Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  Resurrection

  Sitting stiffly, posed on a hard chair for two hours, is not as tough an assignment as it might seem. Time, during that first hour, overlapped me, kindly, quietly. There were few choices to be made and nowhere to go. The buzz of the city faded with the light in the uncurtained window. Nobody spoke. Five amateur painters dabbed and scratched; stood off, staring at the presented obstacle – myself – without excitement or impatience. Stephen Gill, the previous sitter, the one who got me into this thing, took a couple of photographs of the artisans at their easels, then he went away. Nothing else occurred. The young guy at the back did some fancy roll-up smoking, which was almost too dramatic to endure. Smoking was his gift, his special subject.

  Motes dance in a cone of dying sunlight. You learn to breathe with your gills. I had no desire to see the evidence of my unavoidable mortality. After twenty minutes, your knees ache and your neck locks. You walk away or you become part of the set. Part of the long room at the back of St Mary of Eton Church in Hackney Wick. I doubt if I could find the place again. It won’t be there, not in its present form, with velvet shadows creeping across blackened boards. And the company of spectres from another age. Those who will never be evicted. Until the walls come down and the developers win the day.

  Downstairs, the click of ivory balls from the former snooker room confirms the legend of two ancient, near-blind members of the Eton Mission who arrive from nowhere to play out their weekly challenge. Wheezing, they crouch to shoot the odd frame, before subsiding against peeled leather, while waiting to disappear into it. The wild young boys with cropped heads, behind cobwebbed glass up on the wall, are slightly less dead than their portraits. Which have bleached into obscurity. Faces like acid-scorched thumbs. Stern teams of vanished sportsmen. Wilderness lads press-ganged by god’s storm troopers, public-school missionaries from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Benefactors of the territory like Major Arthur Villiers and Gerald Wellesley.

  Henry Allingham, the oldest man in the world, survivor of Jutland and Ypres, a living fossil of the last century’s tragic absurdities, was an Eton Mission oarsman. Active on the River Lea from 1909 to 1914. And again from 1919 to 1922. Returned, at the last gasp, to the canalside club, just before it vanished into the Olympic Park, Henry said, ‘It’s wonderful. This has taken ten years off my life.’ After 113 years, he was ready to go.

  Distracted by the unseen pull of the submerged Hackney Brook, I was about to take ten years off my life too: by walking straight into the diesel-storm of a motorway slip road. With no way out, until I managed to climb a fence and scramble through bushes, thorn thickets, camera poles, back to the edges of civilization. To the Gothic hulk of the padlocked church. Where the artists hung out; meeting at regular intervals to attempt mass portraits of current Wick enthusiasts who have volunteered to fade alongside the images of the long-dead footballers, rowers, athletes.

  Which is why that first hour on the chair was so soothing. Part seance, part dumb confession, the sitting was an effortless unburdening. A remission from troubled thoughts about the devastation of the Lower Lea Valley achieved through the concentrated labour of others. I would become an approximate rendering of husbanded flaws and imperfections. Moment by moment, I was opened to a version of the past curated by the space into which I had been admitted. Liberation derived from the practised skills or the technical inadequacies of the artists. As they drew me out of, and away from, my earlier selves.

  There were difficulties in my life, many of them stemming from local estrangement. The good thing about Hackney, over the last forty years, was that nobody cared. Nobody noticed the place. Transport was hopeless, it was better to walk. A reasonable burden of debt hobbles the politicians, tempers their excesses. The trouble started when our crapness began to be celebrated with a post-ironic fervour: we manufactured enamel badges with broken hearts. And then the Olympics arrived to swivel a searchlight on the dark places, to impose a fraudulent narrative. Everything they boasted of delivering, as legacy, after the dirt and dust and inconvenience, was here already. It had always been here, but they didn’t need it. They lived elsewhere. They lived inside their illusions. Hackney ceased to be a game reserve and became a career. To prove how much they loved the ugly old borough, town hall politicians agreed to rub along on a pittance (ten of them having to share not much more than a million pounds in the last financial year), before decamping on an expenses-paid, fact-finding mission to Beijing. Travel, they informed whinging critics, heightens the perception of what has been left behind.

