London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  Security is (mostly) unactivated masturbation. Low arousal tapes, low definition: you watch the landscape breathe. The canal at night. Wavering reflections of sodium lamps.

  The media zone of the Lee Navigation deals, as it has always dealt, with waste disposal. Junk. I wait for a time when there will be digital mudlarks rummaging through exhausted footage for images to extract, fool’s gold dropped down the toilet bowls of the culture.

  Hackney Marshes are pretty familiar. I had a great job once, painting white lines on the football pitches. A Forth Bridge task: start on Monday morning, under those epic skies, trolleying thick gunge, fighting the impulse to indulge in spiral patterns. Every Saturday and Sunday coarse footballers would obliterate my handiwork. Begin again.

  Fat, glossy crows, cat-sized, scavenge the sward. Seagulls swoop on golf balls. They perch on crossbars, spot a knobbly egg and dive. Dozens of balls are lost in the thick grass where the Marshes slope up to Homerton Road. The walker feels small tramping towards a pylon-punctured horizon. Exposed on this broad table of land. The Friends Bridge, designed by Whitby, Bird and Partners, a way of getting across the Lea as it loops towards the Navigation, is a welcome destination.

  The tough and functional steel and wood structure exposes the pretensions of the wobbly millennial effort, the spidery span that was supposed to carry pedestrians from St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. This bridge works. Its scarlet paint will survive the spray-can bandits. A straight path across honest planks, pale as sand, is counterbalanced by a red steel carapace (like Dalí’s fat lip sofa). The bridge understands its mythical function: to give the pilgrim, who has laboured to find it, access to a nature reserve, a slice of protected wilderness.

  Back on the canal path, at the point where Eastway crosses the Navigation, we encounter one of those oracular concrete caverns. Reflected light sports in the grooves, REGGIE KRAY FOR MAYOR OF LONDON. There’s a reversed swastika (with the number 23), a scarlet skull and a single bone crossed by an arrow. The panels of the wall have been finished in a sort of refined pebbledash: a beach framed for exhibition.

  Under the bridge, weed-slippery skeletons of motorcycles, dredged from the filthy water, have been laid out. I’ve seen travellers, barechested, prudish in old trousers, diving for scrap. Ropes and hooks. Mounds of antique iron. Bicycles, prams. Immune to Weil’s disease, rat bites, they submerge, time after time, in the mucilage, the electric-green scum.

  The triangle of the Marshgate Recreation Ground is in the process of a rethink. Its history, summarised on a board, has been action-painted into oblivion. The newly planted patch has been christened: ‘Wick Woodland’.

  Along the avenue of peeling London planes, caravans have been parked. Cars. And bits of cars. An inhabited junkyard, a moveable suburb. Bureaucratic toleration pushed to its limits by the construction of waste towers, mounds of black tyres. The travellers, barred from upwardly mobile riverside pubs, anathematised by eco-planners, have found a use for this leftover arrowhead of ground. They’ve Balkanised it. Fouled it. Used it. They’ve helped to clean the Lee Navigation. And they’ve done it without grants or ten-year business plans. Obviously, they’re doomed. They’ll be moved on. Strategic planting will win the day. For now tidy citizens might wince as they pass through this corridor of filth, avert their eyes; missing the improvised beauty of the accidental – a collision between a band of traffic on its high curve, new plantings, woodchip walkways, benches on which to contemplate the scene.

  The mystery of the Navigation, where the Marshes confront rows of neat canalside hutches, was best captured by Rachel Whiteread in her monochrome plates, taken on the day when the Sixties’ tower blocks were blown up. Whiteread’s photographs celebrate silence; small boats on the river, crowds on the banks. Tents. A revivalist mob watching vertical history crumple and disappear.

  As we pass the Middlesex Filter beds (closed) and move towards the weir, close to Lea Bridge Road, by the Princess of Wales pub, I try out a Fortean Times myth on Bill Drummond: how two headless, skinned bears were found floating at this spot. Children reported a yeti-like sighting, in a snowstorm on the Marshes. Paw prints were discovered and photographed. There was talk of circuses, gypsies – but no animals were reported missing. The implication was that the beasts had scavenged in Epping Forest, for picnic scraps, discarded burger cartons, roots and berries. Then started to forage further afield.

