of a secret until now. In reality there was nothing to stop people visiting before, just a £1 admission fee to pay (except the ban on under-eights obviously put off the young family contingent). I think very few people either knew they could get in or thought it worthwhile visiting. Now with two additional entrances, it's easier to get in and I have to admit, it's also more tempting. I was expecting something much more regimented, like the smart new walkway where you enter the site from Forest Road. But that is the only place where visitors are confined to a walkway, and the rest of the site still has the character of a working reservoir with very little in the way of intrusive barriers and notices.

Passing the untidy billboards on Forest Road near the entrance.

The site is unfinished and today there are many signs that things are still being worked on, things being put in place and maybe strategies being developed. The engine house is finished but the Coppermill is still a construction site. There are photocopied signs taped up asking people not to run or cycle except on the designated concrete track. The old rusty bridge is still rusty but it has a nicely-designed new handrail bolted to it. Bits of old machinery, unrestored, are dumped anyhow on the grass next to the engine house. Big concrete blocks sit among the trackside weeds here and there, awaiting their proper place. Next to the cafe, temporary rope barriers and cones block off a big expanse of bare soil to give new grass a chance to grow. Bedraggled wildlife illustrations in plastic sleeves are flapping in the breeze along the cycle track. There are no bins except the big ones at the entrances - will that work? I rather like all this, and for this visit I want to focus on photographing that rather than the birds and empty expanses of grass and water.

The new walkway...

...with holes in the metal deck for trees to grow through.

The old brick railway viaduct was replaced with this concrete structure a few years ago.

The engine house, the showpiece of the new visitor infrastructure.

Unnecessarily bright bollards...

...and various temporary barriers.

Smart new railings by the new cafe contrast with old steel barriers.

Work on the Copper Mill is still being finished but you can just make out the new lift that will give access to the open viewing deck.

There are two electricity pylons on the site. This one in particular is known as a perch for peregrine falcons.

May Morris:Art and Life at the William Morris gallery

This small exhibition brings together a collection of work and artefacts by May Morris, who lived in the shadow of her father, William Morris, but successfully made her own way developing embroidery as an artform, living an artistic lifestyle and consolidating her father's reputation by way of the 24-volume Collected Works. The exhibition room is dominated by her large-scale embroideries, and the first impression is that tackling embroidery on such a large scale must be daunting. There is some very fine accurate stitching in some of the pieces, but often she sensibly used thick threads and large stitches to achieve large-scale effects, as you can see when you look closely, and she would have helpers to complete the large designs, some of them six feet high. Some of the hangings are protected by a rope barrier to stop you getting too close, but not all of them, so you can get a good idea of the amount of work involved in making an embroidery of that size. One double panel is stitched onto a fabric that already has a pattern woven into it, increasing the sense of richness. Another is based on a silk mesh so fine it's almost invisible. There is the original artwork for her best-selling honeysuckle wallpaper - I think my mother had that in her kitchen at one time, and it's still available at £70 a roll from John Lewis. Nothing ground-breaking though, nothing too far removed from the established Arts and Crafts pattern of interwoven foliage and decorative birds. And her birds are really not that well drawn, nothing to compare with the birds-with-attitude of the Strawberry Thief. Worth a visit, but not worth trekking half way across London.

Open House

At Open House weekend, once a year, all sorts of interesting places open their doors to the public. This year, Walthamstow's offerings included a hipster popup bar and a trendy house extension. It has to be said, there were not many venues locally apart from places that you can just walk into anyway, like the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum, but a little can go a long way. Nothing to compete with getting to visit the revolving restaurant at the top of the BT Tower (you have to apply on a lottery basis and I finally got lucky this time) but interesting enough.

