W a y m a r k s ~: The "Isle of Bow"

I have a special fondness for islands. I’m not entirely sure why, but I am drawn to them. From small islands in rivers to larger islands far out at sea, the fact that they are pieces of land elementally bounded and set apart lend them an exceptional appeal to the imagination. Arriving or departing from islands is always an act of transition. By their nature islands are sequestered. Islands undoubtedly appeal to the romantic imagination – think of the myths associated with tropical islands such as those in the South Seas or the Caribbean, palm-fringed sandy seashores with tranquil, turquoise lagoons. These places are often associated with notions of escape – not necessarily in the classic swashbuckling, adventurous sense of pirates, shipwrecks, and struggles for survival, think of Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island, or Lord of the Flies, but more often in terms of a consciously sought-after escape from the relentless demands of our increasingly urbanised worlds, think of Paul Gauguin and Taihiti, Herman Melville and the Marquesas, or Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, … or even the long running BBC radio programme, Desert Island Discs (!). The search for the perfect island is more often than not the search for something elemental in ourselves.

The writer and composer, Paul Bowles, more commonly associated with the empty deserts of North Africa, once sought out a tropical island paradise as a counterpoint to the solitude of the Sahara. In the 1950s he bought a small island, wading distance away from the southern shores of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he wrote his third novel, The Spider's House (1955). Reminiscing about his island in 1985, he wrote: "Like most people, I have always been certain there was a place somewhere on this planet that could provide the necessary respite from all reminders of present-day chaos and noise, a place to which one could escape and, having escaped, shut the figurative door, there to breathe pure air and hear only the sounds provided by natural forces. So it was with tremulous excitement that I first saw the little island of Taprobane, in Weligama Bay off the south coast of Sri Lanka. Here was a site that seemed to have all the requisite qualities: It was scarcely more than a hummock of black basalt rising above the waves of the Indian Ocean, yet was heavily covered with high trees that left visible only a glimpse of the house at its summit. I had never seen a place that looked so obviously like what I was searching for. And I felt that it was aware of me, that it silently beckoned, sending forth a wordless message that meant: Come. You’ll like it here." (Paul Bowles, 'An Island of My Own,' in Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 [2010]). The island remains an inspirational retreat even today. The house which Bowles describes, originally built in the 1920s, has now been converted into a luxury hotel and is still an alluring artistic retreat enchanting writers, artists, and musicians alike. As evidenced most recently by the electro-pop chanteuse, Kylie Minogue, who stayed there in 2006 and was inspired to write a song, Taprobane (Extraordinary Day), about the island, echoing those ideas of sun-soaked isles as timeless, transitional and healing, transformative places.

It’s definitely this kind of notion of islands as worlds apart, places of escape, personal paradises, or places of spiritual retreat which appeal to me and have led me to seek them out. Visiting Lindisfarne on the Northumberland coast in the early 1990s on a day trip was made all the more exciting by the fact that access to the island was time-limited to the sweep of the tide that periodically covers up the causeway which is the main means of accessing the island. It reminded me of a similar but somewhat different childhood trip to Saint Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, where we walked the causeway to the island and returned by boat after the tide had cut us off from the mainland. Lindisfarne is different though; it feels much more remote. It was formerly used in Saxon times as a monastic retreat, hence its other appellation – “Holy Island.” Yet even here, standing on the shore of Lindisfarne, one is reminded that there are still ever more remote and inaccessible places set just beyond one’s reach, even at Lindisfarne – for instance, Saint Cuthbert’s Isle, where the Saint dwelled alone for long stretches of time in the seventh century, which still today at high tide remains just as remote and unreachable across the water further out from Holy Island; now only inhabited by the descendants of the birds with which Cuthbert used to commune.

