London

On a slate-grey east London afternoon, Billy Bragg walks out of Gallions Reach DLR station with his head up, smiling. At 49, the Bard of Barking looks more dad than hungry rebel (as he is, to 12-year-old Jack by his partner Juliet) and he’s stockier, but affable and excited about our tour of his patch. Feature continues

Armada Way leads off into wasteland. Bragg, though, is looking past the scruffy present. He points out Shooters Hill over the river, where Caesar marched, and the Gallions Hotel on Albert Basin, where Rudyard Kipling stayed. And in his new book, ‘The Progressive Patriot’, he quotes Kipling’s poem ‘The River’s Tale’ and its image of a harmonious, pre-Roman London: ‘And Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek/Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek.’

A memoir-cum-polemic, ‘The Progressive Patriot’ was sparked off by the BNP winning a Barking Council seat in 2004. Its victories this year and the 7/7 bombings added fuel to his ire. The book is a cry from a multicultural heart for the Cross of St George to be embraced by all of England’s inhabitants – just as political rights from the Magna Carta onwards came to embrace all English people, just as the East End absorbed different immigrant waves. It makes sense to start where the Braggs did – in Beckton, the family’s first home. Winsor Terrace is bricks-and-mortar East End history. The southern side is a sturdy, dark, nineteenth-century terrace. The north side is modern, honey-coloured semis. Tall, padlocked gates dead end the road. Once the entrance to the Beckton Gas Light and Coke Company, they now guard an untidy park. Bragg’s great-grandfather, Fred, lived where the semis now stand.

‘Great-grandfather Bragg was born out in Essex, so the gasworks were the reason my people came here,’ says Bragg, studying the terrace. ‘And coming from the countryside, where they were in cottages, these would have been something great. If my brother was here, he’d be admiring the brickwork.

‘He’s a bricklayer.’ Bragg nods across at the semis. ‘He built a lot of these.’ He built over the site of their great-grandfather’s house? ‘Yeah. It’s hugely ironic. I only found out when I was researching the book.’

In 1889, Fred Bragg and his fellow workers made a historic, successful demand for shorter (eight-hour) shifts. In 1911 another of Billy Bragg’s great-grandfathers – George Austin, a ‘permanent labourer’ in St Katharine Docks – was in a famous strike against the humiliating ‘call-on’ system where un-unionised, casual workers would crowd at the docks, hoping to be picked for a day’s work.

Bragg looks at the padlocked gates. ‘This is where they walked in every day. Now it’s just park and a bit of wasteland. When they opened these gates in 1871, this was the largest factory in the world.’

The factory touches several Bragg generations; not only his brother’s brickwork. ‘When I was a kid in the ’60s, my great-aunt, who was the daughter of Fred Bragg, still had gas lighting. It was a sort of echo of where her father had worked.’ And the union that led the 1889 strike was the forerunner of today’s GMB (Britain’s general union). ‘I work very closely with the GMB on tour, I play under their banner. And that was the union my great-grandfather would have taken part in.’