Strange City: The Umarells of Bologna

Umarells by Wittylama is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

By Dan Carney:

One of the more eye-catching new words in last year’s edition of the popular Zingarelli Italian language dictionary was umarell. The definition accompanying this rather unItalian-sounding term read: “Pensioner who wanders, mostly with their hands behind their backs, at work sites, checking, asking questions, giving suggestions or criticizing the activities that take place there.” Although this might seem too specific to suggest particularly common usage, those from the Emilia-Romagna capital Bologna, where these elderly self-appointed foremen are a common sight, could be forgiven for wondering why formal recognition had taken so long. 

The term, which derives from the regional dialect words for “little man” - omarello or ometto - was first coined back in 2005 by Bolognese blogger Danilo Massotti, when he started cataloguing online the many umarells he came across throughout the city. The concept resonated. Before long, people were sending Masotti pictures of umarells they had spotted. Bolognese construction workers, on completion of works, began putting notices up at the sites giving the location of the next project. Smartphone apps giving these details also started to appear. 

The fame and popularity of the umarells has continued to rise, with the concept now well known throughout Italy, and their commercial and cultural presence has increased accordingly. The highest profile tie-in came in 2016, when Burger King recruited five for a video campaign to promote their new Italian branches. Franco (78), Clemente (69), Salvator (70), Ugo (73), and Adriano (81) became site foremen for a day, with surveyors to log their recommendations. The advert went viral. The Milanese company TheFabLab have also issued an umarell desktop action figure, cast in the familiar hands-behind-back pose, designed to watch over you as you work. Last year, a board game, La Giornata dell’Umarell (“the daily routine of the umarell”), was launched. Massotti, the originator, has published a number of umarell-themed books.

Umarells have also found themselves honoured in popular culture. In May 2020 the prominent Milanese singer Fabio Concato released ‘L’Umarell’, a song in which he describes an encounter with one during the COVID pandemic. Neopolitan film director Adam Selo is currently developing ‘Umarells’, a full-length to be shot on location in the city, in which the umarells rescue the city’s construction projects after workers go on strike.  

The most concrete commemoration came in 2018, when a square on the outskirts of Bologna was renamed in their honour. Speaking at the inauguration of La piazzetta degli umarells, city councilor Matteo Lepore told Italian daily la Repubblica: “It is a way of saying thank you to the many people who every day commit themselves free of charge for the common good.” Elsewhere, in Pescara, a real-estate company has installed umarell-friendly viewing windows in the fences around their sites.

Emilia-Romagna’s most famous umarell is Franco Bonini, who in 2015 was the recipient of a specially created ‘Umarell of the year’ award for his dedicated observation of a shipyard construction site in the comune of San Lazzaro di Savenna, a few miles from central Bologna. He is still recognized due to the TV and newspaper appearances arising from his victory. The title also came with the prize of a day as honorary site director, conferred by the town’s deputy mayor and the site’s project manager. 

Bonini’s temporary promotion isn’t the only example of umarells being given direct involvement in the construction process. In 2015, the coastal municipality of Riccione budgeted €11k to pay retirees to observe sites, monitoring delivery of materials to prevent theft. This year, Uniamo Riccione, a centre-left political association in the town, have launched an Operation Umarell recruitment drive in conjunction with mayor Daniela Angelini. The advert, a stirring call to arms for community-minded retirees, read:

“Are you over 60/65 years old? Do you love your city, your neighbourhood, your avenue, your house, your building? Do you want a better future for your children, grandchildren, family, for yourself and for your community? Do you want to become an “attentive observer” of everything that happens and help solve it? There is a sidewalk to be fixed, an architectural barrier to be removed, a family to help, a tree to protect, children to accompany to school, shopping for those who cannot move. If all this and much more is part of your wishes, you are the GRANDFATHER or GRANDMA for us!”

Those who signed up were given a direct line to both Angelini’s team and the town’s police in order to report issues, as well as a badge to signify their status as one with whom concerns could be raised. The scheme is ongoing.  

