duck island park

taking advantage of a day off horsemouth wandered up through the salt marshes to duck island park - now the housing development for the uber-rich with a rather nice park attached recently opened by some royals. as the average flat decreases in size (to the point where it would be illegal to rent it to social tenants or even rabbits) it is good to see where all this saved space is going - into recreating tellytubbyland in what was once a mephitic swamp/ working warehouse area/ site of the largest purpose built housing co-op in western europe (clays lane -now demolished)/ place where umpteen raves were held. here and there are old sets of concrete steps that have survived the reclamations and cast iron victorian bridges painted appealing colours (and then closed off). horsemouth liked it enormously and will be making his way up there again when the sun is a bit more reliable.


years ago horsemouth read an article about the lower lea and about joan bakewell's support for an arts space to be based there - the people illustrated by little schematic stick people engaging in activities like ping-pong and making movies, these he then crossbred with the glorious shiny computer rendered images of jolly multicultural consumers enjoying the tellytubbied spaces of the soon to be opened olympic park. horsemouth replaced the computer generated consumers (in his illustrations) with the (now strangely less cybernetic and controlling) schematics - allowing these semiotc ghosts to haunt the proposed olympic site - today he went up to the former olympic site to hunt for these schematic creatures. everybody milled about having fun, except for one nervous dad who would not allow his son anywhere near water, but sadly everyone looked much like their architect standard illustrations, sadly there were also no semiotic ghosts that horsemouth could detect, simply a well layed out tellytubbyland gradually shading into walthamstow marshes.

after being denied entry into that space for so long it as if it has been spontaneously and magically appeared and given to the nation.