London Overground Read online

  In 1853, in that remote boom-industrial age, the East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway changed its name to the North London Railway. The original line ventured from Camden Town to Poplar, linking arbitrary destinations in a way that opened new connections, fresh ways of reading the territory. In just the fashion that, in our own day, in my first years in London, the accident of the North London Line sweeping from the brown riverside at North Woolwich, by way of Camden Road (and Compendium Bookshop), to Kew Gardens, set the agenda for so many expeditions and family outings.

  In 1865 it was decided, the City and its money machines hungry as ever, and requiring a rapid infusion of clerks and functionaries, to pleach a branch line from Dalston Junction to Broad Street, a satellite of the Liverpool Street terminus. The new station thrived, expanding to nine platforms. Think of this status, in terms of short-haul colonialism, as being equivalent to the grander transactions of that launch pad of Empire, Tilbury Riverside: its cavernous baggage hall designed by Sir Edwin Cooper, its numerous platforms offering rapid transit to the heart of the metropolis. Think of the regiment of hopeful immigrants.

  The Dalston Junction to Broad Street espalier, away from the main line, thrived and remained in use – I was happy to take it – until 1986, that fateful year. Margaret Thatcher, who believed that anybody over the age of twenty riding on a bus, or enduring public transport, was a self-confessed loser, pariah, potential socialist, closed the link: with the claim that it was unpopular, no longer paying its way. She tore down Broad Street and got on with the real business of making a chunk of the City into a pastiched New York: ice rink, status art, golf equipment, James Bond car raffles, wine bars that looked like tomato sheds. We lost stations and gained hubs: the slower the service, the more time marooned on concourses, the better the shopping opportunities. So take to your cars: as our modest commute to the City was terminated, the M25 orbital motorway was opened, the ribbon cut on 29 October 1986.

  For the next twenty-four years, up to the point where the Olympic imperative demanded a major linking hub (never brought into play) at Dalston Junction, the stretch of elevated railway running down to Shoreditch remained in limbo. The old Dalston Junction Station was reduced to rubble. And, in time, the Victorian theatre alongside it would follow. I thought of a charming remark by Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, after she had failed some minor academic challenge in the neighbourhood: ‘Gott strafe Dalston Junction.’ Hackney Council, like the bloody knights sent galloping to Canterbury by Henry II, took her literally.

  Almost as soon as access was forbidden, invasion began: schoolkids looking for adventure, muggers and street-feeding Apache opportunists scanning twilight pedestrians from a perch above the Middleton Road bridge, drug providers and their twitchy clients, rough sleepers. And the usual drift of psychogeographers auditioning an evolving wilderness.

  And so, yet again, the non-space, the zone that is unmentioned, no part of any official development package, becomes the only space, covert, returned to nature, half wilderness, forbidden. It was difficult back then, and near impossible now, to find a secret way, truly green, free of cars, and outside time. Saplings grew into small woods, railside forest screens. Wildlife and lowlife multiplied. Contraband was dumped overnight. You could pick through the trash of a new morning and recover your emptied handbag, books or papers not worth burning.

  It would have been a great thing if the elevated track had been allowed to complete a circuit of London, without trains, and with the sort of edgeland fecundity that Richard Mabey celebrates: mind-food for free, a walk in parallel, and above, the traffic of the working city.

  After close to a quarter of a century of fruitful neglect, development caught up: Legoland ziggurats, light-stealing towers, investment silos. And the launch of London Overground. The direct connection to Liverpool Street and the City was no longer possible, lost to Broadgate Circus. Now City workers and Hackney folk wanting to make the connection with the Underground service at Liverpool Street were decanted at Shoreditch and invited to make a detour through Spitalfields. Every rail halt, every Tesco Metro, every petrol station, every cash machine had its resident beggar with dog and cup.

  If I could no longer walk above the city – I left those adventures to a new breed of infiltrators, risk-takers – I could plod beneath the full circuit of London Overground, with the ‘final link’ being completed on 9 December 2012. It was easy to imagine this necklace of garages, fish farms, bakeries, convenience cafés, cycle-repair shops, Minder lock-ups, stretching right around London. If the M25 was the significant geography for the Thatcher era, a landscape of decommissioned hospitals converted into upmarket compounds with no history, then the new railway, which was not new at all, but a device for boosting property values, looked like the right walk for our present doleful period.

