London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  Chafford Hundred thrives because it is not really there. It’s displaced, not placed: 2,000 (and rising) pristine, anti-vernacular units. Scimitar-shaped Draylon-grass carpets. Second cars. An empty-by-day enclave with no centre and no purpose. Chafford Hundred, as English as one of Prince Charles’s model villages, is actually bad-weather California: compulsory democracy, the flag (of the developer), total absence of that inner-city ethnic stew. As we walk away, we are overtaken by a white stretch-limo packed with kids on a birthday outing – to Bluewater?

  The satellite estates around Grays are as much about repossession as possession. In the early Nineties’ property slump, late-Thatcherite speculators caught a cold. Ready-cash sharpies (from Deep Essex and London) picked up houses for around £80,000. Now, five and six bedroom properties start at £310,000. Journalist Nick Curtis, reporting for the Standard, claimed that there was nothing to do in Chafford – except have babies, rent videos, and watch more houses being built.

  As we follow the sweep of the broad Thames, the riverbank evolves into what I call: Dracula’s Garden. Plants have had the juice sucked out of them, they’ve swallowed the filth brought in on the tide. They’ve stood up to wind, acid rain, the noxious perfume of the soap factory! And they’ve thrived. Mutated. Treated toxic infusions as growth hormones. Teasels look like spiky hand grenades. Lurid mosses lurk between the stone blocks of the embankment. Tyres, left in the mud, become rock pools. A lovely, lapping tidemark of oil, thick as elephant skin. Abandoned shopping trolleys act as trellises for weeds and rubbery marine growths. Couch grass breaks through a tarpaulin topsoil. Oil is the blood of the place. Oil and its antidote, soap.

  Dominating the path to the headland, to Stoneness Lightbeacon, is Dracula’s Castle (aka Procter & Gamble’s bone-boiling detergent factory). You breathe soap, blow bubbles as you walk. Small pale flowers, meadow saxifrages, have been bleached blue. They’ve taken the additives and bloomed. A vibrant ecology of compromise has developed along the shore, in the shelter of the hot castle walls, under the pall of perfumed steam.

  The factory has been assembled from Vorticist limbs, cylinders, chimneys bolted together. It’s all about circulation: hiss, rattle, whistle, crunch. Then storage. Windowless units with steel-grey walls. The industrial icebergs of Thurrock drift towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. Thousands of tons of soap powder waiting to be shipped out. The most austere warehouse/tank has been sited so that the rising sun casts the shadow of the Procter & Gamble smokestacks across a colour-graded screen: a cinema of morning. This great downriver art work has been painted in four bands: dark blue (for the river), lighter blue, metallic grey, to the pearly haze of the sky. Meteorological minimalism. Constable’s cloud studies revisioned as a child’s building block.

  It was easy to miss, but the Canning Town veteran, sucking on his single tooth, put us right. Follow the roughcast wall with the product placement graffito – PERSIL WHITE POWER – to the chalked Maltese cross (with inset swastikas); then turn north, pick up the path through the thicket of thorns. The block building is your target, two bands of colour poking above the trees. Ash, elder, bramble. Chickweed, mallow, sorrel. Nettles, wild carrot, ivy. A deep-green abundance through which we hack: towards the restored (by largesse of Procter & Gamble) twelfth-century church of St Clement’s, West Thurrock.

  The freakish conjunction of church, block warehouse, factory has us spinning. That a building used by Canterbury pilgrims, a river crossing, should have survived. A major portion of the money required for restoration came from an unlikely source: the makers of Four Weddings and a Funeral. West Thurrock is not a backdrop I would have associated with Hugh Grant and Simon Callow. I checked the video. There it was. Dead Callow, resurrected Auden. Establishing shots from the high ground, a glimpse of the bridge. A melancholy walk, after the ceremony, to the riverside. Most of the magic of the place, mercifully, was elided. Actorly business, in English films, pulls rank on location. The facility fee was earned without evidence of the director (or the crew) seeing what was here, a strange geometry of unconnected elements. The knowledge that Thurrock had any meaningful existence before the arrival of the catering vans.

