London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  When Ferguson decided to move into colour, Jules Thorn asked his engineers to design and develop a dual standard, large screen receiver (VHF/UVF). A junior technician was sent to the local Woolworth’s to buy up their stock of plastic butter dishes. Fetishised in silicon rubber, the dishes were transformed into EHT (extra high tension) multipliers.

  ‘Dangerous radiation levels within the receiver,’ Lewis explains, ‘had to be carefully and expensively screened.’ This too, radiation, carcinogenic leakage, the sour aftermath of entrepreneurship, was to be a defining element in the Lea Valley. History recovered through stinks and scummy water, smoke you can taste.

  On 9 December 1997, a group of former Thorn employees met, on the site that had once been the engineering laboratories of the Euro-conglomerate Thorn EMI Ferguson to witness the dedication of a plaque paying homage to the late Sir Jules. The plaque is now positioned in the foyer of the Enfield Safeway superstore.

  Best Value. We, East Londoners, support the Lea, as it supports us, marking our border, shadowing the meridian line. It is enjoyed and endured by fishermen, walkers, cyclists who learn to put up with the barriers, the awkward setts beneath bridges. We pay our tithe. Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan was a visionary document: ‘every piece of land welded into a great regional reservation’. The Lee Valley Recreational Park. A perimeter fence around a Sioux reservation. Compulsory leisure. The Lea would lose its subversive, grubby culture of contraband, villainy, iffy businesses carried out beyond the fold in the map.

  Way back in 1961 Lou Sherman, Lord Mayor of Hackney, got together with representatives of seventeen other local authorities, and with the support of the Duke of Edinburgh, to realise Abercrombie’s vision. A levy was introduced for councils in Essex, Hertfordshire and London. Grander plans, with the passage of time, required more complex financial structures, ‘partnerships’. Local authorities, UK government, Europe: more executive producers than a Dino de Laurentiis epic. The Lea Valley was a future spectacle. Water was the new oil. Housing developments required computer-enhanced riverscapes as a subliminal backdrop.

  There would be funds for decontamination, a ‘precept on council tax’, unnoticed, except by readers of the small print. Representatives of thirty boroughs had their places on the council of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. Regeneration was the theme, the green lung. A ten-year strategic business plan: ‘It firmly embraces the principles of Best Value in pursuit of enhancements of service delivery.’ Management-speak for the open air supermarket. Best Value. Never knowingly undersold. Eco-bondage. ‘A unique mosaic of farmland, nature reserves, green open spaces and waterways.’ The ideal brochure: god’s eye maps, photographs with jagged, painterly edges, bullet points, heavy print. Best Value.

  Ultimately, all walks contradict the he of the land; they will be circular. An ‘Outer Orbital Route’ designed to ‘follow the outer edge of London, a country walk with London always nearby’. The Lea, given time and investment, would stand physics on its head. It would become a sylvan alternative to the M25. With the motor car as its handmaiden. ‘Consideration must be given to the needs of the motorist.’ A green halo. An aureole around smoking tarmac. ‘Leave the M25 at Junction 25. Follow the signs for City. At first set of traffic lights turn left signposted to Freezywater.’ This is the Lee Valley Leisure Complex.

  ‘We will make our commitment to our duty of Best Value; ensuring clarity of objectives and customer and performance focus at the heart of our cultural and organisational change… Major Capital Development will seek to achieve Best Value.’

  Did we qualify – as customers? Drummond, Atkins and Sinclair? Unlikely. Elective leisure was the condition of our lives, endured through a puritanical work ethic. Drummond scribbling away, anonymously, in the cafeteria of a provincial department store. Atkins hunched in his dark room. Sinclair zigzagging around the fringes in a frantic attempt to avoid all versions of the circuit, the smooth walk that carries you back to the point of departure. We were spurners of Best Value. Drummond burnt money and gave away self-published booklets. Atkins printed more photographs than he could sell in ten lifetimes. I wrote the same book, the same life, over and over again. We wanted Worst Value. We refused cashback. We solicited bad deals, ripoffs, tat. If you explained something to us, we wouldn’t touch it. We knew what Best Value meant: soap bubbles, scented bullshit. That’s why our walk began at the most tainted spot on the map of London. Exorcism, the only game worth the candle.

