London Overground Read online

  Iain Sinclair

  * * *

  LONDON OVERGROUND

  A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line

  Contents

  Goat Mask Replica

  Fish Magic

  Haggerston to Wapping

  Rotherhithe to Peckham Rye

  Peckham Rye to Clapham Junction

  The Fourth Guest at the Table

  Clapham Junction to Imperial Wharf

  Millennium People

  Imperial Wharf to West Brompton

  West Brompton to Willesden Junction

  The Experience of Light

  Willesden Junction to Finchley & Frognal

  Maresfield Gardens

  Hampstead Heath to Kentish Town

  Camden Town to Haggerston

  Blood on the Tracks

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  By the same author

  FICTION

  White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

  Downriver

  Radon Daughters

  Slow Chocolate Autopsy

  (with Dave McKean)

  Landor’s Tower

  White Goods

  Dining on Stones

  DOCUMENTARY

  The Kodak Mantra Diaries

  Lights Out for the Territory

  Liquid City (with Marc Atkins)

  Rodinsky’s Room

  (with Rachel Lichtenstein)

  Crash

  (on Cronenberg/Ballard film)

  London Orbital: A Walk around the M25

  The Verbals

  (interview with Kevin Jackson)

  Edge of the Orison

  London: City of Disappearance (editor)

  Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

  70 x 70. Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked in 70 Films

  Ghost Milk

  Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime

  Several Clouds Colliding

  (with Brian Catling)

  Austerlitz and After

  Objects of Obscure Desire

  Swimming to Heaven: The Lost Rivers of London

  Silenic Drift (with Brian Catling)

  POETRY

  Back Garden Poems

  Muscat’s Würm

  The Birth Rug

  Lud Heat

  Suicide Bridge

  Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems

  Jack Elam’s Other Eye

  Penguin Modern Poems 10

  The Ebbing of the Kraft

  Conductors of Chaos (editor)

  Saddling the Rabbit

  The Firewall: Selected Poems

  Buried at Sea

  Postcards from the 7th Floor

  Red Eye

  For Paul & Susan. Gareth. Slim.

  And Stanley (whoever and wherever he is).

  Torchbearers at the dark frontier.

  Railways do open up the territory, don’t they? They give you space and they give you light and they give you movement.

  – Leon Kossoff

  They embody a state

  which our still encircled world

  looks toward from the past

  – Edward Dorn

  Goat Mask Replica

  A puddle of exposed meat and blooded feathers. A first-light pigeon catastrophe at the crown of a frosted road. The small head was already gone and a pair of glistening crows, as if shaking themselves from an ink bath, disputed strips of pink flesh. This roadkill feast was still warm and gave off wisps of steam, as the large black birds tore and gouged.

  The chain of causality ran back to a lonely woman who emerged from the flats, crossed to the park, invisible to post-code gangs who were still in bed, invisible to entitled cyclists and charitable joggers. From a black bag, she shook out a carpet of crusts stiff as linoleum samples. Every morning, at the same hour, the feral pigeon cloud descended like a minor plague.

  I noticed, as I made my circuit, that she wasn’t there. The crows, mob-handed, strutting and bouncing across the ground with a skunk-smoke swagger, were not bothered. They were glutted on the residue of boozy barbecues, the earth-scorching scars of the party people of new Hackney. The birds gorged, as on a battlefield, on everything – chicken wings, sauce sachets, pizza rinds, saturated card packaging – apart from the bent brown stubs of cigarettes, trodden into the dirt like a midwinter spring. And the grey torpedo tubes of pressurized gas known as ‘whippets’. The kind they use to fire up fancy lighters or put fizz into simulated cream. The small cylinders were the only evidence left of cackle and blah: the shrieks of weekend balloon babies, festival chasers. Grey bone fingers of a defeated robot army. And shreds of coloured rubber like the sad aftermath of joke condoms. Metallic traces of the carnival of laughing-gas sniffers defy the early-morning hygiene crews and the recycling police. Nitrous oxide hobbyists party for a twenty-second buzz. A dissociative anaesthetic snort against the nuisance of city life and the dull pull of the old world bringing them down with its responsibilities. Criminal mortgages. And the price of Anya Hindmarch handbags in Chatham Place.