  We met a Procter & Gamble gardener in the church grounds, a man in overalls who was prepared to let us in. The graveyard was a sanctuary for wildlife (and lowlife). We did the tour: saw the outsize headstones of the Essex giants and the memorial to the boys from the training ship Cornwall – who were buried in a mass grave in 1915, after going down, in a rowing boat disaster, off Purfleet. We admired the Roman brick courses, the evidence of a circular building, discovered on the south side of the present tower.

  Renchi pounced: our old friends the Knights Templar. Only four round churches remained in England, so our guide informed us: the Temple Church (off Fleet Street), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, a church in Northampton and another at Little Maplestead, Essex. We listened to his pitch, nodding over the tiles (Roman sesquipedalia). Hospitallers and Templars guarded pilgrim routes. Without question, they had been active in this area.

  The lid of a large tomb was cracked, the gardener lifted one section: junkies kept their gear inside. Kids from Thurrock and Purfleet haunted the burial ground, smacked out of their heads, sleeping against the church walls. Or, if the rain came in from the river, in a convenient sepulchre. Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham reworked by Wes Craven.

  The headstone of Robert Lee commemorated a man ‘who died in the accident of a pistol in the twinkling of an eye’. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, respectful of vampire lore, took shelter in a suicide’s grave.

  Alabaster effigies, inside St Clement’s, were chilled: chipped profiles, sliced skulls. The pilgrim route was good business. Crossing water called for risk premiums, offerings, prayer. Fear is the surest source of patronage: fragments of medieval glass, illuminated by a press-switch, featured a voyage through Hell’s Teeth – from the cult which followed the 1348 outbreak of bubonic plague. The Black Death. A crowned bear rattling a money bag.

  St Clement’s, West Thurrock, was one of the river’s great secrets. Without the old man in Grays, we would have missed it. I had missed it on previous walks; climbing the river wall to photograph stacks of Portakabins, then carrying on towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. But gaining access to the church, touching alabaster flesh, experiencing forgotten plagues as brilliantly coloured shards of glass, confirmed my instinct. A residue of Count Dracula was still earthed in Purfleet.

  Vampire scholars, such as Kim Newman, have always recognised that yesterday’s Undead are today’s asylum seekers, the Undispersed. The slow-detonating impact of Stoker’s 1897 fiction came, not from its novelty, but from the sense of the book as an original rewrite, the recapitulation of a recurring fable. Beneath the breastbeating Shakespearean echoes (cod-Irving), and the tent-show religiosity, is a considered and accurate geography. Westwards: Transylvania to Whitby. The Gothic imagination invading – and undoing – imperial certainties of trade, law, class. Dracula announces the coming age of the estate agent. Nothing in the book works without the Count’s ability to purchase, rent, secure property. Like the Moscow Mafia buying into St George’s Hill (proximity to Heathrow), Dracula chose Purfleet, alongside the Thames, so that he could ship out for Varna at a moment’s notice. Being an immortal, the Count knew that he only had to hang on for a few years and he would have a bridge across the river, a motorway circuit around London: new grazing grounds. The future M25 was a magic circle, a circle in salt. The Vampire couldn’t be excluded, he was already inside! Purneet rather than Thurrock. The motorway was the perfect metaphor for the circulation of blood: Carfax Abbey to Harefield – with attendant asylums. Stoker predicted the M25, made its physical construction tautologous. The Count’s fetid breath warmed Thatcher’s neck as she cut the ribbon.

  Back home, in his coldwater Transylvanian pile – no shaving mirrors, no central heating – Dracula/Ceauşescu plots his exile, his escape to the fleshpots of the west. He fondles maps and guidebooks:
‘These… have been good friends to me… Through them I have come to know your great England… I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London.’

  London gazetteers are a kind of pornography, a lubricious portfolio of future potentialities. The Lakeside Ikea catalogue would have turned him on to the A13 and the chalk quarries. Ikea were sensitive to ‘that well-loved essential bit of storage’, the patinised pine cupboard like a vertical coffin. Furniture that needn’t cost ‘an arm and a leg’.