A cynical interpretation of the umarells’ rise may be that it simply represents a marketing opportunity, a chance to drum up cash or attention, or – in the case of the Riccione initiatives - a neat way of getting around municipal funding gaps. But the fact that they continue to resonate, over fifteen years after their identification, might also stem from Italians’ inclusive and respectful attitudes towards older people. Italian life expectancy – and the proportion of the population over 65 - is among the highest in the world, with the elderly more visible, and integral to the family unit, than in most other developed countries. The celebration and inclusion of Umarells may, in part at least, be a result of this. 

Nevertheless, some of the connotations are undoubtedly negative. Massotti’s initial characterisation - old men with nothing to do who get kicked out of the house early by their wives - feels slightly derisory, although he has always emphasized the term is meant to be ironic and affectionate, rather than pejorative. The word has also become an everyday Italian expression for those who stand on the sidelines offering advice but never getting involved, a kind of Mediterranean analogue to Harry Enfield’s meddlesome and judgmental “you don’t want to do it like that” character. In 2021 Lepore, so approving when helping to inaugurate the umarell square but now running his (ultimately successful) Bologna mayoral campaign, stated in an interview that his political approach was proactive, rather than that of the umarell. Everyone knew what he meant.  

Overall, however, the umarell phenomenon has brought about more good than harm. As well as enabling the celebration and inclusion of the elderly, their ongoing popularity may also signify that they offer a still-living folk memory, a familiar Italian archetype that provides something reassuring: seniority, experience, and a prioritization of communal benefit over corner cutting and profit. This may be particularly pertinent given current economic and cultural uncertainties, with many feeling unable to trust that those in charge of infrastructure have their best interests at heart. 

This may, of course, be over-analyzing what is simply a funny observation of a universally recognizable subgroup of the Italian populace. But whatever the deeper reasons for the ongoing popularity of umarells, it is clear that they have something to offer beyond unsolicited sideline advice and a neat line in anoraks. 

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Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychological research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Strange City: Thomas Willson and the Primrose Hill Pyramid

Artwork: Laura Haines

By Dan Carney:

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, increased migration into London and rising fertility rates caused the city’s population to almost double, from 750,000 in 1760 to 1.4m by 1815. Burial space was at a premium. London’s graveyards, generally centuries old, were already foul smelling and disease-ridden, overpopulated and unfit for purpose. Bodies were buried on top of others, with older corpses sometimes even exhumed, then scattered, in order to make space for fresh ones. By the 1820s, with the widespread implementation of cremation still several decades away, it was clear that the problem had grown too pressing to ignore. A lively public discussion was underway regarding the reformation of interment practices. 

A popular idea was the building of large out-of-town garden-style cemeteries - something first considered over one hundred years earlier by Christopher Wren - but architect Thomas Willson suggested an alternative solution. Inspired by the craze for ancient Egypt that was sweeping Europe, Willson proposed the construction of a vast pyramid mausoleum atop Primrose Hill. With a 40-acre base as large as Russell Square and a height of 1500 feet (four times the height of St. Paul’s), the 94-storey, granite-faced structure would contain 215,219 storage vaults, arranged honeycomb-like along concentric corridors, accessed via ramps and hydraulically powered lifts. There would be capacity for five million bodies, as many as could be interred in a more conventional 1000-acre “horizontal” cemetery. At the summit would be an astronomical observatory.

Willson first exhibited his idea at the Kings Mews exhibition space at Charing Cross in 1828 before publishing the plans in full two years later. He described his pyramid as a “coup d’oeil of sepulchral significance unequalled in this world”. It would “teach the living to die, and the dying to live forever”, and be the centerpiece of an ornamental site, where families coming to pay their respects to loved ones could picnic on the grass outside. It would also offer investors the chance to make a killing - freehold vaults would cost between £100 and £500, depending on size and location, with further income generated by leasing additional vaults to parishes. Willson estimated that, once filled - at a rate of around 40,000 burials annually for 125 years - his structure would bring in a profit of almost £8.2m. He set up the Pyramid General Cemetery Company in order to promote the project to interested parties. 

