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The security guards who questioned me, on previous expeditions, had decamped, crossed the river. The Thames port had slumped into its Conradian, between-tides limbo. Much of the available energy was expended on protesting about a glass stump: GRAVESEND SAYS NO TO TOWER. Or fretting over a mega-mosque on which, as bloggers fumed, Ken Livingstone wanted to spend £100m of taxpayers’ money. On all other topics, Gravesend yawned.
Empty camera boxes stare at brambles breaking through tarmac. Obscenities left unfinished when the aerosol ran out. Heritage prompts have been slapped on this exhausted whore of the river like nicotine patches: empty forts, stopped cannons, a dead princess (Native American). I never saw a town with so many hair salons. And so many men with heads like polished stones. They were shorn more frequently, and much closer, than sheep on the Grain marshes.
The highlight of the morning was a tour through the concrete works in Northfleet. Spokes of sunlight through grey dust, nobody challenges us. We pass under an arrangement of clattering pipes, chutes, drums. Ships park alongside a private dock in a web of shadows. At the heart of the operation is a statue of Britannia; helmeted, enthroned, magnificent in her detachment from the noise and the dirt, the men and the trucks who pay her no homage. She’s built on an Egyptian scale, a queen without a kingdom. Massive limbs are draped in angular folds. She had been conceived, under Vorticist influence, just after the First War. The statue is the only white object in a microclimate of grey, air you can barely force into the lungs. You feel it solidify. Another mile and we will be statues ourselves. Britannia commemorates the workers who died in the Great War, 1914–18. Names are visible but clogged with years of industrial pollution. Occupations are listed: Labourer, Gauger, Cooper, Horse-driver, Trotter, Stower, Clerk, Machinist, Trimmer, Warehouse Boy. Being here, powdered in the soft dust churned up by lorries, has preserved her integrity: a strange hieratic beauty. She does not age. She is not for turning.
The breakfast, at the coffee stall on the edge of the Ebbsfleet retail park, was one of the best of her life, so Anna reckoned. She may have been influenced by the need to rinse the dust from her mouth and the hours spent drudging through chalk quarries and streets from which all cafés and convenience stores had been excised. They have been obliterated in the push for a Channel Tunnel link, an Olympic staging post. The black hole that was Ebbsfleet is now the very model of the GP future-zone. Giant blue sheds. Frenzied roads. Long-haul lorry drivers staring at maps. A dozen men, gathered around a tea urn, texting furiously to find out where they are.
As we drizzle brown sauce over butter-melting, bacon-egg-sausage sandwiches, washed down by mugs of steaming coffee, we are interrogated by other diners. This river walk we are undertaking to London: where’s that? A woman, with the clear, ice-chip eyes of an Amundsen, tells us about her recent adventures in Bluewater. ‘I went early. There was nobody there. It was the end of the world.’ Drivers, with refrigerated cargoes, find themselves marooned at the breakfast stall when their satnavs give up the fight. You can’t navigate to a place that hasn’t happened yet.
NEXT STOP EUROPE.
A monster hoarding announces its abdication from the mess of downriver Kent. They want you to upgrade, at this point, to the CGI version of the road, the promo for Mark Wallinger’s 164-foot white horse, his mocking tribute to figures carved into hillsides by our mysterious ancestors. Chalk outlines that can only be viewed by shamanic flyers and superior beings on spaceships. The Wallinger nag, an inflated cornflake-packet toy, bestrides the Ebbsfleet quarry, and dominates both road and station, glorying in its scale and emptiness. As a travelling shot sweeps you around the iconic phantom, the promo reveals a spanking-new housing development. The look-at-me horse is intended to divert attention from a process of ripping, gouging, erasing. This dumb beast, twice as big as Antony Gormley’s crucified steel angel, is costed at £2 million. It doesn’t matter if it is actually built or not. It looks great in the movie. If it behaves like a police horse and lets one drop, the emerging Ebbsfleet estate will be buried in steaming compost.
We can smell the marshes but we can’t get at them. The warehouse zone, parasitical on the promise of Ebbsfleet’s European future, has expanded like a boom city, a gold-rush camp of provision warehouses and showrooms with nothing to show. Gravel beds have been laid out with Mexican plants and the sort of geometric ponds pioneered at motorway service stations. Anna asks a young man in peaked cap and blue uniform if he can point her in the direction of the river.