  But the balloon babies of London Fields are not to be denied. They are the present occupiers, supporting a trickledown substratum of Turkish minimarts, secular Muslims working impossible hours to supply wine, beer, vodka, firelighters, charcoal, barbecue trays, fresh fruit, table-tennis bats. The woozy cocktails sniffed from an inflated cartoon bubble also contribute, as an incidental by-product, to the paranoid miasma of greenhouse gases. The fear of the thing is as real as the thing itself. Euphoric ‘hippy crack’ blends with a drench of pesticide perfume from the imported strip of ‘wildflower meadow’ that has replaced the former red-top football pitch kicked to dust by no-limits communal collisions in the last century: unsponsored Sunday-morning games that ran, more or less, from the 1966 World Cup black-and-white TV triumph to semi-final exit in Italia ’90.

  Along with distressing the dignity of ancient, gnarled London plane trees by wrapping them in purple skirts that attempt to take credit for (and impose control over) what was now a de facto party zone, the council razzle-dazzled the red dirt with a drop-in, industrial carpet of showy wildflowers, sprayed with the pesticide glyphosate. This was a highly selective wildness, applicable only to approved flora, and merciless to bugs. The kill product is marketed by biotech giant Monsanto. Meadow strips such as this, laid out like those psychedelic bandages across the bleeding edge of the Olympic Park, look great in photographs. But they are meadows only in the sense that a sewage outfall pipe is now a Green Way. The designer Katharine Hamnett, waging T-shirt war (ACT LOCAL THINK GLOBAL), declared that glyphosate usage has proven links to infertility and birth defects. ‘In planting a wildflower meadow,’ Hamnett said, ‘they have planted a deathtrap. Sitting on the grass, eating with your hands near an area that has been sprayed with herbicide is the shortest route to ingesting it, bar drinking it straight from the bottle.’ Kim Wright, corporate director of health and community services for Hackney, a woman charged with ‘improving the quality of life for all’, pronounced: ‘This product has been declared safe and environmentally friendly by government and is used by councils everywhere across the country for weed control.’

  Official disapproval of unauthorized pigeon caterers, and persons who stock their suddenly desirable, million-pound property wrecks with damaged hawks and buzzards, had consequences. The bag lady vanished. A deprived pigeon ventured on to asphalt to investigate a pizza box dropped from a speeding motorcycle and was splattered. Very soon, a chain reaction created a meat island that threatened to become a continent. One of the crows pecking at the ex-pigeon was tyre-tracked into oblivion. Brothers, hypersensitive to the fresh smell of death, fluttered down to feast. The carnage spread. Birds eating birds, in promiscuous same-species and victim-species abandon
, were culled by motorists busy getting a hit of smoke into the lungs, while ranting into agitated fist-phones. A horrible skidpan of mashed avians, pecking, dying, grew from the first discarded tomato crust to a bloody road-hogging stain that promised to become a symbol of something much worse than itself.

  It was a morning to move on. To explore territory in which I could cut free from a sense that narrative, like our managed landscape, was a fix. Reading matter, however exotic the source, no longer did it for me. The story was the same everywhere. Thomas Pynchon, riffing on another time and another place, seemed to be describing the trivial annoyances of my immediate locality: ‘zapping loudmouths on cellular phones, morally self-elevating bicycle riders, moms wheeling twins old enough to walk lounging in twin strollers’.

  This old-man sourness is addictive. Period pains from the inability to accommodate change. When nature pricks and the heart engages, people long to go on pilgrimages. Atavistic instinct draws us to the sacred spike of the Shard and a long, lustful tramp down Old Kent Road in the general direction of Canterbury. I have spent many years postponing that walk as too obvious. Today was the day.

  You never cross water without some psychic toll. Careful citizens secrete a coin about their person, to pay the ferryman. Coming down through the permitted gulch of the City, between roadblocks and roadworks, Crossrail dumper trucks and vanity tower quarrying, I overtook several buses decanting irate commuters some way short of their promised destination. Tourists for the dungeons of the black museum were dumped on the wrong side of the Thames. And swept aside by the human surge agitating over London Bridge in a wasp-storm of electronic interference.