Reactions to Willson’s ideas were mixed. The London Literary Gazette was unequivocally hostile, writing: “This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have generations rotting in one vast pyramid of death… is perhaps the most ridiculous of the schemes broached in our scheming age.” One prominent figure in the burial reform movement, John Claudius Loudon, was impressed with the capacity but also had reservations. Writing in the Morning Advertiser, Loudon feared the expulsion of foul-smelling gasses – “mephitic exhalations” - and was also perturbed by the idea of bodies being buried away from the earth, in “…any way which prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and becoming useful by entering into new combinations – vegetable, mineral, or even animal, in aquatic burial.”

Willson’s plans went as far as being presented to parliament in 1830, but interest ultimately petered out, with planners and architects favouring the idea of garden cemeteries. Willson, however, persisted, resurfacing over two decades later at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851 with a model of a “Great Victoria Pyramid” mausoleum, earmarked for Woking Common but similar to his previous plan in most other ways. The project received favourable press coverage and another attempt was made to find investors, but interest again waned. Willson’s last sepulchral pyramid-related activity appears to have been in 1853, when he was accused of defrauding a young man called James Sykes, who had offered a £200 inducement loan to anyone offering him employment. Willson hired Sykes in the office of a “British Pyramid National Necropolis Company”, and had received the money, but had fired him several months later with no sign of repayment. Willson died in 1866, but his idea endured, at least in his own family. His son Thomas, also an architect, submitted a plan in 1882 for a pyramidal mausoleum to house the body of the recently assassinated US President James Garfield. Garfield’s widow was, however, unimpressed, and chose another design for her husband’s final resting place.  

Although the likes of Kensal Rise, Highgate, and the City of London demonstrate that the garden cemetery enthusiasts won the argument, Willson’s abandoned plans offer an intriguing insight into an alternate London, one in which his pyramidal sepulchre – taller than The Shard – would be the highest building in the city (and third highest in Europe), one of its most debated and controversial structures. The designer Laura Haines offers a glimpse into this parallel world in her 2016 project Metropolitan Sepulchre, envisaging the vast structure amidst the Blitz, then surviving as a tourist attraction, dominating the modern skyline. 

The Egyptian theme may have been a voguish peculiarity of the era, but with burial space running out in cities all over the world, particularly those high in populations for whom cremation is taboo, the idea of vertical burial structures in London – or its vicinity - may one day resurface. Some boroughs are now completely out of space and are “recycling” existing plots, back to burying fresh bodies on top of old. Vertical burial methods have been used in other cities for a while. The world’s tallest cemetery, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos, Brazil, opened in 1983 and hosts around 16,000 burial units over 14 storeys. Current extension plans will see it rise when complete to 32 storeys, with space for 25,000 units. Echoing Willson’s vision of his pyramid as part leisure destination, the building also features a tropical garden, with turtles and a waterfall, as well as a classic car museum. 

In Petah Tikva, Israel, a 22-metre high structure at the Yarkon cemetery offers space for 250,000 bodies, with Judaism’s requirement that bodies be buried in earth cleverly fulfilled by dirt-filled pipes inside the building’s columns, technically connecting each layer to the ground. The six-storey Kouanji Buddhist temple in Tokyo requires mourners to use swipe cards to have their loved ones’ remains delivered to them via a conveyor belt system. Ideas for vertical burial structures have also been seriously discussed in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Paris, Oslo, Mexico City, and Verona. It may be that Thomas Willson’s ideas, usually a strange footnote in articles on unrealized buildings or 19th Century Egyptian Revival architecture, were simply slightly ahead of their time. 

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Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked as an academic psychology researcher, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

The rhythm and movement of place: an interview with Jack Cooper

By Dan Carney:

Anyone familiar with Modern Nature’s compelling blend of psych, folk, prog, and pop will know that the band’s main songwriter Jack Cooper draws plenty of inspiration from the rhythms and movements of the places around him. Debut collection ‘How to Live’ explored the transition between the urban and the rural, while last year’s ‘Annual’ beautifully evoked the seasonal cycle. Forthcoming album ‘Island Of Noise’, available via the Bella Union label from November 19th, tells the story of an imagined island; its evolving landscapes, mysteries, and customs, as experienced by an outsider.  

