a field student of lampreys timidly goes

a field student of orange chairs, grey tables and green lungs.

Field Study's Man in E17 may well have paddled beyond the security of his dilettante shallows when questioning the Archipelago of Truth's, Technomist, about the appeasement of arty greens with the installation of The Table on the Marsh. FSMiE17 hopes his comments do not amount to muddle and twaddle concerning the relationship between art, science and the environment. FSMiE17 respects Technomist for his erudite views, which are rarely if ever as anodyne as the above table and chairs FSMiE17 encountered today at, The Building Centre, Store St, London. Just off Tottenham Court Road, The Building Centre is host to a permanent display by New London Architecture (http://www.newlondonarchitecture.org/), Transforming the Boroughs. Although only able to visit briefly he was in awe of the architectural model of London - albeit cut out as it was in an odd glistening puddle like swathe. 

Of course, being a dedicated follower of Walthamstow, E17 and other things Waltham Forest, he tried to find himself. Alas, it appears Walthamstow and environs exists nowhere but in the developmental dark ages, a Stygian hinterland from which the feint cries of some of it's denizens can just about be heard, gasping for strategic breaths of corporate high rise spectacle.   

When the nay sayers and nimby-ites stop fighting the glorious heights, E17ers will be a party to such aspiration as is expressed by Stratford City - a stunning new mega block on the southern horizon.

Field Study's Man is fond of conceptual art and looks forward to the new white cities rising out of the rubble of less visionary minds. New Babylon, this is not.

Transforming the Boroughs provides some succinct insights into the prospects for Waltham Forest, in particular, Walthamstow - site specifically, Blackhorse Lane. The display below states:

'Blackhorse Lane, on the edge of the Lea Valley Park, provides an important gateway to Waltham Forest. Over the next ten years, comprehensive regeneration of the local area will provide over 2000 new homes, a 21st century business area with up to 1000 new jobs, new parks, schools, roads and community facilities. This will create an entirely new neighbourhood centre, with major developments located within walking distance of Blackhorse Road Station and easy access to the Lea Valley and its green leisure amenities'.

All good property developer spin. What if the 2000 new homes come in the form of something like 'Hale Village' - witheringly tweeted (?) by someone as having all the charm of the Gulag. The importance of the Lea Valley shifts (further) from being ecological to one of real estate incentive.

The Lea Valley Federation (www.leavalleyfederation.org) published a map/leaflet to help inform the debates about the development of east London and the Lower Lea Marshes.

In the leaflet analysis it says, 'As London's population continues to grow, the importance of these open spaces becomes more acute. The question is, should the Park provide an amenity resource, as an integrated parkland, with its own unique identity? Or do we allow its continued disintegration, through the development pressures of landowners, and through a lack of vigilance of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority itself, although the Park Authority is entrusted with safeguarding the Lee Valley as a Regional Park?'

One of the leaflet maps, 'Ownership' shows how the Lower Lea Marshes consists of 10 different territories each belonging to formidable organisations or bureaucracies - Network Rail, Thames Water - amongst them. This indicates the increasingly complex and equally forbidding nature of land ownership and just how difficult it is to understand why and how things happen here, and also affirms Technomist's comment, the territory as a whole, what goes on in and about it, is very sensitive and symbolic. 

NLA, THE BUILDING CENTRE, STORE STREET, WC1E7BT 

a field student of walking and fallinggggggggggggggggggggg

Field Study's Man in E17 found a path well suited to the practice of the falling stage of his gait, nowhere near the back gardens of Eastfield Road and the yards of Central Parade; a path that was suffused with potent felinity.   

a field student of beguiling concrete slabs

Field Study's Man in E17 was beguiled by the concrete songs of slabs radiating the light of sun dappled shades.

Elsewhere:

http://www.mis-guide.com/mg.html

a field student of tables and SSSSi's

A dry wind raked over an increasingly parched Walthamstow Marsh yesterday. The ditch water, if that is what it is, alongside Coppermill Lane has evaporated to reveal a grey green alluvial sludge littered with discarded cans and bottles, remnants of other indifferent thirsts quenched.

