London Overground Read online

  Chelsea football managers are appointed like provincial governors, hired, fired, paid off. Sometimes, like José Mourinho, they come back, in new outfits, with reconsidered (and greying) hair, and new lines in obscurantist banter. Sometimes, like the unfortunate Spaniard Rafael Benítez, tainted by his association with Liverpool FC, former managers become non-persons, exploitable for a few months before being shipped out to Naples.

  Kötting was restless. It was at least two hours since we had eaten with the man from Ecuador, two hours since there had been anyone worth interrogating. I couldn’t sell my companion the close relationship between geology, railways and football stadia. How Stamford Bridge was connected with his beloved Millwall and the Den. How Stanford Creek once flowed down to the Thames along the way now occupied by rail tracks. In the early days of territorial exploitation, there was an attempt to sell the land on which the stadium was built to the Great Western Railway Company. Stamford Bridge had its own small railway halt, lost after Second World War bombing raids. Great dunes of London soil, excavated during the construction of the Piccadilly Line, were used as terracing for standing spectators. Railways, rivers, stadiums, cemeteries: there was always traffic between them, acoustic whispers, mass cheers and whistles of derision, the scream of trains slowing for West Brompton, drifting over the layered and dignified silence of the nature-reserve burial ground.

  The lodged dead absorb and soak up the restless movement of the city. They manufacture calm. Contemplation. And a measure of gratitude: that we are still on our feet. We are going home. This time. We are allowed to saunter, without challenge, down the broad avenue of an enclosed space laid out over a market garden as an open-air, non-denominational church. A pantheist temple roofed by West London sky. In death, inequalities are emphasized: from grandiose mausoleums, follies and vaults, to half-erased slabs and squares of turf marked with twigs or numbers. And patrolled by crows.

  The design of Brompton Cemetery, seen from above, is like a thermometer with the bulb of the Great Circle to the south. Or like an elongated ankh, symbol of life. Andrew is inspired by this set. He sees possibilities for future interventions. He wants to return with his pet photographer, a former student who goes by the name of Anonymous Bosch, and who has mastered the pinhole camera as a device for capturing interactions between movement and stillness, past and present, the living and the dead. Elective accidents. Leaks of furtive light. Mortality as a lens fault. A sudden blurring of focus confirming future disease.

  The lime avenue short cut between Fulham Road and Lillie Road is an oasis for wildlife and certain specialized subspecies of the human tribe: amateur antiquarians, canine accompanists, relatives paying their respects to the dear departed, gay men patrolling the outer circle, and wild-haired, barefoot vagrants setting down their burdens in shady alcoves. What attracted me was the sense of being somewhere with a rich history about which I knew very little. Among the colonnades, Andrew was a silent stalker. I told him that this was the favourite cruising ground of William Burroughs in his first, mysterious London days, when he practised the cult of invisibility in the old Empress Hotel at 25 Lillie Road. He was cruising for silence and a connection with the reservoir of memory as much as for sexual partners. Bill liked to spread a rug over a convenient tombstone and picnic on sandwiches and wine from a paper cup. He made a number of recordings.

  The dead are a logistical nuisance in expanding cities. They offer a poor return for short-term property investors. In Brompton the concept was always theatrical architecture; an aspect stressed by the designer Benjamin Baud, in order that this railside halt could compete with the rustic attractions of suburban burying grounds like Nunhead and Highgate. Brompton Cemetery was a city of extinguished Londoners built for 250,000 souls. Victorian cemeteries were the original garden cities. A demonstration, perhaps, that utopian theme parks for the good life are much better suited to citizens who will never move again. Here was a sculpture garden dressed with 35,000 eccentric monuments to the wealthy and the established (almost all of whom are now forgotten).

  A former colleague of mine in the illegitimate book trade, a self-assembled eccentric who went under the name of Driffield, wrote about hearing a radio programme on the wildlife in Brompton Cemetery, and being inspired, at once, to go there, after equipping himself with a large tub of ice cream and a pint of fruit juice. Driff was a man who slept under suicide-watch conditions: lights on, World Service playing all night. Waiting for the dawn knock on the door.