‘Tributaries’, Jack’s recent guitar/saxophone collaboration with band mate Jeff Tobias, consists of two unhurried, minimal pieces inspired by Wicken and Debden Waters, streams that meet the River Cam near his home in Newport, Essex. Spidery note clusters and playful, conversational phrases give way to smooth harmonics and hanging, resonant silences, alternately restless then still. Instruments and melodies unite, separate, and then rejoin, perfectly capturing the babble, flow, and meander of natural streams. The result is one of the most beguiling and vital British experimental/improv releases of recent times. I was lucky enough to ask Jack all about it…

How did ‘Tributaries’ come about?

Over the last few years, I've become more interested in figuring out a language for making music like this - things accelerated when I started to play the trumpet and involve myself more in theory and notating for other musicians. My working relationship and friendship with Jeff has really given me a lot of confidence. His enthusiasm and openness has been inspiring and key to me exploring these different routes.

What did you set out to capture on the record?

It's difficult to explain, but more than anything I've written before, I feel it has achieved something that I'm not really able to articulate with words. I've had some nice messages from people conveying back to me what I think I intended, which is interesting. The intention behind the systems and score is very different from the finished pieces, because the intention there was to capture a conversation between myself and Jeff.

What was it about Wicken Water and Debden Water that inspired the two pieces?

On a surface level, these two bodies of water are fundamentally the same; two streams that feed the River Cam. But they are completely different in every way from one day to the next - depth, speed, the various life contained within - the molecules will probably never pass here again. So these pieces of music are similar in that they're never the same twice, but on a surface level they're the same. I've been making a film, a visual accompaniment to the new Modern Nature record and that's based around shots that highlight order or symmetry within the chaos of the natural world. I think that's something I'm trying to find - order within the chaos.

Jeff has said that the record is “based on systems written by Jack melding composition and improvisation”…

The systems have more in common with geometric patterns, based around what I consider to be a more logical tuning of the guitar. I improvise around them and from that a score is composed over a period of time. The performers devise an interpretation of the score and that's what you're hearing here. For these recordings the systems and then the score are really secondary to our interpretation, in that the aim is exploring a sort of melodic collectivism. The main consideration when performing the score and contributing to the overall work is to consider your own personal interpretation of what 'collectivism' means. If the foundation of the piece and its purpose is the 'main melodic theme' or the 'score', then how does your own interpretation of collectivism fit in with that and what can you contribute towards the end goal? What aspects of the score can your performance highlight, support or compliment and how can your use of rhythm, timbre, harmony and intent serve it best?

It’s evident on this record that you’re influenced by 1960s/70s left-of-centre British jazz/improvised music. Which of these artists are worth checking out, for people who may love Tributaries but not be familiar with them?

The music that has got me the most over the last couple of years is Philip Thomas' collection of Morton Feldman's piano music which came out via Another Timbre. I think the pace of the music made me realise how context is everything. With enough space between them, any two sounds can make sense. They've also just released a collection of John Cage's Number Pieces by Apartment House, which has a similar clarity. 

Are there plans to do more?

Absolutely, this is just the beginning really. First steps perhaps, but I'm currently working on a piece that's more involved in its composition so I'm getting to grips with how best to realise that and where to take it. I'm also working on new Modern Nature music as well and I think the lines between these two strands will probably blur a lot more over time.

How would you compare where you live now to where you were before, around the Wanstead Flats part of Epping Forest? 

It's easier to ignore the city here.

