London Overground Page 7

  Peckham improper, the definitive street of small shops, rank meat, trade, movement, goods, deals, arrives so suddenly and is so charged with bounce and collision, leftover civic structures signifying some dissipated claim to being a centre, that we miss it entirely; moving through in hot debate of our own, without pausing to record Peckham Rye Station. Thereby undoing the immaculate procession of our circular walk and disqualifying the premise of the image vine. (I charged back, a day or two later, to commit a selfie. By then Kötting was an absence, a loud ghost sprayed somewhere on the nether reaches of Old Kent Road.)

  The station on Rye Lane was the grandest one so far encountered on our circuit; it required an etching press, not a digital camera. The nudge of recognition came from its association with the Lower Lea Valley and midwinter walks down the Northern Sewage Outfall. The architect was Charles Henry Driver, who was also responsible for Abbey Mills Pumping Station, that yellow-brick Moorish fantasy intruding on the Greenway path, breaking clouds, diverting storms, to disguise its legitimate function: housing engines to refine and reduce shit. Pumping stations and railway stations are in the same business: evacuation.

  Peckham Rye Station, I subsequently discovered, was the epicentre of a major row about development. The promoters were in the grip of what they described as a ‘Vision’. They started calling the commuter station a ‘hub’. Suspect viruses advanced down the line. The journalist Alex Proud said that Peckham was now suffering from ‘Shoreditchification’; entrepreneurial ‘hipsters’ and carpetbaggers in dark glasses were descending from Orange Line carriages to curate the buzz that leads to increased rents and spurious retail projects. These activities were forcing out the original (if not aboriginal) settlers. Network Rail owns the station, the land beneath the forecourt and all the arches leading to Bellenden Road. Following the Shoreditch/Hoxton example, they mean to make the best of it. So Peckham’s railway zone was rebranded: The Gateway. It now sounded like a New Age religion.

  We strain eagerly uphill, enthused by the way the short passage between the lowlands of railway Peckham, as tribal, immersive, loud, watchful as the former Kingsland Waste Market, and the nursery slopes of established Peckham Rye, demonstrates such a leap in real-estate values. Even a minor physical elevation comes with entitlement to upward social mobility. You don’t need oxygen, but the modest ascent uses the Overground as a cultural funicular.

  Muriel Spark might have composed The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but she’d be cut adrift in the contemporary action around the station, the railway lowlands. She treated the working district, in her slender, sharp-witted 1960 novel, as suitable turf for satire.

  ‘Dougal turned sideways in his chair and gazed out of the window at the railway bridge; he was now a man of vision with a deformed shoulder. “The world of Industry,” said Dougal, “throbs with human life. It will be my job to take the pulse of the people and plumb the industrial depths of Peckham.”’

  This horned Dougal, a genial Lucifer, presents himself as a teaser-out of local particulars, a scout in dim municipal libraries. He makes copies of unreliable facts, he raids friable newsprint. He has Mendelssohn composing his ‘Spring Song’ in Ruskin Park. And Boadicea committing suicide on Peckham Rye, ‘probably where the bowling green is now’. He validates a dull present by inventing a ripe past.

  Peckham Rye has chosen Bellenden Road as its engine of regeneration. A five-minute stroll from the Overground station. Tributaries with Hampstead aspirations: Elm Grove, Holly Grove, Blenheim Grove. The estate agent’s tactic of trifling with selected aspects of history that Spark exposes in her affectionate ridiculing of the pretensions of hilltop suburbia are extant in the rapid evolution of Bellenden Road into an elective Montmartre. Pavement cafés. Community bookshop. Authentic artisans stepping aside so that their warehouses and gated courtyards can be occupied by artists and printmakers. There is a well-kept sign pointing out that Bellenden Road was ‘formerly Victoria Terrace’. A Victorian advertisement, like a supersize trade card, has been restored on an endwall: PRINTING OFFICE. FOR BUSINESS BUILDING. ESTD 1884. Here is an advertisement advertising heritage. And asserting the pedigree of the survivor.

