In the land of smashed bushes and crumbled earth
The river Thames from Rainham Marshes
Riding the National Cycle Way Route 13 from London to Chelmsford.
‘The land of the smashed bushes and crumbled earth’
Joseph Conrad - ‘The Mirror of the Sea’.
The A13, which runs from Aldgate in the City of London to Southend-on-Sea must surely be ‘the ugliest road in Britain’. It runs angrily and nosily, carrying goods and people through a blighted landscape of dust, filth and grime. Lining the road are grey drab blocks of forgotten estates, shopping centres half shut-down, disused docks, belching chimneys, and mangled metal parts stacked in contorted piles. The trunk road’s younger sibling, the National Cycle Route 13 tags alongside it for the ride.
The first few kilometres are fair and sanitised. They are a fine example of ‘the safe and accessible traffic-free paths for everyone’ that Sustrans, the charity who run the National Cycle Network, are trying to achieve nationwide. First, the Tower of London, with its murderous past bleached clean for visitors, and the docks of St Katherine’s all purified and yachtified. Then through the gentrified parts of Shadwell, Wapping, and Poplar, where you’ll ride past masted ships in a former tobacco dock, and past the calcified stones of a Hawksmoor Church. The route winds serenely alongside many canals more Venetian than London, their clear waters patrolled by herons in search of lunch. There’s even a sandy beach, where the hot rider can rest, or even swim in the enormous Royal Docks. The first section of this route ends in the shady trees and parks of Beckton, famed as the home of Europe’s largest sewage works. Here the official signage for route 13 stops. The rider is left to find his own way to the next signed section, some sixteen kilometres distant.
If one saw the next few miles of urban punk as a shaky silent movie, winter light picking out its bleak beauty, you’d find it haunting. But this is no film. This is real time riding with its sores and sensory overloads turned to maximum. There is a violence to this road. Its vibrations, its air drilling noise, its deeply scattered glass which lays strewn across the cycle path, its dust and heat which put collectively seek to destroy all but the most determined spirits. Breathe deep the fumes, marvel at nature destroyed. Even the brambles and buddleia cannot live here. Everything is monstrous, ugliness in all its beauty.
Then as suddenly as a summer storm passing, the grit and grime are behind us, and route 13 reappears again on a sign leading to Rainham Marshes. Cycling returns to the pleasure it was. The amorphous land, neither sea nor earth, is full of creeks and cries of birds high in the deep blue of the amethyst sky. Concrete barges used in the assault in the Normandy invasions of 1944 have been dumped in the mud, history left to rot. Until twenty years ago, the reeds of Rainham were pummelled by the MOD, now marsh harriers and hobbies patrol the skies. Patient men with raw beef faces, sit sweating under hats waiting for a favourite bird, their binoculars hanging like seed pods around their necks.
Beyond this demi-urban paradise is a shapeless territory, of cranes and cruise ships, containers and cannons. Joseph Conrad called it ‘confused and impenetrable, unplanned…… as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds’. It’s desolate place to be - a place of shining-black mud-flats, its roads lined with the grey of industry. Drills and rivets squeal in metallic pain, dust swirls like desert djinns from wastelands and the signage for route 13, just like a false friend in a time of need, disappears. The narrative of any long distance ride calls for struggle and once again, the cyclist is left alone to find their way to the exit door of London.
The loneliness is intense. The bleakness crawls around in despair. Everything is a hurdle. On a map this pitted and rough gravel road is marked as a bridleway, a legal route for bikes. Yet, the gates and styles are too narrow for bikes to pass. Sea walls are broken, some paths are closed ‘for safety reasons’. The low-slung ancient forts of Tilbury, and Coalhouse barely visible above the dykes, growl in the corner of the marsh, like a guard dog on a chain in the shade of a yard.
Somewhere north of Stanford-Le-Hope, route 13 begins again. It deigns not to turn into Basildon and Billericay but skulks like a hound in search of richer pickings around the boundaries and into the tree-canopied lanes of Essex. There, behind the walls and key-padded gateways, are monstrous executive houses as ostentatious as they are ugly. The narrow lanes smell of rubber and nettles. The former due to the lads in their cars pushing the corners with speed and the latter wilting in the climatic rainless times.
Once again, at Chelmsford, route 13 disappears like estuarine mud on a rising tide. Sustrans have joined it with route 1 and so I ride looking for a new number on the posts all the way to Colchester. The road rises up the cliffs that bulwarked ancient seas and across fields freshly shorn of grain and my lungs breathe the ochre dusts of harvest, whilst my tyres collect flint chips from the stoney by-ways.
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Later, at the day’s end in a pub where I drink beer, caked in the dust and grime of the day, a stranger begins a distanced conversation and having heard my tale, asks why. Why take the ugly road? I thought for a while, unsure of what to say. What reason could I give for riding so, across the blighted land?
There was no quick and easy answer. Over a couple of pints we spoke of curiosity, of a human need to undertake journeys and see them through no matter what they bring. Of collecting the dust and dirt of the way. That we need a balance between the serene and beautiful, and harsh and hard. I like the brutality of industrial wastelands, I explained - they have their own romance, even on the hottest of days.
‘Have I inspired you with this tale of mine to ride the route which I rode today’?, I asked my drinking companion. ‘Have I excited you with the ‘lust of knowing what should not be known’’?
‘No mate. No way’, he responded. ‘But I tell you what - I’m glad you done it. Saves me from doing it - that’s all I can say’.