London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  The unfussy tranquillity of Southwark Park, a park that does not waste energy bigging itself up, keeps the surrounding terrain in balance. Andrew recalls patting the hot saddle of his motorbike. And sitting at an outside table to wait for friends. He does not howl. He grins. Aragon caught the atmosphere: ‘I ask myself what is dead within me and what is still effectual.’ A quick snort of nature under the sails of the trees, along the sightlines of branching paths, around the lake, makes the pain manageable. But when he has to return to the street, the French poet ‘acts the dog and bawls for the dead’.

  The imaginary lines of influence these walkers leave behind, their neurotic sensitivity to sights and smells, become a set of mental rails linking parks, cemeteries, deserted pubs, rooms where forgotten writers once lodged. Hidden allotments, yards of distressed garden statuary. When Aragon quit his park, he inscribed evidence of the real, in order to re-anchor himself in a particular place at a particular time: RAILWAYS. OUTER-CIRCLE LINES. STATIONS: BELLEVILLE-VILLETTE. PONT-DE-FLANDRE.

  You know where you are when you know where to eat. Kötting has our breakfast lined up in an old haunt called La Cigale in Lower Road, Surrey Quays. A good choice. In a street of interest, undisturbed by the Canada Water mall or urgent traffic heading for Evelyn Street (memories of the seventeenth-century diarist), and the pull towards Greenwich and the east.

  In 1661 John Evelyn published Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke or London Dissipated. Outside La Cigale, London is dissipated. Lost in fumes. Inside, settled in the window slot, Andrew demands another oxymoron: very strong cappuccino. The proprietor, barely awake, fiddling to get the machines functioning, insists that all his cappuccinos are of a uniform strength and flavour. His reputation depends on it. And how would the overheated signor like to take his panini? ‘With gherkin. Mayo. Brown sauce. Both mustards: French, English. Horseradish. Onions. The lot.’ Mr K mops his dripping brow with a bookie’s spotted handkerchief.

  We have tuned in to conflicting radio beacons. But we are receiving Deptford loud and clear, channelling another diarist: Sam Pepys. Bence House, Pepys Estate, is the council flat where Andrew brought Leila at the start of their joint venture. When Margaret Thatcher offered the chance to buy (and later sell), Andrew took it, despite Leila’s sound socialist objections. It was the only way, so he asserted, to achieve living/working space: move out, move on, to St Leonards-on-Sea. Before the Hackney mob colonized it.

  While we made our fourteen-hour walk around the circuit of the Overground Railway, Kötting composed fourteen ‘ponderings’. Songs of place. Trampish meditations.

  Carry me home you old sea spray

  Drag me back to a life with Deptford.

  We were young in old Deptford.

  When the wind blows east and the ferryman pulls away from the pier

  He might carry me home to old Deptford.

  It floods back, the romance: after a spell as a lumberjack in Sweden, it was lovely, loud, river-smelling Deptford. The view from the balcony. ‘South London, paradise … GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT … D&C Metals and Salter’s Paper to the Dog and Bell and selling wicker furniture with Jack Sharp in Deptford Market … Evelyn Street in the rush hour. The city of lookback, the city of lookout! Speed bumps and bollards … But now to home. The flat. Red brick, yellow insides. An entrance at the rear. Puddled with piss in summertime and blocked with adolescent bliss in wintertime. The lift gleams with spittle, the corridors with polish. Up on the sixth floor, the corridor, second on the left and in. Home, their home. Good-to-be-home home. Bence House, Pepys Estate, home.’

  The joy of being out in the van. Banging heads in the gym. A corner of London that is all London. Andrew was a beachcomber of the southern suburbs. With a brown foam of strong cappuccino distinguishing his grey-flecked stubble like a petit mal seizure, Kötting recalls the distant wonder of banknotes: £7,000 cashmoney. In the hand. Down in Dulwich Village on the estate where Lady Thatcher lined up a retirement property, but couldn’t bring herself to come over the river from Westminster.