  ‘These people are individuals who want to make a difference to their community and they must be rewarded for that,’ said Councillor Merrick Cockell: from his totally impartial viewpoint. It’s boom time on Mare Street. On bling central. Penny Thompson, chief executive of Hackney Council, receives an annual salary of £164,839. Director of housing, Steven Tucker, is on £126,000. Timothy Shields, director of finance, and Kim Wright, corporate director of community services, earn £120,000 each. And worth every penny. Read about their achievements in the council-funded, eco-friendly Hackney Today.

  My second hour was less comfortable. The organizer, an American woman called Leigh Niland, discovered that her watch had stopped. A consequence, I suppose, of experiments in relativity being conducted out on the marshes, in the tunnels and bunkers. So I was deputed to monitor the passage of time, to warn the painters of their final countdown. Time was no longer seamless, a reverie interrupted by the clatter of trains on the high embankment.

  From a window at the back you could look on a cancelled future of unstrung cricket nets, bits of lawn where feral youths had been encouraged to engage in community sports. Eton Manor, Eton Mission: young gentlemen, in striped blazers and celluloid collars, arrived in this uncolonized edgeland to import the ideals of Empire; buying up farms, preaching amateur-football morality, constructing boathouses. Public-school and university men, fired by the challenge of Satanic gloom, the lurking thieves and prostitutes, were conspicuous, according to Michelle Johansen, ‘for striding purposefully straight up the middle of the road’. Hackney Wick was a shanty town, reached without weeks at sea. A suitable landscape for the opium wars of religious doctrine.

  Oxford Movement missionaries, often at their own expense, countered gang-related violence issues by establishing a direction of travel that offered a legacy to coming generations of East Londoners: playing fields recovered from industrial squalor, rowing clubs on backrivers, allotments presented to those without gardens. They created everything that has now been torn down to make way for the Olympic Park. The football pitches stolen for VIP parking. The popular cycle track destroyed against the promise of an elite facility. Locals forced to improvise training exercises in the corners of a retail park. Swimming pools shuttered and standing idle. Allotment holders expelled to a flooded patch of yellow clay, alongside a busy road, up against the shell of the doomed Eton Manor clubhouse. The uniform sheds, with which they were provided, in place of previous tumbledown assemblages, were like battery-farm chicken coops.

  An Old Etonian, E. M. S. Pilkington, wanted to do great things for the youth of the area, denizens of railway arches and rabbity terraces. But the marshes were never easy to locate. That was part of their charm. ‘Having searched diligently through Mogg’s Guide to London and the Suburbs for the correct geographical position of Hackney Wick, and all the Metropolitan timetables for a suitable train to Victoria Park Station, I duly started off one evening in search of adventures in the Wild East.’

  Those adventures included the instigation of drawing classes: in the room where I now posed for Pilkington’s elective descendants. Loving water, the muscular Christian solicited funds to establish a swimming club. All the fine young men, rising at 4 a.m., would troop down to the Lea, for a restorative plunge, right opposite an active factory.

  ‘On early summer mornings the men from the dye works used to stand out on the edge of their wall and look on. They were sometimes a rich blue all over, and they were
sometimes red, according to the dye which they were working at the time, and their appearance was always picturesque.’

  To read about the achievements of the Eton Manor philanthropists (who were not cleaning up the territory to present it to a mall developer), is to discover one crucial difference in their presentation. The spinners of the ODA and LDA speak of what is to come. The sporting pioneers write of what has already been achieved. In 1923, using their own money and money raised from friends, four Old Etonians acquired thirty acres of wasteland, near the River Lea in Leyton, and turned it into ‘one of the most conspicuously beautiful recreation grounds in the metropolitan area’. It was known as the Wilderness: ‘a vast sporting Eden or nirvana, with nine football pitches, two rugby pitches, a cricket pitch, six tennis courts, a squash court, running track, bowling green and swimming pool for the Eton Manor Boys and Old Boys to share.’