We visited Sideshow first, the temporary bar space on one of the demolition sites next to Blackhorse Road station, a spin-off from Blackhorse Workshop that is only there until the end of the year. Although it is open for coffee in the mornings and as a bar a couple of nights a week, I hadn't seen it before, and the architects were there to explain about the place. It's colourful, a series of plywood walls painted in bright primary colours, with zigzag tops to remind us of the factories that have been demolished all over the area. The bar has a roof but most of the space is open to the sky. There are tables and benches, various bits of art to look at, a metal fence to lock your bike to. The colour is uplifting, as is the indoor-outdoor feeling on a fairly cold morning. The star turn though, is the Heath Robinson-ish ball race contraption. Turn a huge rubber tyre and steel balls slowly rise way above your head, propelled by a very long archimedes screw (like a wood screw but much bigger) until they reach the tipping point. From there they race round a complicated array of tubes overhead, making a lot of noise but, since the tubes are mostly opaque metal, it's impossible to work out where they are - you can only guess from the sound, and look out for them hurtling through the clear plastic bits. When the balls get down to the lower levels, there are levers you can pull to let them go a bit further, until they get back to the beginning. Worth a look on a normal opening day, probably a nice place to drop in when they open in the evening. Catch it before it closes and the excavators move in.

The other venue was quite different, a private house that has had a drastic overhaul of the sort you expect to see in Islington, not in Walthamstow. Or did until recently. Originally a quirky Warner house with tiny rooms, the back of the house has been extended to make a spacious kitchen / living room with big glass doors opening out to the garden. Upstairs, a new bedroom extension juts out from the back of the house, a tall bright space internally, on the outside clad in trendy charred timber. Charred timber is literally burnt black on the outside instead of being painted. It's burnt somewhere else, before being nailed on to the outside of the building. I was sorry to see the downstairs part of the extension - although it's also black - is not charred but painted, perhaps because all that burnt wood will blacken anything that touches it. The combination of old and new does work, up to a point. You have a sense that the original rooms are very much secondary, and there is inevitably something a bit jarring about the juxtaposition of old and new. One of the original front rooms is an office, the other is really just a way through to the back. But it helps having some old furniture in the new part. A bit of inconsistency makes for a more interesting place to live, and it's certainly a cut above the standard kitchen extensions and loft extensions you see all over Walthamstow.

Designing the town centre

On Friday I joined a group touring the High Street with members of the council's design and development team, an event that was designed to show off the many development sites in the area. The most interesting discovery was that the council have an office on the top floor of the Scene, a corner flat with great views across London. We met there for coffee and introductions before setting off to look at the quiet private courtyard for residents of the Scene. It's a car-free development. Is it true that (as rumoured) after three years tenants can get a parking permit? Nobody knew the answer but they thought probably not.

I spent two hours with an assorted bunch of architects and a contractor or two without really discovering what the purpose of the tour was or who it was aimed at. But as a resident it was at least a chance to make a point or two about the Mall proposals. We got to discuss (briefly) the loss of public space, 150 year old trees likely to be cut down, and the lack of joined-up strategy for the overall space including the bus station and Natwest. Vague plans for an overall strategy were mentioned but it certainly isn't at the stage of hiring designers to work out an acceptable solution, an alternative to the Mall's commercially driven proposals.

Isn't the value of the current square and garden their scale, large spaces flexible enough for all sorts of activities? No, the response was that a smaller space could be better designed and would provide somewhere to arrive at rather than just passing through. No, the trees are suffering from being too close together. The Scene is obviously a nice place to live and enhances the end of the High Street, tall but not too tall. But surely tall towers without their own public space are not going to enhance anything? I missed my chance to mention Grenfell Tower, but in any case we didn't get any response on that as far as I could tell. But it was pretty noisy, maybe I missed something when a refuse truck pulled up alongside our little group.

We looked at the shopfront improvements at the St James end of the market. Nothing to criticise there (except that whoever designed the new shopfronts ought to know that window sills need to slope so the rain runs off, otherwise they will go rotten). It's paid for by the council and lottery money about 50-50, about £3 million overall. Looks like money well spent (except for the window sills).

