At the top of our road is a thoroughfare named Portway. It heads roughly east to west, with houses and side roads along its southern edge and West Ham Park bordering to the north. This park was originally part of the Upton Park/Ham House estate, where, in the 18th century, Dr John Fothergill created a botanical garden ‘second only to Kew’. Alongside the wide green open spaces, the football pitches and sports areas and playgrounds, all essential parts of a living, vital community resource and sanctuary – in other words, of an urban park – there is an ornamental garden, where remain traces of the design and layout of Dr Fothergill’s garden, with trees planted by him. The ornamental garden is, to me, the heart of this haven in east London.

The gate we use to go into the park – the one nearest to our house, also closest to the ornamental gardens – is designated Portway Gate.

It’s quite unusual to have a street name which is a single word, ‘Portway’, and Portway Gate is an even more gloriously evocative, tautological name. Like Pendle Hill.

I don’t know if ‘port’ refers to a settlement with navigable waterway, although certainly the route leads towards the River Lea. But ‘port’ itself is part of a cloud of words meaning carry, bear, point of departure and entrance: porter [one who carries], portable [something that can be carried], transport [to carry across]; porta is Latin for door and we still have the word portal, which often has associations of a magical doorway, and entrance to something special.

‘Way’ is an Old English word, weg – road, path, course of travel, room, space, freedom of movement, and then, through figurative use attested in Middle English [c1300 onwards] it means the manner in which something occurs.

And Gate: also Old English, Old Saxon roots – originally meaning gap, hole, breach, and it also bears associated meanings of street, lane, alley.

So Portway and Portway Gate. A web of intertwining, overlapping, shifting meanings all embodying their function – a route to go somewhere, an entrance point. Meaning exactly what they are, which – for anyone who remembers, or who has since been bored by my half-remembered third year dissertation when I learned a little about 17th century theories of language – is Adamic naming, the idea that the name for something exactly matches, reveals and communicates it.

Earlier this year I read a fascinating book called Wayfinding, by Michael Bond, which traces – amongst other things – the way that spacial language is essential to our cognitive processes. We live, as it were, within spacial metaphors in our mind and emotions – we feel close to someone, we think our way through a problem… it’s so ingrained we barely notice the imagery. Way in particular is one of those deep rooted resonant words, with port and gate following close behind.

Doorways and gates are full of symbolism and figurative force in stories. Secret doors, magical doors, an entrance into a different world, or back through time; gatekeepers who set challenges, magical tasks to be completed before the hero can gain access, a key which must be carried until one finds the door, discovers the lock which it matches. Gandalf at the entrance to the mines of Moria; Bilbo waiting – not knowing he was waiting – for the thrush on Durin’s day. Alice finding the key, and the secret small door into Wonderland. Tom’s Midnight Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden. ‘Further up and further in’ cries Reepicheep in The Last Battle, until they reach the world within the world within the world, the original garden of Eden.

So there is Portway Gate. Across Portway – along which goes the bus to Stratford, along which I cycle each workday morning, heading towards city and bustle and busy station..and the whole wide world. Across Portway, through Portway Gate. To a garden, created by a Doctor and made for healing, and learning, and solace, its traces still here.

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world.

Burnt Norton, TS Eliot