London Overground Read online

  Battersea Bridge confirms the distance now separating us from the Overground circuit. Shallow arches, alternately black and white, harpoon directly into the alien aggregation of the Chelsea Harbour development. Our footfall bridge is a Turkish fantasy, nicely managed, playing games with scale, under thunderous skies already stained with sunset. We are conscious that the five-span bridge with its seductive cast-iron detailing, its rose-pattern screens throwing shadows on the path, is a relative newcomer, a Joseph Bazalgette replacement of 1885, taking trade from the original ferry. Coming over by boat allowed time for adjustment. There are claims that this was the point of the Thames, then sluggish and fordable, where Julius Caesar made his crossing in 54 BC.

  Alongside the statue of Whistler, in a little riverside alcove, is a bench of respite, where pilgrims can follow the exiled artist’s unblinking stare back across the Thames to St Mary’s in Battersea. A gaunt figure, in a greasy trilby, was slumped, panting, recovering, legs gone. I noticed that he was wearing a shroud-like garment, a hospital gown or unlaced straightjacket, under his long brown coat. Andrew was too tired to bother with memorials. The American impressionist, master of tone, moonlight on river, silver on luminous black, left him cold. He was flinching from the sudden wealth of Cheyne Walk, the compulsory blue and brown heritage plaques like posh people’s satellite dishes. He spoke of cycling down here, not really knowing where he was, and making deliveries to pioneer production companies. He didn’t have the puff, at that moment, for his usual interrogation.

  ‘Four miles to Mortlake,’ said the man on the bench. ‘Must be at least that, wouldn’t you say?’

  He spoke as if he knew me. The trick is never to stop moving. Just smile and nod. I nodded.

  ‘You could get the Overground from Imperial Wharf to Clapham Junction, then the train,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t employ buses. Or trains,’ he replied. ‘One never knows who one is going to have to sit beside.’ He gave Kötting a meaningful glare.

  The distressed walker reminded me of a character out of Sebald, a revenant squeezed from the sepia juices of old photo albums, incubated out of friable press cuttings, translated and mistranslated into the contemporary world. He called up the Sebald laboratory assistant in Manchester, the one who absorbed so much silver that he became a ‘kind of photographic plate’. Face and hands, exposed to bright light, turned blue. Then other selves, earlier portraits, came up through his skin: a carousel of death masks.

  Sebald, I was reminded when I came to check that reference in The Emigrants, also had something to say about the dangers of a morbid obsession with train systems. Which sometimes led in his manipulated histories to acts of ritualized suicide, head on tracks, spectacles laid aside, shadowy form approaching as a terrible sound: mortality. ‘Railways had always meant a great deal to him,’ Sebald wrote, ‘perhaps he felt they were headed for death.’

  Our man hunched forward. If he moved, the pain would be unbearable. His brown brogues were unlaced; in fact, they had no laces.

  ‘It hurts too much to bend down.’

  He had no socks and his ankles were like wrists, all knob and hairless bone.

  ‘How far have you come?’

  ‘Brompton.’

  Long walks, at certain points, throw up messengers from parallel worlds. You see them when you need them. Perhaps, in some strange way, they need us too: confirming absence, confirming the validity of a confession that has to be made, over and again. I’ve come across old women supposedly picking up litter in Kentish woods who saved me miles by putting me back on the right path. Wise men waiting in birdwatchers’ hides near Whitstable. Snake-tattooed stoners on narrowboats with keys to forbidden locks.

  Kötting took the chance to massage his own ankles, but he wouldn’t risk removing boots that were beginning to slurp with burst blisters and the cheesy secretions of feet that had never quite recovered from the rats and mud of his swan voyage up the Medway.

  The vagrant’s story emerged in fits and starts. The Mortlake room, in a house overlooking the graveyard where Sir Richard Burton, the saturnine adventurer and eroticist, pitched his stone tent sepulchre, was the motivation for this desperate hike. The man without socks lived between river and railway. The light of one. The sound of the other. He wasn’t well, but who is? Blinding headaches, white light. Pressure on the basal ganglia. Eventual collapse. Local quack. Ambulance with siren screaming. Hospital on the wrong side. Brain tumour. Power drill splits the scalp.

