Tales from Havering-Atte-Bower

Snapshots from Havering-Atte-Bower 

(SA/2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Havering-Atte-Bower is a semi-rural village 345 feet above sea level. It lies just a few short miles up the road from my house in Harold Hill - or a world away, depending on how you measure these things.

 

The first part of the name is Saxon in origin, dating back to the 11th-century reign of Edward the Confessor. It refers to a great landowner known as Hæfer. Literally translating to he-goat, we can assume he was either a man devilishly aware of himself, or simply rank-smelling. 

 

The suffix - pronounced to rhyme with catty and flower - was added by 1272 and marks the village's history as the site of a royal residence. Known as The Bower, this part-palace, part-rustic retreat fell into ruin and was pulled down in the 17th century.

 

 

II. 

  

A 20-minute ride on the 375 bus from Romford station brings you to the village green. Alight here to find a sign announcing the village's 1042 founding, alongside the original village stocks and an old whipping post. 

 

Fortunately, these are no longer in use, though under the current Reform UK council you never know what the future will bring. Still, I doubt even Nigel Farage and co. would revive the practice of ducking witches, though the pond for such is located just across the road (if now overgrown with reeds). 

  

Other landmarks include St. John's Church, constructed in the 1870s by architect Basil Champneys on the site of a medieval chapel, and Havering Country Park, home to one of England's only two giant redwood plantations imported from California. There is also the white-walled water tower on Broxhill Road, built in 1934 (we were told as children in the 1970s that the pop star David Essex lived there).    

 

Finally, there's the traditional village pub: The Orange Tree, on Orange Tree Hill. Licensed premises have stood on this site since at least 1754, under various names, and not only does The Orange Tree serve food but they actively encourage vertical drinking for those who like to stand by the bar and socialise.  

III.  

As Essex villages go, Havering-Atte-Bower possesses all the features that make them so beloved. And despite the fact that it is, technically, part of Greater London, it still feels as if one were (almost) in the countryside, surrounded as it is by green belt fields and farmland, and offering some lovely views. 

 

However, I regret to inform readers that it's also an ecological dead zone: I spent an entire afternoon there and didn't hear a single note of birdsong, nor the distinct buzz of insects in the long grass. There's just the relentless sound of cars. 

 

Havering boasts of being one of London's greenest boroughs. Yet its tree canopy has plummeted from 25% in 2018 to just 14% today, and nearly all the wildflower meadows of my youth are gone. Natural habitats face relentless pressure and animal numbers continue to decline. 

 

It's not just the huge impact of new housing developments and the gradual erosion of green spaces. Decades of intensive agriculture - ripping up hedgerows and spraying fields with poison - have wiped out the insects, leaving birds and small creatures to starve. 

 

Intense summer heatwaves, arson-induced wildfires, and the illegal dumping of rubbish obviously compound the damage. 

 

The UK-wide biodiversity crisis is profoundly depressing. And, despite the efforts of conservation groups fighting to restore local ecosystems and rewild certain areas, I hold out little hope, to be honest.

 

One can't help wondering what Hæfer would make of the county he knew and loved now deprived of its breeding birds and large beasts, its rivers and ponds once teeming with fish now polluted.   

 

 

Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Goodbye to the Village', from the album Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (E.G. Records /Virgin Records 1986). 

 

 

A Brief (Somewhat Belated) Note on the Online Safety Act and the Peter Kyle / Nigel Farage Spat

Peter Kyle MP / Nigel Farage MP

 

A lot of people are expressing concern about the Online Safety Act (2023); a new set of laws passed to protect children - and adults - from all kinds of online content deemed to be potentially harmful by Ofcom (an independent regulator, albeit one established by Parliament and which is overseen by the Culture Secretary).  

 

Some critics worry about how it might impact on free speech and privacy; others say that it will be largely ineffective at restricting access to content and so is doomed to failure.  

 

To be honest, it's not an issue that particularly excites my interest. However, the moment I hear supporters of the Act pleading with us to think of the children à la Helen Lovejoy [1] - thereby transforming an important and complex question into a simple moral issue in order to effectively shutdown debate - I immediately side with the critics.

 

What does interest, however, is the manner in which everything moral, orthodox and conformist - i.e., everything which was traditionally associated with conservatism - has passed yet again to the political left and that it's members of Keir Starmer's Labour Party who most vociferously support the Act and, indeed, wish to strengthen it still further. 

 

Reform UK, on the other hand - a party on the populist right of the British political spectrum - have pledged to repeal the Act if elected into government, prompting the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, to make the unpleasant and ludicrous accusation that Nigel Farage is on the side of those peddling hate as well as sexual predators like Jimmy Savile.