Lastly we walked over towards the South Grove site. Interestingly, there was talk about developing the dire bus park area behind the High Street, bringing that to life with new uses. Then the tunnel under the railway brought us into the old industrial area. The garages were all busy, and demolition of one large block is well under way. Nothing decided yet about the long-derelict pub. This site between the railway and South Grove is earmarked for tall blocks, which will be perhaps a bit like Tottenham Hale. What about the loss of business premises? Yes, they have to move further and further out. Could the small garage inits be turned around so they don't face the new residential area? NO, they are part of the land designated for development. Aren't there any plans to provide affordable business units elsewhere in the borough, perhaps where industrial areas could become denser? Well yes.. sort of, nothing definite though.

I would have liked to know more about the new requirement for significant planning applications to go to a design panel, but discovered nothing useful except that it happens. It was a frustrating morning. The team have obviously considered all the issues before, but the event (which to be fair wasn't designed for that purpose) provided only a hint about the reasoning behind the current official policies. Walking around provides immediacy but it's not really the best situation to discuss and understand the pros and cons of complex issues.

On the Art Trail

With so much to see on the Art Trail this year, it's not easy to plan a tour of sure-fire interesting spots. Two things quickly became apparent though: firstly, it's much more interesting to visit someone's space and talk to them about what inspired them and how they achieved what is on show, than it is to look at a shop window or an exhibition in a public space. The other discovery was that what looks uninteresting from the short entry in the trail guide can turn out to be absolutely unmissable. Here are some of the highs and lows from the places we managed to cover so far.

St Mary's church has a huge scrawly painting by Hassan Vawda, an unframed canvas suspended above the pews, featuring a rough bearded character who might be biblical but is most likely a self portrait. The high point though, is getting to squeeze up the narrow stone spiral stair to the roof, where you can see across London to the City and Canary Wharf (see first picture). The tour also included a demonstration of bell ringing in the belfry.

At Today Bread there's a board inviting comments on the question "What's the point of art?" A relevant question that deserves a decent-sized space for responses, not the baby-size Rymans notice board they have given it, but then it is a bakery not an art centre. There is some nice photogenic lettering on the window too, but no clues to what "Growing Culture" means - later in the day I googled "today bread growing culture" and got a lot of stuff about beards. "Why CEOs are growing beards" and "Why does God like hairy chins?". Google must think I can't spell.

Invisible Numbers at Winns Gallery in the park is a mixed show of interesting if apparently unrelated artworks, although the common thread is explained in their informative handout. Hannah Ford's circus banners stand out, both for size and colourfulness and for their political viewpoint - an image of Theresa May comes at an especially appropriate time, in fact very possibly just in time. Andrew Baker and Kirsten Sibley's work on early computers (with a Walthamstow link) comes closest to the Invisible Numbers theme. At one end of the gallery are Denise Ford's calm paintings of Suffolk rope-making, contrasting with Rebecca Ward's alien Face Invader, which pumps out techno music and looks too scary to try on. Although a succession young visitors are not so easily put off.

Hewing Wittare Project Space turns out to be an upstairs Warner flat with distressed plaster, work in progress awaiting architectural perfection. It's a show of work by three artists under the title "Shapeshifting – tactics to combat drowning" and the artworks all relate to the theme of survival, hence the floor of gold rescue blankets. Pictured is one of several papier maché objects by Rebecca Glover, designed to be worn as a mask or perhaps a helmet.

Back in the town centre, Paul Tucker's photographs of trees taken over the seasons are let down by the way the Mall shows them, cordoned off in a desolate spot by the lifts. They deserve to be seen much bigger and without the clutter. We liked the idea of The Mathematics of Plants, shown in the window of XL Hair Design, but we were a little disappointed. The description talks about the whirling spiral patterns found in a surprising number of plants, but the photographs rather conspicuously didn't show that. Danny Coope's Contraptions was also a bit of a disappointment, not because we didn't like his collages but because they are just photographs displayed at the front of his amazing front garden. We definitely wanted to see the originals.

In the next street along, Gomacg - Curious Characters is an open house showing colourful multi-layered paintings on pop art themes. It's well worth a visit.

