London Overground Read online

  Art is more knowing in the Hoxton/Shoreditch quadrant. An audience is required. The presence of the railway stimulates the compulsion to leave your mark, to address passive travellers – who will, most of them, be heads down, swimming in the shallow digital puddle. In earlier, braver times, the hit was to deface the actual trains, aping New York City, junk for art’s sake; the visceral thrill of beating the goons, night-raiding, signing your guilt in eyeball-affronting capital letters. Now railside infiltrators are out of it, high, drunk, fleeing the police in incidents like the death of promising young cricketer Tom Maynard; on the tracks near Wimbledon Park Station, electrocuted, hit by a train. Or some unfortunate caught under helicopter beams and running towards disaster. Or white-van pirates stripping overhead wires and electrical cables for their scrap value. And bringing about more rail delays and suspensions.

  A standard post-Banksy piece has taken up residence near Hoxton Station – which is not really Hoxton at all. True Hoxton is a street market, illegitimate, pisshead, traditional (but under revision, café-bar for grease caff). True Hoxton is the birthplace of the Kray twins (with all the slipstreaming myths of bare-knuckle hardmen, spivs, deserters). It belongs on the west side of Kingsland Road, cluster-flats in which to vanish among legends of world-class shoplifters like Shirley Pitts, and old-school villains emerging from wartime rubble to an afterlife of ghosted memoirs, the rosy glow of self-aggrandizing fictions dictated to bored scribes. But Overground stations make as free with geography as the namers of new educational establishments. Want Brighton University? Try Hastings. And don’t expect to find a cruise liner moored at Surrey Quays.

  But we can console ourselves that politicians are beginning to take an interest in this blighted zone. Richard Benyon, reputed to be ‘Britain’s richest MP’, acquired a stake in the consortium buying the New Era housing estate in Hoxton. He delivered the warning that tenants can now expect to join the Big Society by paying a proper ‘market rent’. A hike of three times the present amount. Mr Benyon, whose constituency is Newbury in Berkshire, served as Environment Minister in the Coalition until October 2013. When public outrage became loud and visible to the media, attracting Russell Brand and others to the Hoxton barricades, the Benyon family company decided to sell its stake. Mr Benyon’s own modest estate includes a stately home surrounded by 3,500 acres of woodland.

  Ironies multiply to the point where they cancel each other out in a drizzle of white noise. Competitive Hoxton graffiti is the acceptable face of vandalism. Where a tolerated station beggar should sit against the wall, we find the stencilled cartoon version: wool cap, accusing eyes, slumped, supporting a handmade placard. NEED MONEY FOR BEER & WEED.

  The sad coin collector on the street outside the pub on Columbia Road, the one I noticed on another Christmas walk, when unsold trees were being grabbed by customers who kept their nerve to the very last moment, was too smashed to rescue his tipped beaker. Pound coins had run away. The sentiment of this tableau, and the knowledge that the pub was a recruiting place for vagrant children, like Sarah Wise’s The Italian Boy, who would be drugged with a mix of porter and laudanum, before being stripped and drowned in a well, had me digging into my pockets. It doesn’t make much sense to support those who are already gone, while stepping around the professionals on their railway pitches. But I couldn’t bring myself to pension the Bishopsgate pavement artist, with the healthy dog on his lap, when I heard him rattling away on his mobile phone, fixing an evening meet in a Shoreditch bar.

  On the brick stack to which an iron gate has been hooked to protect the entrance to a set of Shoreditch railway arches, there is a spray piece, communally achieved, one artist working over the residue of the last. A stripped black boxer, harsh light polishing his raised gloves, anchors the composition. He is superimposed on the present queen.

  At the point where the Overground sweeps west like a suddenly broad river over Kingsland Road, there is a special island, a triangle formed by Shoreditch High Street, Great Eastern Street, Old Street. A hidden zone-within-a-zone. A Gulliver landfall waiting for its Swift. The railway makes this corral into a spectacle of permitted gazing: decommissioned Underground carriages on flat roofs, self-consciously cinematic figures moving behind the frames of naked windows, monster murals of fabulous beasts, secret yards with romantic smokers at wet tables. Spectators on the Overground have only a few moments, before the train recrosses the road for the Shoreditch station. With that soothing recorded voice prompting you to rise from your seat, ready for the flickering red button that must be pressed for release into the world of pedestrians. By way of concourse-haunting charity muggers, flower sellers, generic coffee empowerment. And hawkers of black-wrapped cosmetic packs with smiles they can’t switch off.

