London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  We’re intrigued by London Waste Ltd and their Edge of Darkness estate. What was once grey belt, the grime circuit inside the green belt, is now called upon to explain itself. Before the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, Euro slush funds and council tax tithes, it didn’t matter. Reclamation was never mentioned. Fish and fowl were there to be hunted. Dirty and dangerous industries provided employment, built cottages for the workers. Now we have Best Value.

  The incineration industry, and the London Waste Ltd plant at Edmonton in particular, were investigated by television journalist Richard Watson, on behalf of the Newsnight programme. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste were guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with contaminated fly ash. The end product was then used in road building, and for the manufacture of the breeze blocks out of which the plethora of dormitory estates were being assembled. Waltham Abbey and its satellites as Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  The defoliant Agent Orange, 50 million litres of which had been dropped by the Americans on Vietnam, registers around 900 nanograms of dioxin to one kilogram of soil. Mixed ash from the incinerators, used on chicken runs in Newcastle, registered 9,500 nanograms. Eggs concentrated the effect. They didn’t need shells. You could see right through them. Dioxins are carcinogenic. Combined with dust, when householders carry out repairs, hang paintings, drill holes in breeze blocks, they are guaranteed to keep future surgeries and hospices busy.

  The Environment Agency fed the relevant minister, Michael Meacher, the usual soft soap. The firms responsible for working mixed ash into conglomerates used in surfacing new roads declined to reveal the location of their handiwork, the 12,000 tons of aggregate dropped on the landscape. Their spokesman, sweating lightly, sported a Buffalo Bill beard: frontiersman peddling a treaty to the Sioux. One major recipient of this dubious cargo was uncovered by Watson’s researches: the car park of the Ford plant at Dagenham. The A13, yet again, had something to make it glow at night. A topdressing of contaminated Edmonton ash.

  ‘No more dangerous than Guy Fawkes night,’ declared Meacher to the House. When ash, removed from Edmonton, was tested, it registered dioxin levels ten times higher than the figure floated by the Environment Agency.

  Walking north towards Picketts Lock, we turn our backs on the incinerators, the smoke. Frame it out, it’s not there. Go with the Dufy doodle on the side of London Waste’s rectangular box, the company’s upbeat logo: limpid blue sky, lush grass, a pearl-grey building like a Norfolk church.

  Edmonton is the Inferno and Picketts Lock the garden, the paradise park. In the past, on hot summer walks with my family, we used to come off the Navigation path for a swim at the Picketts Lock Leisure Complex. (How complex can leisure be?) This modest development, on the edge of a hacker’s golf course, was an oasis. It didn’t take itself too seriously and it filled the gap between the London Waste burning chimney and the Enfield Sewage Works.

  The polyfilla theory of Leisure Complex placement, the old treaty between developers, land bandits, and improve-the-quality-of-life councillors, worked pretty well. Another chlorine-enhanced waterhole on ground nobody could think of any other way to exploit.

  But that won’t wash in these thrusting millennial times. The name Picketts Lock starts to appear in the broadsheets – and it acquires a bright new apostrophe: Pickett’s Lock. Pickett’s Lock will be reinvented as a major sports stadium (convenient access to the M25). It will be the venue for the 2005 World Athletic Championships; thereby conferring enormous benefits on the Lea Valley; tourists, media, retail spin-offs. Computer-generated graphics omit the chimney at the end of the park, the smoke pall. Nobody is bad-mannered enough to mention the fact that London Waste have put in an application to extend their site. The application has been approved by Nick Raynsford, Minister for the Capital. It is awaiting final approval from Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers. (Poor man. It was going to get worse, much worse. Byers epitomised the New Labour attitude of glinting defiance. Fiercely tonsured and spectacled, tight-lipped, he would suffer assault by flashbulbs, while sitting bolt-upright in the back seat of a ministerial limo. He would be attacked by forests of furry microphones at the garden gate. He would be sideswiped from Trade and Industry to Transport. Pickett’s Lock to Purgatory. Official pooper-scooper. Ordered to clean up after all those years of misinformation, neglect and underinvestment. A man undone by his own spinners and fixers, he came, with every fresh appearance before the media inquisitors, to look more and more like a panicked automaton, a top-of-the-range cryogenic model of The Public Servant.)