Some of my most enjoyable memories of travelling have been to explore islands in different parts of the world. From the very remote, such as Guam in the midst of the Pacific, or the distinctly atmospheric, such as the little island at the far end of Lake Bled in Slovenia, to places set distinctly apart from the continents they are connected to, such as the islands of Malta and Madeira, to smaller, scattered archipelagos such as the islands of Matsushima in Japan, the coastal islands of Croatia, and the myriad islands dotted about Hong Kong – on one of which (Peng Chau) I got separated from my travelling companions, and, without any mobile phones to help us find one another, I found myself marooned by them as I continued to explore the island from tip to tip of all four points of the compass, whereas they’d already given up hope of finding me and took the boat back to the mainland. I took a later ferry and eventually caught up with them, as I’d expected, in our favourite bar in Kowloon, milking the fact that they had so heartlessly abandoned me like a latter-day Alexander Selkirk or Ben Gunn! – It seemed incredible we’d managed to miss each other given just how very small the island is; we must have each spent a good couple of hours wandering around the circumference of the place in equidistant circles.

When you have an affinity for islands, and you enjoy looking more deeply at the fabric of the world with a geographer's eye, you start to see islands in the most unlikely places. Last summer I spent a lot of time poring over both modern and old maps of London, retracing the locations linked to the lives of my grandparents and great grandparents in the East End. I found myself beginning to look beyond the grid of streets which gradually morphed over time to see the largely unchanging veins of the city’s waterways traced beneath the time-worn skin of those maps. The Isle of Dogs is still referred to by locals as “the island” – even though it is now hard to discern exactly where or what delimits its northern “coastline.” The city is a palimpsest, a map which is constantly being redrawn. Urban accretions silting up old channels and disused passageways, rebuilding roads, reclaiming waterfronts, and smoothing out contours – the solidity of brick and stone now rapidly giving way to the newer and more fluid lines of glass and concrete. The disappearing 'docklands' on whose name the area continues to market itself even whilst it devours that very essence on which it trades. Development equals destruction. It was whilst I was reflecting on this point that I spotted the traces of another unseen island hidden in the eastern half of the city. Marked out by four former industrial waterways which have managed to persist through all the realignments and repurposings which have taken shape around them. Once you have spotted this hidden island it is hard to ‘unsee’ it. And so, fancying myself a kind of Cockney Captain Cook, I decided to name my discovery, christening this new continent within a crowded city – “Bow Island” or the “Isle of Bow.”

The Isle of Bow is of course a manmade landmass, but an old one nonetheless. It borders on the Thames, with part of Limehouse forming its southernmost isthmus. If we take our initial bearing from Limehouse Basin, we can then chart a course heading northwest along the Regents Canal until we reach the Hertford Union Canal, which heads northeast until it meets the River Lea. These two waterways in effect form the west and north coastlines of Bow Island. The River Lea flowing south then forms the east coast until it diverges into the Limehouse Cut and tidal Bow Creek. Limehouse Cut, the oldest canal in London, thereby forms the southern shore of Bow Island, bringing our circumnavigation neatly back to Limehouse Basin where we began. All of these waterways connect in such a way to make a kind of extended moat around Bow. Beyond its edges, particularly to the east, the various canals, channels, sluices and streams, the tidal creeks and rivulets which criss-cross the land, hidden by old decaying factories and humming concrete flyovers, shiny new tower blocks and edifices still redolent with feel-good 2012 Olympic glory – the East End is an overlooked and largely unseen urban archipelago.

Using old maps to navigate new geographies

Having perceived this terra nova on my doorstep I felt beholden, as any explorer worth his or her salt, to set out on a voyage of discovery; to see if I could chart this new realm and thereby plant my flag. As I was then discovering it was a place in which my family had deep roots (to give one example, my grandmother was walking across one of the bridges over Limehouse Cut when she heard her first air raid siren during the Second World War). To explore here would be to make a journey back into myself, following the city’s veins and channels back into the very heart of who I am and ultimately where I came from. Journeys of self-discovery are rarely so readily translatable into such solid terms of geography. But rather than conducting a naval or maritime expedition (which would seem to be a perfectly feasible proposition, especially if one were to hire a canoe from Limehouse Marina), I decided to send a landing party to survey this new coastline – in effect, to beat the bounds – and see if it was possible to walk the edge of my new, yet old ancestral island. In doing so, I discovered a rather nice route for an inner city walk, a very pleasant way to spend a warm summer’s day. And given that the route follows a series of four different waterways it is relatively flat throughout its course, the only real exertion deriving from its distance. Ambling at a leisurely pace and allowing for stops to take in the views and shooting photos along the way it took me around 3-4 hours to complete the circuit. But it would be easy to get distracted as the route skirts three major parks – Mile End Park, Victoria Park, and the Olympic Park. And there are plenty of new and old buildings to tickle one’s curiosity too – from the Ragged School Museum, and the newly built Queen Mary University Campus, to the 2012 Olympic Stadium and the old mill and oast houses of Three Mills Island, as well as the Hawksmoor Church of St. Anne’s at Limehouse.

