I had reached the end point of my long journey both for the day and a much longer journey too. For a little more than a year I had been travelling around London to visit spots in my next book, Angels of Postmans Park. A week earlier I had travelled over 100 miles around London for 4 or 5 locations. I felt thoroughly exhausted and jet-lagged .
This day it was just tiredness as I was generally in the same 10 miles or so, just all over the place within there and following my hunches to find each spot.
I didn’t have any order to visit and photograph the locations. Some of it was opportunistic such as when I made a day on the new Elizabeth line to Finding an old WW2 pillbox on the Thames and others I ticked off in ones and two’s either on tours or on trips out.
A dozen or so were an ordeal, hard to get to where I live and complicated journeys on public transport between them. After giving tours all day in London, it can be hard to go for another 3 or 4 hours to look for a spot ‘in the middle of nowhere’ with little certainty that I’d find it.
This was the very last place I had to visit. A throughly transformed area since Victorian times. The photo above just about shows a clump of trees between the lanes of traffic where now there is a one last, landscaped and incredibly healthy River Lea.
And this is the very spot I wanted to see where one of my Victorian heroes had drowned whilst saving a stranger, a boy. It was very hard to find as nothing is left of how things were 20 years ago, let alone 120 years ago but my research and overlaying old maps on new, I was certain this was the spot, very close to the Olympic Park velodrome, one of the iconic locations of the London 2012 Olympics.
I waited here for a while. I’d been walking and tubing for 6 or 7 hours and I only vaguely knew my nearest station was somewhere to the left of the tower a mile or so in the distance. I knew that somewhere around here were the original Olympic Rings from 2012 and atop of a small hill I found them.
It seemed a fitting place to end a research trip of Olympic proportions. I’m 80% through writing the first draft and with all the photos now gathered and my experiences of each place as they are now, it will allow me to push on with renewed momentum and remember a group of true heroes who saved peoples lives and I think that beats any achievement on the track or field.
Stephen Liddell 