  Sometimes, as with so many elements of this precious rail service, the recorded voice goes out of synch. So that, sliding in above the pop-up shops of Shoreditch, we will be warned to prepare ourselves for Whitechapel. Then, vanishing into a tunnel, the Whitechapel approach is flagged as Shadwell. The tentative reality of London dissolves; without official confirmation, anywhere is everywhere. There are no uniformed humans onboard, no reassuring presences on the platform. TfL employees cluster at the automatic ticket barriers, ready to challenge defaulters or to open gates for bona fide travellers refused by the filtering machinery of the ticket-swallowing exit.

  The covert Shoreditch zone, when we followed it on the day of the Kötting walk, felt quite distinct and divorced from everything else on that run between Haggerston and the plunge beneath the Thames at Wapping. On Rivington Street, in 1968, the anti-psychiatrists around R. D. Laing and David Cooper, along with the usual suspects of that time, established their anti-university, a cultural black hole far more powerful than it appeared to be at the time, drawing so many strands into this railway-shadowed margin of the City. Without acknowledging the relationship, they honoured the first Elizabethan theatres, the Hoxton asylums, a shifting borderland. The premises at 49 Rivington Street were being occupied at the very moment I arrived in Hackney.

  It was an endgame as much as a beginning, a consequence of the gathering at the Roundhouse in Camden in 1967, the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence). Potential students paid £8 to sign up, with a further ten shillings (50p) for individual courses. No diplomas or degrees were on offer. There might or might not be talks by Yoko Ono, Alex Trocchi, C. L. R. James, Robin Blackburn, Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing. John Latham, sculptor-philosopher, book-burning heretic, was a numinous presence. David Cooper spoke about radically changing the ‘rules of the game’, breaking the nuclear family out of its cage. The nominated building was bleak, unwanted. The aura was soot-stained, nicotine-choked, passive aggressive. Guardedly articulate Vietnam War refuseniks delivered most of the TV interviews. They met documentary interrogators with a modulated drone of theoretical resistance. Tieless in uniform black shirts and drab corduroy.

  Black Mountain College, London Free School, Kingsley Hall, Situationism, Black Power, Sigma, International Times, Arts Lab, psychogeography: all the current arrows of influence thudded into this peeling Shoreditch door. They predicted the coming shift, a mass migration to the east. The anti-university, flaring for a season and fading from sight, was the first intimation of that exodus from Notting Hill. Even before histories of the period were adequately researched and composed, ephemeral documents from this countercultural flare would be offered for sale in the galleries and retro boutiques of Hoxton.

  The Shoreditch look on the day of the Kötting walk was original Rivington Street grunge given the kiss of life by smart, genre-promiscuous entrepreneurs: odd chairs and random tables, heaps of books as set-dressing. Skinny trousers. No socks. Bright shoes. Pavement roll-ups. English as a second language. Stapled magazines as style, not content. Unthreatening urban vamps, booted and leather-jacketed, and bloodless youths with fringe-beard manifestos, skittering between endlessly revised appointments, yelping into invisible phones, swept effortlessly past u
s, as we puffed and panted up the tragic dunes of age and alienation.

  The transformation of the Shoreditch/Hoxton reservation had been gradual, barely perceptible; it took time for developers to work their way north from the old Truman’s Brewery on Brick Lane to Bethnal Green Road. The railway was part of it, the functional elegance of Victorian arches and catacomb tunnels became a symbol of vulnerability; a battleground between antiquarians, lovers of the fabric of place, and thrusting futurists. The argument resolved in an interim colony of inessential shops and five-a-side football pitches for group bonding by City traders.

  Unrequired corners of once-active meat or vegetable markets are ceded to small-timers for a show of handbags, costume jewellery, vinyl LPs, heritage postcards, grainy bread and brownie briquettes. Neighbourhood bars are constructed around vintage photographs of bohemianism. Georgian properties are restored by name artists to a pitch of authenticity that was never part of the original settlement. Conceptual wealth is made visible, investment silos for the privileged gulag of the City: jagged skyline like a fever graph made manifest in glass and proud steel. Dirty money was never so bright, so blatant. So protected by the politics of know-nothing quiescence. Disgraced bankers are shamed with bonuses, then redeployed like sacked football managers. The bigger the scandal the heftier the premium. Being sentenced by a court – rarely, rarely – is a miraculous cure for cancer, senility, Alzheimer’s, dead hearts.