  ‘They always say “size of a grapefruit”. More like a moderate-sized lemon. And good riddance.’

  He discharged himself in two days, against advice. And is now walking back to his Mortlake room, his papers.

  I told him about a person who sent me a bag of notes, diagrams, X-rays. He superimposed the outline of his tumour, the size of a Christmas pudding, on Clerkenwell. The notion being to walk the shape as a healing pilgrimage. He dedicated the exercise to Rahere, the monk who founded the hospital of St Bartholomew in Smithfield. He died within a month of the attempt. I left out that part of it. And we took our leave, wishing the outpatient well.

  It’s unfeeling and predatory to dwell on such incidents, but the encounter with the man on the bench gave our steps a certain lift, as we discussed and debated the veracity of his account. The wounded walker didn’t remove his trilby when we raised our hands in a farewell salute, but I saw no evidence of hair beneath.

  Heritaged artists of former times, now approved as enhancers of real estate, dominated this stretch of the river. Along with parking space for superior houseboats under threat of eviction, to make room for the yachts of oligarchs. Here were moorings where bohemians hung out in swinging London films of the 1960s. John Osborne, at the time of his triumph with Look Back in Anger, was tied up at Chiswick. In more recent times, Damien Hirst customized one of these floating islands to the highest specifications. He was part of a co-operative of barge owners trying to buy the Chelsea Reach moorings, before the owners could sell the land for £4.75 million. The Cheyne Walk spectres of Sir Thomas More and Sir Michael Jagger nudged us towards the Overground. We would all live on the river if we could, waiting for the rains of Schadenfreude to wash us away. Climate is another word for conscience.

  Turner, Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Hilaire Belloc, Philip Wilson Steer, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ian Fleming: quite a party. What a roost of entitled egos blue-badging enviable properties.

  Lots Road, losing the impact of the Thames behind the domineering bulk of the former power station, is a useful demonstration of how London can switch gears in a blink. Don’t look back. Lot, the Old Testament fugitive from Sodom, his wife recently converted to a pillar of salt (valuable commodity), was condemned to wander in desert places. The name ‘Lots Road’ reverberates; tight terraces, now brightly painted, sound like Lost Road. Like Los, Blake’s ‘Prophet of Eternity’, manifestation of the spirit of poetry.

  Andrew does look back to days editing early films in production houses that advertise the transition from dirty (and useful) industry to artisanal latte, retrospective orthopaedic chairs, and property sharks wanting to price anachronistic residents out of the market.

  And I look back too. We are salty enough already, sweat dripping down our collars. The power station was still in play, 1964, and I was home from France, roofless, in company with Ivan Pawle, later to achieve cult status with the psychedelic folk group known as Dr Strangely Strange. The usual West London floors, around Cromwell Road and Notting Hill, were not available. A riverside drift brought us to a boarding house in Lots Road, hot bunks for shift workers at the coal (and later oil-fired) power plant. This brief Orwellian moment made me aware of what the city offered if you were without employment or money in your pocket. A view of smoking chimney stacks and a penitential wall.

  The original task at Lots Road was to supply electricity to London Underground. The generating station, built on Chelsea Creek, became operational in 1905. It burned 700 tonnes of coal a day. In 2013
, the developer Hutchison Whampoa Properties took over the eight-acre site. Boris Johnson tooled down to give his blessing to the rebranding as ‘Chelsea Waterfront’. Plans are afoot to build the new (and ill-conceived) Thames Tideway super sewer right alongside. A case of excessive sanitation for promised but as-yet-unbuilt apartments.

  Much of the former electricity-generating plant has been adapted into space for desirable cushions, drapes and other necessary but expensive accoutrements of fashionable life. Most of the former pubs and corner shops have adjusted to the coming climate. Newish antiques of the better sort. Auction houses far grander than the plunder they are attempting to flog. Hand-woven rugs from the margins of war zones. Tables that cost more than three of the terraced houses of the 1960s.

