London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  Clapham Junction is overprescribed, a little shaky on its feet. If we trundled along at this elderly speed in Dalston, we’d be flattened. Everybody up there has learned the art of looking as if they know just where they’re going. They’re shrugging and twisting and patting themselves down, fresh from the latest stop-and-search confrontation. The twin streams, urban hipster and recent indigenous, don’t see each other. They weave, sharp shoes swerving from angry shoulder-rollers who come straight at you. All parties use the width of generous pavements, relics of promenading times, to avoid the sorry legions of substance-abuse beggars and damaged solicitors of single coins. The casualties of cuts and expulsions who are barely tolerated, as invisibles, in the microclimate of station-confirming blocks with pointless water features and thrown-up-overnight estates.

  Arding and Hobbs, an imperious department store, a shopping experience kept at a polite distance from the station, is presently occupied by Debenhams. Who thrive by offering something off everything. And then something off that. And setting up outstations in places like mid-town Hastings. The urban regenerators have used the Ginger Line as the excuse for imposing, right opposite Debenhams, a ginger-themed block with slim window slits and metallic trim: TRAVELODGE.

  The railway part of Clapham Junction, with coffee outlets, fast-food kiosks, numerous platforms, blue-roof and grey-roof trains hissing and hustling, is immense and relevant and active. Comings and goings between systems: junction and terminal. Achieve Clapham, having come across the Thames from Hackney, and it seems right – like a change of horses – to pause, rest, take refreshment, realign. Before going on over Battersea Reach, by railway bridge, to another kind of London entirely: the pyramid on the tower at Chelsea Harbour, the oligarch’s whim of Chelsea FC at Stamford Bridge. Start again. The circuit is broken.

  The rear approach to the station, up against an embankment of goose grass, blue cans and empty burger cartons, is secure ground: for cars. Pedestrians are not required. As so often in zones undergoing the blessing of regeneration, the signalled footpath runs straight into mesh, a blocked bridge, an unspoken invitation to step out into headlong traffic. It’s fortunate that Clapham is not yet a cycling colony. The pavements, if you make it out of the station, are free of two-wheel racers, and the sort of aggrieved and entitled off-road pedallers who punched a protesting citizen in Bournemouth and killed him.

  We’re happy with Falcon Road; even under the hoot and snarl of cars and white vans, the falcon can still, if he works at it, hear the falconer. We slouch towards a pit stop on the curve of Battersea High Street. It is coming, the Overground guarantees it: ranks of Barclays bikes (for which the bankers are no longer footing the bill) will soon be installed. A docking station on Grant Road, a tributary to Falcon Road, is promised. Symbols of future docking stations fall from the map like a shower of hot-air balloons. If the elevated orbital railway were a cycle track it might work. For the moment, ranks of blue, set up to obscure sightlines for motorists, do nothing more useful than clog highways with the support vehicles required to service this monster fleet. They confirm the status of new stations around the Ginger Line. When I paused, back home in Hackney, to inspect the scale of ground given over to empty Barclays docking racks, a neighbour told me that local rumour had container-loads of blue bikes turning up in Africa. Which part of Africa she didn’t stipulate. I’d seen a few, in the days of their novelty, being joyridden, two or three up, along the canalbank and through the estates. Now, like everything else, the bikes were an investment opportunity for the export market.

  Another kind of bike becomes a topic of conversation: Kötting’s motorized steed, the machine on which he ramps out of London and weaves across Romney Marsh in a delirious interval between tasks. Hot-metal release: cold hands, aching back. And the English road. Swaying into bends. On the motorbike you are in landscape, in weather.

  So Andrew says. So he promotes the romance.

  ‘A red BMW R1200GS. German like me.’

  Russell Motors on Falcon Road is a riot of folk art and a colourful riposte to the accumulation of generic enterprises around Clapham Junction, station and shopping centre. As ever with these colonized crossroads, the theoretical centre doesn’t hold; it’s an illusion, a courtesy title. The term ‘centre’ when attached to ‘shopping’ implies a centripetal force: that everything pours inwards, to a locus that is not really there. The centre has no centre, it’s all corridor leading to nothing. A chasm of prostituted windows and secure doors, goods that are like advertisements for digital versions of themselves. You buy into what they represent, not the actual objects – which are inevitably diminished, faded in attraction, by the time you get them home. Very often, addicted shoppers carry the purchase straight back to the store. Another journey, another railway adventure.

