On 26 September 2007, I stood outside Stratford Station – like those unfortunate celebrities on Millennium Eve, waiting two hours for their connection to the Dome – in the hope of spotting John Hopkins with his black Land Rover. And his sidekick Nathan, the name-badged driver. Hopkins has the title of ‘Project Sponsor, Parklands and Public Realm’. He is employed by the Olympic Delivery Authority: as an explainer, facilitator, tour guide. He is an affable, well-informed man with an interest in London history. He recently attended, so he tells me, a public conversation between Peter Ackroyd and a journalist ‘who looked like Hugh Grant’. Stephen Gill accompanies me; he has photographed the site so often, before the occupation, that he can’t pass up this opportunity. The spill-zone in front of the station has a triumphal arch with an electronic timer ticking down the minutes to Olympic glory, a corkscrew clock tower (with broken clock), a steam engine called ‘Robert’ (home to dozens of incontinent pigeons). Beggars, junk-dealers and god-ranters, expelled from more salubrious districts, are much in evidence. Across the road is a labyrinthine mall-tunnel of resistible bargains, sachets of ‘Calf’s Pizzle’ at £1.99 a hit. There is an underpass with prints of night-blue skies dedicated to the legacy of Stratford’s own poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Circle-citadels indeed. The Jesuit poet’s smoke-ring conjurings have come to pass. Stratford Circus, as we drive to our entrance gate, has choked Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in a rash of Pizza Expresses and Caribbean Scene restaurants, budget multiplexes fronted by an ugly silver-hoop sculpture. ‘Ah well,’ wrote Hopkins, ‘it is all a purchase, all a prize.’ David Mackay, author of the original Stratford City plan and lead architect for the Barcelona Olympic Village, is horrified by what is happening: ‘The silliest architecture seen for years. The Olympic legacy will be more like a Hollywood set for a ghost town or an abandoned Expo site.’
The first thing that goes, as we emerge beyond the fence, is any sense of place. There is nothing by which to navigate, except the legend: ‘Bronze Age, Viking, Roman and Norman inhabitants have enjoyed the temperate climate, fertile land and powerful river … A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revitalise the valley, leaving in its footprints world-class sports, business and leisure facilities.’ Twelve thousand new jobs; 1.2 million visitors. ‘Billions of TV viewers.’ And statistics beyond number. Statistics are the cash crop of Stratford. Our slow circuit is respectful of tadpole beds, Museum of London ditches, wire fronds and crushed concrete arranged in gallery-quality exhibition piles. Gill wants to record these abstract patterns, but permission is refused.
He emailed me, soon after I got home: ‘I had a kind of territorial feeling, everything had been taken away. I almost cried in the back of the car, it is such a political experience. Whenever the guide talked about removing fish, saving the newts, making homes for insects and butterflies, I always checked on the opposite side to the one he suggested, it was much more interesting.’
Nathan, our gap-year chauffeur, told us, while we waited at yet another checkpoint, that they had given him another job, filling in tax-concession forms for the contractors, allowances for asbestos removal, handling pollutants. Manufacturing cake. That’s what they call the heaps of rendered mud. Treats for cloned cattle.
One area I do recognize, even in its peeled form, is the mound on which the Clays Lane Estate once stood. Bill Parry-Davies was employed to represent tenants who felt themselves threatened by the documented evidence of radioactive material, used in the manufacture of luminous watch dials, buried in cesspits on the site.
‘There was concern,’ Parry-Davies told me, ‘when the contractors started boring deep holes … The nature of radioactive material is that it only becomes dangerous once it’s been disturbed. Once you release it into the air, as dust, it becomes a major problem … At the end of last year, they undertook tests on the run-off into the River Lea. They found levels of thorium in the water. Atkins, the engineers, considered that it was possible that thorium had dispersed along the water table. Thorium is ductile and malleable, it’s used as a source of nuclear energy … When they found the run-off in the Lea, it was enough to confirm the engineers’ prediction of what could happen. The effect being that the entire Olympic Park is contaminated with thorium at water-table level.’
