Within the stretches of the Lea Valley from which the Travellers, camped under flyovers and diving for scrap metal, have been expelled, along with the broken bivouacs of rough-sleepers, our ragged troubadour procession passed without comment – beyond the occasional herbal wave of acknowledgement from a pirate narrowboat. As we approached the spectacular unreality of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, mirage structures appearing and disappearing before we could reach them, the peloton of commuting cyclists thickened. They were silent assassins, sweeping from behind, often with growls of resentment that mere pedestrians were body-blocking their favoured highway.
Olympicopolis, now that the barriers were down and the military returned to barracks, was a ‘park’ only in the sense of retail park or car park. Or theme park still to identify its theme and waiting on input from a content provider. With no great stretch of imagination, they christened the water margin: Canalside. Bars and burger warehouses and bright new hangars so adaptable that they seem to have slipped, unimpeded, from the CGI versions that used to be plastered across hostile blue fences. The Olympic Park was provisional, like a promised Eden that might be withdrawn in an instant and returned to mounds of landfill.
‘Canalside is the place to be on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Set among green spaces and wild flowers on Here East’s stretch of the Lea River, Canalside offers an eclectic mix of independent restaurants and retailers.’ As, for example: MOTHER (a place where you can hang out, feel good and eat well… as all our ingredients are sourced locally). THE BICYCLE MAN (everything for the urban rider). RANDY’S WING BAR (established as a pop-up in a pub in Hackney). GOTTO (a slice of the Italian Riviera on Canalside Hackney Wick).
Everything is pop-up. Nothing is true. The fables are authorless and generic, finessed by computer programmes. Boasted green spaces are the conceptual green of plastic football carpets. Wild flowers are currently unavailable. A patch of scorched earth has been fenced off: ‘Sorry, we are closed right now. We are busy growing new plants ready for you to enjoy.’ Locally sourced fish and edible beasts are keeping well out of it.
Meanwhile, private security guards on electrified buggies, observing our antics through binoculars, can’t decide which offences we are committing. They let us continue, unmolested.
Our disorientation was confirmed, shortly after my return from the walk, by a report from the London Ambulance Service on the shameful incident when a 60-year-old recreational cyclist at the Velodrome suffered cardiac arrest and died before paramedics could reach him. Two emergency ambulances and a rapid-response vehicle were hopelessly confused when their sat-navs failed.
‘The access to E20 Olympic Park (in particular the Velodrome) is difficult, especially for crew not used to the area,’ said the report. There was something of a history here. Hours after Sir Bradley Wiggins, with his history of perfectly legal drug exemption certificates, thrilled the nation by winning another gold medal at the time trial in 2012, Dan Harris, a 28-year-old internet consultant on a racing bike, was killed after being dragged under an Olympic bus within the shadow of the Velodrome.
When we came alongside the illuminated hulk of the former Olympic Stadium, the hollow bowl we must learn to call ‘London Stadium’, it was evident that the expensive (to us) rebrand had not taken: we were in the presence of the Death Star. An alien invader capable of destroying life as we know it. The karma of the transfer of West Ham United, a club founded by ironworkers at the mouth of the Lea, to this soulless and unsuitable environment, came with a catastrophic loss of form, crowd troubles and an overspill of resentment when thirsty and aggrieved football crowds crashed the locally-sourced artisan breweries and smoke-houses of Canalside, Hackney Wick. London Stadium means London Stadium – until a lucrative naming rights deal can be achieved by Karen Brady, the sorceror’s apprentice. The new club crest has to incorporate the word London.
Olympicopolis is the new capital: a city divided into two hemispheres, two Westfield supermalls. A city of pop-ups, naming rights, committee-bodged artworks, cash-cow academies, post-truth blogs and charity runs. And government pay-offs to the right sort of private enterprise. The bill for this disastrous stadium conversion stands at £323 million. And rising. Without the fix, waved through by Boris Johnson, the original cost of £752 million would never have been agreed.
