Matt Banji begins a series of Rising East reports on the boundaries and extremities of Greater London.
It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m waiting at Newbury Park station for an eastbound Central Line train to Barkingside, followed by the 247 bus to Romford.
As the train approaches, it greets me with the oh-so familiar sounds of the London Tube. Screeching to a halt, the beep-beep-beep of the doors, and the announcement that ‘this is Newbury Park. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. This is a Central Line train to Hainault.’
Then there’s the signage: red, white and blue exterior; the familiar red and blue roundel with the word ‘Underground’ written across the middle.
No need to write ‘London Underground’; the L-word goes without saying.
As I took my seat, five or six hooded youths boarded the train. One of them got out his phone and began to blast ‘Next Hype’, a grime song by East London rapper Tempa T.
‘Man’s feeling this beat still,’ I heard him say. The response was: ‘init blud, man ain’t heard this ting for time but it’s still sick!’
For the uninitiated, they were saying ‘I love this song. I haven’t heard it for a while but it’s still great.’
‘Init blud’ – nowhere else but London. Except, according to some definitions, we weren’t even in London when I heard him say it. Although areas like Ilford and Romford part-qualify as London because they are part of the London boroughs of Redbridge and Havering, they don’t have London postcodes (the highest eastern code is E20, and that’s been allocated to newly created Westfield East). Privatised or not, as far as the Royal Mail is concerned this ain’t London; it’s Essex.
Born and brought up in inner East London, I don’t like to think of myself as a suburbanite. Arriving in Romford thanks to the aforementioned 247 bus, I looked up and immediately felt deflated when I saw a sign for ‘The Essex Fish Bar’.
I looked to the left, and saw more youths walking along – half-walking, half-hobbling, trousers virtually wrapped around their knees, doing the ‘swagger’ that is thought to be cool and gangster.
The more I looked, the more it puzzled me how anyone can call these areas Essex when there is so much that is characteristic of London: hundreds of big red buses with Stagecoach, Arriva, First, or Go Ahead London crests on the side; the youths with their urban dialects and music; all the West Ham and Tottenham replica shirts; not to mention Cockney accents and a host of ‘ethnic’ variations thereof.
Essex, I thought, begins at Braintree or Basildon. Round here’s still my kind of town.