  Everything is pouring into the definitive non-place that calls itself CHELSEA HARBOUR. The approach to this fortunate enclave, beyond a rank of waiting taxis for those who won’t be braving the Overground station at Imperial Wharf, is a sheet of glass down which water constantly pours. I read it, one letter lost in my own shadow, as CHELSEA ARBOUR. A bower. An orchard of millennial balconies. A brochure come to life without the human element. You can go in, but you’ll soon subside in a coffee outlet like a canteen in a fading television franchise.

  The original Chelsea Harbour tower with the witch’s hat, where Michael Caine was rumoured to be in residence, a formidable early-morning walker, looked astonished to be surrounded by so many other buildings. If the tower were to be pictured as a person, it would be Don Quixote in the paintings by Honoré Daumier. A windmill, in a silly helmet, tilting at itself.

  And that is what we are now, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: my ridiculous, head-down charges at illusory enemies and Kötting’s more grounded clowning. The whole picaresque extravaganza of treating the railway as a metaphor was collapsing around us. Chelsea Harbour put satire out of business.

  I flipped my Cervantes and stabbed a finger. ‘These Preparations being made, he found his Designs ripe for Action, and thought it now a Crime to deny himself any longer to the injur’d World, that wanted such a Deliverer.’

  Millennium People

  You wonder why Princess Di, in Oxford-blue FLY ATLANTIC sweatshirt, long bare legs, white socks, morning-after diva glasses (anticipating funerals), at the wheel of her dark green Audi Cabriolet, schlepped all the way from Kensington Palace to borderline Fulham, out of Barbara Cart-land into J. G. Ballard-ville, to work up a becoming flush in a leisure centre open to all manner of indecently wealthy riverside casuals with time on their hands, as well as the occasional over-entitled rugby professional from the other side, from middle-class Barnes, or Putney, where resting actors play at domesticity? Was she slumming for romance? For a trademark toss of the floppy mane and stutter of tribute from fellow member Hugh Grant – who is busy sipping ethical coffee and skimming the tabloids for actionable sleights? Anyone for tennis?

  Chelsea Harbour was a late-Thatcher dragnet for new money, commissioned with a champagne party, in April 1987, held on two pontoons floating rather precariously on the newly flooded ‘marina’. Invitations went out to representatives of sport, celebrity, business; all the opportunists prepared to decamp to a triangular island between the Thames, Counter’s Creek and an active railway embankment – which featured, at that time, no stopping point to let off proles until you reached West Brompton. Therefore: excellent parking facilities for gym members. And no bicycles, not then. Ranks of Audi Cabriolets, sleek BMWs, Chelsea tractors. Diana could have availed herself of the private gymnasia reserved for royalty, but she was drawn, without much resistance, to the pre-breakfast, body-image narcissism of the coming millennium people: semi-retired thesps, televisual travel promoters, cosmetic surgeons, fashionable dentists, Olympic oarsmen waiting on a sufficiently visible role with one of the better charities. As much as anything, Di’s commute was to do with the enactment of that eyes-down scuttle between open-top German motor and the secure entrance to Chelsea Harbour Club.

  For brief periods, boats called in at that harbour. A river service connecting outreach Fulham with choice bits of the heritage city – Charing Cross, Tower of London, Greenwich – was in operation when I passed through at the period when I was researching Lights Out for the Territory in the mid-1990s. This was a voyage that never failed to lift the spirits, as powerful craft surged, low to the water, offering unrivalled vistas of historic real estate. Without commentary. The river trip was a boost to the senses, not a feat of endurance. Now, dragging myself to the deserted pier with a mute Andrew Kötting, on a necessary fact-finding mission, I learn that the padlocks won’t be coming off the gates until the Harbour-dwellers are ready to return from City and Docklands. River transport is exclusive to the rush hour. Chelsea Harbour, in the afternoon, is funereal. It has outlived its time. Novelty, when it goes just off the boil, is oppressive and slightly embarrassing: like yesterday’s fashions before they achieve retro cool.

