A Cycling Tour through Great Britain

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Defoe on Chatham Docks
“The building yards, timber yards, mast-yards, etc….. are like a well ordered city; and though you see the whole place as it were in the utmost hurry, yet you see no confusion, every man knows his own business; …..”

Journal note written in Chatham Historic Dockyard
The fluctuating morals of today have made the notion of Empire sour, so it might not be appropriate to say that within these mighty grey-blue sheds the noble glory of a nation was born.

Here the ships of a small island race were built plank on plank with their futtocks, flowers and half-timbers placed. Under sail they set upon the Medway tide with names of Victory and Fighting Temeraire written on their side. They returned much holed and battle burnt having destroyed the old and built anew - a world on which a sun could never set - and subjugated great swathes of people under the British yoke.
(Just as the good ships of Apple and of Google do today).

I wander in Nelson’s tread through the sheds now melancholically quiet where once the thousand voices of men toiled with their ropes and rivets driving and twisting into the wood and sail. All is now empty save for a seagull shitting from a yard-arm in dry dock and a man in a jacket of fluorescent yellow sitting on a chair tapping his feet in rhythm to a tune playing tinnily on his phone.

Traffic hurtles by beyond the brick yard’s walls and a tide comes in empty of its ships The queue for tickets is pitifully thin. I meander, tarry, pause and admire the piecemeal bits of Empire now no more and I, alone.

Continuum
The distance from Chatham to Rochester is short - but the urge for lunch after a morning of history is great. I ride five kilometres and have stopped for lunch.

Defoe on Rochester
“There’s little remarkable in Rochester, except the ruins of a very old castle, and an ancient but not extraordinary cathedral, but the river, and its appendices are the most considerable of their kind in the world. This being the chief arsenal of the royal navy of Great-Britain. The buildings here are indeed like the ships themselves, surprisingly large and in their several kinds beautiful”.

Journal note written over lunch in Rochester
What to visit in Rochester? A castle, a cathedral or Dickens?
I eat a lunch of apples and cheese and drink a bottle of Nelson Beer, and choose the middle of the three.

Inside Rochester Cathedral
Two chairs of hardened oak are placed on either side of the cathedral nave whose stones of quietness are disturbed by a man rushing off the street wearing dirty clothes. He sits panting, then places his small day pack by his feet and binds his hands together tightly in his lap. He stares wide-eyed at the sun-streaked altar. A volunteer comes across to greet him with her gun, apologises and aims it at his head. She pulls her finger and it squeaks. ‘All clear. It’s thirty-six’, she says with a medicinal smile tucked behind her visor.
From her right hand squirts a jet of seminal sanitiser and it splashes on his hands. A tear falls down his cheek.

Continuum
Into a frisky wind and a cloud racing sky, I ride home to London, fortified by lunch and history.

A journal note whilst pausing on Higham Hill on the Hoo Peninsula.
On this hill is an ancient type of quiet, matured by time and neglect. The light is so rich it has to be cut up into slices. From the hill the waters of the rivers Thames and Medway are seen, both are muddy and frothy, the colours of a sparrow. The lands are pockmarked by the lonesome figures of gypsy horses, many of which have been brought here and abandoned. Orchards and tunnels of plastic under which immigrant labour toils picking Kentish berries for the supermarket shelves. They live in crumbling caravans on the edges of the fields their washing blowing on lines in the wind. An outside tap drips into a red bucket where a dark-skinned man, half-dressed, cups water into his black hair.

Journal note written on the way to Gravesend.
A jay jetted alongside me for a while along a windy country road, and as it flew it turned its head to say, look, this is how it’s done, and then with a tip of a wing, it flew into the trees to laugh at me from a crack willow branch.

Defoe on Gravesend
“Having been often in the town, I know enough to be able to say, that there is nothing considerable in it.”

Journal note written in Gravesend
The Thames is grey and working hard under a scudding sky. Two barges filled with city waste huddle mid-river, pulled reluctantly down stream by tugs towards the hungry cranes which feast on the refuse like Malibu storks. On the opposite bank, chimneys smoke into the sky squat round tanks filled with oil and gas gleam white, whilst from upstream creeks and ports come ships in liveried yellows, whites and reds, decks stacked cliff high with Maersk containers smoke belching from their backward leaning funnels. Aggregates are mixed and concrete made on this side.

A young man with fag dangling from his mouth, walks past me as I watch these ships from the esplanade, his face etched with lines of weariness and toil. He sits on a bench two down from me, with hands deeply buried in jeans and shoulders hunched, he watches too, the boats and I think he dreams with wistful smoke-filled eyes, of a life beyond the seas.

Journal note written at Erith after some hard miles
There’s been nothing wistful about the last few miles. The many lorries, the innumerable cars, and the noise of industry, hammered my head. I rode on the segregated cycleways of Route 1, passing gridlocked traffic. Every road though the housing of Dartford was filled with polluting vehicles driven by the weary. I asked a driver, whose window was down, why.
‘They’ve closed the bloody bridge, haven’t they?’ he said. (The Queen Elizabeth Bridge, Dartford Crossing.)

Journal notes written beside the M25
Route 1 runs alongside the M25, separated by a metal barrier and a wide grass verge, which is filled with self-seeded Mediterranean plants, fennel, mallow, wild parsnip, rocket, hypericum , eryngium, mullein, teasel, wild chicory, euphorbia. Stateless seeds growing beside an English road. Very beautiful. Apple trees fill the hedge, ripe with fruit - having grown from thrown-from-the-window-cores.

Journal note written alongside the Thames.
Pleasant riding. Flat, along a smooth tarmac path beside the flowing Thames. Traffic-free. Nearly home again. Passed sewage plants, recycling incinerators, nature parks, mounds created by the excavations of Crossrail, expansive river views, grey flats and new homes in ubiquitous yellow brick. And an old tyre warehouse. The messy part of the river. Then around a bend, the the city’s towers rise grey and jagged against a heavy sky and I feel the thrill of an adventurer who is returning home on the rising tide.

Tyres at Gravesend — A disused tyre warehouse at near Gravesend.

Journal note written in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
I am sitting on a bench in the sun, trying to calm down having been round the mis-named National Maritime Museum. I am seething like a roiling sea. This museum is a joke. A total and terrible joke. It must be de-listed, have all government funding withdrawn.
We are a nation of the sea. Britain’s soft landscape, its chalk and limestone hills were once a seabed, its great public buildings built from sea-made rock. It’s weather is classified as maritime. Our wealth has been derived from the sea. Fish and salt, war and wood. Our maritime courage, our curiosity and desire to explore beyond our shores is unique amongst all nations. And for sure, like other Western Powers, we exploited what we found, for a nation’s self-enrichment. Around the country, there are monuments, squares and streets named after these men - and for seafaring, we are talking about men. Local communities are proud of their seamen sons. So one would expect that the National Maritime Museum would seek to celebrate some of the Nation’s maritime achievements.
No honourable and ancient institution - if you can see Britain as an institution - is without its ancient and dis-honourable crimes. This museum is hell-bent on denigrating every seaman and tabloidising every conceivable ill. No man in the National Pantheon is spared. They were all self-motivated crooks, rapists, lured by greed and self-interest. Drake, Frobisher, Nelson, panned. Exhibits focus on slavery, brutality, exploitation. ‘How do you think you would feel if a white person landed on your shores and claimed you for his Queen?’
What a joke of a museum. What a sorry place. Someone should take away the title, ‘National’.

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NCN 1 Chatham to Greenwich