  ‘Come,’ says the Count to Jonathan Harker, ‘tell me of London and of the house which you have procured for me.’

  Dracula is the original psychogeographer, map fetishist, timetable freak.

  The lamps were also lit in the study or library, and I found the Count lying on the sofa, reading of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide… He was interested in everything, and asked me a myriad questions about the place and its surroundings. He clearly had studied beforehand all he could get on the subject of the neighbourhood, for he evidently at the end knew very much more than I did.

  The Count, doing his own research, located the heritage set needed for his experiment in English country house living. Sunk in reverie, on the couch in that dim library, he resembles Peter Ackroyd, conjuring up mists and miasmas, busy streets and quiet courtyards, passages where time flows as sluggishly as the Exxon oil-seepage on the Thurrock foreshore. Dracula’s special subject is: doctored memory, describing the past in the excited prose of a contemporary observer. The body of London solicits his bite. He knows just where skin is tender, where the stitches will part: the alleys and waste lots and riverside chasms where ancient crimes are unappeased.

  It takes a person of rare sensitivity to nominate Purfleet as a convenient-for-Fenchurch-Street-and-the-City estate. Carfax Abbey, Stoker called the place. The etymology, as Leonard Wolf (editor of The Annotated Dracula) points out, plays back to the ‘fourteenth century Anglo-Norman carfucks’. Carfucks. An immaculate crossover with J.G. Ballard and Crash. Carfucks. The appropriately suggestive subtitle for the A13 and its tributaries (running off into Rainham Marshes). Lay-bys. Portakabin castles. Breakers’ yards. Leashed curs howling like the wolves of the Carpathian Mountains.

  Stoker, in the trance of composition, becomes Dracula in his study, the connoisseur of maps. I don’t imagine that he ever spent time walking the river path from Grays, he didn’t need to; he was in the drift. He had his researchers out on the road, doing the legwork. Harker reports:

  At Purfleet, on a by-road, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It was surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates were of heavy oak and iron, all eaten with rust.

  The ebbing of the tide of time drags London, its heat, to the cold east: Soho becomes Clerkenwell, becomes Hoxton, becomes Shoreditch. Dracula’s Purfleet, just inside the present M25, is our West Thurrock. The smoking mass of the Procter & Gamble factory is Carfax Abbey – constructed from giant silver bullets: to suppress memory. The neighbouring lunatic asylum, kept by Dr John Seward, is reconvened as a colony of Barratt homes. The church remains. Bram Stoker’s description is better than Pevsner, lively as Ian Nairn.

  The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say to medieval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my kodak views of it from various points… There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum.

  There is no medieval chapel in Purfleet. This is it, under the bridge and on to Thurrock; the church of St Clement’s, hidden among soap factories and storage facilities, a wild garden of mallow and storkbill and sorrel. A refuge for estuarine junkies.

  Like Harker, I kept busy with my Kodak. I strung together numerous ‘views’, knowing that the alignments would shift; by the time I returned the teasel thicket would be cleared for a car park. My casual topographic record mutates into an epic canvas (painted by Jock McFadyen), or a lovely sequence of small panels, crafted from video-pulls, by the artist Emma Matthews. West Thurrock is in danger of becoming another Barbizon, the stalking ground for a school of weekend casuals. With stools and smocks and binoculars.

  We moved on towards the bridge. Heavy clouds hugged the shoreline, black at base, blooded as the sun climbed above the Littlebrook Power Station. Backlit dredgers. Two skeletal towers, one on each shore, carrying power lines. They never fail: river, marshland, the pier that looks like a concrete boat. All the sensory buttons are pushed. Space. Flow. Dereliction. New estates springing up. The thick tongue of oil on the shoreline, its ridges and patterns.

  At Stoneness Point, we can see the Dartford Crossing; skinny bridge, cloud road. We look across the Thames at what was once Ingress Abbey (and the Nautical School), at Greenhithe. The subtlety of Stoker’s geographical revisions becomes suddenly clear: he works through triangulation. Three distinct locations. Three addresses for the coffins of Transylvanian earth, Dracula’s bolt-holes: Chicksand Street (off Brick Lane in Whitechapel), Jamaica Lane (Bermondsey) and Piccadilly (with a view of Green Park). A thin isosceles triangle. Like that Portland stone dagger, the steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields.