Field Study’s Man in E17 emerged from the mud to make a foray into the nature of the Archipelago of Truth, to assess the impact of The Table on the Marsh and it’s part, purportedly (?), as one of the tendrils of modern leisure and property development’s mission creep into this wildlife reserve or haven.

Walthamstow Marsh (including Coppermill Fields) has been a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) since the 1980s - a designation deserved in part due to the presence of adders tongue fern. Technomist, of the Archipelago, asserts there is increasingly a lack of an s for sensitivity in the management of this place. ‘The Table …’ is, according to Technomist, totemic of the insensitivity - a gimmick simply meant to appease the green arty set. The table is, as I understand his commentary, on a par with destructive lawn-mowing/habitat destruction, and, via other links (the comments following the October 2010 post about the table), artfully (?) fly tipped ('dumped') household goods and furniture. The presence of public art is frequently inappropriate, merely ephemeral ornamentation, indicative of the domestication of the environment - as if the marshes are just a back yard or garden.

Iain Sinclair wrote,

Without the Lea Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. (London Orbital, p.40)

How effectively The Lea Valley Regional Park Authority is caring for our collective sanity is a matter, in Technomist’s mind, of national importance - especially given the indifference of Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, in his distancing from the disputed Essex Wharf development - a matter of environmental neglect and abuse in which various local politicians are implicated or perhaps complicit. Technomist implores, support the Lea Valley Park in standing up to such insanity masquerading as ‘development’.

Is the Table on the Marsh capable of bearing the load of this psychogeographic context? Yesterday the underused perception of the table remained true but for the state of the ground around it. Perhaps the ground was well trodden by processions to the table or has it just been mown? Grasses were growing long and high into and around the spaces of the table suggesting not so many feet have come to rest at it. This growth may continue and consume the table. Close to the table there are patches of scorched ground - worryingly so given the increasingly dry state of the field and marsh. The table is not just the material presence but also the behaviour or conduct it attracts. The absence of people sitting at the table gives it an incongruous theatrical presence - perhaps making it an abandoned prop from some sort of performance. I think this is a problem for smaller groups using the table as it imposes a theatrical spectacle on those sitting at it, who become players/actors. Despite the choice of material, the methods of joinery and the anthropological research, I have doubts about the design of the table overall as a convivial space or site. I have attended and enjoyed events at the table however I have been uncomfortable with the authoritarian presence of the chairs at each end - they suggest or exert hierarchy and confrontation. The ostentation of the arrangement akin to a medieval feast or banquet is alienating albeit with a sense of humour and irony. I like the idea of a table or tables on Coppermill Fields, tables which are sympathetic to the environment and express inclusive ethics of community, celebrating its diversity of customs and beliefs. I respect the well intentioned energy of the work and disagree with Technomist about the appeasement and its part in a creeping mission. I believe The Table on the Marsh would be better situated in one of the municipal parks - Springfield Park or St James Park for instance. I think there could be more creatively ambiguous ways that tables might be interpreted to create convivial spaces on Coppermill Fields. In some ways these happen anyway in the way of picnics (communal chomping on liminal cheese sandwiches), ephemeral gatherings which improvise according to needs and don’t need such a stark formal presence or provision.

     

Coppermill Fields/The Table on the Marsh, 4th June 2011 

a field student of love forages

a field student of cheese forages

'Field Study’s Man in E17' has been lost in the translation of poetry into painting, and vice versa. It was a stuffy experience albeit a labour of computer administrative love with well intentioned misunderstanding. The digital toils were alleviated in part by despatches from Technomist, over in the Archipelago of Truth. They arrived like wafts of spring blogged air, in particular the post, Elders in Flower.

Technomist expounds the potential complexities of elderflower as a foraged ingredient for elderflower wine. Elder (Sambucus nigra) has a great deal to offer the forager. Richard Mabey’s, Food for Free, offers 2 pages and more on Elder (1989 paperback edition). He writes, the flowers can be ‘munched’ raw off the branch, used in infusions and as an ingredient for sparkling wines/’champagne’. For the forager with an appetite for more solid fair, the flowers can flavour preserves (often with gooseberries) and, more solid still, be rustled up into fritters. Elder berries can supplement the content of fruit pies, as well as be stewed, strained (and left for 7 years) to make Pontack Sauces. Others might also extol the virtues of the berry for wine.