  But the aspect of Baud’s plan that appealed to me was the circle of colonnades (with catacombs beneath) at the approach to the Anglican chapel. This lidless temple, rimmed by Piranesi walkways, memorial tablets obscured by occult geometries and sexual solicitation, is a forest of calcified classical figures: stumps, pillars, crosses. The carbon-encrusted skulls on the fading stones are a vanitas, a stern reminder of the penalty for thinking too well of ourselves. Here are the platforms, ramps, vaults, of a ghost station from which no traveller returns.

  The intrusion of metaphysics into our tramp dressed the colonnades in Shakespearean velvet: Hamlet, Act V, Scene I – A Church-Yard ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’

  A brisk female photographer fussed around a senior actor, who was being invited to hold up one of those circular sun-reflecting disks. Like a provincial aristocrat expected to catch his own head after he has been guillotined. She rushed and flustered to exploit the golden hour.

  ‘You must tell me about the hair,’ the man said, patting it down. What there was of it.

  ‘I can always retouch.’

  He is in a white jacket for an uncivil day, a midnight-blue shirt. Dressing for the Med, in the way some big performers favour: as if coming ashore from a cruise liner. And expecting the day to be ten degrees hotter than it actually is. Dark glasses and straw hat optional.

  I know the actor’s face, his mannerisms, the timbre of the voice, but the name takes a few hours to shake from my sluggish memory-file. I’d seen him do Polonius. And, if not, he should have done, he had the right look: asymmetrical, one eye more hooded than the other; successful, well fed; a babbler of unwanted advice with a streak of irony running down his spine, like Blackpool rock. Courtier, minor duke, king’s uncle. Now required to turn out in a cemetery, to be herded and primped by a photographer the age of his daughter, if he had one. Lear and Cordelia. Where Lear is fond, confused. And Cordelia can’t keep still. This man was more obliging about the process than Ballard when he was trapped on a traffic island in Shepherd’s Bush in the rain. ‘One more, Mr Ballard.’ Sodden, nagged by back pain, threatened by traffic. ‘I’m off.’

  Oliver Ford Davies. The name popped into my head, a couple of hours later, and three Overground stations down the track, as we skirted a flashers’ wood on the margin of Wormwood Scrubs. I saw Mr Davies do a turn as Duke of York to David Tennant’s king in Richard II. Serviceable. But playing well within himself, the senior company man. This other performance, gracious among the tombs, was a ruder assignment.

  The whole spectacle of the colonnades, figures vanishing into alcoves and secret exits, broad steps leading down to the underworld, makes Brompton Cemetery one of London’s most Jacobean retreats. The empty grave of the Sioux warrior Long Wolf proves this quality of other-worldliness. The burial site, on the left-hand side as you approach the chapel, is a bed of lavender. Long Wolf, who is reputed to have fought against Custer at Little Big Horn, died when he was performing with Buffalo Bill Cody’s troop at Earls Court in 1892. In September 1997, the grave was opened. There were two caskets interred on top of Long Wolf: Star Ghost Dog, a two-year-old Sioux girl who fell from a horse in Cody’s show, and an anonymous Englishman. After tribal ceremonies, a feast of venison and buffalo meat, Long Wolf was returned to South Dakota, to the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

  The long straight avenue leading to Old Brompton Road was a meditative walk through a gated community where all the temples had shru
nk and the towers were occupied by owls and ravens and the multifarious wildlife with which Driffield wanted to become acquainted. There were names and dates on doors and relief portraits like selfies taken with a marble camera. Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette. Dr John Snow, pioneer anaesthetist. James McDonald, co-founder of Standard Oil. Bernard Levin, journalist. George Henty, novelist. Constant Lambert, composer. George Borrow, writer and wanderer. And thousands more in this huge West Brompton boarding house, this alternative Empress Hotel, of all the trades and professions. With a notable repertory company of players and stage folk, gypsies of the halls: Sir Squire Bancroft, Richard Tauber, Brian Glover, Benjamin Webster, Sir Augustus Harris, Walter Brandon Thomas.

