London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  Which is why Kossoff’s paintings are so heart-rending: ordinary life transformed into a reality as absolute as Turner. The domestic narratives delineated by Litvinoff, and by the novelist Alexander Baron in King Dido, the sexual initiations, ritualistic fist fights, petty crimes, market trades, cruel poverty, are swallowed in the rectangular frame of a high-angle vision of the great west-flowing railway.

  Our zigzagging descent takes us into liminal land, disputed, ruined, recovering: with the virtue of escaping surveillance, slipping away from official heritage promotion. It isn’t happening yet. Railway arches are breeze-blocked, developers have mesh-fenced unredeemed earth mounds: with warnings from ‘professionals in security’ about ‘advanced forensic marketing’. Strict corners of nowhere are schizophrenically divided between the next urban improvement and tired green space with horses and play-farm trappings.

  The guerrilla artist specializing in snake-necked, sharp-beaked, black-and-white emus has worked some trompe l’oeil trickery to present his hairy creature as emerging from a hole in the railway embankment, above a stack of black rubber tyres. We are at the point where our track goes underground. To stay with the orbital circuit we’ll have to dowse. I know that Whitechapel is the next station. And I can see the silhouette of the enlarged Royal London Hospital. What happens after we are excluded from the sight and sound of the railway is guesswork. We won’t experience, as I did on my attempt to walk around the M25, acoustic footprints, the hum of the road carrying back over winter fields.

  A WIZARD SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Here was a graffito worth recording. Kötting is fired by what he sees as the Tarkovsky aspect of this stretch: Stalker. He has to have a number of projects cooking at any one time to keep the black dog at bay. It helps if the new venture is more difficult, more absurd and improbable than the last. If he has swum with his brothers across the English Channel, he’ll go it alone from Hastings to Land’s End. The darkness inside is a form of tremendous energy; stray humans encountered on our walk are buffeted, pitched against fences, left breathless in his wake. The scheme he’s chewing at is set underground, the deserted caverns and brick arches of the railway inspire him to sketch a little of what he wants to attempt. A procession of mummers, Jack in the Green folklorists, morris dancers, straw bears, bikers, pirates, holy fools, will climb through a French forest to a cave. In heretic country. Near Mont-Ségur. Tortured history. Kötting will enter the cave and, if possible, remain there for forty days and forty nights (according to biblical precedent). Beyond this, a measure of Tarkovsky crawling and dragging through flooded cellars, carcinogenic wasteland, is advocated. I therefore position the film-maker against the grey fence. Another parallel-world tag: THE CAVE MAN. Our shattered narrative beginning to fit like a fun-house mirror: his Underland and my Overground. The elevated railway circuit is also a tunnel.

  I told Andrew about the poet Douglas Oliver’s book: In the Cave of Suicession. Like Kötting, Doug was using darkness to exorcize darkness. He climbs into the abandoned Peak District lead mine known as ‘Suicide Cave’, a worm edging towards his elective oracle, with impossible questions to be asked if not answered. ‘The inquirer carried into the main entrance a torch, two fat candles, typewriter and paper, bottle of beer, bag of crisps, boat oar, length of rope, pair of binoculars, and a “sacrificial cake” bought at a Derby bakers’ a few hours previously.’ Rattling away at the typewriter, in lightless confinement, mistakes in transcription were made. And retained. As part of the texture of the experiment. ‘I have no more ambition for this text. I renounce it,’ the supplicant says. ‘Now we are beginning,’ the oracle replies.

  Andrew will never read this book. And I know that he won’t read it. But it needs to be referenced. I need to borrow some of the luminescence of Doug’s poem and some of the difficulty. Kötting’s cave squat will be both a performance, an endurance test, a way of provoking the shadows on the wall into a form of primitive cinema – and a ritual for not being at home, trapped within his entombing body, the way it ages and endures. The son of his father and the father of the reverberating voices in his head.