‘So it has come at last – the Distinguished Thing,’ I said. Meaning the shadow of death in the room for Henry James. Fallen to the floor, James heard a voice that was not his own. Olympicopolis was my own distinguished thing: the latest and last London. Beyond this point, there is nothing left but naming rights for ghost towns. A railway city divided against itself: Stratford in the east and White City to Willesden in the west. Brownfield wilderness to conflicted Eden. We were not marching like Harold and his troops into London, we were leaving it behind, the emerging digital conceit on the Viking bank of the River Lea. There were no abbeys, palaces, hospitals or madhouses. Olympicopolis was a curtain of fog on which anything could be projected. When our coastal walk was completed, I vowed to return for a tour of inspection. I had avoided the area in the years after the 2012 Olympics; it was time for another circuit.
My hunch was that the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park was the checkmate in a long game initiated by Margaret Thatcher’s tyranny of the suburbs: the unmaking of local governance, the emasculating of councils, the deregulating of financial markets and the scrapping of planning controls. The old centre was hollow, occupied by remote profit harvesters. The river was prostituted to tourists, implanted with vanity towers and helicopter obstacles.
Olympicopolis has been constructed in a style they call ‘New London Vernacular’: biscuit-coloured brickwork for airport-sliproad blocks admitting to no confirmed function. The most revealing shift in status is the promotion from Zone 3 to Zone 2 in the transport map. Property values soar. Established art brands – Victoria & Albert Museum, Sadler’s Wells, the Smithsonian Institute – are parachuted in, or courted with sweetheart deals. Property speculators butter the map with bucolic claims and riparian associations: Manhattan Loft Gardens, Stratford Riverside, Glasshouse Gardens, Neptune Wharf. Get in early. Get in often. ‘Prices start at £615,000.’ And finish in meltdown.
The former Olympic media centre, now known as Here East, is the cornerstone for the translation of a mixed economy of small businesses, grubby trades, warehouse artists and squatters, allotment gardeners to an aspirational park glorying in display and disguise. The view from a ‘Manhattan’ loft. A post-industrial grid calling itself the ‘East Village’: ‘an emergent hub, an eco-friendly and sustainable neighbourhood’. With no visible neighbours. ‘A green haven in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities, with an emphasis on nurturing the natural environment.’
Cafés, eateries, gyms, cycle shops, teeth-whitening salons, beard barbers and mailbox services. A prestige address in a place where ambulances will never find you. Should you want to navigate the mysteries of Here East’s terminal architecture, you are issued with an orange booklet; hip design features offering instruction in ‘Atrium Wayfaring’. And counter-intuitive journeying. The maps are based on electrical circuit language and they work perfectly: they look beautiful and they are inscrutable. Every element of the building is a metaphor. The toilets, if you find them, are capicitators capable of temporary storage for electricity. ‘They charge to a pre-determined level and then ‘flush’ themselves when full.’ Visitors are still required to provide the content around which the device will operate.
It was a dream landscape when I made a slow circuit of the Olympic Park in the aftermath of our walk, a posthumous dream. I couldn’t convince myself that I was really here. The panoramic sweep, that Sunday morning, was a single sentence, outside time and beyond place. I put it down to fatigue, boredom, frustration: a flash forward to a future that could manage very well without me.
The entrance, by way of Hackney Wick, came through sentimental corridors of squalor I no longer trusted; protest copywriting and spray-can obsceni
ties approved by counter-narrative committees charged with dressing a small zone of the right sort of opposition, in order to make East Village and Canalside edgier and more authentic. The borderland bushes and concrete vaults under flyovers showed the usual signs of occupation, flattened shrubs, tunnels into the thorn, cans and blue bags rammed into mesh fences. Among the devils’ heads and wolf-serpent nightmares, the Aitch Group have a loud pitch to make: MORE LAND REQUIRED.
The Lord Napier pub is an anarchist artwork: SHITHOUSE TO PENTHOUSE. MEANWHILE IN EAST LONDON, LUNATICS DECORATE THE BUILDING. The walls are sticky Rauschenberg composites: overlays, tattered advertisements, household paint, lumps, growths, found objects. The neighbouring building, offering household products, has a punt at blue-plaque heritage: ZAMO HAS BEEN IN THE WICK SINCE 1960, A THIRD GENERATION FIRM. BUSINESS NAMED AFTER THE FAMILY’S PRIZEWINNING GREYHOUND.
I step back to allow a focused jogger in a TALK WITH YOUR FEET vest free passage. On the wall behind him, it says: 9/11 FIFTEEN YEARS OF LIES.