I would automatically avoid anything that includes knitting in the description, but someone told me the Howard Road House is good, and so perhaps undeservingly discovered the amazing knitted garden up there. Isaac Newton with an apple suspended over his head is a specially nice touch, along with the Smurfs, Dr Who and Einstein.

And finally, I read the description of Danny Neon Open House / Creative Vandalism and decided not to put it on my list, I don't know why because we had an entertaining time looking at the website. Fortunately we went to have a look anyway. The venue is a spacious flat above a High Street shop. Steep narrow stairs lead up to eight rooms including the kitchen and bathroom, all packed with amazing creative clutter and thoughtful and/or provocative artworks. No neon to be seen, but plenty to look at, easily the most fascinating show we saw all day.

Get the E17 Art Trail guide online here

Veg without plastic

Fresh vegetables in a recycled cardboard box, with no plastic packaging. That is so obviously the right way to buy vegetables, but it is difficult to achieve in practice. It's all too easy to get vegetables along with everything else from the supermarket, but the quantity of plastic involved is becoming distinctly worrying, and the supermarkets don't care about the effect on the environment, only shelf life and marketing targets.

Last Saturday I set out to see if I could buy the week's vegetables without any plastic. I looked at the market stalls but got put off by the pound-a-bowl business, and decided to shop at the International Supermarket on the High Street. They are probably even less interested in being 'green' than Sainsbury's are, but (for different reasons) hardly anything is packaged. Most of their fruit and veg is displayed in the boxes it came in, inside and outside the shop. There are stacks of plastic bags but you don't have to use them. I cycled there (green transport!) and my shopping bike has a large box attached to the handlebars, plenty big enough to carry everything.

The selection of vegetables and salad ingredients in the Turkish-run shop is impressive, with many varieties that you wouldn't get in the big supermarkets: yellow courgettes, purple-and-white streaked aubergines and also white ones, long thin peppers in various colours, and lots more. Mostly the quality is good, although it's not consistent the way Sainsbury's is, but that just means choosing what is good and maybe trying something new, rather than deciding what to buy beforehand.

You collect purchases in a basket and most things can just go straight in, but it was impossible to avoid plastic altogether. Some things came with plastic packaging: celery is in a polythene bag, fresh chives come in cellophane and cooked beetroot is (unavoidably) shrink-wrapped. It didn't seem practical to get loose French beans so I took a polythene bag for those. I brought a used carrier bag with me for potatoes, so as not to push my luck at the checkout, also a big Sainsburys 'bag for life' to carry everything home.

I didn't entirely succeed in my plastic-free shopping mission. I underestimated how much would fit on the bike, so we needed to buy a few things from our local shops during the week. The comparative cost? About the same as Sainsbury's. And the actual saving on plastic bags? Sainsbury's often offer a choice between packaged and loose vegetables, and most of the things I bought could have been loose - so probably less than I expected.

Cherry blossom time

The street was lined with cherry trees, each one loaded with heavy clusters of pink blossoms. All exactly the same heady shade of pink. After all the streets we visited, all the little two-storey houses each with something right and something wrong about it, the cherry blossom swung it.

We were looking for a house we could afford in Walthamstow. There were things wrong with that house, like all the others, but it wasn't as bad as some, and there was obviously going to be a downside to every one of the houses that were for sale. This one had no fireplaces, an awful kitchen and vinyl wallpaper everywhere, but it didn't have pvc windows or a crappy home-made kitchen extension, or rooms that you could only get to through another room. And it did have a good sized garden with a cherry tree of its own. So we went for the immediate feel-good factor and put in an offer. Four months later we finally got the keys.

Every April pink petals made deep drifts on the pavement and in the gutters, and sprinkled the parked cars with pink confetti. Some of our down to earth neighbours thought it was a nuisance and swept them out of their concreted front gardens, but we were newly pleased every time. Our two growing boys were a plausible excuse for childish games, throwing handfuls in the air or at each other. Twenty years later, we still live there.

