Hello! I’m Danny Baxter, a creative artist living in Barking and Dagenham, east London and I’ve been a regular contributor to Write On! almost since it began.

In this, my third Showcase, I will be looking at how the mindset is influenced by one’s environment. I’ll be taking you on a trip around my locality; which is home to much inspiration, motivation and culture which informs my outlook and creative activity. I reached out to fellow local poet Gertcha, who I regularly bump into at all the local poetry venues. I posed the topic to him, and this poem about the B.A.D. Borough is his response.

A B.A.D. Influence

Rhymes come to me freely and randomly
As I saunter around my neighbourhood
Many a muse hit my rhythm sticks
From Barking Creek to Robin Hood

The tall Lombardy trees of Mayesbrook Park
And the wild Anatidae swimming in the lake
Make me feel bucolic on my own doorstep
And help direct the mind-path I choose to take

Whether it’s the sway and susurration of the leaves
Or the ripples gently converging into one whole
In the heaviness of East London rhymes ring out
In my head, nature paves a way for my pen to scroll

In the busy-ness of the East Street Marketplace
Another convergence in this bottleneck occurs
A mix of differing cultures interweave en mass
Buyers and sellers form a Kaleidoscope of colours

The confusion of odours excite my olfactory senses
Exposing memories long filed away on a dusty ledge
Memories of shopping with my Nan in Queen’s Market
Causes many ideas in my head to take wing and fledge

The libraries, theatre and arty like groups and clubs
Help give me a channel to flow my scribblings down
Where I can perform my workings; warts and all
And never ever leaving feeling like a failed clown

They remind me I’m actually quite good at peopling
As I have a tendency to hide me and my works away
But they all give me reason to expose myself en entier
Shedding these cobwebs that weave a snare day to day

Yeah!
Many a muse hit my rhythm sticks
From Barking Creek to Robin Hood
Rhymes come to me freely and randomly
As I saunter around my neighbourhood

© Gertcha Cowson, 2025

Connect: X @cowson_gertcha

This personal poem not only presents how Gertcha’s environment feeds his inspiration and empowers him to overcome obstacles impeding his creative expression, it also exudes inspiration itself with such illustrative and rich language.

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Our next poem tackles the influences of the area from its iconic past. This is the work of Shannon, a poet I connected with recently at a local painting class at the Whitehouse Dagenham.

Old Dagenham

Take me back yonks ago
When fords blew clouds white as snow
Working together as a community
The town show was the place to be
Bowling and ballrooms on a Saturday night
Public housing upped their plight
Fishing and swimming in every lake
Kirby on the old estate
Watch a movie at the pictures
Poor as anything but in many ways richer
Church bells rang every Sunday
You don’t hear that nowadays
Dagenham was the place for me
When it was the 1930’s

© Shannon Quinn, 2025

I found it interesting that Shannon chose write about Dagenham from a period way before her time. The  building of the Becontree Estate and Dagenham Ford Factory would have had a major effect on the community, their prospects and aspirations, even to this day. Dagenham’s heyday. Also, this happened around the time of the 1925 Barking Revival, my current focal interest, so I note the connection.

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In this next piece  Jo Renton couples her memories of an immersive visit to a coal mine in Germany many years ago with a more recent foray into a mining museum in the heart of industrial Germany. Though it’s my only piece not set in the Borough, it’s a great reminder of the power of time and place, which is central to this week’s Showcase.

Coal

“Nana, where does coal come from and why does it burn like that?” asked a curious small child while gazing into the flames and seeing all sorts of characters from fairy tales within. Open fires and black-leaded grates were the only heating we had back then. We lived on the second floor of a typical, probably Edwardian London house, with fireplaces in each room. The marble mantelpiece over the fireplace in the living room once fell onto my mother’s head, while she was sweeping up the dust and cinders, and promptly broke in two. I don’t even remember her sitting down afterwards to recover. People were tough in those days. They had to be.

And coal mining was one of the toughest of jobs. I’ve only been down a mine once. And that was in Germany when I was accompanying my husband who was a government official for Saarland. I’m still not entirely sure what the purpose of our visit actually was, or what made us accept the invitation in the first place, but there we were, a not particularly happy group from the ministry, embarking into the unknown.

I think they must have been extra careful about our safety, as we were given so much to wear and carry, we felt we were encased in a suit of armour, especially at first, till we got used to it. The helmet alone must have weighed at least a kilo if you included the light in front with its attached wires and battery fastened firmly to a sturdy leather belt. The white suit we were given to wear was made of such stiff, heavy-duty material, it could probably have remained in a standing position even without anybody inside it, and the weighty metal-capped safety boots I was given seemed at least three sizes too big.

The first part of the adventure was to be transported by a primitive sort of lift with metal gates which slammed shut, called a Förderkorb. Once inside, we were transported to the bowels of the earth almost at the speed of falling until, at the last minute, luckily for its passengers, it slowed down and landed almost gently in the realm of Hades, enabling us all to emerge, shaken but still in one piece.