  Princess Diana, handsome, burnished, high-bred, but amputated of those boring ‘Royal Highness’ trappings, was a star without a confirmed project. Her in-development movie was conceptual, a modelled walk from car to gym. Camera-vultures were allowed to perch on ladders, at a safe distance, simmering their Sunset Boulevard fantasies, and shouting vulgar encouragement. The young woman who commanded the world’s attention trotted gamely through to the next entanglement like a promotional clip for a David Lloyd Leisure Club. Most of the male population of Britain, it seems, confessed to dreaming, lasciviously, about either Margaret Thatcher (as Ballard did), in an SM scenario better not imagined, or the offering of a strong shoulder to the spurned princess.

  Eager courtiers acquired from Chelsea Harbour exercise-machine proximity, and elsewhere around town, if taken one at a time, by profession and appearance, fit nicely within the Mills and Boon template: surgeon, riding instructor, motor-trade salesman, personal-security muscle, art broker, England rugby captain. The talent list, as an erotic collective, with most of them married, indicates a pattern of behaviour that belongs to Ballard’s ‘Chelsea Marina’: the casual, off-kilter sexual collisions and shifting alliances of his 2003 novel, Millennium People.

  At the Harbour Club, freed from her tiresome husband and his coterie of toothpaste-squeezing attendants, his fusty obsessions with architecture and organic farming, his obligations to an inherited regime of duty (with sidebar entitlements), Diana opted to go American. A nice reminder of what those colonists did to George III. If she gave the FLY ATLANTIC top a rest, she favoured a white variant branded with HARVARD. The firm-calved blonde in the dark glasses, in perpetual transit between place of exercise and coffee outlet, with a detour to drop off the kids, is ersatz US East Coast summer season. In the Diana years, Chelsea Harbour was the place to chill between holidays. It had to look like you were always a week back from the Hamptons. And waiting to get on court for a knock-up with Tim Henman.

  But the more telling revenge on Diana’s unfaithful husband was instinctive, not plotted: it was architectural. Chelsea Harbour, ambitious infill from a generic brochure (‘luxury’ apartments, ‘luxury’ hotel, offices, showrooms, bijou marina), was top dressing on the rubble of an ex-British Rail coal yard and a Victorian coaling dock. Black mounds to feed the trains up on the embankment. Generations of dumped contamination provided the right radioactive compost for mushroom development, with room for a seventy-five-berth marina, apartments, commercial space, and that witch’s hat stack with the pyramid at the summit. The signature Belvedere Tower, visible for miles, was a building in translation; a draughtsman’s joke made literal.

  The royal letter-writer, HRH, disgruntled of Highgrove, would have abominated the whole speculation, encroaching as it did on the Thames of Turner and Whistler: if he had recognized it as being architecture at all. The scope for carbuncular metaphors and references to East Berlin secret police barracks was limited. Chelsea Harbour was post-vernacular, pre-postmodern. Another nice gig for Bovis Homes Group and the P&O & Global Investment Trust. Maritime operatives cont
riving a fabulous harbour, an upstream Gibraltar with cruise-boat facilities. It would make perfect sense for Chelsea Harbour to align itself with Crimea by voting to join the empire of the oligarchs. It’s twelve minutes’ walk from Stamford Bridge and the citadel of Roman Abramovich. Unfortunately, Ambramovich’s yacht is too big to fit into the marina. To compensate, several of the blocks pastiche that floating-gin-palace style.

  Oliver Hoare, a man from the shallows of the art trade, schooled in discretion, was a millennium person out of the pages of Ballard’s Chelsea novel. Even his name has the authentic Ballardian stamp, English as a hard biscuit, but caught in a double bind: puritanical first name, libidinous surname. Officer class, privately educated, no distinguishing features. Ballard’s remedial professionals – architects, makers of commercials, doctors, spookish bureaucrats – don’t actually work; they’re recovering, in remission, sitting on the balcony. These are men of means living in secure compounds with access to the gym by 7 a.m. Which is where, at the Chelsea Harbour Club, Hoare met Diana. He flogged Islamic art to the world’s biggest collector, Sheikh Al Thani of Qatar. When the broker was caught up in an investigation into financial irregularities, it emerged from forensic examination of invoices that he had supplied the Sheikh with artworks worth more than £20 million. Under threats from his wife, heiress to a French oil fortune, the dealer broke off his friendship with the Princess, an alleged consummation of shared exercise regimes and fine dining.