  Shoreditch/Hoxton, by the mid-1990s, was black-windowed, clubland ecstatic, sweat-burrowed with gay saunas, leather bars. The railway arches were adaptable, many exploited their current emptiness and offered secure parking for nightbirds. Right alongside the brick gatepost with the glistening portrait of the stripped and rippling black boxer was a cave. The kind of retreat, or private space, at an oblique angle to the traffic of mundane London, in which the footballer Justin Fashanu hanged himself in May 1998. His life was complicated and increasingly messy, his moment in the sun was over. He had been cruising in the male-on-male Hoxton bars. He faced an alleged sexual-assault charge in Maryland. A warrant had been issued for his arrest. Brian Clough, his former manager at Nottingham Forest, shipped him out when Fashanu declared himself to be homosexual. There were fabricated tabloid affairs with Tory MPs. His brother, John, the Wimbledon bruiser, had broken off communication. The body was discovered on a dim Saturday afternoon, between markets, between parties.

  They have a swimming pool on the roof of Shoreditch House, the private members’ club now occupying a couple of floors of what was once a tea warehouse. Part of the remit, in terms of sophisticated entertainment, is to promote events that touch on local history and heritage.

  I gave a talk in a bamboo bar where the gins kept coming on silver trays and the Ditchers were alert and responsive to alternative myths of place. One heavy presence, tieless in a loose designer suit that gave off sparks as he moved, blocked a doorway, swilling pints of fruit-topped cocktail and grousing. When the time for questions arrived, he grabbed the microphone and fisted it towards his broken cosmetic snarl like a liquorice toothpick. History, he said, was pigs’ bollocks dipped in sherbet. But if you want to listen to … Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago, Tales of Mean Streets, Arnold Circus, Charles Dickens, furniture sweatshops, bagels and … blah-blah-blah: OK, fine. Each to his own. But these are not, my friend, the realities of the moment. You know fuck all about that. About the rewrite of territory, the rescue of the old shitheaps, for which he was responsible: a player, an investor. He put his money where his mouth was. And his tongue was blistered with diamonds.

  At first, the bright young women running the gig didn’t know how to play him. He swayed and staggered in a spray of expensive eau de toilette and class contempt. When the liberal mutters started, he cranked up the volume, the obscenities, and looked for someone to hit. They manoeuvred him out. He got his hands around the organizer’s throat. The consensus was: kick him senseless and drop him in the pool.

  From the rooftop oasis, new Shoreditch was a jackpot of honeyed light: roof parties, showroom windows behind which products were being launched, deals celebrated, fortunate lives lived. Railway margins. Discontinued lines. More walls to deface. The modest dead, keeping their own counsel, crouched in pissy doorways, out of reach. The violence we used to encounter, of rubbled wastelots, subsistence prostitution, faded away, subsumed in more complex interactions behind concierged desks.

  When V. S. Pritchett introduced a new edition of Arthur Morrison’s The Hole in the Wall in 1956, he identified the riddle exercising the drunk Shoreditch House property developer. Morrison’s tale of Ratcliffe Highway and the riverside reaches grew from the ground we were now headed towards on our walk. Do the wounds of the past heal? How deeply are we implicated in historic crimes? ‘There was a London like this,’ Pritchett wrote, ‘seedy. Clumsy and hungry, murderous and sentimental. Those shrieks were heard. There were those even more disturbing silences in the night. Docklands, where the police used to go in threes, has its authentic commemoration.’ A book is a city. Pritchett echoing Morrison echoes Thomas De Quincey. A never-ending chain that pragmatists, schemers, improvers, grabbers will always try to snap.

  I’m told they call this section of the line the ‘Hipster Rollercoaster’. Shoreditch High Street Station is a retail concession buried under a wobble of temporary boutiques. This was once a smart notion, the metroflash equivalent of filling the gaps in dying high streets (made redundant by out-of-town supermalls) with charity shops. Until it became a charity to step through the door: that smell of posthumous bed linen, the lab-rat plastic of empty DVD cases, lumpy, book-sized VHS tapes waiting to come back into fashion (it’s happening). Pop-up shops are no longer Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas flashing attitude in 1993. Tracey has moved on to Emin International, an outlet managed by her aunt, and trading in exclusive artist-branded product.