  4

  Breakfast is a priority on these walks. Which is something of a problem in the desert between the neck of the Isle of Dogs at East India Dock Road and our access point to the Lee Navigation towpath at Bow Lock. The landscape is provisional. Strategic planning runs up against sulking real estate, tacky old businesses that won’t fade away, inconvenience stores, revenants from Thomas Burke’s Chinatown. Marine provisioners have decayed into monosodium glutamate takeaways that leave you orange-tongued, raging with thirst. Merchant marine outfitters peddle cheap camping-gear, unisex jeans, diving suits for non-swimmers.

  Bill Drummond is a good walker, long-striding, easy paced. He doesn’t go at it like a journalist, rushing the rush, overwhelmed by a bombardment of sense impressions. Atkins has his aches and pains, but he’ll plod on for as long as it takes. Not much, as yet, to photograph. A token view across the river, back to the Dome, from the spot that featured in EastEnders, the hotel where Ian Beale married Melanie.

  East India Dock Road, with its evocative name, has a secondary identity as the A13, my favourite early-morning drive. The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; flyovers like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for their transporters. The A13 drains East London’s wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated. The wild nature graveyard in Newham. Inflatable, corn-yellow potato chips wobbling in their monster bucket outside McDonald’s in Dagenham. River fret over Rainham Marshes.

  Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.

  A high sierra of container units in rust colours and deep blues, chasms through which sunbeams splinter, wrecked double-decker buses with spider’s-web windows. Junk yards with leashed dogs. The Beam rivulet and the sorry Ingrebourne meander through spoilt fields, beneath the elevated highway (a road on stilts).

  Where a road goes informs every inch of it; there is an irritability about the section we have to cross. Why are we heading north and not swinging east, following the hint spelt out by juggernauts? The ramps that lift you on to the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge are decorated with burnt-out motors – as if joy riders from Barking and Hornchurch knew they’d reached the end of the line. Fire the evidence. Leave the orbital motorway to major league crims.

  The A13 shuffle through East London is like the credits sequence of the Mafia soap, The Sopranos; side-of-the-eye perspective, bridges, illegitimate businesses about to be overwhelmed by the big combos. Black smoke and blue smoke. Waste disposal. A well-chewed cigar. The motorway, when you reach it, has been infected by this shoddy progress; the drivers are up for it, hard men, warriors. Hear the screech of tyres as they carve across three lanes to hit the Sandy Lane ramp without losing momentum.

  To drift through low cloud, through the harp strings of the suspension bridge, is to become a quotation; to see yourself from outside. From the Thames river path. Or the forecourt of the Ibis Hotel. A chunk of metal r
attling over a concrete bandage. The toll booths on the far shore legitimise this transit. You need the ceremony of release. The motorway proper begins with mathematical nomenclature, Junction 1a, 1 b. No wonder the Bluewater quarry feels like one of the Channel ports. See bemused strollers searching for someone who speaks English.

  But reach the M25 through the Surrey suburbs and it’s a different programme, another era. The Good Life, Ever Decreasing Circles. Anything with a pre-Lear Richard Briers. The motorway is perceived as a rude beast (germs from the east, asylum seekers, infected meat, rogue cargo).

  The promoters, the strategists of the Lee Navigation path, hope that one day that path will carry walkers right to the Thames. They’re acquiring patches of land, potential sanctuaries. But, for now, we beat against the counter-currents of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach; snarled, south-flowing traffic (one lane in the tunnel before 9.30), fraught incomers heading north. Drummond remarks on the pompous splendour of an extinguished library, white stone and weeds. The kind of building that Atkins might once have photographed (rescued), but now doesn’t. I can hear his stomach grumbling. And I know it falls on me to find them a decent breakfast.

  Drummond is a café man. An A13 aficionado. He spotted very early that Dagenham was the new Barcelona, the coming city of culture. Dagenham was the place to find a studio. Blight, wide pavements on which are parked gas-guzzling collectors’ motors. Rusty light from the river.

  There’s nowhere better for the morning meditation, the crisp notebook. Strong tea, that’s Bill’s fuel. And plenty of it. He spends much of his life plotting in cafés, keeping one jump ahead of the trend spotters; seething, cackling. Issuing orders to abort yesterday’s mad fancies.