The trees must have been as old as the houses, nearly a hundred years old. The gnarly old trunks oozed resin and blocked the pavement in places, so you had to squeeze past between crusty bark and overgrown hedges. We lost a tree when the boys were still in primary school. The lady next door but one used to bleach her front yard every day, and the chemical run-off drained across the pavement into the tree roots, with predictable results. The council came and cut it down. Other trees disappeared, and the council filled some of the gaps with new trees, but they were all white blossom varieties, not pink.

At the end of the street is a little warehouse and lorries come most days to unload pallets of car parts in wooden crates, using a gas-powered forklift. The lorry drivers have a hard time parking in the narrow street, and several times they backed into my car, wrecking the driver's-side door just enough for an insurance claim, but not enough to make it worth getting the damage repaired. Eventually one of them managed to back into the tree nearest to our house, knocking it right over. I watched, torn between amusement and indignation as they decided what to do about it. They looked worried. Eventually they decided to hide the evidence by using the forklift to load the tree on to their lorry. Before driving off, they thought it would be a good idea to back the lorry onto the pavement to smooth down the patch of bare soil. Then they burned off in a hurry. I called the council but they were not very interested. So it was a surprise when a month later a new tree appeared, complete with two stout posts and a watering tube. As I write, it is getting to a decent size, past the stage of being easy to vandalise, and doing its best to resurrect the almost defunct pink blossom effect.

Last year most of the old trees were in a sad state, with obvious rot in the old trunks, and many dead branches. This year they all got cut down, all but three of the original trees, leaving stumps a metre high. Later, an expensive-looking machine came along to grind the stumps down to sawdust, and a new timber pole marks the location of each former tree. If that means replacements are on their way, maybe it's the beginning of another generation of hundred-year old trees.

The Lime Tree Walk etc.

Above: aerial view of the gardens as they are, with the reduced footprint outlines in green.

Redevelopment of the Mall came a step closer with their second exhibition of proposals, held in the Mall on 24 and 25 February. There is a bit more detail, but nothing much has changed, except the towers have become even taller. The area covered remains almost exactly the same. My particular concern though, is with their intention to build over a large part of the present Town Square and Town Gardens which, let’s not forget, won the Mayor’s Award for Planning Excellence in 2004.

The gardens were laid out nearly 150 years ago, in 1869. They were originally much larger, a big open space very similar to St James Park (the Walthamstow one, not the one in central London) with trees all round the perimeter and an avenue of trees running diagonally across the middle. Construction of the Mall and then the bus station account for two thirds of the original area, but what is left is still a decent-sized bit of green open space right in the centre of town. Open space is a valuable resource, and this serves a very necessary function, a space for things to happen, and a relief from the busy market and the densely packed streets of terraced houses. You can of course point to the many other parks and gardens, and in fact the borough as a whole is well endowed with open space, but that does not detract from the value of public gardens in this busy location where people congregate in large numbers. With the increasing population represented by the many new flats about to be built, that pressure will only increase. In my view building over the Town Square and Gardens is short-sighted and quite simply should not be considered. But there is every indication that the council must be providing active endorsement of the proposals to do just that. The proposals will result in a much smaller space, a busy urban park that is mainly paving with planting beds here and there, fragmented spaces that will not allow most of what happens there now to continue.

Above: the plan of the gardens after development. But ignore the trees, most of them will be replaced with saplings.

The Town Square is big enough for the many events that take place there. The evening screening of the Olympics opening ceremony was a highlight. Some of the things I’ve seen include a BMX stunt display and a cycling event where you could try riding all kinds of unusual bicycles. There was a regular French market on Saturdays for a while, out in the square, not where the Sunday market is. The Walthamstow Acoustic Massive packed the square. I’ve seen more than one rapping contest (I think that’s what they were) and various other musical events, not all of them evangelical Christian. There was a road safety event that brought in some beautifully restored vehicles including WW2 Jeep and the fire engine from the Pumphouse Museum, and an HGV lorry to show cyclists what the view from the cab is like - I may have misunderstood the overall theme, but the point is there was plenty of room for the vehicles, information stands, the usual market stalls and still room for people going about their normal business. The planned expansion of the Mall will reduce the size of this space to a “gateway”, not big enough for anything.