The Olympic Park is a game reserve, lacking beasts as yet, but awe-inspiring in its privileged emptiness. Miles of unoccupied concrete floor at Here East, enough for regiments of rough-sleepers. Helicopters overhead. Flight path tourism. Downward-staring surveillance cameras are postmodern design features, black and corvine, on the rim of generic hangars. Beyond some lazy, golf-cart security, there is nobody about. On a pre-rusted steel overpass, two young Chinese women in Santa Claus outfits are arguing over the coolest backdrop for a selfie. The borders of the park are trimmed in orange. CONSTRUCTION IS A CAREER LIKE NO OTHER. Rectangular tubs of spidery grasses are reflected deep into the darkness of blandly sinister buildings.
Cycle lanes are cancelled for upgrades. Pedestrians are ordered to stand back to allow the morning’s Dame Kelly Holmes charity half-marathon to thread through interweaving levels of road, pedestrian paths, canal. Flagging runners are encouraged by men dressed as bears, turning up the sound for Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby. Yuletide favourites boom over bitumen meadows: the stream of cars heading to Westfield, the emerging crop of investment flats, the red cranes, the anvil-dunes of remediated soil, the shuttered concession stalls and the scarlet ArcelorMittal Orbit with its viewing platform and screaming silver tubes.
The vision – blighted Eden, radiant hub – was awe-inspiring in the style of a cross-section diagram in an improving boys’ comic from my childhood in the 1950s: canal with cyclists and joggers, scattered statement buildings too new to be used, polished roads, retail village, casino, breakfast bars, residential towers, muckheaps, public art, perpetual construction, helicopters, drones, shuttling trains, huge skies. But the sight that had me laughing out loud was the rank of pristine swan pedalos parked on a stretch of river staring straight at Westfield. Poor Edith! It seems that our absurdist voyage, crashing a Hastings pedalo against the chains of the emerging park, had been neatly subverted, in the four years between the Stratford and Rio Olympics, from provocation to inspiration for the latest promotional gimmick. The entire working model for the regeneration project – ArcelorMittal helter-skelter, swan pedalo ride – was a straight steal from the Flamingo Amusement Park in Hastings. Our liberated swan, consorting with vagrants, river rats, Alan Moore and Stewart Lee, was now available as one of the park’s main visitor attractions.
I ran. I barged through ribbons of red-and-blue tape, shrugging off patronising hugs reserved for the charitable athletes who made it to the line: I escaped. And found myself catching up with earlier identities, adventures on the Northern Sewage Outflow, the improved cycle-friendly Greenway. Heading towards Victoria Park – which more than ever now felt like a proper park, an oasis, a green lung – I finished exactly where I had found myself, forty-two years ago, at the start of my theoretical London project, when I ‘ran the oracle’ for a self-published book called Lud Heat.
‘No word other than the need for it.’ I came up against a wartime relic, a six-sided concrete pillbox. A pissy shrine guarding the River Lea close to the point where the old Roman Road made its original ford. All those intervening years had brought me was a better class of confusion, obfuscation, error. A misreading of signs and symbols.
I stopped. The pillbox was intact and unimproved. It survived between blocks of exposed flats and the London Stadium, the Death Star. On the wall beside the bridge, someone had sprayed a naked plea: HELP ME. I looked through one of the machine-gun slats. On the pillar at the concrete core of the bunker was the outline of a ghostly figure drawn in chalk, King Lud as Green Man. A phallic stake had been driven through his cheating heart.
Pushing into early evening on the first day of our Harold tramp, we found that familiar markers had vanished. Novelty towers in striking colours rose above the remnants of dirty industries. The old detour that once carried walkers across the tricky vortex of the Bow flyover had been replaced by a shivering pontoon walkway, on the fence of which somebody had sprayed the obvious response: EVER CHANGING WORLD. All too soon, permitted paths ran out and we were trudging down the diesel-ditch of the A102 towards the Blackwall Tunnel, tapping curbstones in the choking fug.