  The floodlights alongside the running track were the inspiration of Major Arthur Villiers, the benefactor who presented Manor Garden allotments to the landless folk of East London, to enjoy in perpetuity. Villiers, a man with no great cultural pretensions, endured the classical European tour. He motored around Italy, under a cloud of grim necessity, a chauffeur at the wheel. A friend, coming across him by chance in Pisa, was astonished to see the former officer studying the famous leaning tower and the Campo Santo. It was the floodlighting, not the architecture, he was interested in. Villiers grasped at once how electrical technology could be adapted for the running track at Hackney Wick. He built himself a house on the edge of the Wilderness and stayed there until he died in 1969. Like an old India hand, puffing a cheroot, on his veranda in Bournemouth.

  Everything promised, swimming pool, cycle track, rivers enjoyed by working men and women, had already happened. The post-Olympic facilities were here all along, getting on with their business, struggling for funds. The poisons of industrial exploitation were in the ground, undisturbed and inert. If the drama of international competition, man against man on the track, was required, then Hackney Wick found ways to provide it: as a modest private investment. The nation didn’t have to go into hock to pull in the punters. It occurred, spontaneously, before the age of multilayered development agencies, the tearing out of gardens, the expulsion of small traders, the removal of travellers.

  The 2012 Olympics were a noisy sequel. The original Hackney Games had been witnessed by vast crowds. In 1857, James Baum, an impresario based at the White Lion public house in Wick Lane, created a running track on one acre of his own property. He organized boxing matches and the ‘Victoria Park Races’, a modest version of the current extravaganza. The White Lion track was made from gravel and followed the natural features of the ground. Spectators massed in the centre of the track or up on the railway embankment. There were long-distance pedestrian races, handicapped runs and wrestling bouts. A number of records were set. William ‘The Crow-catcher’ Lang came down from Middlesbrough in 1865, to take the world one-mile record with a time of four minutes seventeen and a half seconds. Not bad on an uneven track with an uphill section and a mob pressing tight to the verge. John ‘The Gateshead Clipper’ White established a six-mile record that stood for sixty years, before it was broken by Paavo Nurmi, the legendary Finn, in 1921.

  The fame of the White Lion track was such that Louis Bennett, a Native American known as Deerfoot, crossed the Atlantic to challenge our English champions. Four thousand people, many arriving after the race started, travelled from Fenchurch Street Station. As the series progressed, crowds grew: 10,000 were expected when Baum put up his own version of the blue fence, around the back of the course, to secure it from freeloaders. The railway embankment was enclosed to form a grandstand. Private boxes were provided for the great and the good (the wealthy). ‘Every nook and crevice from which a glimpse of the contest could be obtained was occupied,’ reported the Sporting Life. ‘And no little merriment was caused by the repeated break downs of lottery platforms.’

  Baum, as Warren Roe reports in a thoroughly researched piece in Hackney History, ‘was also a bit of a philanthropist, always keen to promote events that would benefit the poor and under-privileged’. He organized fund-raisers for the distressed cotton workers of Lancashire.

  It couldn’t last. That moment of balance between the fading pastoral of the marshes and the industrial imperative of dye works and fish-curing sheds. The argument between Arthur Villiers, who wanted to see Eton Manor funds used for practical projects, clubs for urchins, and the Church authorities, who proposed the construction of a great tower, was a rehearsal for much that would follow. The vertical thrust of a single structure, dominating place by overlooking it, would be opposed, repeatedly, by horizontal energies: which are always democratic, free-flowing, uncontained.

  Sneaking a glance at my watch, tracking every tick of time, fixed to my stiff chair in the limbo of the Eton Mission, I played over the stories I had read: the races run, the forgotten benefactors recovered through research by local historians in vanishing libraries. It was left to the Sporting Life to compose the tragic elegy.

  ‘Hackney Wick – alas! what a falling off! … The place has been allowed to fall into such a state of decay that it is enough to give one the horrors to look at it … The whole wears such a woebegone aspect as to plainly betoken that the once famed Hackney Wick must soon be numbered among the things that have been.’