  On the day that I took the Overground train back to Haggerston from New Cross Gate, after my aborted Canterbury pilgrimage, I had a glimmering of what my next project should involve. A walk around the circuit of the elevated railway, that accidental re-mapping of London, in a single day. That’s what it had to be. If it could be managed. And if Andrew Kötting, the film-maker and performer, could be persuaded to join me. As foil, informant, partner in absurdity. A shamanic bear in unconvincing human disguise recently returned from his mountain hut in the Pyrenees.

  Haggerston to Wapping

  The diagrammatic outline of the London Overground is a flaccid rugby ball that some large person around Caledonian Road has sat on, very firmly, squeezing a nipple-bud out beyond Willesden Junction. Thirty-three stations and thirty-five miles to tramp. With inevitable and unforeseen detours and false steps. Would we make it in a single day, if I failed to get Kötting on the hoof before ten o’clock? He was camped in the suburban obscurity of Forest Hill and would be cruising across town on his large motorbike. If he wasn’t sleeping in a ditch, a forest, on a beach, he didn’t spring from his chrysalis pouch at first light. On the Swandown film, when we pedalled a plastic swan from Hastings to Hackney, I fretted, watching drifts of autumnal mist burn off across river meadows, that lovely alchemical redness dissipating, while the boys in the camper van argued over burnt bacon and rancid socks.

  Andrew has been staying with his favoured photographer, Nick Gordon Smith, the man who shot Swandown and the delirious and eccentric round-Britain adventure of Gallivant. Gallivant was my initial experience of Kötting and I was captured from the bizarre opening sequence, which was clearly designed to boot audience expectations out of the window. A bearded black weatherman in a stiff suit signs and deaf-mutters against contradictory subtitles, sending up all sorts of politically correct conventions, while at the same time summarizing the theme, the plot and the subversive poetry of the voyage we are about to undertake, in the company of a feisty grandmother and an astonishingly present child: Eden. Andrew’s daughter rises above her Joubert’s syndrome disadvantages with miraculous bird-throated whistlings. Even as a babe Eden had been wired so that brain anomalies could be mapped, malfunctions scanned and plotted. Now she embarked, coming and going from the Gallivant shoot around the ragged fringes of our island, on her accidental odyssey.

  Most of Kötting’s work exploited this model: identify the journey, press-gang the necessary characters, get them moving (dragging swan lures or inflatable fathers). Arrange collisions, raid archives and reverse engineer meaning. These were great films to experience, at least once, with your eyes closed. Soundscapes were layered and crafted against the jumps and gestures and neurotic kineticism of the visuals. With the director swinging in and out of frame, plunging from rocks into a wild sea, licking the lens.

  They say of Samuel Beckett, one of Kötting’s touchstones, that he was loveable: despite the terrifying silences, the burning eyes, the drink. Trembling actors were brought to breakdown by failure to satisfy Sam’s demands, his refusal to answer questions of interpretation. Sam the inimitable. He would drift away on one of his walks, exiting Sloane Square in the general direction
of World’s End. Where he recalled the worst of London days: poverty, skull-splitting pressure, an ugly and indifferent city. Kötting’s troop felt much the same: bring it on, captain. All the mud, the madness. ‘Beckett wasn’t a saint at all,’ said the theatre designer Jocelyn Herbert. ‘And thank God he wasn’t.’

  A day tracking a railway through London barely merited an entry in the Kötting catalogue of absurdity, but Andrew appreciated my notion of spillage; how one project leaks incontinently – and immediately – into the next. I have a prophetic disc known as ‘Lull’s Device’. Three wheels held in place by a central pin. ‘Traditionally used to stimulate discussions among circles of friends gathered together for spiritual and self-improvement. It is not a toy. It should not be done more than once a day.’ I agitated the discs to cast our railway walk: IGNORANCE, LAUGHTER, REMORSE. That sounded about right.