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‘Tributaries’ album on Bandcamp: https://astributaries.bandcamp.com/album/tributaries 

Pre-order the forthcoming Modern Nature album ‘Island Of Noise’:
https://bellaunion.ochre.store/release/250629-modern-nature-island-of-noise 

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Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychology research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Memories of Elsewhere: Westcliff Parade, by Dan Carney

Photo: Marc Pether-Longman

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Dan Carney:

It’s a number of things that will keep Westcliff Parade in memory shortly after you’ve left, when venturing further than 500 metres from home will become an exotic and reckless act, and your mind will be constantly occupied by the newly inaccessible.

It’s the curious way it can feel windswept and deserted here even when the air is still and there are people all around. It’s the grand old Westcliff Hotel, brilliant white and offseason-empty, as well as the Cliffs Pavilion theatre just beyond, a strange but compelling blend of art deco and brutalism, a 1950s Butlin’s building imagined as a cruise ship from the near future. It’s the gentle decline, on one side, to the seafront between Southend and Westcliff, and the Cliff Gardens, a multi-tiered Edwardian pleasure garden set into the slope and stretching all the way along to the Adventure Island amusement park. A tastefully verdant point from which to take in the not quite unending view of the never quite empty sea; the first widening of the Thames Estuary, and the Isles of Grain and Sheppey. The Canvey Island skyline to the right and, to the left, Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world.

The gardens were designed by the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose other works include the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan presidential residence in New Delhi, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Lutyens was also responsible for the memorial to Southend’s own Great War dead, a freestanding eleven-metre obelisk of Portland Stone that also resides here, further along at Clifftown Parade. His daughter Elisabeth, a prominent composer, had a similarly diverse career, pioneering her own technique of serial composition – an approach involving the equal usage of all twelve notes on the chromatic scale – scoring a number of 1960s Hammer horror films, and drawing admiration from Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, and Stravinsky. 

But what will make this short stretch linger, more than its panoramic views, impressive landscaping, or aristocratic architect-composer bloodlines, is the thing that has brought you here. Dad died two days ago, fading away peacefully – and expectedly - in a nearby care home, following a long period of illness. You’ve been here since, staying at the Westcliff Hotel, helping Mum with death administration and trying to provide general support.

Between you, you’ve been working down the list – getting the death registered, cancelling the pension payments, transferring the joint account into a single name, going through the production line notification of friends and relatives. There’s a bleak humour in how mundanely procedural a lot of it is, how the infrastructure of eight and a half decades of unbroken existence can be so easily dismantled or reassigned. There isn’t much humour, however, in how nothing either of you do or say seems enough to fill the new gap, a vast, weird expanse it’ll take time to explore and understand. For now, it’s less complicated to collect the certificates, make the appointments, and sign the forms, all rituals which - at this moment - seem to exist solely to enable the deferral of the more ambiguous stuff.

Even so, you spend a lot of time while you’re here wondering what’s going on. Even when death is foregrounded by decline and inevitability, a release when it finally comes, it’s still a punch in the chest. You’ve been standing on the track watching the train approach, able to do pretty much anything to prepare for impact, except get out of the way. And if it’s hit you hard then Mum, after 55 years of marriage, has been hit harder still. What it leaves is more than just simple sadness or loss. It’s a disorienting blend of the fluid and the fixed. Panic and permanence, everything rising and spinning around a monolithically immovable core. A contradictory thing which won’t settle or be made sense of, leaving you feeling like a switch waiting to be flicked, a punch yet to be thrown.

As if to reflect this, Westcliff Parade dissolves and reforms daily. In the mornings it’s a marvel of Edwardian seafront elegance, the gardens stately and welcoming, the timber- and glass-fronted houses inviting unhurried admiration. It’s not hard, in the bright mornings - even months before the summer crowds will arrive at the beaches below - to feel the energy and possibility that must have crackled through here in the 1800s and early 1900s, when Southend was an exclusive seaside resort, the destination of choice for well-heeled Londoners.

In the evenings, however, the desirability and bustle of years past are nowhere to be seen or felt, overwritten by darkness, dread, and decades of affordable overseas holidays. Westcliff Parade is the chilly precursor to hasty Wetherspoons meals, eaten late and alone in the cavernous converted post office off Southend High Street, before the trudge back to the hotel. It is yesterday’s place, shuttered and embalmed, offering no restorative views or palatable metaphors for death and grief. It doesn’t want you here, and it makes sure you know it. It watches disapprovingly, tallying your steps and keeping track of every minute you stay.   

