London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  In April 1999, a man called David Copeland, crazed by his reading of the city, his fear of immigrants, miscegenation, homosexuals, his own impotence in the face of these challenges, placed a nail bomb in Brixton Road. He was hoping to ignite another riot. That old hunger for fire. That image-thirst. For sirens and helicopters. Burning buses. Torched warehouses. A market trader, sharp-eyed and wary of cameras, moved the suspect bag around the corner into Electric Avenue. The bomb detonated, injuring thirty-nine people. Copeland then shifted back across the river, and east, to position the next bomb in Brick Lane.

  In my Electric Avenue days my inclination was to head north – Charing Cross Road, Camden Town, Belsize Park, Hampstead – chasing films, meeting friends in Soho coffee bars so uncomfortable in atmosphere they had probably been cursed by William Burroughs. It took a few months before I found Liverpool Street and the 149 bus to Dalston Junction and the Rio Cinema, for Joseph Losey’s The Criminal. But even then I recognized a connection, crumbling civic pomposity and imported Marxist rhetoric, between the two proud ‘loony left’ boroughs, Hackney and Lambeth. Town Halls thumped down like monolithic bookends. Both boroughs were denied a direct link with the Underground system, a punitive cultural prophylactic. As if they were zones of contamination. Socialism might be catching. Thatcher was not so much interested in abolishing the Greater London Council as abolishing Lambeth and Hackney. In the meantime, it was enough to make it as difficult as possible to get in and out of the renegade boroughs.

  Angela Carter opens her final novel, Wise Children, with a riff on ‘two cities divided by a river’. Her ageing music-hall twins are marooned in Brixton. ‘The rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops …’ Carter’s feisty old sisters, with their bittersweet Hollywood memories, were not unaware of my film-school street: ‘The whirr and rattle of the trams, the lights of Electric Avenue glowing like bad fish through a good old London fog.’

  Hackney, flogging off Shoreditch landholdings, tearing down Georgian properties for the benefit of development packages tied to Overground links, lifted the curse. They kept the white temple of the former Town Hall as a photo op for Saturday-afternoon weddings, while throwing up more glass and steel than Stansted Airport for the new municipal offices. Old, loud, close-packed markets were downgraded or destroyed by overregulation, while farmers’ markets and foodie extensions of Borough Market were promoted. The arrival of the Overground, taking up tracks unused and allowed to rot in the Thatcher period, signalled the political emasculation of Hackney and its rebirth as hip boomtown. House prices of terraces condemned in the era of the tower blocks doubled, then tripled, overnight. Locals, mesmerized by daily offers, couldn’t decide whether to stick or bust.

  Brixton, we felt, although it was moving upward, was not quite ready for Ginger Line dinner parties. There was a healthy dose of edge to the streets. This was still a parish infected by poetry and the lives of poets who came, perched, passed through, suffered incarceration. Many of the luminaries of the 1960s and 1970s paid their respects to Professor Eric Mottram in his Herne Hill house. Among them Allen Fisher, then a Brixton-based plastic-pipe salesman, later another peripatetic professor. Fisher’s Place, a serial publication undertaken through fugitive presses, was an epic of local history, international conceptualism, conceived in the spirit of Charles Olson.

  before us a land lying waste

  not 1026 acres of pasture

  but a row of streets

  strung out in rhythm with the railway

  Back in the day, I visited Fisher for a meal in his compact flat, up the hill, not far from Brixton windmill and the prison. There was not enough room for two couples to eat together. Our hosts went first, before our arrival. Then, if memory serves, we sat on a cleared patch of floor, at a low table, while Allen’s partner brought out plates for their guests from across the river. As my wife recalls, the cooks perched on the top of the bookcases. Space was required for production. Allen was a painter and publisher and Fluxus artist as well as a poet. Books that had been exchanged with other writers piled up. And books for research. A slim poetry volume such as Brixton Fractals came with a five-page bibliography, running from Theodor Adorno’s Theses against Occultism to Ya Zeldovich’s Giant Voids in the Universe.

