Pedley Street RIP

2011-08-16T09:34:00.004+01:00

I've just come across this 2009 paper by archaeologist Emma Dwyer, with a focus on the railway arches at Pedley Street and Grimsby Street:
'Underneath the Arches: The Afterlife of a Railway Viaduct'
The Great Eastern Railway Company’s viaduct in East London was one of the earliest, and most substantial, railway structures in London, transporting huge quantities of goods and people entering and leaving central London. Rather than considering the official use of the viaduct, however, this chapter will focus on the unofficial, parallel uses of the spaces underneath the arches, long used as a sanctuary and shelter, a series of secluded places where independent businesses and illicit activities thrived.
full text available at:
http://leicester.academia.edu/EmmaDwyer/Papers/130565/Underneath_the_Arches_The_Afterlife_of_a_Railway_Viaduct

Pedley Street Finds

2010-11-19T17:32:00.006Z

Here are some of the fabulous things found on the 28th July 2010 with Lottie Child and Street Trainees

Pedley Street Training

2010-07-28T21:31:00.011+01:00

On the 28th July 2010 walkwalkwalk led a session of Street Training/Campfire Conversations Summer Course, a project by Lottie Child at Spitalfields City Farm. The evening was aimed at presenting our work on Pedley Street and walking, as a means for introducing the course participants to particular ways of engaging with and discovering aspects of the city. The course members also introduced us to many new and exciting thoughts and aspects of Pedley Street. You can find out more about Street Training and Campfire Conversations here.

We discussed the Pedley Street site, which we have come to know in extreme detail over the last six years, and what it means to us. We visited particular sites - the Shoe Tree, The Incongruous Fig Tree, Shit Bridge, Pedley Street Arch, Pedley Arena, the stump of what was Fleet Street Hill, the unopened and now not-so-shiny-new cycle path - and recited walk stories related to those places, and also told oral histories of the places and encounters of Pedley Street. This included The Boys, Fear on the Bridge, Box of Shoes, Model and the Pedley Street Arena (written stories); and The Shoe Tree and Winos, Fight Club, the Fire/Soup stop and others 'orally.'

We wriggled under fences and amongst newly constructed feet of bridges.

We collected new objects for the Found Object Archive.

And talked a lot.

We gathered underneath the Pedley Arch. I was concerned that my favourite piece of graffiti was gone (one of my favourites), but it wasn't - it still says 'I LOVE JAN! YOU KNOW THE BIG POLISH GUY FROM SWEDEN' Who is this mystery man? and how big is he, I often wonder.

There was also a new addition beneath this writing, melancholic and beautiful (and quite literary) I thought:
IT'S SAD TO FALL ASLEEP. IT SEPARATES PEOPLE

Lottie mentioned having seen the walk fly posters under the arch a few years ago, with walk stories on them (perhaps The Model) and said it felt like the city was speaking to her.

We re-visited 'Shit Bridge,' the site of many previous crossings and memories, in particular the location featured in the walk story 'Fear on the Bridge' (please click here to read the story). Serena read the story aloud as we gathered around, listening attentively amidst the ubiquitous stench of urine (though in the absence of the occasional giant turd). There was some new and very shiny silver graffiti on the end wall, much blingier than the fragment of walkwalkwalk fly poster that had remained for years after it was pasted up (until grey paint obliterated it).

Pedley Street Arena

2010-07-26T15:29:00.008+01:00

In December 2009 Gail read 'A Christmas Anecdote – Pedley Street Arena' for Lost Steps' Christmas special on Resonance FM. You can listen to the programme here. The story revisits one of walkwalkwalk's nightwalks...

It’s Winter Solstice 2007 - not quite Christmas, but this is the night when walkwalkwalk have our ritual nightwalk, and it always feels festive. Tonight it’s so cold I feel sick; such intense cold that everyone is at their limit. This imbues the walking group and our Bethnal Green route with an atmosphere of ruthless bacchanal…a sense of something bubbling, struggling to burst out. Yet the night is also strangely still on the surface – thickly, damply, mist wraps around everything – leaving half-buildings, sawn off stumps. It’s like a ‘50s film with Dirk Bogarde, lingering on a street corner. Bogeymen emerge from the mist. The still, quietening of the mist releases fragmentary moments of acoustic weirdness, otherworldliness…and impending violence.

