Walthamstow | TICKETS MONEY PASSPORT

From the 11th-13th January, Walthamstow hosted the opening event for the first London Borough of Culture and it was a feast of art, culture and fun for everyone. For one year, Waltham Forest will be the centre of the universe for people that get a kick out of culture. For us that live here, it already is the centre of the universe and we’re more than happy to share our home with you.

Seeing the light show at Lloyd Park being tested throughout the week got me excited for the event itself and after a queue that wasn’t as gruesome as I’d feared, we were in Lloyd Park and headed for Nest, a shimmering light installation by Marshmallow Laser Feast with music by Erland Cooper, using the voices of over 1000 local school children and choir members. The lights from Nest could be seen from afar but up close is where the magic happens; people were lying down in the centre of the space, looking up at the sky as the lights danced around the park and up into the clouds. It was a beautiful moment of peace and contemplation in the midst of the town.

After Nest, we travelled down Forest Road and encountered a carnivalesque atmosphere, with a man playing a mobile piano and another man riding a bike while playing a double bass. Das Brass, an 8-piece brass band blasted out Michael Jackson songs as well as other classics from Toto and The White Stripes. Further on, bright white figures march past while giant tree monsters give limb bumps to kids. Before joining the queue for the Town Hall installation, we get to admire the ever-brilliant neon from God’s Own Junkyard slung up in the trees. A fitting end to the Borough of Culture would be for these neon beauties to be distributed among residents of the borough in a raffle. We can but dream! One day, I’d love a giant neon pair of lips in my living room.

Kids in yellow vest – is Walthamstow ready for kiddy *gilets jaunes?*

The final piece of the launch event was video work projected onto the Town Hall, kicking off with Addictive TV’s Welcome to the Forest, where local musicians were sampled to create a song about, you guessed it, the Borough of Culture! Much rapping about the gems of the neighbourhood like Lea Bridge Road and Chingford ensued before Greenaway and Greenaway’s sensational multimedia story of the borough and music by Mercury-Prize winning musician Talvin Singh. In this, we are urged to close our minds to the realities of life for one day, to immerse ourselves in the art and to celebrate the place we call home. The story of the borough takes us from old men in pubs to the swaying trees of Epping Forest, through the war and everything since. We hear voices denounce austerity, gentrification, fear of crime and ever rising house prices making it hard for people from the borough to stay here. One man questions “how it’ll feel, when I’m on my knees” while another questions why people hate others because of the colour of their skin. The show’s impact lies not just in its technical brilliance but its aim to get people thinking about the place we live and the one we’d like to see. The projections end with a young schoolgirl reciting a line from William Morris “The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”

Naturally, with an event like this, there are voices of dissent that the borough of culture exists at all when we see more and more homelessness or shocking crimes on our doorstep. With the bad, we have to revel in the good and celebrate what we can achieve, even if average house prices of £500,000 and child poverty sit uneasily side by side. Kudos to the team behind this for focusing on the inequalities in the borough as well as the groovy stuff. By the end of the show, I felt prouder than ever to see the faces behind the creativity and talent in the place I live and this was a well-deserved celebration of all things Waltham Forest. This was a great start to what I hope will be a brilliant year.

“It’s a pleasant day, I’m 35, what else am I supposed to do?”

Inaccessible to all but fisherfolk for 150 years, Walthamstow Wetlands has finally opened to some fanfare and much quacking after £8m of improvements. My first view of this enormous new open space, spanning 211 hectares, is via the Maynard Entrance on Forest Road, a ten-minute walk from Blackhorse Road tube station. This entrance gives you access to the northern reservoirs which are some of the largest and least picturesque on the site. Lockwood Reservoir is a great expanse of water, which you climb an embankment to get to. Up top, you can see clear views for miles and walking around the perimeter of this would take at least twenty minutes or so. To the south you can spot the clusters of skyscrapers at Canary Wharf as well as the city, giving a perspective on the landscape of London as much more than just urban sprawl. As an internationally important site for birds, I expected to see more but in attendance were swans, coots and moorhens in abundance as well as ubiquitous gulls and a few herons.

The landscape undergoes something of a transformation once you cross Forest road and into the sites’ main entrance. Here you can walk to the renovated Engine House which just a few years back was a partially derelict building. Now it’s a stunning visitor centre with a brand new 24-metre tower housing 54 swift nest boxes as well as space for bats and a café serving your standard “how much?!” cups of coffee and snacks. That said, the Wetlands is free to visit and is open 7 days a week so I’ve no business complaining and they don’t have security strip-searching for contraband snacks.

The Engine House

The central reservoirs really show off the beauty of the site, with two hectares of new reedbeds planted which helps encourage lots of wildlife playing hide and seek. In making the site accessible to visitors, many tiny jetties have been installed to sit on, stand on and fish from. It’s easy to get lost amongst the foliage and listen out for the bird song alongside the occasional whine of a police siren. If you are after genuine serenity, you’ll need reminding that the site is close to Tottenham, on the edges of Walthamstow and still very much in an industrial area of London. Richmond Park it ain’t, but there’s something enchanting in the Wetlands where nature abounds amid pylons and chimneys puffing out the pollution that is making our air toxic. This is a surprisingly peaceful patch of London though, especially when you experience the full size of the site.

Pylons and birds

Aside from the obvious birds I can recognise, don’t ask me what specific brand of bird you’ll spot because that’s where I fall down. When I was at uni in Exeter, I regularly went to areas laden with fowl and lived with a naturalist who knew her birds. All that knowledge is now lost to time but the Wetlands may yet bring some of it back. When I thought “bird over there with long beak” was a cormorant, I was entirely wrong. As a 35 year-old, it’s entirely appropriate to learn about birds, especially when a nationally recognised reserve has just opened on my doorstep. It’s not like I’m going to go clubbing.

So, the wetlands. It lives up to its name, being extravagantly wet. And it being east London, there’s an Andrea Arnold-esque beauty in how industrial lands combine with nature to create something surprisingly peaceful. Another win for Walthamstow and a marvellous new amenity for the people.