  In 1998, at the time of the conception of his Angel of the North, Antony Gormley had a studio here. Knighted now, a sculptor of international consequence, Gormley has followed the railway to the hub of hubs at King’s Cross, the ultimate Eurozone of future development. Back then, I walked from Hackney to Peckham with a commission to produce an essay in response to the Angel. Blake was part of the attraction, his tree of celestial beings. Peckham angels were infusions of light, evanescent, but no more extraordinary than the colonies of parakeets in Wanstead. Less noisy perhaps. Alexander Gilchrist in The Life of Blake, first published in 1863, describes that famous episode: ‘On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it was, as he in after years related, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he had his first vision. Sauntering along, the boy looked up and saw a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars.’

  Gormley’s office-workshop, off Bellenden Road, shared a yard with the studio of the artist Tom Phillips. Phillips had been plundering the past, very fruitfully, by working over a Victorian novel by William Hurrell Mallock called A Human Document. Pages of starchy narrative were defaced, isolated phrases emphasized, colour and pattern-making employed, to chart an adventure in concrete poetry. Phillips called the project A Humument. The original book was found in Peckham Rye, at Austin’s, a furniture repository and accidental mausoleum of dead stuff that might now be dignified as ‘architectural salvage’. Austin’s was a major South London resource, somewhere in character between the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill and Nunhead Cemetery. Graham Greene references the place. He was a premature Overground man, testing the adulterous liaisons of The End of the Affair on Clapham Common. He furnished rooms from Peckham warehouses. In the days when Greene was making a fetish of not being filmed, he agreed to be interviewed, so long as his face wasn’t shown: on a train.

  Phillips visited Austin’s in the company of R. B. Kitaj: School of London investigates a reserve collection of unoccupied beds, cupboards, chairs. A mad, uncurated heap of periods and submerged stories.

  ‘Ron, I’ll get the first book I find for thruppence and spend the rest of my life working on it.’

  That book was A Human Document. A suitable case for the William Burroughs treatment: the masking, slicing, excavating of covert truths. Rivers of phrases. Pools and puddles of words. Enochian signs. Hypnagogic undertow. On page 111: ‘a broken bridge and / photograph, betrayed … certain S-shaped iron ties’. Peckham as a site of divination, Mallock’s novel as a reconfigured I Ching. Mundane narrative redacted, by the wit of Phillips, into poetry.

  Like all of us who are responsive to place, determined to acquire a chorus of spiritual forebears, Phillips positions Austin’s ‘on Peckham Rye, where Blake saw his first angels and along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham’. And where Muriel Spark located her own mischievous archivist burrowing into legends of freaks and mermaids. ‘It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-being, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.’

  Phillips ripped through numerous copies of A Human Document. The first one cost almost nothing. The one I sold him in 1981 was £8 (postage included). He sent me a postcard of ‘Dante in his study’. The Peckham artist, the man on the far side of Gormley’s courtyard, began by simply scoring out words to uncover the skeleton beneath the obfuscations of the dead author’s controlling mind. Phillips used the found book as I was using London: a Tarot, a Book of Changes. He tapped it for confirmation: ‘wanted. a little white opening out of thought’.

  Tom’s companion on that first trawl through the furniture repository, Ron Kitaj, shared this attitude towards a form of art recoverable by way of books as mediums. He favoured prints made of poets, philosophers. Walter Benjamin. Ed Dorn. The one-eyed Robert Creeley. The wall-eyed Robert Duncan. Kitaj�
��s painting Cecil Court, London WC2 (The Refugees) is an epitaph for a vanishing trade, bookdealing. A paved beach and a court of windows. A memory-culture escaped from Hitler’s Germany. A strip of London real estate soon to be priced out of existence. The painting has the noise and smell of Yiddish Theatre.

  ‘I began to collect scarce books and pictures about this shadow world, the trail of which has not quite grown cold in my past life,’ Kitaj said. He prowled book alleys. And the furniture repositories of Peckham. Street markets. Junk pits. But the submerged libraries of dealers who store everything and curate nothing have gone. Swept away in the slipstream of the Ginger Line. Oxfam shelves, and all those other charity displays on dying high streets, will never supply the singular items with which Phillips and Kitaj worked, tracking wormholes through time. Some know-nothing dealer will be around to advise on what is to be kept: the bright, the current, the glossy pretenders. The rest is landfill. Austin’s of Peckham has become Austin’s Court, a nest of railway-connected flats. A desirable address. Old Alf Austin, the last of his line, had a catchphrase for first-time visitors to his warehouse. ‘Gentlemen, everything is for sale.’