  Out here, despite the romance of a 360-degree pan – railway, gas holders, river – there’s no whiff of roasted coffee, bacon-tongues crisping in a pan. The day is a London ordinary, pylon-punctured cloud base. Grey duvet flopping overhead.

  Three Mills at Bromley-by-Bow is one of the showpieces of the Lee Valley Regional Park, a major photo opportunity for the heritage lobby. It’s an infallible rule that anything you spot on your rambles, anywhere you nominate, will be discovered; rescued, tarted up, divided into viable units. Cycling with the painter Jock McFadyen towards the Northern Sewage Outflow, the elevated Green Way to Beckton Alp, I began to understand how the system worked. McFadyen, a perky observer, auditioner of unlikely prospects (abandoned cinemas, trashed snooker halls, drinking clubs), leapt from his French machine. He’d clocked a ruin on the wilderness promontory where the Hertford Union Canal flows into the River Lea. An islet much favoured by herons. I imagined, when McFadyen began to blaze away with his camera, that he was gathering material for a future painting. Nothing of the sort. The artist was sussing a property. These days the huge canvas is of secondary interest. Paintings are no more than blow-ups of estate agents’ window displays. They’re done, the best of them, with a lust for possession. Speculations that got away.

  If this was Kent, you’d look for oast houses. Structures designed for a purpose, drying hops, take on a second life: women drowsy, aroused; men tilting golden liquid in a tall glass. From the car park of the Tesco superstore, we acknowledge the clocktower of Three Mills, the drying kilns. (I’ve done the tour, seen the flood pool, the four twenty-foot-in-diameter water-wheels; listened to the creaks and groans. I’ve admired the shape of the building, the bare boards. The work that is now a show, a museum piece.)

  There’s a café, brasserie or wine bar, with window looking out on Abbey Creek, on the junction of various streams, backwaters: Limehouse Cut, the Lea, City Mill river, Channelsea. A shuttle of silver trains over Gasworks Bridge. Industrial ghosts are loud here, but the café exists to serve media folk from the studios. And it isn’t open. It used to be the bottling plant of a distillery, another kind of mill, a gin mill. Water, the flow of the Lea impounded, was a great resource. Now it comes in blue bottles, carbonated. We make do with a Tesco sandwich and a carton of something. Atkins, the veggie, takes his sugar hit from a choc bar.

  The island around Three Mills will be the epicentre of a new media empire; the intoxicating sweep of the landscape stimulating concept-generating faculties. You won’t actually see river, gas holders, exotic weeds, allotments, Bazalgette’s minarets in the mustard-Gothic cathedral of sewage, but they will inform the sensibilities of the programmers. Nicholson’s Gin Distillery, dark and forbidding, kept the workers anaesthetised, took the edge off middle-class anxiety. Nothing changes. The distillery peddles a different kind of fantasy, a new addiction: Big Brother. Prison Portakabins for jaded peepers. The TV show in which nothing happens on a twenty-four-hour feed.

  Hence the Berlin effect, checkpoints, border guards, security cameras. A faint whiff of celebrity blends with the bindweed drench, the marsh gas, and that sharp smell that braking trains give off. Celebrity is fear, testosterone, oestrogen, unease. Celebrity is heat. Remove it from its natural habitat, the heart of the city (club, restaurant), and it rots, stinks. Celebrity is having a bunch of people standing around on the pavement, waiting while you eat.

  At the back of Three Mills, Xerox celebrity hurts. It hurts place. The point of this area is to be obscure, a discovery any urban wanderer can make. Overgrown paths, turf islands. The imagination can reach out towards ambiguity. Find yourself by accident on the Northern Sewage Outfall path (now designated a ‘Green Way’) and you can follow the march of pylons, relish privileged views across West Ham; Canary Wharf glimpsed through the gravestones and memorials of the East London Cemetery. You can make your way, with the tide of shit, towards the A13 and the Thames. Gas, electricity, water, elements that shape the grid. Polluted streams picking a route, unacknowledged, through disposable landscapes.