On the last day you are here, the duties are mainly done. The morning is clear and crisp but the answers, unsurprisingly, are still to appear. You check out of the hotel and find yourself standing at the top of the Cliff Gardens in the rising wind, surveying the choppy estuary. You look across to Canvey, then down at the couple on the bench. In the months that follow, you’ll sometimes feel like you’re on your way through, but more often like an engine sputtering quietly to a halt, a box boarded under the floor.

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Dan Carney is a musician/writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Snaresbrook Road

By Dan Carney: 

Snaresbrook Road is a perfectly straight 800-metre stretch, bisected by the border separating the outer London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Redbridge. At the road’s western end, there’s the scruffy ambiguity of Walthamstow Forest, alternately idyllic and unsettling, the start of a narrow passage of woodland that leads to the widening of Epping Forest at Chingford Plain. To the east lies the suburban village of Wanstead. An affluent and comfortable place, but also one with a recent history of radicalism and subversion, the location of a series of noisy public protests in the mid-1990s against the construction of the nearby M11 link road. Now, however – at a glance, anyway – Wanstead is all boutiques, tasteful cafes, and posh second hand shops. A place of satisfaction and prosperity, tethered and tiled, declared one of the capital’s top ten places to live by The Sunday Times in 2018.

This contrast between the two ends of Snaresbrook Road, between unpredictability and conformity, also runs side-to-side. There’s regimentation and structure, represented by the public school Forest, Snaresbrook Crown Court (housed in an imposing Elizabethan-style mansion designed by the famous Victorian Gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott), and the concentric functionality of the adjacent Hermitage housing estate. On the other hand, the numerous woodland paths leading to Hollow Ponds, as well as the debris-strewn Eagle Pond - which separates the eastern end of the road from the court building on its oak-lined southern bank - embody nature, improvisation, and secrecy. The area directly behind the pond is Epping Forest’s most active homosexual cruising site, an eastern Hampstead Heath analogue, where tissues, used condoms, and other sexual debris can be found strewn in thorny undergrowth. It’s played host to these activities since before World War II, when gay sex was yet to be legalized, and the existence of homosexuality yet to be acknowledged in any widespread form. Now, the forest authorities accept that it happens here, with keepers working alongside LGBTQI organisations in order to promote good littering practice.

Snaresbrook Road thus takes you from the panoptical to the concealed, from the administrative to the unrecorded, in the space of a few dozen strides. It’s a syncretic centre line, a starting point for any possible tangent, where high court judges deliver verdicts of public record a few yards away from furtive, fleeting woodland liaisons. Footfall is, however, sparse, and even with the opulence of the court building, as well as Eagle Pond’s considerable size and appeal, Snaresbrook Road’s in-between status ensures it never quite feels like an actual place. Semi-fluorescent joggers, returning dog walkers, and waterfowl enthusiasts – the latter eager to inspect the mute swans, moorhens, tufted ducks, and Canada geese that gather at the water - trudge a thoroughfare that seems to have been implemented only as an afterthought. A connective in search of a destination; a lonely, infinite corridor, laid in the absence of other planning initiatives. 

This unreality frequently induces a dreamlike lull through which thoughts emerge unhindered and unanticipated, free to idly swirl and reform, fluid and spontaneous. This fuzzy ambience can, however, quickly harden into something sharper and more hostile. Sometimes, in the half-light of dusk, when the clouds hang low and still, and there is a lull in the traffic hum, the fronts of the flats and retirement homes opposite the water can appear as two-dimensional facades, fabricated or adapted for the concealment of something undesirable behind. Flattened imitations intended to mask and deceive, like the two “houses” comprising 23-24 Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, which hide an uncovered section of railway line, or the brownstone-cum-subway vent on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. The fact that there is nothing which might need concealing, or ventilating, behind the buildings here does very little to lessen the paranoia. When it hits, one is left disconcerted, keen to wander around the backs of the buildings to seek reassurance amidst the car parks and the gardens. 