  The flat was a beacon among the southern slopes, linked by tom-tom of electric typewriter, stencil cut, silkscreen chemicals, punch of stapler, with others of similar persuasion, in a network of anarchic cut-up urbanists. Or ‘future exiles’ as I called them, knowing they would have to leave town, pushed out in the early Thatcher years by rent hikes and diminishing employment opportunities. Poets are always the first redundancy. Brixton Fractals, a farewell to Lambeth, was published by Aloes Books in 1985. ‘Brixton,’ Fisher writes, ‘is that part of southwest London extending south/north geohistographically from its prison and windmill down through the high road to the police station on one axis, and from the employment exchange to Coldharbour through the market to the Sunlight laundry factory east/west on another.’

  Fractals are intended as a useful device: ‘to sharpen out-of-focus photographs; to make maps of the radio sky; to generate images from human energy’. In the wake of riot. The dance of flame. The prismatic spectrum of petrol stains on shattered glass. In advance of civic disorder. And the tumultuous voodoo whispering and threatening down the rails of the Overground from Dalston Junction to Croydon. A conceptual railway system, showcasing virgin territory like an estate agent’s CGI travelogue, is a three-dimensional extension of mobile phone technology. Inside the orange-flashed London Overground torpedo, they are all confirming, all tapping and stroking. I’m coming. I’m delayed. You’re there, are you? I’m here. We’re stuck.

  ‘Steel wheels on steel rails,’ Fisher said, ‘run through the lounge.’ Visible crime is street-easy, it confesses and asks what you are going to do about it. Police responses are more comfortable behind locked doors, vans and cells. It’s a closed system with a long tradition, understood by both sides. It’s ugly, yes, but it’s a familiar ugliness, susceptible to translation into popular television. The angry boil of Fisher’s map of crime is about to burst, to recalibrate, become fractal in the banking system. When you can see the ice sculptures of the City of London from the windmill on the hill, the pyramids and dildos and giant toasters, it’s too late to do anything about it. ‘The irrational State insists on control.’

  Bill Griffiths, another terrifyingly prolific producer of texts, drawings, pamphlets, had connections with both Hackney and Lambeth. He spent time in Brixton Prison in his youth, after warrior days with Hell’s Angels, the Harrow Roadrats. Bill rode a red Ducati.

  When he heard the word ‘Ducati’, Andrew perked up. He had listened dutifully to my tales of poets, the more obscure (to his way of thinking) the better. Sometimes he accepted copies of their books. It washed over him. Motorbikes were another thing. He swept across Romney Marsh to his teaching duties in Canterbury like the spectre of T. E. Lawrence. The poetry of movement. He probably got served that stuff in school. Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn: foxes in the attic, leather boys on the roar.

  I saw affinities between Kötting and Griffiths, the two bikers, in the way both men scored for multiple voices. Bill wrote about his Brixton incarceration in a rush of scorched phrases, broken police statements, hallucinated epiphanies. ‘Like let someone ask you how Angels fight.’ The prison is houses, rows of houses. ‘They make a real noise they say is baiting of me.’ The usual misunderstandings with authority over language, bureaucratic rictus against choke of breath. Warps and wraps of unreliable evidence. Taken down. Against the seizures of poetry that are the only true echoes of place itself. ‘Smacking at my head And what / will i say to you court folk what can i say to you whos world it is.’

  When I heard the soft-shouldered Griffiths, with his tat
toos and biker’s jacket, the beard at which he constantly scratched, read for this first time … Reality. He wheezed and sang, travelling a beat or so behind words fresh-minted and liberated from reflex usage. Jeff Nuttall spoke about Bill performing ‘with the light hesitancy of a hunting thrush … His voice, grey with roll-ups, skips in a series of syllables and short gasps along his perfectly tuned lines.’

  Griffiths moved in the same spontaneous and validated bird-skips across the territory, away from childhood Kingsbury, which he called ‘Thatcherite London’, to prefabs and anarchist squats in Whitechapel, to a narrowboat at Uxbridge (lost with his papers to fire), to Seaham Harbour, where he died in harsh poverty. At work. Engaged. Picking at origins of language: Old English, Norse, pitman dialects.

