This Pleasant Lea
By TERENCE BEND1XSON
Not that this matters. The point is they are there. They are the vanguard of a tide of city dwellers who are going to have more and more time to do as they please, to walk, to talk, to laugh or tinker or just to laze. That today's average working week is decimally longer than 1938's does not conflict with this proposition, because the expansion of middle-class attitudes and the possession of more money affect the ways in which people enjoy themselves just as much as the possession of more free time. And more leisure' will come next year if it does not come this year.
These are the facts underlying the Civic Trust's plan for a Lea Valley Regional Park, and the Trust's capacity for looking with detachment at social change is revealed on every page of its pithy and well-illustrated seven-and-sixpenny booklet on the park.
Not for it petulant outbursts against young- sters bored to the point of malevolence during Bank Holidays. Rather, a recognition that Robert Vaughan's statement, If any nation is to be lost or saved, by the character of its great cities, our own is that nation,' is as true now as it was in 1843.
The need that the Lea Valley is designed to meet has its origins in the nineteenth-century urbanisation and in the close, hard-living con- ditions that were the lot of the manpower of industry. Much has already been done to better these conditions. Bank Holidays and holidays with pay enabled the townsmen to escape them. Southend, Blackpool, Scarborough and numerous other resorts grew fat on the strength of such innovations and provided an urban environment free from dark, satanic mills. Sanitary improvements, smoke control and the slow creation of playing fields attacked priva- tion at its source, but for all this the tissue of our cities is still fundamentally Victorian.
This is particularly true of east London, which lacks the modernities possessed by the pros- perous west. Even if the new leisure should turn out to be a mirage, a 6,000-acre leafy corridor, half again as large as Hyde, Green, St. James's and Regent's Parks and Hampstead Heath all rolled into one, would be invaluable to the East Enders in Hackney and Bow, Waltham- stow, Poplar and elsewhere.
It was this that the Mayor of Hackney, Alder- man L. Harman, had in mind when he invited a boatload of councillors to take a trip down the Lea in August, 1961, and see the dereliction and the possibilities. The outcome was that ten county and district councils bordering the Lea (the number grew later to seventeen) commis- sioned the Civic Trust to investigate the recrea- tional potential of the valley.
The resulting appraisal is of such high quality that it has validity for Glasgow and Manchester as well as London. `Now we need weekend and evening resorts in the great towns themselves to supplement holidays at the seaside, in the country and abroad,' says the Civic Trust book- let. The Lea Valley Park with its provision for an infinite variety of pursuits—boating, swim- ming, flirting, sailing, dozing, bicycling, dancing, watching, eating and drinking—would be an intermediate stage between the extreme urbanity of a Leicester Square and the wilderness of a Snowdonia. Fully developed it could, the Civic Trust estimates, accommodate over a millioti people over its twenty-mile length and reduce proportionately the need for Londoners to get far out of the city before they can find a change.
The presence in the valley of the river and of lakes guarantees the success of the idea more than anything else. Sailing, rowing, powerboating, skin-diving, water-ski-ing, swimming and fishing are all gaining greatly in popularity. The efforts of developers to get planning permission to build yacht harbours 0 la Florida in East Anglian and South Coast estuaries are one response to this appetite. An exhaustive report on outdoor recreation, published in 1962 by a Commission of the US Congress, put it : 'the focal point of much outdoor recreation is water.' Already several lakes created by gravel extraction in the Lea Valley are in use for. sailing and the Civic Trust proposes that more should be created as . digging continues. Already a number of cruisers are moored along the banks of the river and the case for creating more moorings is strong, since the valley is connected via the Regent's-Canal to 2,000 miles of inland waterway as well as to the Thames. There are similar possibilities for almost any other sport, be it football, riding or bird-watching. All are nascent activities in the Lea Valley.
What the Civic Trust recommends, and Alder- man Harman saw in 1961, is the need to re- design this forgotten service area that pierces to within six miles of Piccadilly Circus. Much of the valley's present condition means that this is no small task. The valley is hard at work providing 15 per cent of London's water, grow- ing vegetables, generating power, processing sewage and generally providing routes for rail- ways, high-tension cables and river traffic, par-
ticularly timber barges travelling between the Thames and the vigorous Hackney furniture in- dustry. But this is at the southern end. Up to- wards Ware in Hertfordshire the open fields of the Green Belt spread away towards Epping Forest. At the halfway mark Waltham Abbey provides a ready-made resort and its stout Norman nave already attracts numerous sight- seers. And even in the south, acres of derelict and unused land, the forgotten marches of the innumerable authorities that front the Lea, are already in public ownership and ripe for mould- ing into a playground.
A vision of what they could be was first established by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, who iden- tified the valley as a `green wedge' in his Greater London Plan of 1944, and subsequently by Leslie Lane and his Civic Trust team. All that remains is to get organisation, money and new teams of landscape architects, engineers, planners, architects and park officers. 'Five years of in- tensive activity should see substantial improve- ments. A ten-year programme should suffice to realise the major part of the project,' says the Trust's booklet. Spread over that period, the cost would be about seven shillings a head per year for the population of the Greater London Council area—£30 million in all.
One way of measuring the feasibility of such a plan is to search for precedents. One is The Backs at Cambridge, which were formed on top of medieval town rubble, another is London's St. James's Park, which was a swamp until drained by Henry VIII. At its northern end among the water meadows, the Lea Valley could be made equally arcadian. At its southern end where its backdrop would be waterworks, pylons and limber yards, its virility would be unprecedented a niong parks.
Son et lumiere woven around the romance of the Tower or of the Chateaux de la Loire are festivities known and enjoyed by tens of thousands. Son et lumiere in the Lea Valley at Brimsdown power station would be a new frontier.
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