Even if figures are fudged and scare stories buried, it is going to be tricky to fulfil Ken Livingstone’s promise that the money for the construction of the Olympic Park will be earned back, afterwards, by flogging the land. ‘They won’t be able to do it,’ Parry-Davies confirmed, ‘unless they clear the whole thing up, which is a huge undertaking.’ It’s a grim scenario, especially for the travellers expelled from their established camps at the base of the Clays Lane mound and for the tenants who tried to hang on to home and community. ‘Those who are still there,’ Parry-Davies reported, ‘are woken at five in the morning, to find a police and army exercise going on, anti-terrorist war games, bombs and guns and helicopters, clouds of smoke. Nobody told them this was going to happen.’
The Olympic Park is zoned like a city under siege. You listen for the muffled thrum of a big-bellied airlift squadron. Murphy, Morrison, Nuttall: they have strategic checkpoints and private armies. The shadow of old Berlin is unavoidable. But this time the corporate entities have walled themselves, by their own choice, inside their defended stockade. Only by erecting secure fences, surveillance hedges, can they assert their championship of liberty. The threat of terrorism, self-inflicted, underwrites the seriousness of the measures required to repel it. Headline arrests in the Olympic hinterland followed by small-print retractions.
We have to sign our names on clipboard forms at every barrier. We splash through troughs of blue disinfectant. John Hopkins, with his interesting grey moustache, keeps up the patter. ‘New jobs are being created,’ he says. ‘Look at those Polish women from the relocated salmon-packing operation enjoying their alfresco lunches.’ The next night, on local-television news, I recognize Hopkins, in a boat, giving the identical word-for-word pitch. Say it often enough and it becomes true. They are very good, the explainers, at delivering an unchallenged monologue, but when the hard questions come, a momentary time-delay kicks in. They struggle like flak-jacket correspondents unsynched by video-phone technology on a desert road.
Gareth Blacker, a deathly pale, black-suited Irishman, was sent by the LDA – before the unfortunate business of the mislaid procurement funds – to patronize the folk at the Manor Garden Allotments. He had the same soft-spoken, infinitely reasonable pitch as John Hopkins. Perhaps they have media professionals to teach it. Blacker stood in the rain, under a golfing umbrella, staring at highly polished shoes, while his PR consigliere, Kinsella, hovered in the background. When Blacker responded he seemed to be answering the wrong question, the one asked a minute ago. The allotments, an island oasis ticking every possible regeneration box, stood in the way of the perimeter fence.
‘This is part of the Olympic Park and the Olympic Park legacy. It’s a temporary move. We want the allotments back after the Games. Everything will be in place. The only thing that will come out is a lot of concrete.’
‘How can something return after it has been obliterated?’ I asked.
Blacker checked his laces. A question of national security, simply that. ‘The highest levels of security on a building site for a long, long time,’ he said. ‘More security than this country has ever seen.’
Consultation concluded. Sheds come down, blue fence goes up. Some of the gardeners relocate to a dank swamp and start again, others shrivel like the summer crops they will never see. The afterlife of the allotments, the home-made sheds in which so much time and love had been invested, would be a series of affectionate portraits by Stephen Gill and a clear-eyed elegy on film by Emily Richardson. Direction of travel. Letting a hidden camera run, while she toured
the Olympic site on an official bus, allowed Richardson to record a Tourette’s syndrome spill of upbeat statistics combined with tracking shots across a panorama of blight and ruin. A superimposition that reduced audiences to hysterics.
The tacky blue of the perimeter fence does not appear on any of the computer-generated versions of the Olympic Park. The prospect from the north is favoured, down towards Canary Wharf, the Thames and the Millennium Dome. The heritage site looks like an airport with one peculiar and defining feature: no barbed wire, no barrier between Expo campus and a network of motorways and rivers. The current experience, in reality, is all fence; the fence is the sum of our knowledge of this privileged mud. Visit here as early as you like and there will be no unsightly tags, no slogans; a viscous slither of blue. Like disinfectant running down the slopes of a urinal trough. Circumambulation by the fence painters is endless, day after day, around the entire circuit; repairing damage, covering up protests. Sticky trails drip into grass verges, painterly signatures. Plywood surfaces never quite dry. Subtle differences of shade and texture darken into free-floating Franz Kline blocks.