  When this matter is raised, the site’s owners (Lee Valley Regional Park Authority) become quite huffy, insisting that additional incinerators will ‘pose no risk’ to the health of athletes or spectators. ‘Better far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as venues for the Olympics,’ states Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing.

  Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000–2010) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to emerging, modern competition.’ Horror: ‘25 years old’! Disgusting, obscene. Tear it down. The swimming pool and poolside café might look clean and friendly to the untrained eye, but they are older than David Beckham. The cinema, video arcade part of the enterprise will remain.

  Which is a relief. This is a rather wonderful building, with a long straight approach, a tiled, mosaic walkway. The Alhambra of Enfield. A Moorish paradise of plashing water features, ordered abstraction, glass that reflects the passing clouds. Everything leads the eye to the cinema palace, lettering that looks like the announcement of a coming attraction: WELCOME TO LEE VALLEY. Cathedral windows catching cloud vapours, the floating dome of another burger bar.

  Nothing is cramped and mean about this approach. The Pickett’s Lock multiplex is one of the wonders of our walk; we begin to understand how a commercial development can be integrated into the constantly shifting, constantly revised aspect of the Lea Valley. With its strategic use of dark glass and white panels, the generous space allowed between constituent elements in the overall design, Pickett’s Lock presents itself as a retreat, a respite from the journey. Buffered by the golf course, it remains hidden from the Navigation path. But, should you take the trouble to search it out, here is green water (swimming pool, ponds and basins); here is refreshment (motorway standard nosh, machine-dispensed coffee froth); here are public areas in which to sit and rest and study maps.

  Pickett’s Lock works best, as a concept, if you don’t step inside. If you avoid the full Americana of burger reek (foot-and-mouth barbecues with optional ketchup), popcorn buckets, arcade games in which you can attack the M25 as a virtual reality circuit, UP TO TWO PLAYERS MAY RACE AT ONCE. INSERT COINS. In fact, this sideshow at Pickett’s Lock represents the Best Value future for the motorway; grass it over and let would-be helldrivers take out their aggression on the machines.

  This pleasing sense of being removed from the action, the imposed-from-above imperatives, that we must enjoy ourselves, take healthy (circular) walks, observe bittern and butterfly, nod sagely over ghosts of our industrial heritage, is fleeting. The builders, the earth-movers, the JCBs, will soon be rolling in; hacking up meadows to make way for another stadium, another crowd puller; more promised, but postponed pleasure.

  Postponed indefinitely. New Labour couldn’t face another Dome situation. Another money pit. They waited for Bad News Day, 11 September 2001. Then slipped the announcement into the small print. The Pickett’s Lock athletic stadium was aborted. No mention of London Waste. Economic considerations only. The apostrophe was withdrawn like Princess Di’s royal status. Picketts Lock, now surrounded by an ever-growing retail park with suspiciously bright roads, could go back to being a community centre for a community of transients.

  Why, I wondered, as we hit the stretch from Ponders End to Enfield Lock, were there n
o other walkers? As a Best Value attempt at drumming up clients for their recreational facilities, the Lee Valley marketing men were not having a good day. Most people who live for any length of time in East London, even Notting Hill journalists with friends in Clapton, or connections in Hoxton, claim to walk the Lea. Filter Beds, Springfield Park Marina, Waltham Abbey, they boast of an intimate knowledge. Any free moment, there they are, out in the fresh air, hammering north. But the towpath stays empty. A few dog walkers, the odd shorthaul cyclist. Where are the professionals, the psychogeographers, note-takers who produce guides to ‘The London Loop’ or the Green Way? Local historians uncovering our industrial heritage: do they work at night?

  We’re on our own, exposed; under a cradle of sagging wires in a pylon avenue, on a red path. Marc’s foot is swollen and he’s beginning to lag behind. Bill Drummond is still buzzing; logging blackthorn blossom and brooding on his Unabomber assignment. The Lee Navigation, keeping us company for so many hours, provokes Drummond into a rhapsody on crashed cars, the road movie he made with Jimmy Cauty in homage to Chris Petit’s Radio On.