Then there are the gardens. A large undulating expanse of grass, room for kids to run around, for lovers to find a spot away from the crowd, a pleasure just to walk through at any time of year. The children’s playground nestles conveniently across from the Mall entrance. It’s a little tired but nothing that can’t be resolved. Sometimes there is a small funfair. Then there is the avenue of 150 year old lime trees, which I particularly love. It’s nice in winter with the bare branches and network of sparkling blue fairy lights. Spring and summer are amazing as the leaves come out and turn the avenue literally lime green. Even autumn has its moments as the leaves turn colour and fall. It forms a natural connection between the tube station and the market - which the Mall doesn’t like because, in simplistic planning logic, it directs the flow of people past them. It seems especially inconceivable that the trees might be better got rid of, chopped down to make way for what might or might not be called progress.

There is a problem with the gardens though: the space between the avenue and the bus station is a bit of a wasteland, not so pleasant to sit out next to the buses and the blank back-end of the library, with unfriendly gravel surfaces that are not really used for anything. It would make more sense to build here and leave the other side well alone. There is space to create shops and cafes where you could sit out in the shade, a habitable space along the edge of the park, and flats above looking out over the treetops. That is unlikely to happen though, what with commercial logistics and the issues of ownership and development capital. The Mall proposal is to cut down the trees so the bit of space left isn't split up. At least they don't want the space for an American-style car park, but as Architects E17 point out, the Mall proposals don’t provide a plausible strategy for the whole. It’s up to Waltham Forest council to provide that overall vision.

Note: the diagrams are based on published information and are as accurate as possible given the limitations of the material available. The Mall proposals are here. Click here to view the Lime Tree Walk video.

Another one bites the dust

This is the big Art Deco factory building in Burwell Road. It's the biggest feature of a little complex of industrial buildings, not the elaborate Victorian architecture that would perhaps be listed, but simply solid brick buildings with big Crittall metal windows, metal roof trusses and lots of rooflights. Nothing fancy apart from the decorative street frontage, but the buildings have a solid dignity that could have formed a basis for something really interesting, perhaps a mixture of flats, shops and studios, a place with a real sense of identity that would be an asset to this end of Lea Bridge Road. That isn't going to happen though. The site was sold for development, the developers applied for planning permission for flats, and despite highly vocal opposition, planning permission was granted without any serious modifications to the densely packed tower blocks that were drawn up. What is going to be built on the site is just flats, too many flats appallingly shoe-horned into the space to maximise profits. The last tenants have gone, and now the demolition machines are working their way across the site, leaving this imposing structure until last. It's unlikely to be a great place to live, let alone 'affordable'. The little two-storey terraced houses across the road are going to be diminished by the close proximity of very much taller buildings - and it is no justification to point to the familiar presence of the factory even if it is twice the height of the houses.

In a parallel universe, old buildings like these would be an asset, even when their usefulness as factories and workshops is over. All over the country, old industrial buildings have been rescued and turned into thriving popular areas, using the inherent qualities of no-nonsense industrial buildings to enhance ideas and enterprises that don't fit easily with modern development. Camden Lock made it work by using the old warehouses, stables and workshops for the thriving market. Covent Garden and Spitalfields markets were due to be demolished, but instead became successful as a different kind of marketplace. Borough Market, better managed perhaps by the long-established Borough Market Trust, simply made the transition bit by bit, acquiring some modern additions that blend in with the whole sprawling, hectic phenomenon. In Clerkenwell, businesses and flats occupy the old commercial buildings. But it takes a particular combination of development control, economics and enterprise to make that sort of thing work: buildings and land with little in the way of cash-in value, or protected by listing or conservation status, and often, enterprises working on a shoestring while they becomes established. Walthamstow's industrial buildings are mainly doomed simply because the land they occupy is so valuable, and except in rare cases there is no statutory protection. A huge swathe of buildings along Blackhorse Lane and Sutherland Road went in the last five years, with just two buildings - Gnome House and Blackhorse Workshop - left as inspiring examples to show what might have been. At this point I don't think there is anything major left to demolish.