Eagle Pond, unprotected from the road by railing or wall, stands as testament to our relentless appetite for the arbitrary division and allocation of land. Its banks are owned by different entities, with the City of London Corporation, Her Majesty’s Court Service, and the London Borough of Redbridge each responsible for a particular section of the surrounding grass or concrete. The water body itself, which has likely existed in some form since the eighteenth century, was adjudged part of Epping Forest, and thus the responsibility of the Corporation, in 1882. When you stare across it as you walk, it’s not hard to conjure the sensation of floating serenely across the surface, like an overfed waterfowl or even a piece of fetch-driven litter. Sometimes, even on an overcast, uninviting afternoon, the urge to dive gleefully into the water can be momentarily overwhelming. Although the pond is covered in islets of green algae, it would likely provide an excellent place to float or wade, separate from everything but still visible and contactable from the pavement twenty metres away. This may be the standpoint from which Snaresbrook Road is best experienced; present but not completely involved, removed but vigilant, with a watchful eye on all sides. Even if the buildings don’t quite feel real, the birds seem happy enough. You’d probably get used it as well, given time.

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Dan Carney is a musician/writer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Dan on Twitter

In Walthamstow Forest

By Dan Carney: 

Wide, flat dirt paths carving through lush woodland, open meadows flanked by wooded corridors and undulating, densely covered glades. Clusters of hornbeam, oak, and birch, many ancient, pollarded at the top to encourage further growth, presiding over hundreds of plant species; grass, herb, nettle, weed, fern, and wort. Underfoot, the fossil-rich London clay soil, hard and stiff but deceptively quick to churn during wet weather. Birdsong mingling with the low, umbilical hum of traffic on the A104, Epping to Islington, everywhere between, periodically suppressed by the sound of a plane or the sudden and invasive whooping of a siren. Bisected by both the Woodford New Road and the endless, disheveled North Circular, this is the beginning trickle, the tentative first stretch of the north-east London woodland panhandle which will open out into Epping Forest proper, and eventually creep, pleasingly, just beyond the confines of the M25. This part of the forest is a scruffy outpost, often overlooked in favour of its more storied and unbroken counterparts. There are no visitors’ centres, Iron Age settlements, or Grade II-listed timber hunting lodges here, but the paths lead, eventually, to all these things.

The first path, approaching the southernmost entrance to Rising Sun Wood, is inauspicious; a thin, dusty track, cracked and dry in the summer months, running through an open field, reassuringly parallel with the 1930s semis of Forest Rise opposite. The entrance is marked by a wooden post, painted white at the top, ground-secure in the shadow of the trees at the top of Greenway Avenue. Underneath the first flourish of woodland canopy, the path widens, becomes even and firm. The trees are tall, with dramatic branch formations exploring every possible angle. Some are hollowed out, exposing tender white bark. Dead trunk husks lie everywhere. A sparse glade foregrounds the wrought iron gate of the St. Peter’s-in-the-Forest graveyard, where the headstones are lopsided, covered in ivy, many rendered semi-legible by weather and time. The air is comfortable and still.   

Just to the north is an open, unkempt meadow. Large oaks guard secretive glades along one side, hash paraphernalia and half-empty chicken boxes strewn at the thresholds. Opposite, behind the incongruously shiny Empire Lounge on Woodford New Road (“Enjoy The Food, Enjoy The People, Enjoy The Vibe”), lays Bulrush Pond. Bog-like, derelict, murky water mostly obscured by large clumps of reeds. Once there were paddle-wheel boats, ice-cream kiosks, and deckchairs, before widespread car ownership enabled the leisure-seeking families who gathered here on bank holidays to travel further afield. It’s quieter now, but by no means deserted or bereft. Joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, families on short-hop rambles, occasional equestrians, and groups of teenagers punctuate the calm, but now it’s less organized, no longer an end point but a backdrop, a surrounding, or a point on the journey. On a warm summer’s day, the meadow feels enveloping, hermetic, unconnected to anywhere else, only leading back to slightly differing iterations of itself, like a gently fluttering audio loop or blinking, cyclical visual display. Bucolic and restorative, a place to think things through, but always with something flickering away, faintly, off to the side. A made-for-TV fever dream poking through the idyll. Layers and stories just beyond the lens flare, unseen, unarticulated but ready to emerge and speak, when the wind rises and the nights draw down.

