EOTL12: Lord Upminster

[David Scott]

Pictures

I know that many of our readers like nothing better than to spend an evening perusing the EOTL map, looking at the exciting places we’ve been to. If you are one of these people it will not have escaped your notice that EOTL has been a peculiarly Westerly deal up until now. Biggs and I decided recently therefore to head East to Upminster for our next jaunt. We both live in the East. So we thought this should be straight forward. We of course spend less time looking at maps than maybe you do .

The train that pulled me into Upminster on Thursday night was my third and it had been over two hours since I left the house. I’d been the only person on board for the last three stops. It felt like we must be close to France.

 

 

 

Upminster station isn’t so much a tube station as a train station where tubes stop sometimes. Biggs couldn’t have been happy with the architecture, which is that of a suburban train station.

Upminster doesn’t have a lot to offer either. Our EOTL research relies heavily on Wikipedia and what Wikipedia has to say about Upminster is that it has a windmill. This is no bad thing of course but that’s pretty much all that Upminster has to offer. The only other thing of note is that Ian Dury grew up there. He called his 1981 album “Lord Upminster”. Tellingly “Lord Upminster” is agreed by most critics to be his most rubbish album. Wikipedia lists Archie Mitchell, Glenda Mitchell, Ronnie Mitchell and Roxy Mitchell as having lived close to Upminster before they moved to Eastenders’ Walford, however these people are fictional.

Biggs had guessed a few days earlier that Upminster must have a pub called The Windmill and he suggested that we should meet there. He was later pleased to reveal by email that there was indeed such a pub and that it was only minutes from the Upminster station. This statement is almost true. What you need to do to make it true is insert the word “Bridge” between “Upminster” and “station”. The Windmill is only minutes from Upminster Bridge station. Which is half an hour from Upminster station. By the time I sat down with Biggs at The Windmill pub therefore I wasn’t really in the mood to do much else. Biggs agreed. He had in fact walked more than me in order to visit the windmill itself, which was nowhere near The Windmill or either station. We agreed that this was the worst EOTL destination ever.

The Windmill pub is noted by Beer in the Evening as Upminster’s finest pub. It might well be. It is however rubbish. For the first time ever we had to agree that this was not a good EOTL. We decided to finish the evening off on a more metropolitan note, back at London’s ICA. On the way in a clear rejection of suburban values Biggs made use of the Embankment’s splendid pissoir.

   

Footnote: Dashiel Hammet once said that in everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption, and so to demonstrate that EOTL is indeed art, I should mention that on the way out of The Windmill we had a chat with our very own Lord Upminster: a nice chap who was wearing some fiery braces.

[Ruth Scott]

Great read bro - but a bit unkind to any upminsterers reading - my friend Susan stayed there for a while years ago and liked it ................but then it was a long time ago .................x