  Raw and primitive: RED! A hand-painted, heart’s-blood splash. Surrounding a leathered and helmeted biker hurtling through a laurel wreath. Heroic British names in traditional calligraphy: NORTON, BSA, ARIEL. MOTOR CYCLES & SPARES. It makes you proud to be on the loose in the city. On the wrong side of the river. We are experiencing the buzz Antonioni located in places like Stockwell, when he discovered blocks of Mediterranean colour on grey English walls, for the driving sequences of Blow-Up. Submerged areas of South London, for their own reasons, commercial or mundane, love to enhance brick, to challenge the prevailing drizzle and drudgery of endless pavements with slaps of Iberian red, midnight blue. Intimations of the Portuguese immigrant communities Patrick Keiller identifies and salutes. Tribalists dug in among driving schools and flying-saucer spotters.

  Russell Motors is a proper family business in a proper London street. A street that is ordinary and exotic, spillage of infinite cultures. The shop was established half a century ago, a few years before I moved to Hackney. I’ve never needed it, but it’s been there from around the time I left South London. The founder, Bill Myers, came out of the RAF in 1945. He specialized, so he says, ‘in ex-war-department spares’. A trade operated, with less legitimacy, by many others on this side of the river; some of whom rose to be notable scrap dealers and property speculators; some of whom employed Kötting and spare brothers as painters and decorators.

  Afghan Road. Khyber Road. Cabul Road. We’re tramping through the high passes of imperial history, the old mistakes and fated incursions dignified with real-estate speculations; desirable terraces thrown up against the curve of the railway as it slides towards Battersea Creek.

  Hunger calls up recollections of previous pit stops, memorable coffees; hard crumbs of biscuit, lodged between the teeth, remind us of past pleasures. I had a place called Mazar in mind for lunch: Lebanese and Continental Cuisine. It was on Battersea Square and it suited me very well; quiet, roomy, with friendly unobtrusive service, rich thick treacle coffee in decorative silver-thimble cups. My consoling reverie lifted me above present discomfort, the regular thud of Andrew’s heavy tread. I recalled another excursion, a view on a conceptual square, like a vision of something in a French provincial town rudely sliced by through traffic, with just enough going on to tease your interest.

  A young woman on her mobile phone, in light drizzle, described a generous circle around the paved pedestrian area. Her attitude was initially playful. Orbital loops: clockwise, then counterclockwise. After perhaps five or ten minutes, the circles tightened. There was more tension in the shoulders, kabuki gestures of exasperation. Where the early circuits were flirtatious, and took in the potentialities of the entire square, the new loops favoured the south side: round and round a parked car. Soon I felt, now wholly engrossed in this movie, she would beat on the bonnet. The circuits straightened into lines about half the length of a cricket pitch. Like being condemned to pace a cell instead of the prison yard, the nunnery garden. I pictured relationships crumbling, betrayal, tearful confession. I pictured the phone dialogue as a grinding Ingmar Bergman breakdown, detail by remorseless detail, existential and unforgiving. She might have been enjoying a coffee in Mazar when the phone shrilled. She
stepped outside, pleased at first, to be in the sunlight, then concerned, alarmed, furious.

  A regular came in, distracting me with her chat, blocking my sightline as she gossiped with the obliging manager.

  ‘He gave me some unusual Christmas presents: a lunch box and two tea towels. Then for my birthday he got a bumbag. And books. Books. He’s got no idea.’

  She moved, just in time to allow me to see the irate, possibly suicidal phone victim dart through a door. When I paid my bill and headed back out, I couldn’t resist crossing the square to see where the woman had gone, half expecting the door to be still open.

  An estate agent.