As we pass through the hodge-podge of 1960s estates and 1890s remnants, sandwiched between Brick Lane and Vallance road, twisting our way to what was Pedley Street and Fleet Street Hill, there is a sense of excited anticipation. We are nearly at the soup stop, the point where we traditionally have a fire, awaiting our arrival in a brazier. The luxury to colonise this spot has been possible as it is a gap in the city: odds and ends of insignificant streets and waste ground, railway perimeters, that nobody’s been interested in for years. But now the new railway is coming and the whole area has been sectioned off, closed in, covered over – Pedley Street is concealed behind hoardings and mounds of earth, the Railway Footbridge and Flying Hut are inaccessible, and Fleet Street Hill is only navigable through a corridor of wooden fencing. The area has become a flat, smoothed arena, contained behind high chain-link fences, and tauntingly flood lit. Above, on the old railway bank, there is a line of static machines – cherry pickers, diggers and cranes, left like musical statues, elegantly, hungrily poised. The edge of this arena is to be the site for our soup stop – still in enough of a no man’s land.

Ambiguous shrieks and grunts penetrate the thick air – they emanate from where the fire and soup will be. I run ahead to see what is happening. The kids who usually hang around, trying ineptly to mug the residents of Weavers House, have got hold of our axe, from chopping fire-wood. The lure of the shining floodlit arena has proved too strong. As the nightwalk arrives for our soup we hear crunching, cracking and smashing as the kids take the axe to the lights and fence of the construction site. Whooping and squawking with delight at their destruction, (though still too timid to go inside the arena), they express the desire that was palpable in the atmosphere. The Pedley Street arena summonsed this violence, taunted us to get inside and smash it up. We don’t get the axe back, though the kids do have some soup.

The Pedley Street arch towards 'the Arena'...

...and towards Shit Bridge.

Walk Fire Jumping

2010-07-26T15:15:00.001+01:00

Press play to see Gimpo (egged on by Gail) jumping over the walkwalkwalk fire under the Pedley Street Arch. On this walk, Winter Solstice 2008, Gail waited with Gimpo for the nightwalkers to arrive for their soup, as she had injured her knee and couldn't really walk. It is the mini-walk fire. We also have a full size brazier, with 'www' cut into the side, which we use when we are not injured - I'm not sure if Gimpo could have jumped over the big fire...

Fear on the Bridge

2010-07-26T15:00:00.001+01:00

We were walking one night along Cheshire street, about to go across the railway footbridge, which cuts through to Pedley Street. It's a very dark and secluded spot. I don't think there's any street lights, maybe there's a little light coming from the windows up above. The railway footbridge cuts through from an alley off Cheshire Street and over the railway. The steps down at the other end of the bridge turn a corner to the left, then turn another corner, leading down into a railway arch. Because of the turn of the stairs you can't see who might be coming round the corner. And as the railway arch is very dark, leading onto a cobbled lane, secluded from any main streets, there's not that many people passing through, sometimes a few during the day. It's also very scummy, dirty, with needles, shit, condoms, all sorts of filthy things. And so I guess, understandably, you imagine there's somebody equally filthy and scary who might be lurking round the corner, just out of sight ready to pounce on you as you go round the corner. So, as we approached the railway footbridge I felt the apprehension of all those things.

It was dark. It must have been about eleven o’ clock maybe. There was nobody really around. But we wanted to go over to the other side because it was on our route. So we tentatively approached the steps up to the bridge. And, we looked at each other, and we went up a bit further, further up the steps…and one of us thought we saw something at the other side, and one of us gasped. And I don't know who, but somebody shrieked, and we all went running back down again, screaming. And got to the bottom, asking each other 'What happened? What happened? ' 'Well, I heard you two getting a bit nervous, and I was getting a bit nervous. Then I screamed. Sort of joking but a bit scared, and kind of trying to make you more scared, but kind of believing it myself… and then we all ran down'… We couldn't believe how scared we'd been. And how stupid it seemed. Because however dangerous it might have seemed to cross the bridge, or whoever might have been lurking, the fear seemed to have nothing really to do with those ordinary fears of being attacked in the street by someone. It had taken on a kind of supernatural quality. Some kind of indefinable fear that was lurking along this bridge.

Shoe tree re-born

2009-12-14T00:15:00.004Z

The shoe tree rises again, this time on actual trees on the edge of the park, very close to the former location (a wire running across Pedley Street, outside Shoreditch tube).

This is how it used to look (Film still from August 2006)

diversion on the diversions

2009-08-17T20:34:00.005+01:00

I went to see if I could get through from Pedley Street to the foot bridge today, but it seems like it will be permanently inaccessible as the rising east London line extension emerges from underground right across the pathway.

The signs on signs, diversion over diverted.......