  None of the poets are there now. Moved on, moved away. And I’m no longer present in these Brixton streets. A youthful intruder fading from photographs. I don’t see myself on the flat roof at the back of the film school, with milkless coffee, yellow cigarettes, and the morning conversation of mature Dutch, Portuguese, Egyptian students; the only British male in the place. Afternoon witness to silent German epics by Fritz Lang. We are offered no film stock, outdated or otherwise, to record our visions of place. I am another. Brixton stranger. Bus passenger. Regular patron, after a short walk to Stockwell, of the Northern Line.

  The twin sisters, Dora and Nora Chance, dancers, soubrettes, of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, are old Brixton personified: resting actors behind every privet hedge, successful comedians shoring up rental property against the inevitable turn of the tide. ‘Brixton, before the lights went out over Europe, hub of a wheel of theatres, music halls, Empires, Royalties, what have you. You could tram it all over from Brixton.’ Tall, narrow houses stuffed, as Carter has it, with goats, dancing dwarves, the wanted and unwanted regiments of switched-off performers. And legitimates who ‘considered themselves a cut above’.

  After a big night in Croydon, loss of virginity, first tacit acknowledgement from famous thespian dad, Dora doesn’t take the tram (the whispering remnant of which has been brought back to the town centre as a symbol of regeneration). She cabs it home. And stops at the top of Brixton Hill to walk. Only walking will do it. ‘The sky was the colour of a gas jet.’

  Dora’s descendants are out there now, among us, on the orbital walk. Smart girls, hard-shelled, making the best of it, setting the style by copying whatever they fancy, striding out. And the old ladies too, slightly skewed, one heel shorter than the other. They’re fine in Streatham, on Brixton Hill, in Atlantic Road market, but they keep away from the tracks. ‘It’s never the same,’ Carter writes. ‘Even the railway stations, changed out of recognition, turned into souks. Waterloo. Victoria. Nowhere you can get a decent cup of tea, all they give you is Harvey Wallbangers, filthy cappuccino. Stocking shops and knicker outlets everywhere you look.’

  It’s a boost to be among a thrash of walkers whose sudden swerves are impossible to predict. They flinch away, some of them, from unsanctioned meats, others from brands of butchered orthodoxy of which they disapprove. There are even those, Carter tells us, who cross the street if they notice a florist; fingers in ears to mute the scream of cut daffs. Back-parlour naturists awkward in layers of outdoor black.

  And then there are no pedestrians; greasepaint Brixton, chummy and herbal, with an undertow of justified resentment, morphs into narcoleptic midday Stockwell. Hanging on to the railway brings us down Ferndale Road towards Clapham North, where the Overground does not halt, and Clapham High Street, where it does: a generous splash of orange on old yellow brick.

  Now there are only the ghosts of earlier Stockwell walkers, European lodgers who misread the signals from the landlady’s daughter. Apollinaire returning to Landor Road. Vincent Van Gogh, polishing his top hat, to stride out from 87 Hackford Road to his employment with the art dealers, Goupil & Co, in Covent Garden.

  Clapham High Street has come on us before we are ready for it. Another urban village, well stocked with overspill of Pimlico and Chelsea, looking with yearning across the river. A knot of politicians finding Clapham convenient for the House. For late, boozy dining. And, in some cases, nocturnal adventures among the pick-ups on the Common. This triangle, bordered on all sides by streams of agitated traffic, has never had much appeal for me. Or for Kötting – who is running low on anecdotes, a long way from Deptford, stomach rumbling with mustard-basted panini, and getting ready for the next hit.

  I tried him with an account of my visit to John Bellany’s house on the north side of the Common, when I wanted permission to use his painting Time and the Raven on the cover of my first novel. Early Bellany, fuelled by Calvinist folk memory, Port Seton fishermen, bloody labour, and a good hard stare at Max Beckmann, was primal. A slopping, seething bouillabaisse of tentacles, octopus crucifixions, love’s claw, bible-black Munch wakes, wax suns, scarlet dagger tongues, pelican beaks, seagulls and accordions. Drink was part of it. His liver was shot, but not yet replaced. There was a yellow tinge to his eye. The stacked paintings had the DTs. They hallucinated a retched vision of the history of European art. They reeked of turps and fish oil. It was like opening a smokehouse of eels and kippers inside an immaculate Clapham Common villa.