  We sat in Gormley’s office above the Peckham yard where a regiment of sculpted avatars, forked and naked, endure the season’s showers, acquiring a weathered patina: Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens bursting from the pod. Antony Gormley is monkish, long-limbed, an abbot of intent at the heart of a multinational enterprise; a global brand whose product is the marketing of copies, reworkings, extensions of his own body, cast by his partner, Vicken Parsons, and her assistants, who are sterile-suited in white like a forensic team newly arrived at the scene of the crime. Photographs of these procedures have a fetishistic allure: yogic discipline, the whiteness of the bandages, clingfilm body wrappings emphasizing every bump and gnarl. Private rituals servicing public art, with each stage of the process documented like The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  The Angel of the North, Gormley told me, was the realization of a dream. The sculptor’s responses to my questions were considered, lengthy, and delivered after long pauses as he waits for the right word, the only word, to emerge from religious silence. I find my attention drifting to the window and the walk I made, up the hill to a small park, a stamp of green I associate with Blake’s vision. I sank into the infinite emptiness Gormley locates within the human shell. His thin spectacles. That ink-black hair. The interrogator’s quizzical tilt of head. The becoming stoop of a benevolent hierophant explaining years of rigorous discipline and practice to a layman with a hungry notebook.

  Gormley saw his Angel as ‘a concentrator of landscape’, privileged above motorway and Sir John Hall’s consumer hub, the Metro Centre. Why not in Peckham? Why not above the Ginger Line? The Angel, beginning as a peeling of self, travels out into the world to occupy a northern hilltop. Gormley’s need to present his giant as the final flare of the age of iron, with heavy engineering complemented by digital technologies, is understandable, but marginal to the presence of the thing itself. The Angel is a Blakean archetype, a rusted automaton whose roots drop down into native rock. The steel sculpture is the focus for ‘a field of energy’: the tired eyes and wandering minds of 90,000 motorists, sealed in their metal bubbles, driving past every day of the year. They look at the blind looker. Who cannot return their gaze. The Angel of the North is the symbol of a symbol, logo for regeneration. Rooted and imprisoned where Blake’s birds of light shimmer and vanish.

  On the window ledge of Gormley’s office is a small plaster figure, an angelic form of modest wingspan. The simple maquette exists somewhere beyond, and not before, the public clatter, committees and convoys of the Gateshead giant. It was made, Gormley explains, for the child of a friend. Seeing what he had achieved, the sculptor decided that the figurine belonged with him. It was the germ of the grand project. The Angel of the North should stand for at least 150 years. This warm-to-the-touch plaster thing could vanish tomorrow; its vulnerability is its release from the prison of time.

  The benign emanation on the windowsill, looking out over Bellenden Road, was private. The inflated version, locked down in Gateshead, was an issue, political, cultural, economic, right from the start. If Gormley were to leave a memento, to pay his respects to a period on the south side of the river, it would be the commission from Thames Water to produce a series of manhole covers for Peckham. The project was stillborn, with the exception of a unique prototype installed at the junction of Maxted Road and Sandison Street, a short distance from the studio. The design is based on the sculptor’s naked footprints, whorls and hard ridges of skin from miles tramped in London and elsewhere. A rectangle filled with a unique signature of self: the beating of the bounds. An iron mirror has been cast, as Gormley suggested, to look like ripples in a pond. ‘You are invited to stand on it and feel yourself suspended, as it were, between the great infinity of the blue dome of the sky and this river of human ordure that it flowing beneath your feet.’

  Ian Mansfield, a blogger, reported back, after making a pilgrimage to view the sacred slab. ‘I doubtfully stood on the manhole cover and contemplated deep thoughts about how artists get away with such bollocks, and then darted swiftly away as this is a modestly busy road junction and standing in the middle of the street is a most unwise idea.’

  Within days, the labyrinthine footprints, like blow-ups of a future crime, were gone. Some art fancier excavated the iron panel and took it away. The blogger came under attack, not so much for his adverb-heavy literary style, as for the injudicious identification of the site. The sewage hole was plugged by a standard Thames Water cover.

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ Kötting said. ‘City of Disappearances, my arse. Leave well alone. Justgone and hasbeen. Adiós. Adieu. Goodbye.’