  A NEW WORLD CLASS, AFFORDABLE RAILWAY. A boast painted down the side of the only way left to cross the tracks and gain access to Whitechapel Station. Here is a hub brought to prominence by the Overground link and the tunnelling required for the epic and unnecessary Crossrail project. A project that has already claimed its sacrificial victims: cyclists crushed by earth-moving trucks. Where are they taking all that gouged earth, that bone-rich clay? The old station with its labyrinthine layers, romanced in Jock McFadyen’s paintings, has nothing as advanced as a lift service. Which is an inconvenience for the halt and the lame, the incapacitated, and the heavily pregnant women making for the Royal London Hospital. If your injury is traumatic enough, you will land on the roof, collected by a red helicopter. But the station remains trapped between eras: regular Overground shuttles, links to a hobbled District Line service, antiquated stairs, exposed sky, rags and tatters blowing in strange hollows of exposed pipes, with ferns, cobwebs, pyjama jackets and sparking wires.

  Somehow it was possible, darting across Whitechapel Road, through the hospital car park, beyond the bleak Safestore facility where my cans of degrading 16mm film are hoarded in an expensive tin box, to believe that we are directly above the Overground tracks. An M. C. Escher paradox. Keep walking, stay on the move without reference to maps, and the throbbing train travels with you, communicates. But there are no railway arches, no caves to commerce. Safestore, selling its services as ‘self storage’, is a booming business operating out of a posthumous yard, a secure parking lot with a few broken-wheeled trolleys and a set of inefficient industrial lifts. The self I was storing was my memory-bank, home movies going back to childhood, student films, visual diaries of our early life in Hackney.

  I liked the geographic coincidence of the relation of my Safestore archive to the Royal London Hospital, with its library of locality, its early X-ray mementoes, its cast of the Elephant Man’s deformities. The Whitechapel triptych was completed by the minatory Tower House, Jack London’s ‘Monster Doss House’ from The People of the Abyss. The history of poverty within this gaunt, twin-towered building, from the lodging of respectable migrants to squatting addicts and squalor, achieved its inevitable outcome in its present revision to a set of private pods with a pastiched art deco doorway. A nudging invocation of the wrong mood and the wrong period.

  On Sidney Square we found a white ghost bike, a memorial to an accident victim, a dead man called Andrew.

  Shadwell is the point where the Overground connects with the DLR, the unmanned fairground ride to Docklands, the City Airport, the ExCel Centre and Beckton. Navigating towards Wapping and the river, we operated on instinct. The traffic flow was all west–east, roads and railways. It was a perversion to carve south from Whitechapel through Shadwell to Wapping, collecting our Overground-station snapshots like Boy Scout badges. But we were on the right track, the vibrations in the ground compensated for the absence of railway arches, visible cradles of electrified wire.

  I began to notice a series of circular brochs, like brick remnants of some remote industrial era breaking through paving slabs and phantom clusters of public housing. The Shadwell brochs were not survivors of an Iron Age Orkneyian cult brought in on the Thames, but they had the same kind of essential beauty: sophistication as the simplest solution. If we strain our ears, we can pick up an oracular whisper of trains, or ancestors, or primal winds, in the open-topped funnel of brick. Ventilation shafts, I guessed, for the buried Overground. Broch by broch, we closed on Wapping and the first big decision of the day. How to cross the Thames?

  The unseen railway was working its magic. Walking through the sprawl and spread of London without losing hope, or the lineaments of personal identity, requires a framing narrative. A thread. A device on which to hang anecdotes and observations. There is a contagious urban neurosis: to collect decommissioned Tube stations, or to climb to the roof of secure towers, thereby acknowledgin
g the potency of this novel architecture of cruelty. A fractured alphabet of gigantism dominating views that can only be achieved from protected penthouses. The Overground, even when it is lost from sight, is a ladder of initiation. If we could get inside one of the circular brochs, we would become part of another script. We would be making a premature start on Kötting’s Underland project. Morlock-world was within easy reach, if we heaved ourselves over the lip of a ventilation shaft.

  Not today, not now. Our separate madnesses cancelled each other out, bringing us to a truce of sanity: keep walking. Major detours had to be set aside if we were to complete the thirty-five-mile circuit in a single day. If we were to achieve whatever answer the oracle of foot-foundered determination would gift us.

  My notion of pushing downriver to the Rotherhithe Tunnel is set aside. The morning is running away from us. We’ll ride beneath the Thames, taking the Overground for one stop from Wapping. After that, it is a trail between the little known and the unknown. And a return for Andrew to home turf, the first years with Leila, the weekend market stall, the gym, the Millwall mob at the Den.