  Not Here

  Under the dust of development, the brutal imperatives of the current regime, I sickened. Books, paintings, and property, were a burden, symptoms of the disease. I wanted to walk away and to keep walking. I had not recovered from my orbital circuit, my tramp around the M25 motorway loop, that perfect icon of endlessness. I dosed myself with German road movies (better without thesubtitles). And Chinese poets, driven out of China, seeing London with fresh eyes. Yang Lian, relocated to Stamford Hill, contemplated the margins of the River Lea. ‘People he meets all his life are as unavoidable as this place.’

  Lying awake at first light I hear the click of the letter box, the sound of a single item hitting bare boards. I do not leap from the bed: another bill. Small businesses are going under, which seems to be part of the great scheme of things. Talk to an established postman, if you can find one, and they’ll describe a gradual erosion of confidence, grotesque schemes thought out by computers and enforced by clipboard management: impossible rounds, no overtime, no incentives to deliver a decent service. The landscape, in the shadow of the Olympic Park, is in the process of being brought on-stream as a virtual paradise. The model is German, old East and older West: Honecker’s urban planners, the propaganda of Dr Goebbels. A surgical removal of stubborn traces of the local makes way for a mindless verticality. Statements of control. New blocks, lacking Berlin’s communal courtyards, are positioned for convenient access to the extended malls that will replace the free-flowing anarchy of the street market. Tessa Jowell, dismissing a critic of the Stratford grand project, remarked: ‘He’s a man who doesn’t like shopping.’

  The white envelope, with the latest bill, addressed by hand, had wedged itself neatly into a crack between floorboards. Where I left it, quivering slightly, when I walked out to meet the Chinese-British photographer Ian Teh. A man whose surname my monoglot laptop sniffily corrected to the definite article.

  After the incident – we’ll return to that later – film crews arrived on my doorstep from all over Europe. America too. A brief item on the Today programme, followed by a blog from the presenter, making a bullet-point summary of a long-winded essay I’d written months ago, provoked an Olympic feeding frenzy. Belgians, Germans, Italians, French: civilized and serious-minded communicators solicited a guided stroll through the dust storm. Their reports might run for as long as two minutes, probably less, so they were never going to walk the entire blue-fence circuit. A hired people carrier, stacked with camera boxes and tripods, would park on Wick Lane, near the barrier with the weave of memorial flowers. The presenter, after checking hair and make-up in a hand mirror, would follow
me on to the Greenway. They never got further than the site where the skeletal stadium was emerging from the clay like a waking crocodile. Wraparound weirdness overwhelmed the cultural tourists, huge skies the like of which they had not previously encountered. Concrete funnels dispensing liquid slurry into a perpetual stream of trucks. Rinsed earth in mounds. Swaying cranes. New developments with picture windows mesmerized by the virulent green of the duckweed-clogged canals and backrivers.

  ‘I am becoming paranoid for people like yourself who regularly visit or live on land around the Olympic Park,’ Bill Parry-Davies told me. ‘The Lloyds Shoot tip is where some really nasty stuff was found, a forgotten dump situated on the Olympic arena site. The West Ham tip and the banks of culverts also appear to have been randomly covered with radioactive substances. God only knows what they dredged out of the Lea.’

  Much of the work, so it appears from an article by Ted Jeory and David Jarvis in the Daily Express, was to facilitate the construction of a massive bunker, ‘the size of half a football pitch’. It was hidden beneath an approach ramp, ‘next to a site where new homes will be built before the 2012 Games’. Toxic soil, 7,300 tonnes of it, lined with a plastic membrane, was buried in a ‘disposal cell’, between the railway station and the river. Residue from luminous watch dials, churned up in the development process, leached into the water table. Thorium, a radioactive isotope, has an estimated half-life of fourteen billion years. But who’s counting?

  Olivier Pascal-Moussellard, from the Paris magazine Télérama, came over to do an interview, as part of a special London issue. Checking his copy, on his return, Olivier rang me: ‘Is it really so bad?’ The London issue was intended to promote the place, to prove that we are not just beefeater heritage and Oxford Street shopping. (Now you can shop at Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush or a quarry in Thames Gateway.) ‘Have you perhaps been a little negative in your opinions? Can you strike an optimistic note for the future?’