  Jock McFadyen had a story about the two of them, Scots boys, out on the Serpentine in a rowing boat, after some art opening, whisky bottles clinking in coat pockets, drifting in circles. He thought Bellany looked like death. Brian Catling, in his days on the art-school circuit, remembers John, liquid-lunched, fired up, grabbing him by the lapels and thumping him against the wall, ordering him to do it, make the work, bugger the rest. Painting and drinking: life.

  Time and the Raven. The bird’s predatory beak. The stopped clock. The operatic gush and spill of brothel red. The suicide of Juliet, Bellany’s second wife. The version I used on my book was a watercolour, a swift recapitulation of the oil-on-canvas version from 1982. It’s a hard painting to live beside. I told Bellany how his work fed, in a way I didn’t really understand, into the last section of my novel, the funeral of Sir William Gull. How the royal surgeon stands on a hill watching the procession carry his coffin to the churchyard at Thorpe-le-Soken. Maybe that name, Gull, was the link. Or some residual Scottishness on my part. A rip in the direction of Nordic expressionism.

  ‘I can see the man walk out of the woman. Voiceless, steps on to a beach of tongues, live fish … When the double departs, there are only three days to live,’ I quoted.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ he said, cutting me off. I was telling him something he knew. He got all that without having to read it. ‘Oh aye.’ And he turned away. Back into the art mob of the coming Hackney, warehouse as gallery.

  Bellany’s success at that time was marked by the move to Clapham, this house, and by the way he dressed, white deck shoes and cableknit cricket sweater. He’s sporting it in the portrait by Lord Snowdon. I don’t know if it was a gift from Ian Botham, but it has the same colours at neck and cuffs as the stout figure in the painting. This strange and unbalanced account of the cricketing hero, a National Portrait Gallery commission painted at the house of Tim Hudson, Botham’s rock-star agent, was in evidence, resting on an easel in the Clapham studio. Like subsequent celebrity portraits undertaken by Bellany, such as the wild stab at Sean Connery, the head is too small, propped on a solid body, as if shrunken or boiled in a bag. Like an alcoholic potato balanced on a sack of grain. Botham admired the intensity with which the portraitist studied his prey. It was just the way he himself sized up a batsman, probing for weakness. The sweater, I surmise, bears the colours of Hudson’s private cricket ground.

  Reacquainted with the Overground, stations appear at regular intervals. It has been said that Clapham experienced a social dip in the late nineteenth century, when public transport made the village more accessible. The grander houses around the Common were nudged by terraces thrown up to lodge the common man. The broad avenues, as we head north towards Wandsworth Road, are having none of it: they speak of established settlement, sust
ained property values. A nodding relationship with a sunken railway that has been adequately screened.

  There is a spectacular mansion at the bottom of Brayburne Avenue, right beside Wandsworth Road Station. Paint is peeling; it might have been close to ginger once, laid over many coats of rusty brown. Odd windows. Single chimney stack, off to the side. Dutch roof, tiled. It’s not a ruin, but it hankers after that status, a lurch into the Gothic.

  Kötting scowls. He props himself on a convenient bin – before trapping a flustered woman on her way up the steps. She is gripping the ginger rails with scarlet talons, wrestling with knapsack and laptop and wheelie case. In no mood for ordinary madmen: survey-taking clipboarders, charity muggers, religious hit squads.

  ‘Are you a Ginger Liner?’ Andrew bellowed.

  ‘I’m sorry … ?’

  ‘The Overground.’

  ‘Oh, the bloody Overground! Its very existence means I can no longer travel from Wandsworth Road, one minute and thirty seconds from my front door, to Victoria. The journey to work used to take me seven minutes. And there was, you know, a lovely pre-Beeching feel about the service: two carriages, twice an hour, from a station with no ticket office which one approached up a slope with a glorious shrub-filled flowerbed to one side. The drivers used to wait for you if they saw you running. And now …’

  She gestures at the orange-tipped stairs, the matching stair rails like a walking frame for legless heroes.

  ‘Give me your petition, I’ll sign. The only way to get to Victoria by Overground is to go in completely the opposite direction and change at Clapham Junction. Honestly!’

  ‘Anywhere around here for a decent Scotch egg?’