Liminal London: The 10k hike from Rainham to Grays via Purfleet

This bleakly beautiful trail along the east London stretch of the Thames takes you to the liminal world between past and present as well as the world’s longest graffiti wall.

‘Stop! Go Back! You are being recorded on CCTV’, echoes a mechanical voice from the ether. We glance at one another and quicken our step.

One of our party had stepped onto the grassy verge of the Thames path to take a photo of monolithic warehouses through the ten-foot metal fencing, incurring the wrath of Big Brother (guilty as charged).

‘Isn’t this just a recycling centre?’ one of us asks. ‘It must be a data centre – look at all the security.’ Too late, we see the cameras, standing on crane-like white posts at frequent intervals. We hurry along the endless perimeter as the message repeats its order, glancing nervously behind us for any security guards.

We were an hour into our ten-mile hike along a forgotten stretch of the Thames, on the hunt for open skies, intractable river views, and remnants of industrial and military history. This inauspicious start didn’t bode well, but thankfully, once past the black behemoths, the walk opens up its treasures. 

We’d started our escapade at Rainham train station, dipping below motorway underpasses and across three-laned roundabouts to reach the scrubby marshes with distant views of Tilda’s rice factory.

You can smell the Thames before you see it, a tantalising freshness encouraging deeper breaths. Before long, we see water and step onto National Cycle Route 13. To the right, NCR 13 extends to Tower Bridge; to the left – our destination – it runs all the way through east London, Essex, Suffolk and up to Dereham in Norfolk; a total of 136.3 miles. But we’re only going as far as Grays.

By the time the cycle path reaches Rainham, it’s more like a country footpath fringed with tall grasses and mysterious plants that we argue could be cowslips, fennel or hemlock. The low tide reveals glistening mud with dangerously deep fissures.

This is a quiet stretch of the Thames with few cyclists or walkers, but it offers an intriguing insight into London’s underbelly. Looking inland, tractors are infilling the old rubbish dump, and data centres are guarding their secrets. On the shore, you will find signs of the river’s pirate and military past, and a sense that this has always been a remote spot used for covert operations.

There are weathered wooden signs with pirate messages, rifle bunkers grown over with grass, and Kryptonite-coloured glass rocks embedded in foreshore, discarded by a long-gone glass factory.  

Most impressive is the fleet of concrete barges, nestled in the mud like beached whales. Built to carry fuel to Dunkirk in the war and then sunk here to shore up damaged flood barriers in the Great Flood of 31 January 1953, these 16 hollow barges are now home to thousands of birds.

As we approach Purfleet, halfway through our 10-mile hike, we reach the RSPB reserve at Rainham Marshes, which extends towards a distant view of the A13. There is no café here, but there are scenic tables where you can eat your packed lunch. 

Ornithologists may wish to stop here and walk its three-mile perimeter – if you bring binoculars, you’re likely to see Lapwings, Redshanks and wildfowl, and the long grasses provide nesting grounds for Short-eared Owls and Reed Buntings. From there, it’s a short walk – past the now dilapidated hotel featured in Bram Stoker’s Dracula – to Purfleet train station.  

But we plough on to the second half of the hike, which takes an altogether more industrial turn. The stretch between Purfleet and Grays is not for the faint-hearted. It’s a concrete path shuttered on both sides with no exit. 

For three miles, you are pinned in by oil refineries and the like to one side, and the river defence wall to the other. The only view you’ll get of the Thames is by clambering up metal access ladders, ignoring the Keep Out signs.

While this stretch of the walk is unrelentingly industrial, the sights it affords are impressive. You pass within metres of vast factories, busy supplying the capital with the utilities we depend upon: mountains of coal, miles of fuel piping, forests of refinery chimneys, banks of shipping containers.

It’s a relief when the path takes you below the river defence wall again, reconnecting you with the expansive views of the Thames and the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. The bridge, built to relieve traffic from the Dartford Tunnel, is so high that you can’t hear the cars travelling southbound above you.

Beyond the bridge, there is peace – and surprisingly, art. The water comes much closer to the path, and you can hear the therapeutic sound of waves. Looking at the wider and wilder vista of the Thames, thoughts wander to how the Romans, Celts and Vikings managed to navigate the waters in their shallow boats.

This contemplative soundscape is the perfect backdrop to appreciate what is perhaps the most surprising discovery of the walk: the UK’s, and possibly the world’s, longest graffiti wall. 

The two-meter-high defence wall between Purfleet and West Thurrock is adorned with graffiti for almost its entire length – nearly two miles. On the Monday after the annual Southend Festival, hundreds of artists will descend on the path to transform the graffiti.

Finally, with the soles of my feet throbbing from the concrete path, civilisation reappears. The billowing grasses and glittering mud banks littered with flotsam and jetsam give way to old wharves converted into uninspiring housing that obliterates their medieval past. Here, a five-minute walk into the town of Grays gets me back on the CS2 train into Fenchurch Street.

As I sit back on a half-hour train journey that took me five hours to walk, surrounded by West Ham fans heading to the Saturday match, I feel a pleasant sense of disassociation. The walk from Rainham to Grays is gritty, but I’m left with a sense of a secret that London has shared with me. 

It’s an unrelenting and wind-swept walk, best done in good weather, but one that will leave you feeling you have travelled across centuries of history and seen things that society prefers to keep hidden.

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