Flying over Coppermill Lane
Oliver Smith takes a ritual walk west from Walthamstow
Harvey Dalton Johnson made a first fateful decision in the early days of World War II, crossing the border to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, fighting facism at a time when his fellow Americans stayed neutral. A second fateful decision came one Sunday in November 1942, as he was flying his Spitfire over Walthamstow and heard the engine cut out. He could bail out and watch his fighter crash into residential streets. Or, he could stay on board to try to glide it onto the edge of the Lea Valley – an empty expanse where the only death would be his own. He ‘rode a blazing plane to a hero's death’ according to an AP report. His plane had been low enough for residents to see his face.
For saving these Victorian terraces – quite possibly the one I live in now – Dalton’s sacrifice was honoured with a portrait at the local primary school, where he grins, martyred against fluffy white clouds. The area has changed much since residents looked up that November day. It has gentrified in the 12 years I’ve been here. Yet that empty plot he sighted from the cockpit is much as it ever was – a no man's land in inner city London, a patchwork of playing fields and reservoirs, padlocked substations and whirring pylons, plus the overgrowth and undergrowth and what passes for nature within the North Circular. I walk across it about twice a week on Coppermill Lane.
Coppermill Lane is a narrow road that runs for about a mile across the Lea Valley, linking Walthamstow and Clapton. It is a road with a sense of humour. A motorist can drive it west from Walthamstow to the edge of Clapton – whereupon the lane abruptly terminates at a locked gate. Also on the route is a booby trap: a railway bridge that offers a meagre 5ft of clearance. A passing Transit would get written off, a cyclist going too fast would get a concussion. Even walkers have to assume an odd penitential stoop to pass beneath the girders. They look, sometimes, like pilgrims entering some holy cave.
Here, you soon understand Coppermill Lane wasn’t meant for idle strolls – even less for through traffic. It is a thoroughfare to service the infrastructure of the capital, and is trodden by people with hard hats, clipboards and hi-vis.
Nonetheless I have my ritual walk. Walking west from Walthamstow you first cross a flood relief channel – as steeply sided as a canyon in the Old West – within which all local moggies gone missing are presumed to have slipped and drowned. Coppermill Lane then climbs an embankment, with views of the London skyline from a perspective no architect cared about. The skyscrapers at Stratford look like a game of Tetris: the City like a wigwam, sagging under the tent pole of the Shard beyond. In the foreground, beyond barbed wire fences, are a long chain of Victorian reservoirs. I like to imagine each lap of the wave and eddy is caused by someone boiling a kettle, watering their begonias, flushing the loo. On the banks fishermen slouch – dressed in their habitual paramilitary camouflage – avoiding eye-contact.
Lastly, Coppermill Lane dives into a tunnel of greenery, and anonymous footpaths fray off into thickets. The seclusion here is valued by many tribes: fly tippers, nature lovers, mid-pandemic ravers whose subwoofers set the toothbrush holder in my bathroom shaking. In spring, Hackney hipsters gather armfuls of cowparsley here in fits of countryside cosplay. This is also a crime hotspot: if there’s a sudden gathering on the marsh, it could be a kingfisher sighting: could also be a drugs drop. The lane ends at a footbridge over the River Lea, but more often I stop at a midway point where I can sit and listen to its soundtrack: chuntering pipes, crackling electricity lines, Greater Anglia trains screeching over points.
Exploring Coppermill Lane is a bit like watching open heart surgery on a city – those unseen arteries that course about it, service it and sustain it come to the surface, many old and failing after centuries of hard living. Like open heart surgery, it's initially a bit disgusting, but look longer and you see beauty in the intricacy of the design: in the weaving and webbing of pylon and watercourse.
Planes waiting for runways at Heathrow and Stansted circle over the Lea Valley, and when returning from overseas trips I always try to get a window seat. Most London streets are indistinguishable in the urban grid but Coppermill Lane is recognisable: especially at night when its archipelago of street lights span the dark valley. Perhaps that perspective, high in the clouds, was known to the American pilot who plotted a final bearing, in service of the city all around.
Oliver Smith is the author of On This Holy Land: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain which published in 2024