‘There is supposed to be a lake somewhere around here,’ he says, ‘but I’ve never seen it myself.’
‘The Thames? It’s a very large river.’
‘Sorry.’
Negotiating a tight avenue of self-reflecting glass is like putting your trust in a corporate brochure. We find ourselves back on the river path. Around the headland of the Swanscombe Marshes is the skeletal span of the QEII Bridge, twin lines of stalled traffic, sunlight glinting on windscreens. The warehouseman’s imaginary lake is busy with container ships stacked with new cars, or heading downstream towards gravel-dredging operations and concrete works.
The walk dissolves into pylon prairies, scrapyard suburbs, decommissioned fever hospitals, landfill dumps – and constant attempts, against the grain of natural resistance, to throw up riverside towers and estates. Ingress Abbey is now a gated community. Greenhithe a tolerated village. There are more retail parks. More surveyors. The Crossness Sewage Treatment Works features a splash of landmark architecture that reminds me of Terry Farrell and his dockside intervention in Hull: a fat block with a curved back, a whale jigsaw made from glass panels.
‘Handling enough sewage to fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools every haul,’ boasts the notice. And I can believe it: teal, sheldrake, oystercatcher, curlew and redshank, they are all out there. Feeding on the sludge, paddling through meaty London-waste mud. Crossness copywriting comes in Braille for sight-impaired wanderers: ‘Industry and wildlife will be your companions.’
The last time we passed this way, we were held for an hour, thanks to an ‘incident’ in the sewage farm. Which the embarrassed copper, pressured by aggrieved hikers and cyclists, finally revealed as a visit from the Prince of Wales. We witnessed the big black car, the procession of outriders and helicopters. The suited dignitaries, frozen on the steps, breaking into excited chatter as the cavalcade swept through the gates. A tray of MBEs in the post.
But that’s where we were now, ejected from new developments, clomping around token wildlife reservations, deafened by planes on a holding pattern, or swooping low towards the City Airport at Silvertown. Anna Minton in her 2009 polemic, Ground Control, prepares us for the coming nuisance from above. Stratford City, the Westfield supermall, are about to launch a new urban-control device, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Drones operated by the American military for spying and assassination in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is expected, according to Dr Kirstie Ball, a surveillance specialist, that the flying cameras, tried and tested in the Olympic Park, will become a permanent feature of London life. By 2012 there will be no perceptible difference in techniques of control employed in war zones and in homeland development zones: making the world a safer place for shopping.
Northwest Passage
If you manage to stay upright on a balcony as springy as a ship’s gangplank, in wind that rips around this eighteen-floor obstruction, the view of the Woolwich Ferry is unimpeachable: downriver London at its reeking, clanking best. Red sun, grey water. The conceit, that this new tower will make an adequate stand-in for Ballard’s High-Rise, doesn’t play. A couple of twists in the Thames, beyond the Barrier, and it’s already too far. The tension in Ballard’s 1975 novel comes from its severed connection with long-established reservations of money and influence. His gated community, in its vertical stack, is specifically located on the north bank, two miles from the City. The view, across the river from High-Rise, is dr
essed with concert halls, medical schools, television studios. In other words, Ballard has folded the map, conflating the South Bank culture-zone, between old and new versions of St Thomas’ Hospital, with the coming Docklands development. The whole story of landscape piracy neatly packaged in a single panoramic shot. A scrupulous economy of means, as always.
And now a radio programme, responding to real-estate spin, decides that one freakish tower block, overlooking the river, is as good as any other. Walls are made from ricepaper. Furniture is minimalist, scaled down to create the illusion of space. Mirrors do what they can. The hanging silver-ghost TV is skinnier than a postcard. The show flat is like a room in an airport hotel: with the expectation that you’ll stay for about the same amount of time as you’d get in compensation for missing a connecting flight.
Discussing High-Rise in Woolwich, we are doing what Ballard did all those years ago, nudging the narrative a few miles further out, into unwritten territory where the consequences of warped utopianism are not yet visible. Those who have been seduced by the lifestyle pitch, averting their eyes from what is actually going on, are not Ballard’s alienated professionals, his architects, psychiatrists, graphic designers. Those premature New Labourites have headed in the other direction, towards Chelsea Harbour, Putney and Richmond. That’s the rule. Live upstream of Westminster and invest your bonus east of Tower Bridge.