  ‘We got the nod from Metal Mickey. Put in an estimate for a decorating job for the missus of one of the Brink’s-Mat mob. They were spreading out across London, into Kent, like horseshit on rhubarb. Shenley was favourite, A20 and over. Junction 2, M25. Keeping the property bubble going all by theirselves. With trickledown bungs for local craftsmen.’

  Catching sight of tenders from the upmarket West London firms in opposition, Andrew cranked his own estimate from £3,000 to £7,000 – and Jo, the former page 3 girl, bit his hand off. He rounded up a few loose brothers to make a quorum. And they did a good job. Gold leaf in the snooker room. Gold taps like spouting dolphins.

  The Dulwich family, a close one, were all Joes: Big Joe (dad), Joey (first son), JJ (number-two son), Mr Joseph (accountant son from first marriage), Jo (trophy wife), JoJo (her dog) and Joe Stalin (attack mastiff).

  ‘Don’t touch his soldiers, for fuckssake,’ Jo warned. Lead soldiers, a museum-quality collection. Regiments, correct in every detail, occupied the shelves and cabinets of the games room. ‘Insured for two million.’

  When Joe took the fat roll from his pocket to settle up, he said, ‘Don’t count it, son. Any shortfall come down the yard.’ That’s etiquette. That’s the social distance between Dulwich and New Cross. New Cross is on the Overground, Dulwich isn’t.

  The stretch between Surrey Quays and Queens Road Peckham is terra incognita, a miracle of high mesh fences, narrow paths, waste-processing plants. The railway is a dominant presence, but the substantial gap between Overground stations means that it’s hard to read its effect on property development. If there are arches or caves beneath bridges they are motor-trade traditional: big doors, big dogs. Divorced from the street, the windows of working clothes and heavy boots that hover between function and fashion, the railway path has the exhilaration of the Regent’s Canal, the muddy towpath, in the days when it was forbidden to civilians, those who did not have business with coal boats and lumber yards. Our parting from Lower Road is emphasized by a wall painting: a white male of the clerical type, bureaucrat policeman, suspended from a giant clothes peg. HUNG OUT TO DRY.

  Railways cross railways. A felt underlay of scabby grass. The tall chimney of the processing plant. A single black tree stripped of its meat tilted over the permitted path, asset-stripped by the yellow spew of burning waste, gritty particulates you are free to absorb at no extra charge. SELCHIP, the South East London Combined Heat and Power Plant, squats the railway as the Enfield version, source of carcinogenic rumour, lurks beside the River Lea Navigation. The combined heat-and-power system was conceived, at no small cost, for a scheme that has never been implemented. Electricity – and bad will – are generated here. In 2002 Greenpeace activists, troubled by the threat of dioxins produced during the incineration process, took direct action by invading the main tipping hall and climbing the stalk of the chimney. After this episode, and the attendant publicity, Liberal Democrats on Lewisham Council, and Peter Ainsworth, Shadow Environment Secretary, pledged their support. The looming presence of the plant, with the scatter of new-build estates, the dying tree, the silver tracks slipping under a double-arch bridge, evoked earlier journeys, our walk up the Lea to join the circuit of the M25 at Waltham Abbey. The same elements, the same mounting excitement.

  London’s smaller rivers, the tributary streams, visible, buried, or choked by refuse, flow by inclination towards the Thames, while the Overground, on this part of its circuit, drifts alongside the river, in parallel, a short distance inland. A rival. This unknown and previously unexplored Bermondsey landscape is made comfortable by its resemblance to the parts of the Lea complicated by never-resolved arguments between discontinued industries, converted gunpowder mills, expanding retail and storage zones, waste disposal, Ikea riots and the first stab at regeneration by means of showcase athletics.

  PICKETTS LOCK FIASCO HEAPS SHAME ON BRITAIN bellowed the Telegraph in 2001. The author of this critique, scorning the polit
ical failure to erect a workable stadium while balancing the books, called the whole sorry affair ‘an Ealing comedy’. ‘Manifesto pledges have been broken, secretaries of state and sports ministers have come and gone and press officers have been plundering the thesaurus to construct obtuse and misleading language … Our ambitions are being butchered by incompetent ministers and lightweight, self-serving quangos.’ Here was a prime example of the nay-saying negativism from certain elements of the media so furiously denounced by Lord Coe in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic triumph. The author of this scurrilous Telegraph diatribe was a certain Sebastian Coe.