Burwell Road, photographed November 2016 (above) and February 2017

Print show at the Mill

I entered a print for the current exhibition at the Mill, the community space in Coppermill Lane, and they asked for a website link - so I thought I would write something about the prints on show. The Mill isn't a commercial gallery and their criteria are simply that the artworks should be by local people, any age or degree of expertise. The results are quite impresssive, a fascinating sample of what creatively-minded people are doing in Walthamstow.

A lot of the prints are done with well-established traditional techniques, screen printing and all the print methods using a printing press: lino and woodblock prints, etchings and intaglio (must find out what that is). A few simply sent in a drawing. It's fascinating just trying to work out how some of the effects were created. I was evidently not the only person who looked for a way to produce a print without actually having a printing press. Several of the images are monoprints - a technique that can be as simple as using typist's carbon paper to transfer a drawing, and one exhibitor has done just that, creating a lifelike image of their dog. Others use the more traditional method of rolling out printing ink on a sheet of glass, laying paper lightly on top of the wet ink, and drawing or pressing on the back so that the image is formed by the contact of paper and ink, a nice smudgy or grainy effect rather than crisp hard lines. Surprisingly, there is not a single potato print.

My own effort (pictured) is only partly a print. I only had black and red acrylic paint so that dictated the colour scheme. The patterns are made by squeezing paint between two sheets of glass so that it spreads out into a thin layer, then when you pull the sheets of glass apart the paint naturally forms amazing fractal patterns. Lay stiff cartridge paper over the paint, smooth it down gently, and the patterns transfer on to the paper. I made a dozen or more of these, and spread them out on the kitchen table to decide how to use them. I cut out shapes and tried different ideas until I got to this abstract arrangement, then glued them onto black card. It looks decidedly worrying - someone said they looked like healthy and diseased lungs - and I don't think it will get hung up at home when the exhibition is over.

The exhibition Ink, Press, Go! opened on Monday and runs until 11 March.

More information on the Mill website

Architectural limbo

Right next door to the Victorian extravagance of the Bell pub in Forest Road, this little architectural gem goes un-noticed. Clearly, nobody cares about it at the moment, it's just a roof over the fish and chip shop and some no doubt awful flats upstairs. The crass metal facade of Tesco Express next door really doesn't help (although that is not Tesco's fault, it used to be Jewsons the builders merchants), boiler flues are crudely bodged through the fabric of the building, and if all those satellite dishes are not illegal they ought to be. Even so, the architectural quality is rather outstanding, crisp bold details carved in good quality limestone, set off nicely by the red bricks. The original shopfront is long gone, but the upper floors are basically intact. Date, at a guess, around 1910, a time when buildings were almost extravagantly substantial, if not always outstanding as architecture. It sits stranded between the pub yard and the single storey supermarket, as if waiting for better times.

Walthamstow has a reasonable architectural heritage - thousands of solidly-built terraced houses, some good civic buildings, the remnants of some fairly unexciting country houses - but not so many buildings like this, ordinary commercial buildings with a bit of class. We can't afford to build anything like as good now, for complicated reasons which I suppose come down to all the things people didn't have and didn't even aspire to in 1910, but do now. All the more reason to value what we do have, a wealth of decoration and craftsmanship that can't be replaced, and saves the modern city from uniform contemporary blandness.

Discussion point: wanting buildings like this to be cleaned up is arguably a sign of creeping gentrification, but does this sort of mess really represent some kind of gritty authenticity?

Filling a gap

We're getting used to seeing large buildings shoe-horned into every available corner of Walthamstow. Here though, someone has decided to build a little house, set back from the street and cautiously nestled up against the shop next door, where a much larger three-storey building would fit right in. I've no idea if that's all the planning department would allow, or whether the developer considered alternatives. Either way, it would be great to see the Forest Road / Palmerston Road corner rounded off with houses, to replace the hideous advertising hoarding that dominates the crossroads, and perhaps this is a start.