  The floating things looked human but on the wrong scale, evolutionary accidents. Grey-pink. Flesh like a body condom. The paws had been lopped off, leaving the sorry creatures without proper means of identification. Interspecies monsters. The heads were never recovered. They vanished into London’s cabinet of curiosities, along with the skulls of Emanuel Swedenborg and John Williams (the suicided suspect in the Ratcliffe Highway Murders), the phantom hat of gangland victim Jack McVitie.

  Heads as trophies. The bears were redundant once the heads had been hacked off. Were they decorating some Leaside pub? Or were they nailed to the wall of a neo-baronial ranch in Chigwell? Did they fulfil some shamanistic requirement, bear spirits raised as guides? Heads had long been used, in London’s underworld, as occult sources of power, botched voodoo displays. Instead of Dahomean carpets of skulls around the throne of a high king, the boiled poll of a smalltime informer, a rival.

  East London’s waterway system, dank canals, had canteens of blood-rusty cutlery in them, weapons that continued to sing about forgotten crimes. Knives that begged to confess, plea-bargain. Customised shotguns. Arsenals of suspect weaponry. The police diving team was an everyday sight on the Hackney Cut and the Lee Navigation; wet suits, air bubbles, ropes. Dark fishing after the latest bin bag floater had been hauled ashore. I’ve watched them, with thermoses of coffee, thick sandwiches, cranking a car from the river. Not like Taggart. No hardbitten dialogue, no cynical pathologist dragged from a Burns night dinner. A small team taking a blow in the sunshine.

  It’s more disturbing when heads start reappearing. I’m never happy with empty alcoves on English baroque monuments. It’s too easy to picture the Jacobite heads on Temple Bar. The spikes on London Bridge. Nobody liked it when Billy Moseley’s head turned up in a bundle of newspapers, in a Gents’ lavatory in Islington, up on the ridge overlooking the valley of the Fleet. It was clear, from the frosted flesh, that Billy had spent time in a deepfreeze. Less clear as to why he aborted his ill-advised cryogenic experiment.

  It wasn’t just rubble under the marshes. There were legions of the unregistered dead. Children, animals. Foetuses. All, as I pictured it, headless. As a qualification. To preserve anonymity. Meat without eyes. Without souls.

  *

  I’ve been promising Bill and Marc a notable breakfast in the café by Springfield Park and I’m praying that it will be open. Bill, a connoisseur of cafés, knows the place. It’s where he meets his early mentor, the actor (director, philosopher, madman) Ken Campbell. A Liverpool connection. Campbell lives near the park. I’ve passed the house, without realising that it was his, noticed the tribal masks and fetish figures in the window. Hackney Marshes is a good backdrop for this latterday pataphysician with his alarming caterpillar eyebrows. Sit down with Campbell at an outside table and you are in company with a Ben Jonson clown, a whirlwind of cataclysmic energy; you realise, caught by that stare, those white, bottletop eyes, that the man is stonecold sane. He talks tickertape but his argument is rehearsed and organised; years of improvised performances, multilayered monologues, have honed his pitch. Fast as morse – but intelligible if you give yourself up to him. He puffs a small cigar. Sucks noisily at his mug of tea. He takes his role as spirit of place very seriously.

  The river, as it flows beneath the gentle rise of Springfield Park, that Middle European reservation where orthodox Jews yatter on benches, reminds Campbell of a trip he made by coracle to the source of the Lea. The river slows consciousness. I could never survive in Ken Campbell’s retreat. I wouldn’t write a word. I’d spend my mornings at a table in the café, skying, watching patterns of f
low, oil spill psychedelia. But Campbell’s a native, you feel the realpolitik of Leytonstone in everything he says.

  He put on a durational, science fiction epic at Three Mills. And now he’s up for a ‘pidgin’ Macbeth at the Middlesex Filter Beds. He’s right. There’s a sense of theatre about these abandoned industrial spaces; trenches, dark water, tumbled concrete menhirs. The experience of going up west for an overpriced musical, a rejigged Priestley, is hell. Move the National Theatre to Walthamstow Marshes.