  ‘The film made Jimmy and I think you didn’t have to be Wim Wenders to make a road movie. So we made one and it was dire. And that put me off the whole notion of movie making for the rest of my life.’

  On the path were rusted sculptures that should have been milestones. They’d been sponsored and delivered, but they didn’t belong. ‘Art,’ I muttered. ‘Watch out.’ Objects that draw attention to themselves signal trouble. We were walking into an area that wanted to disguise its true identity, deflect attention from its hot core.

  Drummond already had too much of this day, too many anecdotes, too many pertinent observations. That night, on the train home, he would look over his notes, ‘crossing out anything descriptive’. Text is performance. The only memorial of the synapse-burn in which it is composed. ‘Zero characterisation,’ said Bill. Don’t burden yourself with the manufacture of copy-cat reality. The more I read Drummond’s short tales, the more I admired them; envied their insouciance. He’d learnt how to lie; a man sitting at a kitchen table with a mug of tea, talking about an episode that he feels compelled to relive or exorcise. Confessing his subterfuges, his strategies, he wins the confidence of the reader: trick and truth. His stories never outstay their welcome. The Drummond he reveals is the Drummond who writes. Writes himself into existence.

  The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield Lock is an island colony, once enclosed, independent, now up for grabs. It’s surrounded by water so it has to be desirable real estate. The Italianate water tower, or clock tower, will be preserved and the low, barrack buildings transformed into first-time flats, housing stock. The nature of government land, out on the perimeter, changes. Originally, work was life, work was freedom (the cobbled causeway running towards what looks like a guard tower triggers an authentic concentration camp frisson); now work is secondary, it takes place elsewhere. Sleeping quarters have become the principal industry. Compulsory leisure again. The factory revealed as a hive of non-functional balconies, satellite-dishes monitoring dead water.

  Enfield Lock is imperialist. It has signed the Official Secrets Act – in blood. A scaled-down version of Netley, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital on Southampton Water. Hospitals, ordnance, living quarters: the same pitch, the same hollow grandiloquence. Public footpaths, where they cross recently acquired government land, will be ‘extinguished’.

  If you come east from the town of Enfield, from the station at Turkey Street, you march down Ordnance Road. This was the route the poet John Clare took, travelling in the other direction, when he walked away from the High Beach madhouse in Epping Forest. Powder-burns on privet. Suburban avenues, lacking pedestrians, with front gardens just big enough to take a parked car. Vandalised vehicles, cannibalised for spare parts, stay out on the street. There’s not much rubbish, no graffiti. Military rule is still in place.

  The Royal Small Arms Factory was a Victorian establishment, post-Napoleonic Wars. Private traders couldn’t produce the quantity of guns required for maintaining a global empire. The cottages of Enfield Lock were built to house workers from the machine rooms and grinding mills. The River Lea was the energy source, driving two cast-iron water wheels. The name of the river and the name of the small country town on the Essex/Middlesex border came together to christen the magazine rifle familiar to generations of cadet forces, training and reserve battalions: the Lee Enfield. This multiple-round, bolt-action rifle, accurate to 600 metres, was the most famous product of the Enfield Lock factory, the brand leader. In the First War it was known as ‘the soldier’s friend’. The factory survived until 1987. To be replaced by what promotional material describes as ‘a stylish residential village’.

  The developers, Fairview, take a relaxed view of the past. ‘New’ is a very flexible term. ENFIELD ISLAND VILLAGE, AN EXCITING NEW VILLAGE COMMUNITY. A captured fort. A workers’ colony for commuters who no longer have to live on site. The village isn’t new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is suddenly ‘stylish’. The Fairview panoramic drawing, removed from its hoarding, could illustrate a treatise on prison reform: a central tower and a never-ending length of yellow brick with mean window slits.