  Three or four hours of quiet, steady walking will do that, rub away barriers, borders, distinctions of north and south, past and future. Slipping into dioxin-clubbed reverie, arranging what is before us in terms of dystopian cinema, I am reminded of the way that film-maker Patrick Keiller associates trains with surrealism and privileged witness. In his essay ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’ Keiller writes: ‘The present day flâneur carries a camera and travels not so much on foot as in a car or on a train. There are several reasons for this, mostly connected with the decline of public life and urbanism.’ South London is where Keiller’s solitary and poetically inclined commuter gazes at an eternity of suburb without urb and thinks of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and Apollinaire. Apollinaire, when he lodged in this territory, spoke of ‘wounds bleeding into the fog’. ‘I began to think,’ Keiller continues, ‘it might be possible to predict the future by looking out of the window.’

  The past is always ahead of us. Films like Keiller’s seem to be documentaries about a future that is used up. ‘The future,’ William Burroughs said, ‘is already photographed and pre-recorded.’ All we can do is follow the image vine, the necessary chain of snapshots. Expose one frame, one image made without premeditation, and the rest follows. You pull in the string. Hoxton bleeds into Clapham Junction, into Willesden, into Kensal Rise, into Highbury & Islington.

  I remembered what I felt, at the time of writing Downriver, about the way that accounts of the first railway age, Victorian boom-time confidence, overlaid the area we were now infiltrating. And how our present passage between trackside fence and high wall meshed with intimations of that earlier period. ‘The viaduct blitzkriegs the market gardens of Deptford,’ I wrote, ‘recouping some of the capital investment by graciously allowing the punters to use the edge of the track as a rustic esplanade, catching glimpses of the meandering river, beyond the hedgerows and the mounds of rubble.’

  As we crossed the tracks by way of a new bridge with neat ginger handrails and a roof of strengthened chicken wire (to deter jumpers), Kötting started to beat his chest and chant: ‘Mill-wall! Mill-wall! Mill-wall!’ Was this the right pub, the one where he met his mates before they marched on the Den? The shock for me when I first navigated the railway esplanade, on a recce undertaken before the Kötting walk, was the abrupt, out-of-nowhere confrontation with the notorious football stadium. I should have been better prepared. Living cities thrive on a proven equation: market, hospital, church. Limbic terrain fed by railway or motorway acquires different markers: prisons, megamalls, stadia. The Den, home of the Millwall FC wolf pack, is the obvious but unexpected destination of our railway path.

  ‘Terry Hurlock,’ Kötting intones. ‘Teddy Sheringham. Tony Cascarino.’ Fist thumped on heart for every hero. ‘Football League, ’88–’89 … Division One! Hurlock, Sheringham, Cascarino. Razor Ruddock, Les Briley. October, top of the table. Horne, Darren Tracy, Jimmy Carter.’

  A stadium in repose is a bowl of latent noise, suspended emotion: unheard chanting, the ineradicable cheers of phantom crowds. Like that scummy afterglow left in a drained coffee cup. Here, right beside our path, is a Meccano cathedral with the roof sliced off. An emphatic structure under a dome of sky blue enough for a fatal space launch in Florida. And supported on complimentary blue pillars. A finished work-in-progress.

  The embankment leading down to the turnstiles supplies an abundant source of almost-collectible junk: sodden jackets lacking one sleeve, microwaved vinyl by suspect bands, the usual divorced white goods. The sharpened tines of the protective fence have been embellished with nooses of barbed wire and a set of upturned yellow chairs cast in hard plastic. The chairs are potentially worthy of display in a Broadway Market window within three years.