  Anonymous Bosch, when he came here on assignment, lumbering his tripod and pinhole camera, found a story I had missed: the burial place of a faded celebrity photographer, Bob Carlos Clarke. Like to like, camera drawn to camera, I thought, with the two image-makers as compliant accessories. Bosch, in shaping his record of the grave, was invited to complete a portfolio begun, years earlier, by a very different operator. Carlos Clarke was hard-edged, a cataloguer of women as fish. Bosch sculpted smoke.

  Clarke loved the garlicky Gothic, cemeteries as sets: relief from private spaces where fetishized young women, glossy as seals, were trussed in latex and perched on dangerous heels. He was troubled and of his time: beyond surface, surface. A presentational skill ambitious of critical respect (without the hurt, the risk). Black mirrors of narcissism. Portraits of Keith Richards and Marco Pierre White as stoned refractions of himself. Most of the subjects are invited to glare back at the invasive camera.

  Objects were auditioned from the foreshore of the Thames; bent cutlery swabbed down and removed, to be recorded under laboratory conditions. When mortality first rattled his bones, Carlos Clarke acquired a powerful BSA 650 motorbike. He said he would ride it off the roof one day.

  On the morning of 25 March 2006, the photographer left the Priory Hospital in Roehampton. He had been there for a fortnight and was thought to be responding well to treatment. He walked north down Priory Lane and Vine Road towards the Thames; a route buffered by green acres: golf course, tennis courts, rugby ground. Woodland screening the tracks of the commuter line. At the Barnes level crossing, Carlos Clarke ran out in front of a train.

  Having recently sold his Battersea studio, he said that he made more money from property than from a lifetime’s photography. The Clarke archive, postmortem, was relocated to a rented lock-up in World’s End.

  Driffield was initially drawn to Brompton Cemetery, not by radio wildlife, nor by death (another of his interests), but by I. CLARKE MARINE STORES, a superior junkshop offering boxes of loose porn, replenished daily. Kensington dustcarts disgorged every afternoon. Driffield was on hand to forage, while listening to the Jimmy Young Show. He once walked away with a silk top hat. The junkpit serviced the cemetery like an unlicensed version of the Tate Modern gift shop. The tombs were the exhibits: sculpture, architecture, bandit graffiti. The shop flogged grave goods, the rubbish of our lives, the stuff that survives. And is taken up by living hands, re-narrated. Thanks to I. Clarke, the ranks of the Brompton dead were given a special status, made into honorary mariners. Inland watermen of the Styx.

  Now, as we discover, the shop is gone. The cemetery perimeter has a transitional feel, local estate agents trying to catch an uncertain wave are daunted by the mass of Earls Court Exhibition Centre, a once-popular venue for trade shows and circuses, fed by the railway. Ballard’s middle-class Chelsea Marina terrorists from Millennium People came here to subvert a cat show at Olympia, the other railside behemoth shed. And the sex-death cultists of Crash, enervated by petrol-fume excesses – blood, semen, X-rays – visited the motor show at Earls Court, in order to parade their combat wounds – scars, scrapes, callipers – while hoping, against the dazzle of corporate novelty, chromium and celluloid, that ‘something obscene might happen’.

  Earls Court was Buffalo Bill Cody’s marquee, a metropolitan space where his rough riders and reservation warriors could deliver a spectacle of the old west to the new west, to the emergent suburbs, the railhead. Cody – looking like a trial run for Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Chicken rancher, but without the sinister spectacles – mixed showbiz with dollar biz; he worked the brand, franchising pre-cinematic clichés of wagon-train battles before John Ford had the chance to invent them. Sitting Bull and his Sioux ghost dancers, with other landless shamen, drummed the gods of earth and sky, the diurnal cycle, into London sawdust. Earls Court Exhibition Centre opened in 1887, one year before the Ripper murders in Whitechapel – at which point, Cody was in town. Conspiracy theorists, taken with the way immigrants escaping Russian and Polish pogroms came ashore by Tower Bridge and settled in Whitechapel, believing they had made it to New York City and the New World, decided that there must be a link between First People re-enacting the slaughter at Little Big Horn and the brutal sacrifices of East End prostitutes.