  We’ve had our lunchtime drink. Marc’s rested his foot, which is now quite swollen. And Bill has grilled me on the motivation for my orbital circuit of the M25. Why counter clockwise he wants to know. I dodge that one by moving sideways into a discussion of J.G. Ballard and the western approaches. I admire the way that Ballard has stayed put in Shepperton, same house, same themes. He can hear the traffic, he can hear the planes overhead; he has no responsibility for either of them. Blinds drawn, brain in gear. Three hours a day at the typewriter. Future memories, prophetic TV.

  The answer to Bill’s question has something to do with Italianate towers, the only surviving markers of hospitals and factories. Our walk is a way of winding the clock back. But I haven’t worked out the details. We haven’t set eyes yet on the M25. Like America to the Norsemen, it’s still a rumour.

  If you knew nothing about the Small Arms Factory, and were wandering innocently along the towpath, you’d pick up the message: keep going. Government Road. Private Road. Barrier Ahead. The pub, Rifles, must be doing well; it has a car park the size of the Ford Motor Plant at Dagenham.

  Rifles isn’t somewhere you’d drop into on a whim. The black plastic awning features weaponry in white silhouette, guns crossed like pirate bones. TRAVELLER NOT WELCOME. ‘Which traveller?’ I wondered. Has word of our excursion filtered down the Lea? OVER 21’s. SMART DRESS ONLY. Is it the migratory aspect that these Enfield islanders object to? Or the clothes? What were they expecting, red kerchiefs, broad leather belts, moleskin waistcoats?

  Whatever it is they don’t like, we’ve got it. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. Do they know something we don’t? Are they expecting an invasion from the forest?

  Enfield Lock has an embargo on courtesy. In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old track. Who walks? ‘There used to be a road,’ they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. ‘Village’ is the giveaway. Village is the sweetener that converts a toxic dump into a slumber colony. You can live ten minutes from Liverpool Street Station and be in a village. With CCTV, secure parking and uniformed guards.

  The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes plc are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: ‘Strangers. Travellers.’

  The FIND YOUR WAY AROUND ENFIELD ISLAND VILLAGE map doesn’t help. Interesting features are labelled ‘Future Phase’. You’d have to be a ti
me-traveller to make sense of it. A progression of waterways like an aerial view of Venice, YOU ARE HERE. If you’re reading this notice, you’re fucked. That’s the message.

  ‘Building on toxic timebomb estate must be halted,’ said the London Evening Standard (12 January 2000). ‘A report published today calls for an immediate halt to a flagship 1,300-home housing development on heavily polluted land at the former Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock.’

  The drift of the piece by Stewart Payne is that the Enfield Lock scheme was the model for the decontamination of a series of other brownfield sites, worked-out sheds, shacks and bunkers that once operated alongside London’s rivers and canals. A cosmetic scrape at the topsoil, a capping of the lower levels, wouldn’t do.

  An attitude of mind that found its apotheosis in the Millennium Dome on Greenwich peninsula was evident throughout New Labour’s remapping of the outer belts, the ex-suburbs. Nobody can afford to live at the heart of the city, unless they are part of the money market (or its parasitical forms). The City of London is therefore the first Island Village; sealed off, protected, with its own security. Middle-grade workers and service industry Transit van operatives will be pushed out towards the motorway fringes. The hollow centre will then be divided up: solid industrial stock, warehouses and lofts, will go to high-income players (City, media); Georgian properties (formerly multiple-occupied) will recover their original status (and double as film sets for costume dramas); jerrybuilt estates will go to the disenfranchised underclass, junkies and asylum seekers.

  Unsafe as Houses: Urban Renaissance or Toxic Timebomb (Exposing the methods and means of building Britain’s homes on contaminated land). A report, commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Enfield Lock Action Group Association, revealed that planning permission had been granted before questions about contamination had been resolved. Planning permission was, in fact, granted on the basis of information supplied by the developers. Enfield Council’s chief planning officer, Martin Jarvis, stepped down from that role. He soon found a new position: as a director of Fairview Homes. He was among familiar faces. His son also worked for Fairview, as did the daughter of Richard Course, chairman of the council’s environment committee.