Paul Trevor Photographs

2009-06-21T22:05:00.011+01:00

Paul Trevor's collection of photographs of the East End has been partially digitised and is now online through VADS. There are 2 photos showing the flying hut at Pedley Street. The collection overview is at:
http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/EEP.html
One of the photos is from 1978, the year the City Farm opened (I think) click here to view

permission to reproduce kindly granted, © Paul Trevor, 2007 all rights reserved

and the other is from 1992, with an intervention in the flying hut, if anyone knows who this was by......
click here to view

permission to reproduce kindly granted, © Paul Trevor 2007, all rights reserved

some aerial views

2009-06-21T21:37:00.005+01:00

I just discovered that various online aerial photos haven't been updated for a while and still show the flying hut and other now departed features of the Pedley Street/Fleet Street Hill area.
Here are a few

Baba Yaga

2007-12-10T21:15:00.001Z

Chicken Legs Hut

2007-11-30T19:13:00.000Z

Alongside the recently appeared drawings of The Flying Hut (see earlier blog entries below) - etched into wet concrete - there is a piece of graffiti that has intrigued and puzzled me for some time. It appears to be written in the same 'hand' as the drawings, or at least at the same time, but is quite difficult to interpret. The first words are simple enough 'LONG LIVE..' But the final words were barely legible. Now, with some help, the whole graffiti has been interpreted - and sheds an interesting new light on the history and origin of The Hut. It reads 'LONG LIVE BABA YAGA'.

Baba Yaga is a common figure in Slavic and Russian folklore. She appears as a wild old woman or witch, who flies in a mortar using a pestle to steer. Crucially, in relation to The Flying Hut, BABA YAGA LIVES IN A CABIN ON DANCING CHICKEN LEGS. She flies in and out of the cabin on her mortar - entering through the chimney, as it has no windows or door. This folktale may relate to a popular construction method of Siberian peoples for the purpose of preserving supplies from animals - a cabin without windows or doors is built on the stumps of two or three trees - which look very like chicken legs. There is also evidence, discovered by the archaeologists Yefimenko and Tretyakov in 1948, that the ancient Slavs used huts of a similar construction in their funeral traditions – traces of corpse cremation has been found inside such huts. The drawing by Nicholas Roerich, c.1905, is of a ‘Hut of Death’, and clearly shows the resemblance of the tree-stump supports to chicken legs.

So, it appears that The Flying Hut is alternatively known as Baba Yaga’s cabin – and indeed there are some Flickr pages recently brought to my attention that refer to The Hut in its Baba Yaga guise

http://flickr.com/photos/albedo/267111527/

And under the pseudonym ‘House On Stilts’ there are images of the drawings in still wet concrete – perhaps we have found the originators of both the drawings and the Baba Yaga cult?
http://www.flickr.com/groups/396081@N24/

Flying Hut Over Railway Footbridge

2007-11-28T10:05:00.000Z

The Railway Footbridge AKA Shit Bridge

Flying Hut

2007-11-28T10:03:00.000Z

Flying Hut

2007-11-28T10:02:00.000Z

Flying Hut

2007-11-28T10:01:00.000Z

Steps Down to the Arch - Smells of urine, sometimes of shit

2007-11-28T09:59:00.001Z

The Boys

As we came over the railway footbridge, I could hear voices coming from round the corner, down the stairs. The voices were muffled, I couldn't make out what was being said. But there was an urgency to the sound - I thought luckily I'm not alone, it's a dodgy place. I wonder what's going on. At the end of the bridge we turned to go down the stairs, the voices louder as we turn again to go down the last few steps. We were suddenly confronted by three boys at the bottom of the stairs. Or maybe they were surprised by us. I could smell burning now, coming from below. One of the boys, in a red hoody, looked imploringly at us and pointed to his right, towards the railway arch. He said 'Those boys just made a fire. Those boys. They ran off.'
At the bottom of the stairs we turned into the railway arch, where the three boys were now, and the smouldering pile of fire in the corner. The boys looked at the fire and looked at us, convincing us, wondering what we thought. 'Those boys…' the red hoody boy said again, pointing away down the arch. I laughed and kept on walking.

*This isn't the smouldering pile mentioned above...but another Pedley Street pile.

Steps Down to the Arch

2007-11-28T09:57:00.000Z

Smells bad. Be careful not to step in things.

Under the Arch

2007-11-28T09:56:00.000Z

Under the Arch

2007-11-28T09:53:00.000Z

Flying Hut Drawing 3

2007-11-27T15:49:00.000Z

Flying Hut Drawing 2

2007-11-27T15:48:00.000Z

Flying Hut Drawing 1

2007-11-27T15:40:00.001Z

Three drawings of the Flying Hut have been discovered inscribed into fresh concrete, which was recently poured partially over the cobbled surface of Bratley Street. These drawings were made after the demolition of the original Hut.