  ‘Top of the Pops, a pickled egg, Beckett before bed,’ he said. After days scrap-hunting in a Transit van. Now, as he paces the narrow station platform, a landing stage for our linking voyage, he quotes Gilles Ivain: ‘All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us towards the past.’

  Rotherhithe to Peckham Rye

  There’s real estate and unreal estate … He tells them look how nice, a tree, a shrub, see how it makes up for the noise and monstrousness of tearing down an old building and putting up a new building. That’s the whole secret of corporate structures, my friend. Tell the enemy you’ll plant some trees.

  – Don DeLillo

  Accepting defeat, another day, more of the same, I have attached that time bracelet: my Swiss Railway Watch. Hours big and black enough to register. The date window is a little eccentric, after 31 it runs on to 32, 33, trying to stretch the dying month. To wear a watch is to accept a form of tagging. There are appointments, duties, places to be at certain hours, the exercise walk, the coffee hit, ten minutes with DeLillo, back to work. Watchstraps don’t last, they sweat through, lose their teeth, but that gives me an excuse to return to a cave of electrical goods on Bethnal Green Road. A new strap is a new beginning. Another stretch on the elective Swiss railway.

  Walking all day, and especially when walking with Andrew Kötting, I never look at the watch. Mean time is suspended, we calculate by degrees of hunger. Andrew’s form of relentless energy requires regular fuel intakes, cheek-stretching buns, chocolate bars, blue tins to suck. ‘Anyone got a spare Scotch egg?’ The convenient aspect of location filming is that if there is any kind of budget, you get a runner. A pleasant young woman, with a backstory and private interests of her own, capable of withstanding the banter. And a person who can be sent out into the countryside, swamp or desert, moor or mountain, to return every couple of hours with a tray of hot food, marked coffee containers with correctly recorded doses of milk and sugar.

  The white moon of the Swiss Railway Watch with its schematic black sleepers, its red conductor’s baton, is a relief tattoo. The external symbol of a beating heart. A modest design possession like a small portable Mondrian. Mondaine. Even the name sounds like that spontaneous purchase you carry home from Tate Modern in lieu of a stolen Richter.

  We turn left out of Rotherhithe. After I’ve photographed Kötting and noted the understated symmetry of the station, the windows in satisfying proportions, Moorish eyebrow-curves that seem to reference both wavelets on the Thames and the best kind of railway arch, we double back to the river. I remember what it felt like to look across the water from the other side, the north shore, when I was trying to write about the early Narrow Street developer who chained himself to the slimy wall and waited for the tide to swallow him.

  ‘Rotherhithe was not a place to which he had previously given much consideration. It looked foreign, and somewhat estranged from itself. The significance of this apparently random assembly of buildings awed him. He became aware of patterns, meanings, distributions of unexpended energy. His sense of colour was overwhelmingly personal. It hurt. It hurt his blood.’

  Andrew could never get on with Downriver. At the time he was assembling his short Thames comedy, Jaunt, friends told him that he should try my book. He might be able to steal a few lines. He tried. He hated it. Kötting was a voracious reader, he carried books on trains and boats and planes. Sometimes he opened them. A paragraph at a time, a sentence. A word: confabulation. That’s why he loved Beckett: the white spaces. But the essential flaw in Downriver is that he didn’t appear in it. Early on, I’d called that novel ‘a grimoire of rivers and railways’. And I’ve never really advanced from there. Rivers and railways as a system of divination, invocations of supernatural entities, angels, spirits, demons.

  The Thames bounced light. On the diminishing Rotherhithe beach, fathers encouraged their sons to dig for Roman pottery, pilgrims’ tokens, broken stems of clay pipes. To die here, out with the tide, as my Downriver character did, was to solicit a special blessing. The river does take us beyond ourselves. An hour witnessing the interplay of water and sunlight is remission from whatever follows. Bury the watch in the claggy slop or tramp a teasing narrative out of the false river of the Overground.