  Another Battersea estate agent! The woman was at her desk. Some hot deal had fallen through. A victim of one of those personally addressed ‘we have several serious buyers actively looking for properties in your area’ letters changing his or her mind, pulling out, staying put. ‘You might be surprised to find out just how much your property is worth today.’ Without you in it.

  Andrew couldn’t wait for Mazar. My stories of previous walks carried no conviction when set against the now-rapturous pangs of hunger. Falcon Road narrowed into Battersea High Street with a demographic shift of gear, a few paces closer to Chelsea. Refuelling was a necessity, before we detoured to Battersea Bridge for our river crossing. Galapagos Foods seemed to fit the bill. I wasn’t altogether convinced. The name was too overtly Darwinian: would they be serving giant turtle or other prehistoric evolutionary accidents?

  A pint of fruit crush with ginger and a well-stuffed crayfish baguette with all the trimmings will have to hold the man in the steaming tweed suit. Dew drips from his stubble as he shakes himself down, salty droplets ping into the surface of my soup. The food is excellent and will carry us on towards the twilight of Willesden. The owner, challenged by the intrepid Kötting, Chatwin paperback in fist, says that he is from Ecuador. Quito. Have we heard of it?

  ‘My favourite city in the world!’ Andrew seizes him in a thornproof embrace, a scrape of sandpaper cheek.

  Bonded! Memories pour out from both sides of the counter. The South American expedition with Leila, country to country, city to city, mountain to desert to surf-crashed shore. The Ecuadorian replies with a tale of a cult in his home country, a tribal group who dress in white trousers and sandals made from adobe. They weave textiles from llama wool and sell them to Gucci and Prada.

  Back at our perch in the window, I begin to appreciate how a day’s random tramp around London turns into a travel journal: tourism without the air miles. Werner Herzog would approve. I heard the reed pipes of Patrick Keiller’s strolling musicians from London. The most valuable imports are exchanges in cafés and launderettes. Quito imposed on Battersea. Without the intrusive heliport. They say the pilot in the fatal Vauxhall crash was reaching across to his laptop.

  Enough miles have been covered in this half-day’s walk to call up a discussion about circularity, the Homeric voyage of adventure and return, against the grander reach of the diurnal cycle, an eternal and unchanging figure. Night chasing day chasing night. The abacus of the stars. The eye of heaven orbiting under the dish of ocean, as Charles Olson says in his Maximus Poems: ‘through which (inside of which) the sun passes’. The drawing together of the circle is our faith in that model of the universe. And our love of it.

  Kötting wipes his lips. And gives my stumbling justifications for the miles over which I am dragging him a Beckettian spin. ‘Life’s an interval between whatever and wherever. Every day away from the sea is a day lost.’

  On a wall, suspended from barbed wire, is a book that the scavenging Kötting pounces on: London Falling by Paul Cornell. ‘Only they can see the evil.’ A red pentagram for a cover. Not only is London falling but this paperback looks as if it’s been bombed from a helicopter or flung from a train. A forensic analyst discovers the ability to see ghosts. This gift or curse, known as ‘The Sight’, initiates four police officers into a ‘metaphysical’ parallel world. The sort of hallucination that often occurs for walkers on motorway verges heady with diesel fumes. The author emerged from his own parallel world, television, where he found employment hacking at Dr Who, Coronation Street, Holby City. Andrew slips the Cornell into his poacher’s sack alongside the Chatwin. London Falling had been positioned quite artfully above a crude aerosol graffito: TORY SCUM.

  Battersea High Street is now the kind of place where house-movers stencil FURNITURE LOGISTICS on the sides of their vans. The elevated tracks of the Overground are having an immediate effect. We pass a couple of young bucks in quilted jackets who look ready for presenting a programme about renovating country houses. A handsome redbrick mansion is in the process of being adapted into a holding facility for ‘eligible’ infants. OPENING SEPTEMBER: RAILWAY CHILDREN. This is the first establishment, crèche, nursery, playpen, we’ve noticed that is specifically targeted at the new railway demographic. The poster depicts a set of smiling pink-faced, golden-haired blobs waving from the windows of toy-town carriages on a bumpy track. Here, in prospect, are the first children of the railway, the Midwich Cuckoos of London Overground.