Obstacle

2007-11-27T15:36:00.000Z

Winos' Brazier, out of action

2007-11-27T15:34:00.000Z

Flowers

2007-11-27T15:28:00.000Z

Corner of Buxton and Shuttle Street

Flying Hut

2007-11-27T15:26:00.000Z

From South of Pedley across Park to Railway Embankment

2007-11-27T15:24:00.000Z

Around Pedley Area

2007-11-27T15:23:00.000Z

Fleet Street Hill

2007-11-27T15:21:00.000Z

PEDLEY AUTOS

2007-11-27T15:06:00.000Z

East-West along Pedley Street

2007-11-27T15:05:00.000Z

Ex-Joiners Yard

2007-11-27T15:04:00.000Z

Obstacle 2

2007-11-27T15:01:00.000Z

Obstacle 1

2007-11-27T14:45:00.000Z

Under the Arch, early Summer 2007

2007-11-27T14:43:00.000Z

Pedley Street, 3/5/07

2007-11-27T14:38:00.000Z

Today as I am about to turn the corner from Brick Lane into Pedley Street I have a sense of anticipatory suspense. I know this pocket has been due for radical change, the days of the signal box numbered – the days of in-between-ness marked to give way to an opening up – the march of regeneration. I had heard that the slow encroachments had stepped up – from fenced off areas, tube closure, now to road closure; access denied. The chink of freedom in the overlooked Fleet Street Hill cobbled road, the bowel of the railway arch gradually backed up.

I feel the earth shuddering before I see why. The road is blocked at the Brick Lane end with a massive road-wide chunk of concrete. The Winos’ corner habitat is obliterated. The railway embankment to the left looks as if the top has been sawn off. I step past the concrete and continue along the cobbled anyway-narrow street – today even narrower, bisected by temporary orange fencing, and beyond the plastic fencing a ten-foot high wooden barrier encroaching into the park, the reverse side visible. A sign attached to the orange fencing reads ‘DIVERSION. FOOTPATH CLOSED’ – stating the very obvious.

Two workmen are hacking into the street ahead. I pause before I reach them and watch up to my left. I can see the open top of a lorry, backing at right angles towards the edge of the embankment. The lorry lifts its open top, which I see now, is filled with rubble. The tons of grey rocks are emptied down into a wide chute, as wide as a road, down the side of the bank. The rubble slides and pours with a release like long slow moaning thunder.

I continue along what’s left of Pedley Street. The cumulative hacking and pouring visibly contributing to the shuddering earth beneath my feet, but not fully explaining it – something over and beyond the mound of the railway, out of sight, must be responsible. The once isolated lonely spot is active and noisy, opened up, and at the same time sealed off. I expect as I turn the corner to the left, towards the railway arch, that here too will be mechanical busy-ness: the arch subjected to the same process, being cleaned and ordered and exposed. The wood yard to the left is scoured out; now workmen instead of salvage and wood clutter the yard. But ahead into the darkness of the railway arch I see that rather than the order and busy-ness I thought I might find, the arch is in its scummy element – perhaps having sucked in all the atmospheric degeneracy that’s been washed away around it.

The once pristine Joiners sign at the far end, for the Joiners/wood yard trolls beneath the railway, is defaced; there is no dim light shining out from the cracks in the panels of the arch. The floor of the arch has pools of something, strewn with bits of something else; unidentified stuff. I look along the sides of the arch for traces of familiar posters and graffiti. But the walls have blended into one mottled surface, like a paint palette mixed with too many colours till it becomes a murky substance. At the end of the arch, in the corner by the stairwell, the usual depository of fires and general crap, is the biggest and best ever heap of smouldering filthy unidentifiable masses – part clothes, part car, part electrical innards, part sweet wrappers. I step beyond and up the first flight of stairs to the bridge, which doesn’t let up in its hyped-up last blow out of filth. I step from side to side, holding my jeans up slightly, past condoms and turds. I turn the corner to the next flight of steps, and continue sidestepping more shit, and general sludge and slime. The bridge top is a wind tunnel of cans and packets and wrappers; a breath of fresh air from the dank urine and excrement flavour of the stairs. I descend the stairs at the other side; carefully and slowly, mindful of the slippery surface and the memory of Serena’s fall, bum and hand down into the muck. At street level, in the semi ‘courtyard’ formed between the end of the bridge, a yard door, and the windowless sides of two buildings - usually a last resting place for computer insides and outsides – the creep of the changes is visible too. The usually locked up high-gated yellow doors of the yard are flung wide open for the first time ever, to reveal an empty cleansed space. And a large clean shiny car occupies the space of the computer detritus.

Pedley Street Arch - AFTER

2007-11-27T14:37:00.000Z

Pedley Street Arch - BEFORE

2007-11-27T14:35:00.000Z