A set of ‘executive apartments’, Rushgrove Gate, was fabricated in Woolwich by Imagine Homes, a company run by Grant Bovey, husband of television presenter Anthea Turner. So far, so Ballardian. But the force of place, as Anna Minton revealed in Ground Control, undid this pipe dream. Bovey announced that all the flats had been sold ‘off-plan’ before they had been placed on the market. Units in the riverside tower we visited for the Ballard radio programme were selling fast, the lady with the dangerous heels told me: £350,000 a pop and they are fighting to bag them. One day soon there will be a high-speed riverboat service, a new bridge across the Thames. Woolwich has secured some Olympic gunplay, target shooting, to underwrite its pretensions. But, just at this moment, the glass stack is primped and polished and as empty as the aftermath of a fire drill. They’re happy to let a radio gang mooch about for hours, while they wait for the next off-piste speculator.
Bovey pulled off a considerable coup in flogging the entire block, in a single package, to an investment company called Veritas. A company with whom he was on excellent terms: he happened to own it. The Financial Times revealed that, in the six-week period when the Woolwich apartments were on offer, not one sale had actually been made. The only enquiries came from companies trading in accommodation for homeless people. Investors, Minton points out, receive an excellent return from local councils paying a premium to make up for the tragic shortfall in social housing.
When I hiked through Woolwich with my wife, we recognized the furthest point at which the cultural outflow from the Millennium Dome, that admix of flash-art and hucksterism, was manifest. The Royal Arsenal, armourers to Empire, had converted their barracks and parade ground into apartments, bistro-bars and nude male figures. Rusting sub-Gormley artworks in a defensive circle. The sculptural troop stood on the cobbles, waiting for the word of command, ready to storm the converted storehouse where James Wyatt was once Surveyor of Ordnance. A chipped statue of the Duke of Wellington was relocated, with a new dedication by the Prince of Wales, on 16 June 2005. Was his royal highness doubling up, after a visit to the sewage treatment plant?
Shortly before the O2 Arena opened to the public, I arranged to meet Chris Petit for a day’s walk, between the shamed Dome and the restored Wembley Stadium. In doing so, all unknowingly, we anticipated the progress of the Olympic torch, with its shuttle across town, avoiding Free Tibet demonstrators, jumping on and off unscheduled buses. Petit had some interesting ideas about the relationship between the philosophies of New Labour and the National Socialists in the Germany of the 1930s. I wanted to test my faith in the northwest passage, as a metaphor and a practical solution. We would walk out of my knowledge and through districts of London where Petit had perched at earlier stages of his fitful career.
Psychogeographers talked up the northwest passage as a residue of Tudor England, the period when Dr John Dee could be both an imperial map-maker and an alchemist, a man primed to receive the dictation of angels. With time, the myth of escape moved away from records of expeditions mounted for their trade potential by Sir Hugh Willoughby, Stephen and William Borough. It was a high-risk enterprise, this squeezing through ice floes, over the top of the world, between Atlantic and Pacific, searching for the ‘Arctic Grail’. Englishmen, from Sir Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, ventured in uncharted oceans. The Franklin expedition, like a missing chapter from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, solicited catastrophe. Rumours of cannibalism. Fatty human traces in blackened kettles. Frozen air clamping hard on human vanity.
The cost of walking through riverside territory anchored by the flaccid Dome is disorientation: no firm horizon, history subverted at every turn. Wanting to brief Petit, and to test my pocket recorder, I suggested a pause in Greenwich for a cup of coffee.
‘When did you come up with this theory about Nazi techniques of spin and control influencing Blair and his gang?’
‘There was no immediate moment of realization. I noticed how New Labour developed the habit of forming a divisive bureaucracy in the way that the National Socialists did, in the Hitler period. All those mysterious quangos. I made the banal observation that New Labour was a young party in the way that the Third Reich was new and untested, most of those guys were in their thirties or forties. And as a result they saw themselves as strangely unaccountable. Jonathan Meades pointed to the fact that the Nazis were all foreign in the way that New Labour are Scottish. Hitler was Austrian. Meades listed a whole lot of them. Uncanny parallels.’