Back inside the forest cover, the track splits around a stubborn old hornbeam, its knotted roots securely encased under the top layer shingle. The route to Mill Plain is kinder here, on the west side of the A104, where there’s no need to engage with the fractured grimness of the Waterworks Corner pedestrian interchange. This is where the path breaks clear of the cover and ramps up, knobbly, cracked, onto a raised, open ridge, where the track bends gently through the long grass and willowherb. To the right is the Thames Water pumping station, its wonky rear steel fence offering negligible protection from anything with sufficient stature and determination, and the Waterworks Corner roundabout, only metres away. South Woodford to Redbridge, Barking, Beckton, Woodford Green, Loughton, Epping. To the left, the scoop of the Lea Valley. The atmosphere is sleepy and strange, ominously peaceful. Twin paths converge and slope down towards Forest Road, the occasional tent visible through the bushes, and the sharp tops of City of London buildings poke through the trees. Look into the valley-dip from the bridge adjacent and it’s Walthamstow, Tottenham Hale, Edmonton, Harringay, Alexandra Palace, Brent Cross. Stadiums, reservoirs, retail parks, antennae, the ever-present wash of the traffic, distant and interior.

On the other side, nestled behind the roundabout, is a raised, circular grass platform, flat, wide, and empty, aside from a shabby Thames Water brick hut at the edge. Marked, appropriately, as “The Circle” on Google Maps, it offers readymade laps for joggers, and numerous exits, down the tight, surrounding verge, back into the cover of the forest. Manmade and incongruent, barely visible from the road, it’s easily cast as the site for something more atavistic and obscure. A sacred place, where anonymous figures gather to offer up euphoric human sacrifices to a provincial woodland deity. A landing site for a small extra-terrestrial reconnaissance craft, carved out to order by devoted earthbound aides. A place to hide in the open. Stay too long and the joggers, smiling and efficient, assume – possibly through no fault of their own - a slightly sinister, collective aspect.

The path to the bridge over the A406, just beyond, is gravelly and uneven, bricks and slate pieces baked into the dirt, recalling the clay pits and brick kiln once residing nearby. A well-covered passage, accessible via a tight, cosy glade, runs parallel with the road, overlooking it. Thorny and narrow, discarded carrier bags hanging forlornly from bushes, a person-thin viewing corridor for the unending, thrusting snake of the daylight Walthamstow traffic. Crossing the bridge, to the South Woodford side, is a journey of metres but feels like an escape from this exhaust-choked claustrophobia into something wholesome, time-frozen, pastoral. The trackway widens, getting flatter and kinder underfoot. The canopy is less oppressive, offering a pleasing combination of light and shade. Patches of sunlight cast through the trees, dappling the floor. Little private clearings just off the main track lead into exquisite mini-mazes. To the left, an intricate branch structure built around a large horizontal trunk, and a carved stone memorial marking the birth site of a celebrated gypsy evangelist. Everything honeyed in yellows and browns. With minimal effort, you can block out the vehicle drone. Approaching the open field in front of Oak Hill, boundaries begin to dissolve; thoughts flicker and fade, hazy before they have fully formed. You start to feel drowsy, detached, separate, before the sudden rustle-rush of a small animal brings you back, sharply, to jittery alertness. You turn and hurry back the way you came. The sun hangs low and follows you, blinking and glinting through the gaps, and the temperature starts to drop.

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Dan Carney is a musician and writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He also has a PhD in developmental psychology, and has authored a number of academic research papers on cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, writing, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur. Dan on Twitter.