  In our part of London, when floor-camping with another of his faithful and tested collaborators, the Russian-bearded audio designer Philippe Ciompi, Andrew liked to swim punishing lengths of London Fields Lido, pushing against the morning cabal of skullcapped and begoggled water cyclists. Ploughing chlorine furrows, before the day’s duties, was a welcome penance, a contemporary substitute for beating the bounds and other border-affirming rituals of place. Dawn athletes do it in controlled spaces for which you must pay an entrance fee – and accept, as collateral damage, the patronage of councils and health professionals who boast of their benevolence (quietly forgetting the padlocked shells of former pools, the ghost cathedrals of inconvenient survivors). Andrew told me that by choice at this season of the year he would take himself off to his shed, his recovered shelter in the Pyrenees. And he would go alone, with a sleeping bag, deep into the forest. Where he would howl. Howl. In mortal anguish. Howl like a wolf. Howl for the world. For his awareness of the melting human candle. In the dead hours of the night. Under brilliant and heartless stars. Howl for it. Eternity. The Abyss. ‘But I’m always in tune,’ he said. ‘And the wolves reply.’

  Andrew’s entrance that February morning, bursting on set, crashing through the door, motorcycle helmet under arm, canvas straps across broad chest like Jack Palance as a Mexican bandit, was marred by picking the wrong house. The man has difficulties with numbers. Our neighbours, terrified, denied all knowledge of my existence, and backed away behind the sofa. Boots on, fretting to go, I heard the disturbance and went outside, to find myself clamped in a bear hug of scratchy overnight beard and steaming cloth. The marathon-swimming film-maker had his suits built, not tailored, by his gifted wife, lover, collaborator, the long-suffering Leila. The orbital outfit was project-appropriate for an H. G. Wells time-travelling romp, an Everest assault from the good old days. The jacket was sculpted from thick asbestos cloth, bullet-buttoned. Tubular trousers were thornproofed for barging through hedges. After a day’s sweaty tramp the suit would be freestanding, an auxiliary tent. The look was rounded off with dark glasses and the sort of red cravat favoured by Oxbridge ramblers and the heartier breed of plein air sketcher. Decorative paisley cuffs were folded around the sleeves to make a single all-embracing garment. When the cloth stiffened as it dried, Andrew’s arms would set like plaster of Paris. I’d have to cut up his meat and feed him when we stopped for breakfast.

  It was late, but we were camera-loaded and ready for that big beast, the city. The living metropolitan organism panted as we patted the flank of a stone serpent in a strip of permitted park, and paused for a moment to experience the new Haggerston Station, which modelled itself, with a modicum of tact, on the retrospectively acknowledged achievement of blocky modernism in such Underground halts as Park Royal. The square chimney elevation of Haggerston in an understated taupe-grey nudged us, quite gently, in the direction of Felix Lander’s 1936 Park Royal ventilation tower. With the implication that our swallowed Hackney village was now a born-again suburb, twinned with Acton (but lacking the brewery, allotments, prison). The London Transport designer Frank Pick, on the presentation of the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1936, described the new stations as ‘punctuating the suburbs’. Pick, it is said, haunted London by day and night. An obsessive. Another of those figures seduced by the mysteries lying behind almost-familiar places. David Lawrence in Bright Underground Spaces, his 2008 book on the station architecture of Charles Holden, wrote about how Pick ‘immersed himself in local peculiarities’.

  Local peculiarities in Haggerston have been taken care of by the commission of a tile mural, flanked by lifts, in the open concourse of the station. This conceit by Tod Hanson is called ‘The Elliptical Switchback’, and is a downloaded homage to the astronomer Edmond Halley, a Haggerston boy. And also, in its schematic obligation to soft modernism, a nod to 1951’s Festival of Britain. Halley’s comet loops around a futurist lodestone against a multi-spotted, Hirst-poxed backdrop. Halley’s distant traces, like his Haggerston manor house, have been reduced to dust. His comet, visiting us with the frequency of ministers capable of carrying forward reform without basking in a rictus of self-congratulation, has given its name to a local nursery school. Hanson’s elliptical hula hoop, looking like radio waves circling the transmitter in that old BBC ident, are here translated into bands of other-worldly light making haloes around the pencil of the mosque at the end of Whiston Road.

  ‘Tod Hanson is interested in a world over-amplified and speeding up,’ his website asserts. ‘The telescoping of industrialised environment, the consumer spectacle, celebration, delirium, waste and war through time.’