  The current Shoreditch stack, a profoundly dispiriting gantry calling itself, with no sense of absurdity, a ‘Pop-Up Mall’, features outlets for Calvin Klein, Farah (Vintage), NikeiD, Puma, Levi’s: columns of names like the backdrop for an aftermatch interview with Wayne Rooney. You have to push through a thick fly-curtain made from strips of yellow plastic, offering the potential for interestingly distorted colour photographs. Kötting as a blood-red psychopath. He stares across the road at the excesses of Shoreditch House. At the relief model of a white swan, S-necked on a high panel, a memorial slab for a brewery and for so many demolished public houses.

  Descending to the station entrance, we are blown against a mesh fence jangling with padlocks, a brazen orchard customized with loving messages. MY HENRY. The fence establishes the point at which the railway zone refuses access to inappropriate pedestrians. It is under option, awaiting the next tranche of finance. Blank grey walls lift from a tolerated field of cinders.

  Wall art intensifies, punkish, playful, or hoping to be invited inside. Queen Elizabeth II, with her postage-stamp face, is ripped to naked brick. Flowered Mexican skulls. A plaster cast with a gaping bandaged mouth: the death mask of William Blake. NEVER FORGET. And then, on one empty lot, a troop of hushed, camera-lofting urbanists, fake-fur’d, leopard-printed, stalled beneath an endwall, messianic portrait of Usain Bolt. They are being lectured, authoritatively, by a spray-paint scholar. Bolt is realistically rendered, speared by a psychedelic shower of heavenly beams: as if a high sun were blazing through a stained-glass window on a new prophet. The lecturer’s critique compared and contrasted lesser pieces, gryphons and scaly apocalyptic beasts, with the religiose virtuosity of the Olympic demigod. Mere tags were not tolerated. Amateur daubs were scorned or patronized. The tour moved on through the constantly replenished open-air gallery of Shoreditch and Brick Lane. Every demolition was a fresh opportunity. Every enclosure. Every corrugated-iron fence. The orbital railway, without fuss or expenditure, had become the patron of London’s most active display of walls, recorded and evaluated, but as yet beyond the reach of the next Saatchi. Although Saatchi, his hands around the throat of Nigell
a Lawson, does feature on this great shifting Doom mural. Pixels of newsprint converted into something like a smudged frame from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio.

  My spirits revive at Hare Marsh, on the railway crossing opposite the old villains’ pub, the Carpenters Arms. This high-sided bridge has been a territorial marker for so many years. Emanuel Litvinoff in his memoir, Journey through a Small Planet, describes the bridge as a rite of passage, out of adolescence towards self-knowledge, another country. The author photograph on the back of the dustwrapper has the dapper Litvinoff posing, in two-button check suit, cravat, with hooded eyes, narrow sideburns, on the Cheshire Street steps of the bridge, heading south towards Whitechapel.

  The spread of the railway – all those tracks out of Liverpool Street, before they divide – is exhilarating. Anti-vandal devices, a rim of spinning fish hooks, confirm the impression of a border post, one of the more obscure entries to East Berlin. Litvinoff often spoke about how his family, his neighbours in the Fuller Street tenement, held to the sense of existing in a village, with Bethnal Green Road and Whitechapel Road as neighbouring townships, and the West End, Soho, Bloomsbury, more alien and remote than Warsaw, Kishinev, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.

  Fording the great riverine span of the tracks, down that narrow metal passage with the cacophony of sprayed tags and obscenities, was to experience one of London’s great viewing points. Nobody has made a monumental painting of the type Leon Kossoff delivered from his railway bridge at Willesden Junction. The tidal rush of curving tracks and the stumpy towers of the City against a darkening sky. The spinning hooks of the anti-vandal barrier were a tracery of thorns frozen into steel. Most of the new bridges on the Overground circuit are constructed to abort vision, deny ocular trespass. You’d need to be Usain Bolt or a seven-foot basketball player to get a glimpse of the restored line running from Dalston Junction to Haggerston. Where there is the ghost of a chance of craning on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of a train, they’ll add another course of bricks, dress the wall with a pelmet of blue board. Railways have to be heard, felt in the disturbed air.