9:10pm Thursday 21st May 2009
By Tom King
THE Basildon Heritage Trail is a path with a point to make. Those who think of Basildon as the sort of place where the roundabouts are the town’s most inspirational feature, are heading for a culture shock.
The six-mile route takes in an A-list landscape, works of art, listed architecture, wild nature and history galore.
Much of this is linked by another unsuspected legacy, a hidden green pedestrian corridor that snakes its way through the heart of the town.
A large part of the heritage trail has actually been in existence since the birth of Basildon. It just needed a name and some attention.
It now has that identity, thanks to the efforts of a group of Basildonians who want to make the town more aware of its heritage.
Five years in formation, the trail has been attracting a steady trickle of explorers for some time, but this month the last segments were plugged into place, and the trail was officially declared open.
Now the man best qualified to act as guide has offered his free services to anyone or any group seeking to explore Basildon.
Vin Harrop is the man who dreamed up the idea of a Basildon Heritage Trail and the key figure in making it a reality. He can also claim to have walked the route more than anyone else. Thirty times is his estimate.
“I’ve walked it in every weather,” he says. “I’ve walked it in snow and I’ve walked it in bright summer sunshine. I’ve walked it at every time of day and night and I haven’t tired of it yet.”
You can pick up the trail at any spot along the circuit, but we started at Vin’s recommended point, the car-park at the north edge of Gloucester Park. “It’s green and it’s free,” Vin explains.
Almost immediately, we hit a sort of monument, although a rather sad one. The cricket pavilion lies mouldering in the plantation at the edge of the park.
“It was built to provide an alternative county cricket venue for south Essex,” Vin says. “But, somehow, cricket never caught on here.”
Still at just 60 years old, Basildon can boast a bona fide historic ruin.
Leaving Gloucester Park by the north-west corner, we enter the first stage of an unexpected and hidden world, the world of the Basildon pedestrian underpass.
The town’s underpasses have had an undeservedly bad press. When they figure at all, it tends to be as the scene of muggings. However, that is one excitement heritage trail explorers are unlikely to encounter. “In all the times I have walked the trail, I have never encountered anything or anybody at all menacing,” says Vin.
What you will find is miles of peaceful, green, carefully landscaped corridors, insulated from the roar and stench of the roads on which the vast majority of Basildon journeys are made.
“Basildon was built in the Sixties, largely around the car,” says Vin. “But the planners also built this alternative system for pedestrians. They’ve been useful in putting together the heritage trail, but they are also part of Basildon’s heritage that we want people to discover.”
There are discoveries to be made all along the route. Almost as soon as we hit the underpass network, we find a cluster of bushes, neatly trimmed into ornamental topiary.
This hidden garden is invisible to the traffic that hurtles past, just a few yards above our heads.
There are many other highlights on this sunken path system, all equally hidden from view. There are the elliptical entrances to some of the tunnels, a feature unique to Basildon.
There is the armillary sphere, a giant statue of a navigation instrument used by early explorers, emphasising the pioneering role of Basildon as a new town, and linking it to the wider world, the seas and the heavens.
There is the circular garden that surrounds the sphere. It lies in a sunken bowl alongside the bustle of Roundacre. Even pedestrians at street level are oblivious to this treasure.
The message becomes clearer by the minute. To find the real heart of Basildon, you need to be on foot and you need to go looking.
Not everything is hidden from sight, however. There is another revelation to come, and this one lies not in a hollow, but at the top of a hill.
Follow the trail out of the north along Upper Mayne for a few yards. and you come to a gap in the hedge. This marks an ancient footpath that makes a beeline up St Nicholas Hill.
Developers had to leave this green strip intact, even as they built all around it. The route passes the overgrown site of ancient Laindon Hall, burnt out in the early Sixties.
“There were a whole series of fires that destroyed Basildon’s historic houses around that period. It really was most mysterious,” Vin says, with heavy irony.
No arsonist or predatory developer managed to get at St Nicholas Church, however, let alone the view that surrounds it.
To the west, now picked out by the Canary Wharf towers, you can see London’s East End, from where so many Basildonians emigrated in the Fifties and Sixties.
North lies open farmland, a reminder that Basildon offers a clear border between town and country. The most surprising revelation lies to the south, a landscape of low hills and greenery, with a few buildings dotted among the trees.
Can this really be Basildon centre? Vin reels off a few statistics.
“They planted 100,000 trees when Basildon was being built, and we are now enjoying the result. Basildon has 200 green spaces and 14 parks. It is the greenest of towns, but you need to climb this hill to realise just how green.”
Basildon is still a new town, but alongside the new, there are constant reminders of the old. The detached belltower in Pagel Mead is a modern glass structure, but as Vin points out: “One of the bells dates from the 1400s. It was the first one ever cast by a woman.”
The north-west corner of the town square marks the site of a house that gave Basildon an enduring place in the English language.
“It was called Hotwater Hall,” says Vin. “There was no jail or police station around here, so if someone was going to be hauled in front of the magistrates, they would be held at Hotwater Hall until the court was in session. Hence the phrase ‘getting into hot water.’”
Basildonians who find themselves in hot water these days get to spend the night in purpose-built police cells.
Hotwater Hall is one of many reminders the roots of Basildon run deeper and richer than many of us may have thought. The Heritage Trail is a route to those roots.
“I used to have to explain the words ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy’ to children in Basildon,” says Vin.
“They had no concept as to what the words meant.
“Now they can find out. When they come into contact with the trail, they cotton on pretty quickly.”
l A brochure with a map and guide to the Basildon Heritage Trail is available from the trail office in the Eastgate Centre (first level, opposite Debenhams).
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.echo-news.co.uk/trade_directory/