Odo the crow, ex-bishop, registered his disapproval of the feminising of his name by some heretical development quango: ODA (Olympic Delivery Authority) was an insult he addressed by squirting a white splat on to the saddle of a red Santander bicycle, whose spokes a kneeling David Aylward was stroking with his violin bow. The other walkers stepped aside from the path, as and when required, to leave samples of their DNA, in liquid or compost form, in bushes, under flyovers, in buckets, bins, forests. A wolf trail of steamingly pungent traces. Trousers down, skirts spread.
The long march came to an end in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel with Aylward sawing away at more bicycle wheels and Claudia busking along with a blue-chinned, floppy-haired guitarist of Spanish gypsy appearance, who claimed to be Italian but who struggled with the rudiments of the language. Together, they made lovely, tilebounced music.
Returning next morning to pick up the walk at Greenwich, I became aware that most of my fellow passengers, waiting for the DLR connection at Shadwell, were mutants. They looked like regular Docklands colons – shiny shoes, decisive hair – but there was always one element out of place. The girl in the pristine white raincoat had sprouted a pair of crow’s wings. The programmer with the peppery red eyes was carrying an expensive leather satchel and a plastic lightsaber. Morning-after party girls with rescued maquillage had spiders’ webs across their faces and goats’ horns poking from freshly airfixed heads. Yesterday, it felt like a natural extension of the terrain when I noticed a chunky young woman in a rubber Superwoman outfit on the platform at Turkey Street. But now every Canary Wharf commuter was morphing into a comic-book character, a second-life spook with no terrestrial identity. The mutants were making their own pilgrimage, striking east to the boosted Chinese-owned badlands around ExCel London for a giant comic convention.
‘Hi – Lucinda? How’s Max? Still watching it?’
‘No worries. No worries then.’
‘My sister’s friend has made 25k this year. She hasn’t physically got it, because the house is in Croydon.’
‘There’s that help to buy. I know you didn’t know. Nobody knows. That’s mad. That’s insane.’
‘Dad was a retired priest. Grandma was a retired dentist. She loves grass with lots of space. And I don’t love any of that, obviously.’
I waited for the Kötting troop in Greenwich in the place where, a short while later, I met a procession of refugees and their supporters in bright blue T-shirts coming down the Thames path, on their way from Canterbury to Westminster. David Herd, poet and Professor of Modern Literature at the School of English, University of Kent, organised two of these summer walks, ‘staged in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and immigrant detainees’. In June 2015, they followed the old Pilgrims’ Way. ‘The principal aim,’ Herd said, ‘was to counter the silence surrounding indefinite immigration detention and in the process to call for the practice to be
stopped.’
In silence I waited in a pub on the Pilgrims’ Way for the first arrivals on that original cross-country walk. They were headed from Canterbury, along the North Downs to Crawley, near Gatwick Airport, to the centre where many of them had been detained, without explanation or any hope of resolution for their claims. More walkers, from villages on the route, after engaging with the stories told by the refugees and the writers who travelled with them, joined the march, which was unreported in the mainstream media. In silence I tried to gather my thoughts for the moment when, after they had eaten and rested, the refugees would suffer a talk from a stranger, who was not going on with them. A talk to be endured by innocent locals sitting outside with their pints and travellers who had broken their journey, tempted by an heraldic pub sign and decent car park.
Fired by the accounts I heard, the laws that changed with every shift in public opinion, the years of court appearances, delays, deprivations, I launched into something, trying to respect Herd’s conceit of the Chaucerian tale shared with a random company covering the ground between the city (and their old lives) and the cathedral. As I spoke, I felt myself splitting: the words sounded sincere, heartfelt, but they were faint echoes of what I had heard and what I would not hear, never hear, by stepping away to return to London and the book on which I was working. One self – better or more deceived? – headed for the Downs, the track the refugees had already covered: to walk, alone, to Canterbury. This was the self that had already taken the decision to break off the attempt to write about the condition of London. This was a borrowed identity, a self I have called ‘Norton’ in various fictions: a prisoner of London’s gravity, free to venture through time.
Now, waiting again in Greenwich for the second refugee expedition – I am always early, always nosing about – the fantasy of escape, as I had recently confirmed on the Kötting march to the south coast, was undone. I would be carried to Deptford, Bermondsey, Southwark, the centre of things, by this mass of blue T-shirted pilgrims and their bright-eyed, foot-foundered sympathisers.
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