  The exhilaration for me, above and beyond movement, the glimpse of sedimentary thickness in the river, was the lack of agenda. Nothing to be recorded. Nothing to be written. No maps. No timetable. No rucksack. Nothing ahead, beyond the random impulse of that morning: to start a new season seeking stranger strands, without the Chaucerian requirement to deliver a tale. I thought as ever of John Clare in the madhouse at Lippitts Hill in Epping Forest, and how, after four years of benevolent incarceration, he seized the day, took off, marching vigorously in the wrong direction, before setting his mark on an English road, and hurrying towards the indifferent dead: his inspiration, lost anima, innocence. A journey to shred illusions, burn off the cobwebs of the past. A clean sheet: alienation, severance from family ties, suspension of inherited duty. Writer as writer: a clattering skull on a stick of bone. ‘I am here in the land of Sodom where all the peoples brains are turned the wrong way,’ he reports in a letter to his wife, Patty. ‘I think it is about two years since I was first sent up to this Hell.’

  Southwark Cathedral, where pilgrims might have prayed before setting out, if they were not too well lodged in the pub, is dwarfed by overweening structures that don’t quite fit together: all sheen, no substance. Giant shadow-makers. Premature ghosts. If architects were involved they had blundered, but nobody could afford to admit it. There was a satisfying level of activity on Borough High Street; people of all shapes, sizes and persuasions, in work, are coffee-transporting, cell-yapping, queuing for buses, queuing for cigarettes, queuing for top-ups. For misleading information, bacon rolls, chewing gum, haircuts.

  I noted David Bomberg House. Good to see the undervalued painter’s name referenced on a block of residential properties for postgraduate students. Bomberg, in his partial eclipse, taught at Borough Polytechnic Institute. He grew up on the other side of the river, in Spitalfields, and never let himself be inconvenienced by false modesty: ‘Giotto stands to Cézanne as Cézanne will stand to posterity; and I who am of the line and inherit the blood stream should not be treated as a stranger in my Father’s house.’

  After exhibiting with the Vorticists in 1915, while standing apart from their manifestos and stunts, Bomberg’s strength came from his isolation, the unbroken conviction that he was a spurned man, an outsider. He engaged with London in war, but the great city, its building sites, railways, warehouses, was not really his subject, in the way that such motifs would obsess his two most distinguished pupils, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.

  Noticing the nameplate, David Bomberg House, was as far as I wanted to take it. That a man who regarded those years of instruction, imposing his strict doctrine on students and amateurs taking evening classes, as a banishment from the light, a necessary drudgery, should now be a permanent aspect of the street: without the residents having any idea who he was or without the students looking closely at any of his works. Bomberg’s methods live through Auerbach and Kossoff, the intense scrutiny they bring to place; the practice of drawing, over and over, until the moment arrives for the physical assault, the statement painting.

  The proportions of the tight street, with its courtyard pubs, its access to a major rail hub, open out into a road that is also a destination: Great Dover Street. Generous pavements almost as wide as the road itself are planted with London planes that break up pavings, splitting asphalt into interestingly fissured mounds. And then, after negotiating a notorious roundabout, I find myself on a route fitted for all categories of urban pilgrimage, however debased: Old Kent Road. Fragments of Georgian and early-Victorian terrace coexist with opportunist detritus, metal-shuttered premises and secure booths where visibly wired penitents hop from foot to foot trying to remember the five-digit number that will give them a crack at an extension of a payday loan.

  THE DUN COW SURGERY IS A REGISTERED YELLOW FEVER CENTRE. I remember talking to an old Haggerston villain banished to this part of town when he came out of prison on licence. The idea being to keep recidivists away from former associates, familiar drinking dens where they would be lured back into crime. A futile proposition: the senior contractor for the disposing of inconvenient East London stiffs operated out of a small boozer on Borough High Street. But that three-mile move was too horrible for my man. He died within six months, his best Friday-night suit still in hock. The shame of it: to be found slumped in a plastic recliner in a pair of elasticated tracksuit bottoms and a Billy Bonds T-shirt.

