sUtopias can provide us with a critical vantage point from which to view 'the conditions of life which surround us all to-day', wrote William Morris in 'The End and the Means'. So what sort of conditions do surround us today?
If we fall asleep tonight and wake up fifty years on, what state would London, and in particular Walthamstow, be in?

2055 - icebergs melted, rivers flooded, Camden and Islington submerged. The waters now calm, stabilized, the sea lapping gently around the borders of 'Walthamstow-on-Sea'.

It isn't difficult to visualise Walthamstow-on-Sea. We're halfway there already. We have the pie and eel shop, the Salvation Army headquarters looking like a giant sandcastle, the daily promenading of Robert Crumb ladies in sparkly tops and micro shorts up and down the market.

The other stuff we need for this Utopia we already have, but in a degraded state. We have cinemas and theatres, but they're burnt out, converted to snooker halls or closed. We have enough cafes to fuel an army of day-trippers. We have a beautifully flattened, cordoned off piece of land right at the top of the market, just waiting for our own icon, our own Blackpool Tower.

One person, above all others, who would hate this vision of Walthamstow would be William Morris himself. He despised living in 'the age of the makeshift' and 'cockney' was an insult he used to mean vulgar and materialistic. His Utopian vision, in 'News from Nowhere', dismisses Walthamstow as 'a very jolly place, now that the trees have grown againsince the great clearing of houses in 1955'.

Makeshift, vulgar, cocknified, Walthamstow-on-Sea would undoubtedly be, but also lively, spanerse, bracing. Opposite Walthamstow tube station there used to be a sign 'Walk in, Dance out', not a bad motto for the newly revived
borough, 2055.

Linda Hughes, Walthamstow, 2005.