This is Elmfield RoadE17, a short terraced street teetering on the edge of suburbia.
Elmfield Road is where the late Victorian housebuilders abruptly stopped. It sits on the very western edge of Walthamstow where the land dips down to a broad swathe of marshes, reservoirs and water treatment plants. One side of the road is a continuous two-storey terrace, just as you'd find on many a nearby street, but the other is an open stripe of lawn terminating at a spiky black fence. It's nowhere anyone but residents need to visit, an outpost on the last rung of a segregated residential ladder, but simultaneously a cheery spot where community spirit oozes out of every window.
What shines at present is the street's Living Advent, a festive sequence of homemade tableaux affixed to bay windows ranging from a shiny Christmas pudding via an arty partridge in a pear tree to a not very good joke about turkeys. Everyone's really tried and many have left the curtains open, which I guess is easier on a street hardly anyone walks down with no neighbours opposite. A similar 24-stop trail has been created on neighbouring Salop Road but having three times as many houses allows 100 folk to opt out, whereas Elmfield Road requires a higher level of amateurish participation.
One of the parking spaces was co-opted in 2018 to create Waltham Forest's 250th Bike Hangar. Someone's gone to the effort of draping two hanging baskets from the Permit Holders Only parking sign. Numbers 49-63 were destroyed by a bomb in December 1940 and the resultant deaths of Herbert Gray and John Wren are commemorated by a plaque added to the front porch of a postwar replacement. It comes as no surprise to discover that residents hold a big Summer Street Party every year, even during socially distanced times, with Ana Maria baking biscuit medals and Douglas organising the petanque.
Whichever end of the street you arrive at you're welcomed by a splash of art. A huge mural has been painted across each end terrace, one very much redolent of Picasso, the other portraying endangered urban animal species. The oversized quartet here are a fox, a badger and two bees, each bearing an appropriate placard, and for some reason not a hedgehog. The street's website is quite hung up on hedgehogs, most recently bemoaning the fact that some residents might have sealed up all the gaps in their fences preventing the little chaps from snuffling through. If your street doesn't have its own Wordpress blog, let alone a Facebook group, you're probably missing out.
What makes Elmfield Road unique is the side where the housing isn't. Beyond the grass behind the railings is what used to be the Dagenham Brook and is now the River Lea Flood Relief Channel, a broad artificial conduit for unlovely water. The Elmfield Road Sluice regulates the flow at the southern end of the street and was last overwhelmed in October 2000, for which reason residents are strongly advised to set up flood alerts on their mobiles. And on the far side of the channel is a steep green bank with scrawny trees on top which shields the Coppermills Water Treatment Works from view. I expect its tanks are all too visible from the upstairs bedrooms, but that's the price you pay for living on the edge.
Rest assured I'm not intending to write a post about every street in London, there being over 32000 of them, because that would take the rest of the century to complete. But some streets strike you the first time you walk down them as being anomalous enough to be worth digging into. My congratulations if, like Elmfield Road, you live on one of them.