  St Mary’s at Battersea, a white church dwarfed by cliffs of river-facing flats, is a site of abiding significance. This is where William Blake married Catherine Boucher, daughter of market gardeners. Blake moved to the neighbourhood in July 1782 to stay with relatives and establish residence before the marriage ceremony. Catherine, who marked the formal certificate with an ‘X’, accompanied Blake through all his shifts, helping with the colouring of his proofs, cooking, keeping house, singing – and, like Leila (Kötting) McMillan, making her husband’s clothes.

  I have been inside this church and appreciated the bounce of light from the river, the way it polishes the soft leather seat of the old chair associated with Turner – and the claim that he kept it here, dragging it outside to paint when sunset visions, upstream, took his fancy. I don’t think it matters so much what these London luminaries actually did or did not do; the tables, beds and addresses supposedly sanctified by their presence. There are so many ghosts present in these quiet buildings; unregistered, obliterated from gravestones. We dowse for traces, for special sites to confirm the mystery and magic of the city. Ruin becomes rune. Eloquent absences sustaining our faith in the continuity of stubborn visionary experience. Against everything that is permitted or accountable. The belief in progress. Investing in the future. Serving the community.

  St Mary’s invokes the spirit of Catherine more than that of William. He came to her. He responded to the empathy she demonstrated over the way he had been spurned by an earlier love. She may or may not, at that time, have been literate. She was parted from Blake for only a few days in the forty-five years they were together. He never had reason to write to her. His letters were matters of business, solicited commissions, sleights by patrons. ‘To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes.’

  SPIRITUALLY SEARCHING SINCE 693 AD. OPEN CHURCH OPEN HEART. New apartment blocks, new Battersea: locked church door. Even when the interior is off-limits, the memory of it remains potent. The temenos, the scoop of ground, retains its quality as a riverside retreat, a mooring with an exposed beach of silt, clay, broken bricks, returned plastic. A sanctuary set against the non-denominational pyramid-tower of Chelsea Harbour on the north shore.

  The temenos for Carl Jung had aspects of the peyote shamanism promoted by Carlos Castaneda in his books about the Yaqui brujo, Don Juan: a secured area of ground in which it is ‘safe’ to attempt feats of meditation or magical workings for the renewal of self. ‘I was the noisiest walker,’ Castaneda wrote, when he resumed his apprenticeship after a break of four years, ‘and that made me into an unwilling clown.’ Jung’s temenos was the squared circle, the mandala garden with a fountain at the centre. A site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to wa
lk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything.

  We walked down to the foreshore, which was granular, rough under our tread, like a beach made from cracked nutshells swept from a parrot’s cage. Hanging from the grey-blue wall, at the slipway leading to the river, was a votive display of single shoes, drowned trainers, slime-encrusted boxing boots and scarlet football slippers. They rocked against the rising tide on leather straps and coloured strings. They reminded me of Maltese churches decorated with crutches and callipers, offered as evidence of miraculous cures. This Battersea installation invoked a troop of one-legged marathon runners swallowed by the Thames. Kötting, who had more experience of provincial art galleries, half-cooked conceptualism, put it down to sex, gay trysting. ‘They’re all at it down here. Six-foot hulks with five-o’clock shadow looking for Cinderella’s glass slipper under the railway arches.’

  I’m not convinced. I saw trees on mountain passes in California thick with a harvest of unmatched trainers; much cleaner, it’s true, than this shoreline crop. Crossing Hungerford Bridge, one time, making a considerable detour with the intention of connecting with the District Line at Embankment, to ride east to Whitechapel, for the sole purpose of coming home on the Overground, I looked down, as jumpers do, and noticed a great spread of shoes dropped on one of the piers supporting the bridge. There must be hundreds of barefoot pilgrims out there, following the river, and paying their dues before crossing to the other side. That made more sense: the slipway in Battersea and Hungerford Bridge were points of transition. Give the ferryman his due. Take off one shoe before you enter the next chamber of the city. Limp on, urban sadhu: one foot, encased, touching the ground, and one foot, bare, cleansed in the river. Every step a penance, every step a memento mori.