Architect's vision

On Friday and Saturday, Gnome House hosted an exhibition showing the proposals for the latest segment of the Blackhorse Lane development site, where new flats are replacing the old industrial estate. The exhibition represents two different things. Firstly, the way the Waltham Forest Action Plan has been implemented means that large blocks of densely-packed flats with no amenity space and no car parking is a foregone conclusion. Precedent was established with the first scheme to get off the ground, the student flats which simply fill their plot right up to the edge, as high as they can get away with, which is around eight storeys, a bit less on Blackhorse Lane. The second thing is the way the architects for each plot have tried (or not) to come up with a good design within the limitations imposed by the overall plan.

This section is right in the middle of the site, and will replace the commercial units facing on to the large TfL car park, but not the car park itself. It will be surrounded by tall blocks and, unsurprisingly, this scheme is also an array of tall blocks. The architects in this instance are young and enthusiastic, and I think they would have come up with something more sympathetic to the locality if they had an open brief to design appropriate buildings to fit in with the old terraced houses, the station and the flats across the busy Blackhorse Road junction. As it is, there is a clear expectation that the development has to be tall, economically planned to fit in multiple units of a standardised size and design.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was a nicely-made plywood model showing their work in progress on the design. The model has an interesting, rather charred-looking appearance. That is because laser cutters have become affordable enough for the average architectural practice to afford one, but not perhaps the top of the range that would cut without the burnt appearance. The arrangement of buildings is simple and logical, with a courtyard intended to be open (although it might end up with gates) and public access all round. The care taken with the design is evident in their detailed design drawings. Fancifuly, perhaps with unintended irony, some of the inspiration comes from the vintage buses that were built in the AEC (Associated Equipment Company) factory that once stood there. An interesting feature of the scheme is a long, low block occupying the sliver of land between their plot and the Standard. If all goes according to plan, that will be workshop / studio spaces, that will link up with retail units on the TfL site next across a pedestrian use - a much-needed element of non-residential use. I just hope it isn't value-engineered out of the design. There are also a lot of secure bicycle parking spaces.

It's much better than the appalling commercial blandness of the first phase, the student residences that are being built now. None the less, the overall ambience is going to be a bit like high-rise Hale Village next to Tottenham station, only higher: something entirely separate from the old Walthamstow.

The exhibition boards, but not images of the model, can be downloaded at www.equipmentworks.co.uk

A wet day at the reservoirs

On a rainy Sunday in October, a tour of the future wetlands site at the bracingly early hour of 10:00am. The place is lush and green in an autumnal way, dead seed heads and late flowers set against grey skies, everything covered in a film of cold water. We spot a hawk hanging out near the top of an electricity pylon, see abandoned waterways covered with bright green duckweed, trout fishermen casting flies (no floats involved) and an intriguing robotic strainer that collects rubbish and dead leaves out of the water, creaking into action every half hour. The reservoirs are gearing up for opening to the public next year, but activity is low key - the only noticeable change is lots of new reed beds around islands and edges. They grow on mats of coconut fibre and are fenced in to let them get established. There will be a visitor centre in the Victorian pumping station, but there is nothing to see there yet except scaffolding.

One of our tour guides was Silvia Krupinska, artist in residence, who explained a bit about her involvement with the wetlands project, which doubles as her MA Art and Science degree project. Her work is a nicely offbeat take on the natural life going on there. We also heard some vague talk about public art, which I hope doesn't mean well-meaning art installations dotted around the place. Art is good in the right place, but it's not necessarily a good thing to confuse matters by making little art experiences mixed in with nature appreciation.

The reservoirs still have a wild feel, more so than they will when they are inundated with visitors and all that goes with that, the designated routes, the wayfinding signs and safety features, and my pet hate, 'interpretation'. Actually, it will probably be great, but catch it now just in case.

Above: the robotic cleaner dumps floating debris on the bank every half hour.

Above: new reed beds.

Although it's a year until the wetlands open, you can visit any time - pay £1 at the entrance opposite the Ferry Boat Inn.