  Earls Court and Olympia were born of the railway. ‘Waste ground’, which politicians and promoters love to carve up and rewrite, was available. And would soon become a tangle of metal tracks. An interim performance zone before the imperial trade fairs and the construction of the great white sheds. In 1895 an observation wheel was installed for the Empire of India Exhibition, a precursor to the South Bank’s London Eye. The recent Eye, that symbol of surveillance, being a Ferris-wheel device for allowing tourists to experience aspects of air travel (queuing, security, a circuit of the Thames) without stomping carbon footprints all over the heavens. Virtual travel is the smarter future. Earls Court Exhibition Centre grasped that from the start. The 1935 rethink, the swaggering Egyptian-cinema modernism of C. Howard Crane, had its traditional elements: it ran well over budget and it came in late.

  The old gods were expelled from Olympia. And the lords of enterprise culture ejected from Earls Court with the erection of Richard Rogers’s New Labour tent on Bugsby’s Marshes, East Greenwich. Smart money moved east: more waste ground, fewer regulations. Kensington was covertly decanting into the kind of ghost town left behind by gold-rush fever or a dry oil well. The stucco was as frosty as ever, villas and mansion blocks intact and unravished, but the former inhabitants had been priced out, or replaced by remote investors. The Royal Borough was a manifestation of Monopoly mania, a property-speculating, money-laundering board game: the right to buy and not occupy.

  The commentator Simon Jenkins, who lives in the area, described the recent changes: ‘Luxury cars untaxed in basements. Gated “communities” are like eerie sets for The Stepford Wives. Streets are empty at night … This part of London is like Hamelin after the piper left.’

  The Earls Court Exhibition Centre, overtaken by the O2 Arena (and the novelty of the Jubilee Line station forced through for the millennium-night fiasco), is deader than Brompton Cemetery. It enjoyed a final flourish by taking on the volleyball originally advertised for the Olympic Park in Stratford. The Earls Court pool, an indoor sea comprising more than two million gallons of water, once home of the Boat Show, has been transferred to the ExCel Centre, alongside Royal Victoria Dock, in the eastern development zone. A bigger shed serviced by a newer, brighter railway. Tighter security and more space for arms fairs, displays of weaponry, manacles, cattle prods.

  Earls Court faces demolition. And potential development into the standard blend of residential flats, retail outlets and a convention centre. On 3 July 2013 Boris Johnson approved the plans and waved through a proposal for four new ‘villages’ and a virtual ‘high street’.

  We couldn’t find a corner shop for ice cream and candy bars and energy drinks to keep Andrew ticking over. Forced to pull away from the comforting tracks of the Overground, we followed the curve of Eardley Crescent, another dusty passage of abandoned and now skeletal Christmas trees and communal houses that gave nothing away. I suggested a minor detour to the former Brompton Road Underground Station, but the swollen-footed film-maker was having none of it. He was eager to tr
amp on towards the oasis of the Westfield supermall in Shepherd’s Bush, where he had heard that fast food of every nation was readily available. And that our disreputable appearance would not disqualify us from vacant stools in the street of snacks. He might also break his habit of pissing the mortar from the bricks of shady corners and avail himself of a stall in one of Westfield’s admirable toilet facilities.

  Our disorientation, afternoon slump, was due in part to the way that the Overground walk was becoming confused by the layers of a labyrinthine underground system pulling us in the wrong direction, away to the east. I’d never been able to work out the best method for navigating a route through Earls Court, where all the coloured spaghetti strands of Tube lines knot and unravel. The abandoned Brompton Road Station seemed to hold a clue, if not a TfL minotaur. Its status was unconfirmed. Development pitches were in the air; a sale for £53 million was mentioned. It was also said, as part of the myth, that Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s cracked deputy, had been brought here for interrogation. The disused station was commandeered by the Ministry of Defence, who initially favoured an interval as a heritage attraction: before the site passed to property speculators for re-visioning as executive flats. The Qatar royal family, who never tire of rescuing spare slabs of London, and an unnamed Ukrainian billionaire, are among the rumoured purchasers. The MoD spokesperson, Andrew Morrison, is at pains to stress that the authorities take their role as ‘custodian of the nation’s history’ very seriously. Monies raised from the sale will be returned to the defence budget.