  Transport for London (Overground) have acknowledged their part in the curation of this Bermondsey esplanade with a wall map of the recently completed railway circuit and some propaganda about the ever-expanding city they are shaping. A guerrilla muralist – perhaps the person responsible for HUNG OUT TO DRY – has collaborated so deftly that the work now qualifies for exhibition in a show of art iconoclasm at the Tate. Even though it’s hard to say who is the iconoclast, the original TfL designer or the spray-can bandit who added a neat trompe l’oeil chain to support the map and thereby turn it into a painting rather than a flat computer printout. Two stencilled yellow-tabard hardhats adjust the imaginary piece. One brandishes a clipboard: WE OWN THIS CITY. As soon as the map is drawn, territory is copyright to the map’s commissioner. The ‘Completed London Overground’, like a trail of ginger gunpowder, reduces the complexity of the city to a whiteboard presentation.

  We are heading south towards Peckham. The twin branches of the Overground split into a great V, exposing new mounds of exploitable turf, inter-rail estates, recreational dunes on which solitary males pose with their dogs. Passers-through scuttle in a miasma of unease, hunched into themselves against too much sky: the leaking chimney of the waste-disposal plant, the speedy thrust of the trains. A catalogue of opportunism unable to tolerate for long the notion of a railside path. A stencil artist with a signature that looks something like LOREITO has found a suitable piece for the grey concrete wall: an infant dressed like a cosmonaut pushing a buggy containing a baby with a green alien skull.

  We are expelled into a nowhere of cars with smashed windows, green glass in jagged patterns on soft grey seats. And messianic religions camped in garages and defunct factories: THE REDEEMED CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF GOD, WINNERS TEMPLE. A god of unrequired margins. Website faiths drawing an enthusiastic congregation in the way that, in earlier times, nonconformist artisans found their chapels in working zones outside the walls of the city. Where John Wesley launched his crusades, and William Blake, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan were laid to earth, between Finsbury Circus and Old Street, the seething hub of Silicon Roundabout has emerged: digital traders, masters of robotics, radio freelancers worshipping that Cloud where all the miscellaneous information of the multiverse floats somewhere over India.

  After the detours, the dips under railway bridges, now one side, now another, the windowless cars, the vernacular weirdness of places without a dominant narrative, we pick up the true path with another set of murals. The local artist, recorded at various points along the track from Surrey Quays, is ahead of us, making the Overground embankment into an elongated gallery. It’s liberating, you can collect him through the simple act of walking. He has a satiric edge, after the fashion of Banksy, but he is choosing to show on ground where he is unlikely to be picked up by stray gallerists. Shoreditch lecture groups will not find their way down here just yet, but it will come. The Overground will bring them, chasing the ginger trail. This art is not designed to be read from trains. You have to walk the broken path to find it. A combat soldier on his belly, the penis barrel of his gun with terminal droop: THE WAR IT’S NOT A MAN’S THING.

  Distance between stations induces desert hallucinations, the native oddity of a brief span without overt surveillance. Two black men stride down the centre of the road with large chairs, the exaggerated thrones of Bond villains, supported on their backs. The white arrow on the tarmac points right. They turn left. Or, again, around the point where that pilgrims’ track, Old Kent Road, becomes New Cross Road, we wave at a ginger cow, the sacred beast of the Overground, as she teeters on her rear legs down the uneven pavement. The girl walking with this eight-foot-ta
ll cartoon creature is not collecting for charity. They are chatting. It’s hard for the soft cow, a star emblazoned on its throat, to bend down far enough to catch what’s being said. I don’t know where else in the world you could witness a sniff-and-shrug domestic between a pink girl with short dark hair and a talking cow with no mouth and huge unblinking eyes. As wide and white as death. With nobody on the public street paying them the slightest mind.

  Andrew stalls for a moment, taking a surreptitious blow by looking back down Old Kent Road. He is frozen rigid, in contemplation of an unravelling mystery. As if some earlier self, in the first days of his intoxicated courtship of Leila, and the youthful freedoms of the city, should be revealed. He jumped back from the kerb, pushed by the slipstream of the ghost of his own motorbike. This was the route he always took, so he explained, on his return to St Leonards, after London tasks and adventures.

  The Overground station at Queens Road Peckham is rewarded with another Kötting portrait. He has the energy to point: stout Cortez with his eagle eyes, none too silent on a peak in Peckham. But still managing to alarm a non-travelling vagrant, as he tried to make off with a pile of free newspapers. It says something about this station that they were still there, mid-morning.