  From his days as a pop-eyed stooge for Warren Mitchell, a bent lawyer for G.F. Newman, or anything that called for extreme physicality, Campbell graduated into a professional explainer (nutty experiments, Citroën ads). Whatever it takes to fund his own brand of spectacle and monologue, Campbell’s up for it. He’s not shy of self-promotion. Pidgin as a world-language is his current obsession.

  With his soft black hat and his small cigars, he’s a piratical, actor/manager figure. The bushy eyebrows have, unilaterally, declared their independence. He has to cope with a tangle of dogs and leads, stagy business that involves feeding them a constant stream of broken biscuits. His teeth are magnificently shipwrecked, the colour of ancient dominoes. He’s performed as a duck in Alice in Wonderland, with Ken Dodd as a rat; he’s given underwater concerts with Heathcote Williams. He wears a Dreamcatcher T-shirt. He raps through the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech in pidgin to the amazement of the riverside loungers.

  The café serves filter coffee and has calamari on the breakfast menu. We settle in, calling for additional rounds of tea and toast. Drummond is scribbling in his notebook. He tells us about The Unabomber Manifesto. ‘Today,’ he would write, in his account of the walk, ‘I’m a born-again would-be terrorist.’ From that landmine laugh, you might believe it. The look is right: sensible, corduroy, with pale-rimmed specs. What’s in that rucksack? (He carries it looped over one shoulder, so that it doesn’t actually qualify as a twitcher’s pouch.) Bona fide terrorists are lab technicians, junior lecturers, schoolteachers with a grievance. Bill has some of that, but he’s too tall, too much of a walker. He knows his wildlife. As we strolled alongside the Marshes, the reservoir embankments, he pointed out grey wagtail, dunnock. We aren’t going to challenge him. Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren’t seagulls. He’s telling Drummond about his time as a Heavy Metal roadie.

  *

  Gradually, landscape induces confidences. The cycle gates become less of an irritation. Road bridges energise us, traffic noise plays against pastoral tedium. Ferry Hale Road, Forest Road. On my first walks up the Lea, I used to think that an old fisherman’s pub, here on the fringe of Walthamstow, was truly rustic. Izaak Walton in the back bar stuffing a pike. There must have been a ferry somewhere near this clapboard ghost. A haunt of narrowboat skippers and their dogs.

  The site is now distinguished by a frivolous display of marine architecture. It thinks it’s on the Algarve: balconies, furled parasols, greenery dripping from window ledges, blue glass. The Heron Hospitality Centre. Even the herons are embarrassed by it, they spindle away to Tottenham Marsh. Perch, in solitude, on convenient branches, trying to pretend – which is impossible given their size, the design faults – that they’re not really there. Neo-Romantic doodles, scissor-beaks and Anglepoise knees.

  Drummond is gobsmacked. Hand on hip, he tries to make sense of this latte-coloured folly. Why would anyone position a glass and plaster box alongside a scummy lock on the high road to Walthamstow and Epping Forest? Blatant white space-ism: architects ignore the implications of where their buildings will be sited. Nothing exists beyond the frame of an idealised sketch. Invertebrate people with identikit faces lounging on an imaginary deck. There’s no road, no marsh, no industry.

  It’s enough to get Drummond started on another of his current projects, a heart-of-darkness voyage up the Congo with Mark Manning (aka Zodiac Mindwarp). Along with the inevitable Gimpo (covert camera). The African voyage, with all its logistical problems (paranoia, corruption, disease, river-stink), is the second part of a wildly ambitious trilogy. One: a journey through Finland towards the North Pole, with an icon of Elvis Presley. Two: the Conrad revival. Three: the final (terminal) trip to the moon.

  Jessie Weston’s tag – ‘the otherworld is not a myth, but a reality’ – underwrites everything Drummond attempts. Plotting his adventures is better, much better, than carrying them out. The moon jaunt involves a swim, clutching a buoyancy barrel or life preserver, from Cuba to Cape Canaveral. The next bit is vague: blag themselves aboard Apollo-whatever, or lift off by force of will (a Georges Méliès stunt). The moon’s a dead rock and also a state of mind. The secret history of popular music (which Drummond celebrates) couldn’t exist without it – as a rhyme, a simile. Rhymes are dangerous things, forging connections which can never be broken. Rhymes are addictive. They clog up the memory files.