The next stage of our transport was a rather basic, roofless, doorless, underground train, that rattled us along several kilometres of tunnels which became progressively narrower, lower and more dimly lit as we increased our distance from the main shaft, and neared the coal face for which we were heading.

All too soon, our relatively comfortable ride was over and it was time to stand up and scramble out, switching our helmet lamps on as we did so. Standing there in an anxious little group, we all decided this was definitely not an appropriate occasion for independent sightseeing. So without demur, we all followed our guide in a silent, obedient line along a tunnel so low, we had to bend to accommodate it. A tunnel so dark, all we could see of the miners working at the coal face were the whites of their eyes glistening in the beam of their helmet lights. Their torsos were mainly bare, as I remember, for it was hot down there, and we all felt very overdressed in comparison.

I’ve forgotten how long that walk through the dark tunnels, nearly a mile underground, actually lasted, but it seemed like hours till we regained the relative familiarity of the open-topped underground train once more, and then the long journey to the surface, this time at a more stately speed, hardly faster than a lift in a department store.

Having reached the blessed heavenly realms of natural light and air once more, we found all that underground exercise had given us an appetite. I suppose I must have washed my hands and face first, but still in our now-blackened suits and with a clearly visible tide-mark round my neck, we sat down to enjoy a glass of beer and piping hot Frankfurters, or Wiener as they are called in German, with crispy fresh rolls and lashings of mustard – heaven!

That all happened years ago, almost lost in the mists of time, in fact. However, my visit to the largest coal mine in the Ruhr was only last summer. The Zeche Zollern colliery, opened in 1851, which employed thousands in its heyday, was only closed down as a working mine in 1986.

It is now a museum, still with architecturally decorous buildings and even an Eiffel-like tower, albeit without its slender curved shape, and with innumerable sightseeing levels, reached only by seemingly unending metal staircases.

It had once been the largest colliery in the world and, with its output of high-grade coal, the ravenous hunger of the iron and steel works of the area could be satisfied. Saarland had not even been a proper part of Germany during the war. It had been an independent state, rather like Luxembourg, until 1957. But here, in the Ruhr, we were in the industrial heartland of Prussia, where so much of what was needed for Hitler’s war machine was produced.

© Jo Renton, 2025 

Residing in unusually sized spaces, irregular light levels and odours is like a trek into another dimension. Radically different environments can imprint upon us in an evocative way, giving birth to new reference points to anchor to in the future.

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On my continued trails around the Borough, I wound up at the newly opened Women’s Museum in Barking, who were hosting a spoken word event. These events are great for the exchange of diverse cultural ideas and experiences. I connected with a local poet, Nathaniel, sharing a matrix of prompts with him which he blended into this piece below.

East (Street) Of Eden

On the fringes of London and Essex,
Lies a land of milk and honey,
That bubbles from Barking Creek.
The River Roding that blesses the Redbridge Nile.

Barking is a stalwart of the East,
A staple of our needs,
A cradle of diverseness and grit.

Our forefathers and aunties had,
Gritted their teeth,
Bore it and grinned,
Through racism and strife.

Through their flesh and their blood,
They struggled so we’d know their love.
They fed our souls and covered the soles of our feet.

Just a soul’s throw away from the fishmongers catch.
From West Indies to Ghana, then Aisa Minor,
Then St. Margaret’s of Antioch.

All these roads don’t lead to Rome,
They lead to a Theatre of Dreams.
Be they birthed from renaissance,
Revived from the graves and tombs,
Of Barking Abbey.

Whose ruins got reformed,
Like clay pots in the womb,
Born-again for the noblest of use.

Our renewing of minds took place,
In a mural of colours and spice.
We seasoned and painted, our brushes,
Comforted elders and loved one-another.

Then we’d write it all down in parables and prose.

All we did was speak life into that,
Which we thought had already,
Been dead.

© The Philosophers Poet, 2025

I love how this poem takes a walk through Barking history. Rich word imagery is used to describe a strong sense of the cultural mix, while effortlessly incorporating local landmarks into the storytelling. There is also the theme of resilience. Challenges the past generations overcame, forming a legacy that was passed on to us in the present day.

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Finally, I want to give Creative Barking and Dagenham a shout out. It’s ten years since I first engaged with their creative programme. CBD demystified much of the administration process in the creative arts sector, enabling me to consider community arts from new perspectives. This is a piece written by CBD arts facilitator Izzy during a poetry introduction workshop they recently ran at Kingsley Hall.

Rising With Alfie

The rough and ready bark
Of my dog in heavy dark
Pulls me from the soft sweet dreams
And jumps me to the skirting board seams.

The chewed and crumbled bark
Lies littered on the floor.
His bark an echo now
He sees me at the door.

I rise.
I clean. I soothe.
I sigh and breathe the morning air.
“We’ll get there… we’ll get there.”
I rise.

© Izzy Wolfe, 2025

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If you’d like to see your writing appear in the Write On! Showcase, please submit your short stories, poetry or novel extracts to: pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/

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