 

It's ironic that this remark should be made by the Rt Hon. Member for Hove and Portslade, as Kyle is someone who opposes all forms of hate speech and wants the online world to effectively become a virtual safe space; i.e., an inclusive, supportive, and secure environment ideal for monkeys who wish to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. 

 

Why is it that those on the virtue-signalling left are often the ones who spew some of the most vile and vicious invective? 

 

Might it be because they tie hate (disguised as love) to judgement rather than joy, unaware that by so doing they corrode and corrupt their own hearts and turn what begins as a desire for political correctness into a resentment-riddled ideology which "leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others" [2].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post published on 30 Jan 2016 in which I discuss this 'think of the children' ploy: click here. 

 

[2] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826. 

      I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 130, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Tale of Two Parliamentarians

D. H. Lawrence - Sir W. Joynson-Hicks - Lee Anderson

 

 

I have to confess, I was surprised to hear Lee Anderson mention the name of D. H. Lawrence in his speech to the Reform UK National Conference at the NEC in Birmingham yesterday ...

 

I know the MP for Ashfield is from the same neck of the woods and has a similar working-class coal mining background as Lawrence, but, even so, I was not expecting to hear England's most controversial author of the early twentieth-century namechecked by someone once described by the Daily Mirror as the worst man in Britain. 

 

Celebrating English culture, Anderson arguably revealed his Romantic nature by referring not only to Lawrence, but also to Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron [1]. Just how familiar he is with these writers I don't know; although in his maiden speech to parliament in January 2020 Anderson did claim to have read Lady Chatterley's Lover several times [2]. 

 

It might also be noted that, the following year, Anderson stood up in the Commons to thank the Government for the extra funding they had given to the D. H. Lawrence Centre in Eastwood and to ask whether the Secretary of State would support his bid to get a Lawrence statue erected in Eastwood in order to celebrate the author's life and works [3].     

 

Times have certainly changed: a 100 years ago Tory members of parliament such as Sir William Joynson-Hicks were openly calling for the censorship and destruction of Lawrence's work ...

 

 

II. 

 

Best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government (1924-29), Joynson-Hicks (or Jix, as he was called) gained a reputation for moral authoritarianism. Not only did he clamp down on nightlife, but he vigorously opposed what he regarded as indecent literature. This included, for example, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

 

Postal workers - acting under instruction from Scotland Yard and the Home Office - intercepted copies of the latter being sent into Britain from Florence (where the book had been privately printed). Even more outrageously, the Postmaster General also opened another parcel which Lawrence had sent (by registered post) to the London office of his literary agent, containing two typescripts of a collection of poems entitled Pansies. 

 

The typescripts, confiscated (and eventually destroyed) on the grounds of indecency, gave Joynson-Hicks another chance to attack Lawrence in parliament as part of a relentless secret war waged by the authorities against Lawrence since 1915 and publication of arguably his greatest novel The Rainbow [4]. 

 

Lawrence was understandably enraged by this. However, despite being mortally ill in late 1929, he summoned the strength to go on the attack: "the Pansies seizure inspired him to keep up his campaign against hypocrisy and censorship" [5], memorably describing Jix as a censor-moron and a "miserable mongrel" [6].

 

One can't help wondering what he'd think of Lee Anderson and whether or not he too deserves to be thrown down a well of loneliness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Anderson's list of a dozen British literary greats seemed somewhat random and lacked chronological consistency. It ran in full: D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Jane Austen, Ian Fleming, C. S. Lewis, and George Eliot. 

[2] For those who are interested, the text of Anderson's maiden speech in the House of Commons (27 Jan 2020) can be read by clicking here. 

      Anderson is mistaken to say that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover in his home region - he wrote it in Italy - although it is based in and around the village of Teversal. Lawrence had made his final visit to what he called the country of [his] heart shortly before he began work on the first version of his novel in the autumn of 1926, so he was certainly in the process of assembling ideas.  

[3] Anderson's contribution to parliamentary debate on 16 September 2021 can be found in Hansard: click here. According to Nigel Huddleston - the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who responded to Anderson's request - there were "many D. H. Lawrence fans" in the House - which, if true, is another great surprise to me.  

 

[4] Readers who think this sounds overly-dramatic might like to see Alan Travis, 'The hounding of DH Lawrence', in The Guardian (10 April 1999): click here. 

      The key point is Joynson-Hicks misled his fellow MPs when he informed the House of Commons that the package containing Lawrence's typescripts had been sent via the 'open book post' and had been subject to a random search to ensure the contents had been charged at the correct rate, when, in fact, it had been registered and Lawrence's mail was routinely checked as part of a long-running police surveillance operation. 

 

[5] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane, 2005), p. 389.

    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Juliette Huxley [12 January 1929], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 132.