  The far wall, beyond the mural, is loud with consumer spectacle, popular books and theatre events attractive to the passing throng: a blitz of posters above a rack of bikes.

  The floor has a magic carpet advertising the City Mills development that has replaced the long-established neighbourhood estate. BRAND NEW 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM HOMES. REGISTER YOUR INTEREST FOR THE NEXT RELEASE. Colourful panels flag up a promised street-market-browsing, art-snacking lifestyle that comes with the purchase. This station, the promotional floor implies, is nothing but an atrium to the better life at City Mills. Which is not in the City and was never a mill.

  We begin among winter ruins. The sentence of death on a community provokes a final spasm of image-making: banners, meetings, questions that are not questions but broken statements of grievance. The fates are unkind. Who can be blamed? Kötting, in a publication produced to accompany a show of his daughter’s paintings, said: ‘After quarter of an hour, no one can observe another’s despair without impatience. So we invent things to do and move on.’ How often do we find ourselves at the back of a public meeting, drumming our heels and barely listening to torrents of statistics, specifics of corruption and neglect, illegal or immoral imprisonment, laws subverted, families unhoused. We yawn. ‘Darkness of old times around them,’ Blake wrote in The French Revolution, ‘utters loud despair.’

  The wall art on the condemned Haggerston estate, condemned for being too close to the canal, too convenient for the railway, is outside because there is no inside left. A silent oasis with a few stubborn souls holding out. Crystal icicles barring empty window frames. A handwritten boast in black crayon on whitewashed bricks in the empty shell of an abandoned flat: CCTV IN OPERATION 24 HR.

  The drawings are of red-eyed vampires grinning and swaying in a death dance, figures in a subversive tapestry of eviction: sunflowers, chickens, three-clawed shark-head deformities. Drunk on apocalypse. Paper tatters peeling and windblown are stripped away, exulting in impermanence. Unsponsored, unapproved, unapologetic. If the lives of the flat-dwellers had been undisturbed, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be walking briskly south, heading towards Shoreditch, too much the aesthete of blight.

  Striding alongside Kötting, and aware that the clock was ticking, we invaded one of the abandoned buildings, simply because we could, because there was no one to stop us. The last holdouts were barricaded in crannies and alcoves, behind chipboard, without a chink of light. The developers cut water and electricity as a first move.
/>   On the first floor, with access to a balcony bricked off by a temporary wall, we find a space occupied by squatters: empty bottles of E&J Brandy beside plastic flagons of Olympic-branded Coca-Cola: the twilight cocktail of choice. Window panels have been washed over in aquamarine and muddy ochre and brought to a painterly finish. A couple of young builders engage with Kötting in harmless banter and then we move on.

  The road to Hoxton, our second station, is a confusion of recycled container stacks, new-build flats, and converted warehouses with spectral trade signs for veneering operations long since vanished. Rail zone is still settling into its identity as a generator for investment, a Viagra overload for property prices. The high railway under its pergola of wires. The compulsory blue-bicycle rack. Rescued cobbles. The heady waft of proper coffee. If you move a little to the west, the traffic stutter of Kingsland Road, that old London narrative, is still present, but revised by the remorseless swoosh of elevated torpedo trains. On many of the tributary roads, white bicycles have been hooked to railings: a procession of memorials to the madness of colliding forms of transport. An outfit repairing computers has rebranded itself to pick up on the buzz of the emerging railway corridor: APPLE REPAIR STATION. The sign mimicks the red circle and blue band of London Overground.

  The railway feels like a set of ladders laid on water, as our ancestors once arranged precarious walkways across the fens. Hangars of naked brick, low lit and plain-tabled: so many canteens for City foot soldiers.

  We stop to examine a flat-topped plinth decorated with a grey laurel wreath, a vegetable version of the Overground logo in relief. Railways and cycles of disaster: derailments, fires, failed signals, exhausted or fugue-susceptible drivers. IN MEMORY OF NORTH LONDON RAILWAYMEN WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR, 1914–1919. Does this mean that the war went on a year more for railwaymen? Or did they die when it was over, being returned to a different uniform, a different set of trenches and earthworks? Revised and improved stations like King’s Cross are embarrassed about their duty to remember, the truly terminal aspect of a transport hub; they downgrade or hide away the lists of the war dead.