  When I walked around Channelsea creek with Chris Petit, who was carrying a small Sony DV camera, we were tracked by a security guard with a large dog, a German shepherd. When we stopped, they stopped. Petit was very taken with a silver building like an upturned boat. It had no design features, no detail, no architect’s signature; that’s what Petit liked. The absence of windows. The way it stood in the middle of nothing, minding its own business.

  I felt some sympathy for the dog handler. How much fun could it be following two men who appear to have all the time in the world and nothing better to do with it than to stare at a large aluminium kennel? Security is a growth industry. It’s the job you get if you’re running away from something. Doctors and diplomats, asylum seekers. With their mobiles. Wired to an unseen control. Putting in the hours. It used to be a glamorous career choice, celebrity hoodlums like Dave Courtney, Lennie McClean, working the door. Getting dolled up for gangland funerals. The Look: long black coat, shaved head, earring, dark glasses. But the Look crossed the line into camp, self-consciousness, when Vinnie Jones took over the franchise, designer knucklebreaker. The new villains are pimping for film deals, closeted with ghosts, while they Archer their drab CVs.

  The Channelsea guards are depressed. They are the real prisoners. The fame-succubi inside the huts are being watched. Somebody loves them. Somebody wants to eavesdrop on their dim lives and tiny ambitions. Nobody gives a toss about the watchers, the hang-around-the-gate uniforms. They can’t skive off. They’re surrounded by a thicket of gently panning CCTV cameras. Nobody comes here. Then, for one night a week, the world switches on to see who will be expelled, made to walk the plank, the bridge that takes them back to reality, the Three Mills studio.

  I like this bridge. It doesn’t wobble. And it’s got an ironic title: Prescott Channel. Mud, surveillance, dereliction. The best skies in London. The nightmare of the New Labour suits, the mean spectacles who blink at life like a software package, smoothed and revised. Channelsea has no use for consensus, market research, Best Value. Channelsea is off-limits.

  I spent a Saturday afternoon, in the rain, observing a pair of middle-aged mudlarks, up to the elbows in liquid sewage. One of them dragged an old tin bath out into the river, at low tide. The other worked with a sieve
like a grizzled prospector, Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They spent hours laboriously sifting shit, hoping for the odd ring or coin. And I stuck with them, watching. This was about as far as you could travel from John Prescott. He couldn’t, even if it were explained to him, find anywhere to place such humans. Demographically, they had pulled it off. They didn’t register.

  In the past I’ve taken photographs of the picket fence outside The Big Breakfast cottage at Old Ford Lock. But I can’t resist repeating myself. The messages change so quickly. Every white-painted blade is covered with names, telephone numbers. NICK CARTER IS THE FATHER OF MY BABY. TAMMY SEAMARK LIKES FREE SEX (WITH ALL SORTS). DENISE VAN OUTEN IS A BITCH, SEE YOU SEEM, OR ELSE. Shorthand stalker fantasies. The cottage, which marks the end of the Lee Valley Media Zone (goodbye soaps, goodbye hysteria), has lost its edge. Dead TV. In time a blue plaque to Denise Van Outen (‘lived here from 2 September 1996 to 1 Jan 1999’) will appear, playing games with fuddy-duddy notions of heritage and culture. An ironic memorial to the absence of memory. An Alice in Wonder land makeover. Giant toadstools, paddling pools, artificial grass. You gaze over the picket fence and the surveillance cameras, the security guards, stare right back at you. The lock-keeper’s cottage, beginning as a rural fantasy (sinister in Charles Dickens, jolly in H.G. Wells), ends in self-parody, colours louder than life, a cottage industry on magic mushrooms. The bricks are too bright, which isn’t surprising, they’re wallpaper. The security man in his little hut, guarding the pool and the synthetic grass, is too bored to bother with us, the crusty trio staring hungrily at his thermos and miniature pork pies.

  Asylum seekers, border jumpers, paroled humans, those without status: they collect a uniform, lousy wages, an area to patrol, a free TV monitor playing real-time absences. In Don DeLillo’s ghost story, The Body Artist, there’s a woman who hangs on to her sanity by snacking on a ‘live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane blacktop’. Somewhere unknown, Finland. ‘Twenty-four hours a day.’ A prison fantasy, the weary body hauling itself upright to peer into a frosty window. ‘She imagined that someone might masturbate to this.’