But the major artworks, self-sponsored galleries of opposition, occur at the back of the fence, and on the unexposed panels of giant off-highway hoardings. Two artists in particular, white boys emerging from the squatting and warehouse-occupying nexus, have undertaken astonishing projects: mile after mile of two-headed crocodiles, grinning gum-pink skulls, clenched Philip Guston fists. A punk codex using industrial quantities of emulsion to revise railway bridges and condemned factories. We are here, they shout: Sweet Toof and Cyclops. Ghost-ride mouths eating the rubble of development, the melancholy soup of black propaganda.
You have to believe that the muralists of Hackney Wick are responding to Daniel Pinchbeck’s apocalyptic text: 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy. Pinchbeck is convinced that the year of the London Olympics is an ‘end date’. Stone calendars warn of the dying of one great cycle of time, of environmental catastrophe. The neurosis of stadium-building is nothing more than an unconscious desire to prepare sites for ritual sacrifice: Westfield ziggurats, Barratt pyramids. That horror mantra whispers once more in its echo chamber.
Berlin ’36: The setting in which boy soldiers will be executed for cowardice in the last days of the Third Reich. In the forest that surrounds the Olympiastadion.
Mexico City ’68: President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is instructed by Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, to deal with protests inspired by this moment of global attention. ‘The Olympic tradition is at stake,’ Brundage warns. Ordaz orders 10,000 troops of the Olympic Battalion, accompanied by light tanks and water cannons, to occupy Ciudad Universitaria. The final reckoning, the death toll, according to John Ross in El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, is 325. A figure confirmed by a Guardian journalist buried under a heap of corpses on the second floor of the university building. Two thousand protesters are arrested, stripped to their underwear and held in secure pens in a military camp. Black power salutes, the gloved hands of podium athletes. Future newsreels.
Munich ’72: The city of putsches is remembered for the massacre of eleven Israelis, athletes and coaches, by members of the Black September group. A secure Olympic village. Admired architecture. Hooded figures on balconies. Bungled response. Hijacked Lufthansa airliner. Revenge assassinations in an operation known as ‘Wrath of God’. Documentary feature films. Exorcism by Oscars.
The spray-can artists are not responding to remote legends, their work has a feral intensity. Zany, psychedelic bestiaries informed by pre-Columbian models, more Robert Crumb than Diego Rivera. The social message is: Look at me. Admire me. Give me a show on Brick Lane.
Painted eyes on the walls of the Lord Napier pub melt in an acid attack, but are never extinguished. In every crack and crevice among the crumbling detritus of the Wick, snakes and teeth appear. Priapic buddleia. Vagina dentata.
Coming home one evening, I encountered a group of muralists on the Olympic front line near Whitepost Lane. I was impressed by their quiet efficiency, the speed with which they underpainted, squared up and set to with roller brushes. The boy in charge issued terse instructions. He stood off, letting apprentices fill in the background, before he stepped forward to finesse signature wings and flames. Within a few hours, digital snoops were cataloguing this latest exhibit as a potential CD cover. The process of spontaneous reproduction is the defining characteristic of the area. What begins on the wrong side of a temporary hoarding soon becomes the colourful backdrop of a TV cop show. By which time, the original wall has been obliterated under fresh tags and aerosol doodles.
The pressure of regeneration, force-fed by the Olympics, is such that zones once tolerant of impoverished artists have to turn every wastelot, every previously unnoticed ruin, to profit. To provide more theoretical housing, it is necessary to unhouse those who have already fended for themselves. Walking down the Regent’s Canal from Victoria Park, on the morning of 8 May 2008, I witnessed another eviction. Around thirty police, with attendant vans, bailiffs, hired muscle. Council officials in dark suits clutching protective clipboards. Loud bangs, crunched hinges: the door is battered down.
A towpath cyclist is enraged. ‘How long was that building empty? Twenty years? The squatters cleaned the whole place up, it was going to be a community centre.’