‘Was Blair anything more than a game-show host with messianic pretensions?’ I said.
‘If you look at him now,’ Chris replied, ‘he’s like a shape-shifter. One can’t quite remember him. Thatcher, one has strong memories of: as a personality. Blair is a ghost.’
In his loden coat and brown trilby, Petit had the aspect of a character from that Geoffrey Household thriller Rogue Male. Public school. Regimental background. Name and rank only. It was tempting to think of him as a deerstalking assassin from the 1930s, after bigger prey: the Führer in his Alpine lodge. Petit favoured the jaded ennui of a colonial adventurer returned to a corrupt metropolis and warding off an imminent descent into melancholia and madness by some highland romp involving heretical Catholic conspiracies, golf courses and handcuffed Russian women with ladders in their sheer black stockings.
He was a terrific Household enthusiast. Household, Buchan, Erskine Childers. All that man-against-nature, future-war stuff. The locations. The detachment. The plain prose. He told me that Peter O’Toole, who gets Hitler in his crosshairs, in Clive Donner’s 1976 film of Rogue Male, did a bit of cricket coaching in the nets at his old school, Ampleforth.
‘O’Toole turned up just across the road from where I lived in Willesden Green. His house was not much different from the one we were in. The thing that cost him was a very expensive divorce. He had been in Church Row in Hampstead, a very nice Georgian house. But, like the rest of us, he finished up in Willesden Green, where he cultivated those fast-growing trees and put Mexican gaol-bars over the front window. He was the world’s worst driver. You’d occasionally see him coming straight at you.’
The Meades interpretation of New Labour politics inspired me to repeat viewings of Petit’s feature films. I realized that the underlying themes had been German all along: military occupation, cultural leakage, 24-hour cities of deep assignation. Radio On, the 1979 road movie, London to Bristol, was wholly European: a stranger’s eye on English landscape. The back-to-back German films that followed – Flight to Berlin and Chinese Boxes – were weirdly posthumous. They know, before the credits roll, the game is up. They predict what Radio On
has already achieved. And they are interesting enough to be saved from the oblivion of an afterlife on DVD. Which gave Petit considerable satisfaction. Unseen (and unchallenged), his lost works acquired a mythical status. He appreciated, before the rest of us, that there was only one city. And its name was Zeroville. In time hip young German critics flew to London to search him out. They discovered ‘a grey-bearded Godard-like’ figure of luminous integrity, the walls of his modest flat covered with a collage of photographs, maps, dates, quotations. A film, without budget, that nobody had to make. The only commission worth accepting, Chris said, is the one that is self-assigned.
We had one day, crossing London, to test my fixation on the northwest passage. Petit, it was soon revealed, favoured a swerve to the east: the flat countries, polders and dikes. The Baltic, Poland. He spoke of the willed flights of writers who plunged headlong into the fire. Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Francis Stuart stumbling towards spectral after-images of Dostoevsky in the ruins of Stalingrad. I babbled about surfing the curvature of space–time. About an escape from Hackney.
The trick in this territory is to keep the O2 Arena on your blind side. At a distance, the big tent squats comfortably among yellow-grey chemical alps, rotting jetties and sliced-up cargo boats. Leave the thing alone and it might work. The surrounding area, fenced off, dressed with unexplained structures, is a precursor of the coming ecology of the collapsed grand project. Hard to decide, as CCTV cameras swivel, if it’s an English Guantánamo or a car-boot sale waiting to happen. Left to its own devices – at considerable cost to our pockets and to the reputations of everybody involved – the Dome exclusion zone is a notable addition to the downriver microclimate: spears of grass breaking through tarmac, artworks degrading into their industrial origins. Toy-town estates in primary colours laid out in contradiction of everything that envelops them. The Dome reeks of compulsory celebration, yellow candles stabbed into icing sugar. The original gas-holder, with its skeletal armature, is the wrapping around a wedding cake that has turned to dust. Nowhere better to smell the rancid hormones of the next terrorist outrage than in fumes coming off stalled traffic trying to squeeze into the Blackwall Tunnel.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 21