  My compass bearings are shot. The Thames floats us, lifts our lumbering feet. We navigate territory that is straining for some way to salute a maritime past: deepwater docks, the cargoes of the world, sailors’ pubs, dockworkers’ terraces. The promoters want a way to crane that picturesque version of the past into a CGI landscape of shopping centres, libraries unencumbered by books, community arts.

  As a lad, Andrew came down here to deliver messages. Posing at Canada Water for his station photograph, he shoves his fingers into his ears. A spontaneous but effective gesture: the noise of this hub, buses, cars, vans. A wanton accumulation of effects with no processing mind, no editor. In his thick Black Forest suit, Kötting stands transfixed, acting and becoming Werner Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser, the changeling, the holy innocent from the 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Kaspar arrives in the Karlsruhe of 1812 as if hearing the traffic of Canada Water, a stowaway out of Hamburg trapped in the wrong century with no Swiss Railway Watch. Andrew, like Hauser, might have been hidden for years in a cellar, and now exposed to a place he dreamed as a youth in the wide-eyed innocence of his first job. He can’t move or blink or pull his fingers from his ears.

  Like Michael Moorcock, the other great memory-man from this side of the river, Andrew began with that most Dickensian of occupations, boy messenger. The city favours these apprenticeships, testing the best by offering them the freedom of the morning, close to the smell of the docks, where they are tasked with searching out mysterious buildings, eccentric clerks, minor Circumlocution Office hirelings barricaded behind dusty ledgers.

  ‘I came down this road. There was a big fire. That building is still there. It wasn’t me.’

  Norway Dock. Greenland Dock. Rebranded, in alliance with the Overground Railway, as Canada Water. A retail hub from an earlier generation than Westfield, Palaeozoic to Mesozoic. We cross a bridge to enter the shopping zone, as we crossed the railway in Cheshire Street. Kötting is upbeat about the development; he has come here, in former times, to buy sports kit, budget trainers. The whole deal is cheerfully budget, South London vernacular, easy in security. Canada Water has a heritage name, an aspirational connection with the money-laundering private fiefdoms on the north bank: Cross Harbour, South Quay, Heron Quays, Canary Wharf. Canada Water trades on the confusion of strangers, simpletons who go underground on the Overground, only to emerge in Rotherhithe, thinking they have made it to the Bladerunner set of Thatcher’s Docklands. There is a social gulf between the unmanned DLR carriages on their Expo rides through icy bankers’ towers and
the Overground cargo haulers trundling towards New Cross or Queens Road Peckham. Rotherhithe is a tumour, a non-malignant nodule, a hump cut off by the red strip of the railway, infiltrated by docks given over to retail parks and leisure boats.

  At Surrey Quays, no true quayside but a significant branching point on the Overground, Kötting is coming closer to his beloved Deptford. He can smell it. He can smell bacon in the pan. Gastric residues bubble and fizz, intestinal anticipation leaks in warm detonations of sage and honey, filtered through wet tweed. He shakes his thornproof trousers to disperse gaseous damage. Time for breakfast.

  The station is post-architectural, a glass-fronted bus shelter with an upgrade. Rotherhithe was a proper station, a considered brick construction, a railway mosque respecting the dignity of travel. Surrey Quays is all function. A borehole for the retail island of Canada Water.

  If we hadn’t been stalking the Overground, we would have sampled Southwark Park. The park is the best kind of green blot, it enhances the experience of passing through, drifting, slowing down, taking a clean, resinous breath before the next slam of diesel, nicotine and fox-licked jerk chicken. This oasis for the unaligned urban wanderer, a South London equivalent of Louis Aragon’s Buttes-Chaumont from Paris Peasant, or one of Arthur Machen’s lost paradise gardens, is a resource for the neighbourhood, all ages, all temperaments. Long-dead cricket heroes are remembered. Henry Poole’s draped caryatides, rescued from Rotherhithe Town Hall, have found refuge among the shrubs. Late-rising urban athletes and sabbatical drug dealers work out on free equipment. Swans dress a small lake. There is a café with few pretensions. And two art galleries. One of them, Dilston Grove, is a former chapel where Kötting has been given space to present performances, evidence of projects, pinhole portraits, doctored maps, vitrines of scavenged feathers, tide-smoothed bricks, defaced books.