A barrel-fronted property, dressed in weeds and tendrils, between the Empress coach garage and the gas-holders. I noticed, a few years ago, a sticker on the cobwebbed window: BACK THE BID. Squatters reclaimed this ghostly shell, using Tibetan gods and prayer scrolls for blinds.
Plodding home from Stratford, after discovering that much of the Olympic Park was fated to become a termite shopping centre, I picked my way down what was left of Ruckholt Road and Eastway. They were taking down the blue fence. Panels were hacked out and dumped on a carpet of wood chips, around the stump of an inconvenient ash tree. The blue tourniquet had served its purpose. Plywood was being replaced by more of those virtual-reality panels: archers, swimmers, cheering crowds. High-definition digital photography and ethically challenged fakery.
Signs are unreadable, arrows point towards mesh fences and motorways. I try to cross the Quarter Mile Lane Bridge, but I’m soon engulfed in security checkpoints. They don’t understand the concept of walking, wandering without a fixed agenda.
‘You want a job?’
I’m about to become an example of positive discrimination, those slots reserved for decrepit locals.
‘See that caravan? Go down there and they’ll take you on. Start straight away.’
I’m tempted. Why not return to the era when I cycled out here, to paint white lines on 200 football pitches? And, before that, to Chobham Farm. After all these years, I was being offered regular employment: I could help to dismantle the blue fence of the Olympic Park.
Arriving at Victoria Park, in the golden hour, I am stopped by a troubled and short-sighted Chinese man. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He is flanked by five women of various ages and the same height, daughter to grandmother. They have lost something, somebody, and recognize me as a park regular, foot-dragging, respectably distressed.
‘A little man. No teeth. Not normal, simple. Very, very small.’
He was spotted, twice, last Thursday, by a dog-walker. Nothing since. This tiny simple man has disappeared. He carried an umbrella.
I don’t want to ask if he is Chinese.
‘Does he speak English?’
‘Not at all.’
A man seduced by crowds, a grand public event, noise: the ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’ free concert. He meandered into all that fuss and was never seen again.
Disappointed in my response, the bereaved family move east, in the direction of Hackney Wick, where everything vanishes or is revised. And nothing returns, in the same condition, to the territory it left behind.
Raids
The incident I’d witnessed by the canal, the collaboration of police and council bailiffs, was a commonpl
ace of our early-morning walks. Raids happen at first light, youths congregate at dusk. ‘Pond life are out,’ say the watchers at their surveillance screens, stirring coffee mugs, leaning forward on their elbows. Life on the street is budget television and the police are the major producers. Digital technology at every demonstration. Hours of CCTV footage of suspect corners. Targets (drug actors) audition for remote viewers as the lack of action goes down: the circling bikes, the sprawling on benches, compulsive phone-babble. A virus from boxed sets of The Wire infects the canteen boredom of state-sponsored technicians: in shooting crime, you create it. Postcode soldiers yawn and scratch.
There was a powerful outwash from the Olympic Parkland. A cosmetic imperative. To set and reset paving slabs on busy boulevards. To plant bushes in unlikely places. To throw water at a few yards of tarmac. Nobody builds, they improve the image of construction. Loudly, and on camera, raiders break into the flats of low-level dealers. They evict squatters from doomed theatres and cafés. When stylish swings are installed, down by the canal, they become nests and hammocks for rough sleepers. ‘Working with the community to make a difference,’ says Tesco Express.
In Broadway Market there was an all-day-breakfast operation run by a Sicilian man, Tony Platia. A local facility of mixed reputation, popular with many, and true to this depressed backwater in the lean years of neglect and bureaucratic indifference. When the crunch came and Hackney Council’s £72-million black-hole finances were challenged by central government, an initiative was launched, whereby the usual motley of independent traders were sold out to serious but invisible developers. It simplifies the regenerationprocess. The legal arguments ran on for years. The Italian café, and the Nutritious Food Gallery managed by a Rastafarian, Lowell ‘Spirit’ Grant, were predictable casualties. Community activists, eco-warriors, journalists and professional malcontents occupied the café formerly known as FRANCESCA’S. White lettering on a green signboard.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 8