What follows is a photo essay of that day last summer. A visual record of a gentle stroll around one of London’s innermost and unrecognised islands, an urban expedition exploring the ordinarily unseen lands on my doorstep, an unknown region now lost to a different time, looking with eyes anew at a place which my grandparents, and the generations who preceded them, thought of as home. In their day it would have been a very different place. Certainly, it would have been a lot more industrial, the waterways far more lively and crowded with traffic, the water and air a lot more dirty with soot and smoke. I'm sure it would have been much noisier too. Originally Limehouse Basin served as a bustling commercial hub, linking the River Thames via the Regents and Grand Union Canals to Birmingham and the Midlands, and via the Limehouse Cut and the River Lea Navigation into Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire; allowing seaborne cargoes to tranship north on narrow boats and barges, and similarly goods produced by the water-powered mills of the Lea Valley south into London by families who lived and worked on these boats. As such, the canals and the River Lea Navigation were working, commercial enterprises. The locks, which used to be permanently staffed, regulated the flow of commercial barges and the flow of water alike. Creating and operating such an extensive canal and riverine transport network was a technical feat of hydraulic engineering. It played a key role in facilitating Britain's famed Industrial Revolution and the capitalist push which drove Britain's imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Eventually though, by the late 20th century, as engineering innovations shifted, new and more dynamic road and railway networks rendered these inland waterways redundant as continuing commercial concerns. Declining traffic meant there were less tolls to collect. Consequently, many of the double locks had one lock chamber converted into overflow weirs which enabled the water-level of the canals to be self-regulating. These two facts also meant the lock keepers were no longer required, and so the canals were gradually converted from commercial traffic to the exclusive use of private leisure boat-owners. Hence this network of waterways is now relatively peaceful and a lot greener. Ducks and geese paddle quietly along the slow-moving watercourses. The stone sets alongside the lock gates scarred with deep rope runnels are often all that's left to attest to the hard labour and sheer physicality of the day-to-day work which used to be part and parcel of this long-gone commercial life on the canals.

There are still people living on narrow boats though. Their floating homes nowadays bedecked with tubs of flowers rather than working cargoes of coal or other commercial commodities. Their daily grind less centred around working windlasses and grimy lock gates; more likely revolving along the towpaths on their Brompton folding bicycles, whisking them off to their clean and tidy offices elsewhere uptown. How times change! – That old and faded palimpsest of London doesn't simply redraw itself over time, it is constantly re-peopled with different characters, all making their living in different ways to those who lived here in the past. The common thread though is that this place has always been defined by each and every one of them using the same single word: home. That word has been inked over on this map time and time again by many different hands all down the ages, in different colours and in different scripts, but always invoking the same sense of personal meaning. 'Home' is a word which anchors all of us, 'family' is another, and the two are intimately linked. Circumnavigating this inner-city island of lost time was an interesting exercise in self-reflection. Locating my family's past in relation to the present-day coordinates of an ever-changing landscape brought their world closer to mine. Especially given that this place has also been my home for the last sixteen or so years. Wandering along these waterways, weaving a course through the East End, and exploring the weft of backstreets in-between; I found I kept pausing at points along this walk, wondering to myself what my grandparents and great grandparents would make of it all, if they could see this place now?