Field Study’s Man in E17 has a predilection for the flavour of elderflower. He believes he was enticed into the Paekakariki Press launch of, London Rivers, by the fragrance of non alcoholic elderflower champagne. 

Thus he imbibed and briefly celebrated the Elder scented confluence of the assembled poems (in exacting typeset) complemented by Kate Hardy’s images, before wending his way home to the promise of the culinary delights of allotment grown salads.

Making his way along the bounteous paths of Walthamstow, his hunger was such he was compelled to munch all manner of flora directly from overhanging branches. By the time of the threshold to his humble billet, Field Study’s Man in E17 was in an odd state, perfumed by strange feelings emanating from his belly. He veered away from his door, fearing the homely confinement of the emanations, and made for the open space of Walthamstow’s watery margins. The student walked down the high street, reflecting on his altered inner state, seeking a suitably liminal space to match his liminal state.

Field Study’s Man in E17 recalled the humament-like pages of a social anthropology student’s course book, a bound and photocopied tome, which he had rescued from a skip outside that anthropology student’s hall of residence near Finchley in 2007. This rescue related to the field student’s research into being ‘a beginning teacher.’

One poetic insight is

The unclear is the unclean

one would expect to find that transitional beings are particularly polluting, since they are neither one thing nor another, or may be both, or neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere

betwixt and between

Technomist has recently discovered an island in the Archipelago of Truth, which comes and/or goes by the name of The Marshman Chronicles. Back in April its’ resident marshman pretended to pretend of the partaking of a liminal cheese sandwich at, The Table on the Marsh, on Coppermill Fields. Such pretence is a fine example of a psychogeographic double bluff. Freewheeler of Crap Walking and Cycling in Waltham Forest has boldly documented the discombobulating frontiers of the LBWF. Their dissonant properties may warp our sense of reality and one wonders about the effects of Coppermill Fields (where the chronicled table resides) on the marshman.

In October 2010, Technomist entered into a ‘bloggic’ confabulation regarding his encounter with the launch of The Table on the Marsh. Some readers considered his reception of the table and event to be a tad dismissive. Field Study’s Man in E17 thought Technomist and The Marshman might be interested in the following material retrieved from the annals of Lost and Found in E17. It concerns the concept of liminality applied to being and/or becoming a forager;

October 17^th 2010 at The Table on the Marsh, Coppermill Fields.

What was this? (October 2010, Walthamstow Marshes)

We met Jason (or was it Miles?) Irving, who was to be our guide to the edible flora of Walthamstow Marshes. He appeared to grow out of a patch of nettles and proceeded to lead us to plants for which I made some field notes and took photographs. We were mostly unknowing beginning foragers, neophytes to this ancient survival craft. The marsh is a potentially dangerous place to forage as there are poisonous plants and even some dangerous to touch with bare hands/skin and expose that contact to sunlight. What e.g. is the foraging value of hogweed and the knowledge and precautions necessary for it? 

From grazing on and nibbling at a variety of leaves and seeds we found out there is an array of subtle marsh flavours to be enjoyed although to do so with any confidence would require a much longer course of guidance and instruction, one encompassing all the seasons and the life cycles of those plants.   

We accompanied our guide back to the table bearing a bag of assorted leaves to add to the communal feast at the table - perhaps a situation where there was some ‘communitas’ at play.

Perhaps the event constituted a zone of liminality, with cheese of various sorts and a lot of other tasty ingredients generously shared.

Back to May 2011.

Field Study’s Man in E17 walked in the twilit margins before the intense arrival of the unnerving marsh dark, wisely leaving appetizing leaves for the better judgement of broad daylight and a settled digestion - the aforementioned upset of which he is sure had nothing to do with partaking of the delicious elder flower champagne.

Lost and Found in E17 looks forward to more from The Marshman Chronicles, and nods respectfully to Freewheeler and Technomist for their unwavering erudition.