  If Florida doesn’t work out (troubled back story: exiled Cubans, Chicago hoods, hit men; the missing sliver of Kennedy’s skull), Drummond and Manning will move on to Peru. Straight lines in the desert, clear skies. They’ll take every pharmaceutical, mushroom, cactus extract, loco weed, they can get their hands on. That should do it, bring the moon down. Until they can snort its dust.

  There wasn’t much definition in the sky. Pylons and earthworks, water you can’t see. The occasional horse hoping for a handout. I thought of Jock McFadyen’s painting Horse Lamenting the Invention of the Motor Car (1985). A blue pantomime beast with a bandaged foreleg on a carpet of wasted turf, surrounded by a stream of toy cars. David Cohen called McFadyen ‘the Stubbs of the automobile’.

  The reservoir nags of the Lea Valley, scab-eyed and shaggy, are cousins to animals that live on Dublin housing estates. They stretch necks over barbed wire fences, toss at an irritation of fleas. Wet brown eyes couldn’t be set further apart, without falling off. The horses have a melancholy presence, never finding a comfortable direction in which to set their too heavy heads.

  Atkins is beginning to limp. This walk is a relatively gentle one, but for some reason – perhaps the monotony of the track, the uneven pebbles – it hurts the unwary.

  Drummond can’t decide if our expedition is asking the right questions. The land is too anonymous, no major blight, a steady stream of I–Spy water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp).

  I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action.

  The situation, at the junction of the North Circular and the Lee Valley Trading Estate, is readable. It’s what we are used to, what we advocate; faux-Americana, waste disposal, spray from twelve-wheeled rigs. Powerhouse, Currys. A Mercedes franchise. Signs and signatures. Zany neon calligraphy. Warehouses parasitical on the road, on the notion of movement, easy parking. Old riverside enterprises that basked in obscurity have been forced to come to terms with brutalist tin, container units with ideas above their station. The aesthetic of the North Circular retail park favours colours that play, ironically, with notions of the pastoral: lime-green (pond weed), yellow (oil seed rape), blood-red. Road names aren’t literary, they’re chemical. Argon Road is a memory trace of Edmonton’s contribution to the manufacture of fluorescent lamps. Light is troubled, unnatural. The scarlet scream of the furniture warehouse fights with the graded slate-greys of the road, the river and the sky.

  I love it. I like frontiers. Zones that float, unobserved, over other zones. Road users have no sense of the Lee Navigation, they’re goal-orientated. Going somewhere. Noticing Atkins, foot on barrier, perched in the central reservation, snapping away, drivers in their high cabs see a nuisance, an obstacle. A potential snoop. They’d be happy to run him down. Atkins sees a speedy blur, abstraction, the chimney of London Waste Ltd blasting steam.

  Visible e
vil. Pollution from a low-level castle, remaindered Gothic. Better and better. The London Waste facility is battleship-grey, a colour that is supposed to make it invisible in the prevailing climate: rain, exhaust fumes, collapsed skies. The expectation is that on an average Edmonton morning, diesel fug and precipitation will disguise the 100-foot tower of the biggest incinerator in Britain.

  The Waste Zone, that’s one they left out of the brochure. You arrive at the edge of the city, out of sight of Canary Wharf, and you take a dump. Surgical waste, pus, poison, plague. Corruption. All the muck we spew out. It has to go somewhere. Edmonton seems a reasonable choice.

  In October 2000, a group of Greenpeace protesters occupied the summit of the burning tower. Gridlock on the M25 is a modest fantasy compared to a blockage in the procedure for the destruction of clinical waste. The Edmonton furnaces dispose of 1,800 tons of putrid stuff, contaminated bandages, body tissue, dirty nappies, used hypodermic needles, every day. At the time of the protest, waste material was piling up in seven boroughs (Camden, Enfield, Barnet, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Waltham Forest). Hackney had its own long-running dispute, black bags burst on the streets, as a consequence of the council’s bankruptcy and cutbacks. Generations of braggadoccio incompetence, a system built on institutionalised malpractice.

  Waste that couldn’t be shipped to Edmonton was transported to landfill sites in Essex and Huntingdon. Convoys took advantage of the M25, which increasingly functioned as an asteroid belt for London’s rubble, the unwanted mess of the building boom, the destruction of tower blocks, the frenzied creation of loft-living units along every waterway.