  Lebanese fast-food war-zone escape hatches. Bike-snatched phones unblocked. Money transferred to Nigeria. HUNGRY BEAR HALAL BURGERS. HOTEL ELEPHANT. LA CABANA with its flyers exhorting voters to register for Bolivian elections. Self-medicators in condemned railway terraces without the stamina to crawl out for their yellow-fever injections. Windblown shuttered piazzas marooned from earlier eras. ‘Looks better by night,’ says a passing disability Hummer, snowploughing me off the pavement.

  The valid action is all in the road. A few walkers, of varying ethnicities, went about their business; quietly, discreetly, with none of the powerwalk entitlement of my side of the river. Ankles were safe from bankers on roller blades, balloon-sniffing Twitter analysts on customized skateboards. And Boris Johnson dressed as a fireman.

  The sharpest youths of the current generation, those who respect the past by stealing some of the hippest style fetishes, navigate by way of infinite layers of spoiled pixilation, pink-dyed negatives, seltzer-fizz surfaces strobing and seething. They muddy perception with pictorial degradation, looped sound, weird fragments that reverberate like operating-theatre chit-chat as you go under. Ordinary working streets, if they encounter them, seem perversely undercooked. Techniques of recording have a bias towards banality. The world is all noise and discriminations of headache.

  But Old Kent Road was a powerful antidote. Much of the swirling cloud of cannibalized imagery, pictures of pictures that could be sustained only by tapping on a tablet, was left in Shoreditch, buried with the utility cables and the accidentally excavated Mithraic artefacts in the Crossrail quarrying of the City. It fell to modest incomers to rescue the old pilgrim route.

  I settled to a quality coffee that really was coffee, by smell, look, taste, in le panier a brioche, a lower-case patisserie managed by Mr F. Rafik. It catered to solitary males of a dignified Somali appearance who sat with their phones on saucers, empty cups in hand, waiting for messages that never came. From time t
o time, a woman in a hijab would step inside, and stand waiting at the counter, studying all the possibilities. On being served, the successful client would leave immediately, nursing her purchases against dark folds of enveloping robes.

  I admired the racks of colourful fruit and vegetables on display outside a minimart on the far side of the road. And I wondered about how much lead and heavy metal the skins of those peaches and apricots had absorbed, how much carcinogenic dust from the zone around London Bridge Station, how much road dirt lifted by the remorseless passage of traffic.

  Yellow-green ambulances. Fire engines. Unmarked squad cars with sirens screaming. A conviction that road accidents, birth pangs, outpatient axe attacks in betting shops, were being attended to so efficiently warmed the heart. Those exhausted professionals are under constant threat from a system and a philosophy that can no longer afford them.

  I had not walked more than twenty minutes towards Canterbury when Old Kent Road began to promote out-of-town ambitions: a giant green free-standing ASDA sign, the triumphalist yellow arch of MCDONALD’S, the pale blue office block of NEW COVENANT CHURCH. A 78 bus shuttled a quorum of the undead towards the cemetery park of NUNHEAD, a destination that once signified a safe distance from the city. The kerbs, I noticed, were thick with red paint, double lines spilling over drains and obstacles like tyre tracks after a gruesome fatality.

  At the junction where Rotherhithe New Road swings away towards Deptford and Greenwich Reach, there was a disaster exhibit framed by blue-and-white tape and guarded by two solid community-support officers, while the real cops, windows down, sat in their car checking registration details and scrolling porn sites. The van driver was smoking beside his dented vehicle, explaining himself to a potential witness, while a policewoman took down his details. A lot of blood was trickling into a storm drain, which was embossed with raised letters: NIAGARA 5760 METRO. On the black-grey boards of the barrier separating the road from a small retail park where a low shed hawked BUILDING PLASTICS, TIMBER, INSULATION, ROOFING, I noted the spectral remains of a promotion poster: E SKULL.