  How Stoker laid out his plan without standing here, I can’t imagine. He must have had Ackroyd’s preternatural skill at processing field reports, gutting and filleting obscure publications and coming up with the juice.

  Ingress: ‘the act of going in or entering; immersion’. Ingress Abbey was the model for Carfax. St Clement’s (on the north shore) was the old church. Joyce Green Hospital would do for the asylum. Fiction compresses the picture. Walking gives it room to breathe; topographical elements separate – but are always visible. Paste those Kodak prints to the wall. Work it out for yourself.

  Like Stoker’s troop of bungling adventurers, vampire hunters, we’re always too late; Dracula has escaped. The V of Joyce Green Hospital is destroyed, the site prepared for economic immigrants. The church is taken into the protection of Procter & Gamble. Ingress Abbey is lost (along with its Capability Brown park). We hit the oracular keys and get the inevitable response: Ingress Denied.

  After a river trip, at the beginning of the last century, the Shah of Persia said: ‘The only thing worth mentioning was at Greenhithe, where there was a mansion standing amidst trees on a green carpet extending to the water’s edge.’ Ingress Abbey is now being refurbished, at a cost of £4 million, for a software company. The park will be developed by Crest – who have promised 850 homes, plus ‘amenities and garden features’. The Carfax walls of ‘heavy stone’ have been replaced by ubiquitous chainlink fences. Another potent landscape has been exposed to daylight, stripped of its shadows. Another reservoir of memory is drained.

  ‘CALMER WATERS. A riverside lifestyle to enjoy at your leisure. Imagine living just 45 minutes from the city, yet a million miles away. In the grounds of an ancient Abbey, framed between the River Thames and acres of mature woodland. Ingress Park is the reality, CREST NICHOLSON. The Hallmark of a Classic Home.’

  This is how good fiction works: by transposition, a code any half-bright idiot can break. Purfleet is not (in absolute terms) where Carfax is – but where you see it from. The switch: subject and object. You learn to empty yourself into the view. At privileged viewing points, the observer vanishes: the fictional residue remains, coheres. It’s there even when you don’t see it.

  The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, curved and minimalist, is highly strung. Hawsers fade into the sky. A long black line splits the cloud, flashes of movement. White tuning forks anchor a structure that can’t support the weight. The bridge is free-floating. This is the o
nly place where the orbital motorway lives up to its metaphoric responsibilities: grandeur, lift – surprise.

  Vampires, according to Stoker’s mythology, have problems crossing water. Count Dracula, open-eyed in his coffin, is trapped on board his vessel – until the ship runs aground, or the tide turns. ‘He went south from Carfax,’ says the vampire hunter Van Helsing, ‘that means he went to cross the river, and he could only do so at slack of tide.’ The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, scarlet lights at dawn and dusk, is a ladder for vampires. A ladder on which blood is turned into oil. And back again. A motorcycle outrider with BLOOD on his vest.

  We’re advancing through a cyclorama of storage tanks, rattling chutes, private jetties, CCTV, razor wire, TANK TERMINAL. POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE/EXCEPT ON BUSINESS/SMOKING AND NAKED/LIGHTS FORBIDDEN/WEST THURROCK OIL TERMINAL. Thurrock on the east side of the bridge, Purfleet on the west: oil everywhere. The fiefdom of the Bush boys: Exxon, Esso. (Enron, Energy: an E-scape loud with entropy.) This is where the fuel protesters, farmers and long-distance hauliers staged their protest. Stop the distribution. Barricade the gates.

  Rank upon rank of brilliant blue tractors. Waiting for export. A lake of black oil in the place of Carfax Abbey. But Stoker’s themes are still active: immigration, storage, distribution. The motorway brings in the container-stacked stowaways who will be stored in empty hospitals and windowless warehouses, while they wait for dispersal. (The Roumanian Dracula smuggles himself on to English soil in the guise of a black dog.)