  Peckham Rye to Clapham Junction

  We shook the tree but there were no angels today, just the exposed angles of well-kept paths along which leotard women, blonde hair tied back in swishing ponytails, were chivvied by personal trainers; slim professionals in waterproof make-up, with fit black instructors monitoring performance against the stopwatch. ‘Come on now, you can do it. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine … Come on, last push. Thirty!’

  Threads of willow curtained the railway. Large houses, secure in the status of the hill, risked colour: dark bands of Arctic blue with a giant sun disk in marmalade orange, in salute to the Overground, the confirmation that a rail connection boosts property values. Height above sea level could be quantified in zeros on the asking price. Who’s asking? The villagers of Peckham Rye are a community of morning athletes, yoga-improved, allowing few shops or commercial enterprises on the upper slopes: mother-and-buggy tea bars, choice vegetables, the latest electronic screens flashing behind work-from-home windows.

  Among the imposing villas, copper beech groves, stucco, the views down long straight avenues to Camberwell – and the flicker of unease that comes with missing the moans of a railway muffled by discreet planting – the Kötting libido gives itself a good shake. He reminisces. Art-school days. Parties. Performances. Clattering and smoking around town, Penge to Putney, in a general dealer’s van. Transporting some smitten, mascara-smudged student back to one of these hilltop houses. He recalls. Nests of flats with furniture under wraps, before the paintwork was taken in hand. We are carving across the footfall of Andrew’s memory-map, firing reflex stories of punkish warehouse madness with lights and sirens and shuddery loops of film.

  ‘I was a confusionist,’ he said. ‘If I couldn’t find a thing, I’d make it happen. Then I’d drop my trousers.’

  Something about the settled harbour of silent and desirable uphill properties jolts Kötting. Lovings and leavings. Herb smoke going sour in dirty saucers. Scratchy vinyl sounds bouncing and repeating on the turntable. And the way that old London sunlight used to barge through naked windows, firing bedspreads made from US flags. Nicotine glow of ranks of orange paperbacks: Greene, Orwell, Huxley. And one shoe to be retrieved after the barefoot return from a shared bathroom with an exp
losive geyser and black rust beard under a dripping tap.

  One of the posh clients for Kötting, our Deptford painter and decorator, was the film presenter, archivist, collector Philip Jenkinson. A Northerner from Sale, Jenkinson got his first taste of showbiz by way of delivering juvenile George Formby impressions in holiday camps. An asthmatic child, he diverted his swimming money to illicit cinema trips. Then rinsed his trunks in the Gents before returning home. While lecturing at St Martin’s School of Art, he was talent-spotted by a BBC producer and given a slot on Late Night Line-Up.

  All of which served as useful preparation for becoming Kötting’s front-room university, his inspiration. And eventually his patron. The growl of the 16mm projector, the cone of light on the wrinkled screen, taught the young director the value of creative befuddlement. He didn’t know what he was watching, but it all meshed: Sam Fuller’s bald-headed prostitute wielding a high-heeled shoe in The Naked Kiss and Russ Meyer’s cheesy Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

  ‘In amongst the cacophony,’ Andrew said, ‘was a story.’ Finding that story and disguising it in discriminations of orchestrated babble became his signature method. And he never stopped giving credit for this to Jenkinson. Kötting’s experience of chamber cinema in 1984 replaced the gilded and fading Alhambras still floating in my own memories of chasing down double bills in Streatham and Tooting and Stockwell in the early 1960s.

  Appreciating Kötting’s first primitive and energetic short film, Klipperty Klopp, Jenkinson dosed the youthful painter/decorator on shorts by Dick Lester and Bob Godfrey. Andrew did it all: running, jumping and standing still. He bullocked in and out of abandoned shipping containers, mounds of British rubbish, wearing silly hats and trawlerman’s oilskins. Honouring the tradition of Bruce Lacey and the traction-engine survivalists of Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and the Sledgehammer, Andrew scavenged war detritus and relics of dying riverside industries. Over film stock shocked into silence, he imbecile-soliloquized, contradicting himself, scoring chaos into accidental poetry. Funny voices, warped sentiment and Millwall bluster lift and enhance the fogged footage of what would otherwise be an orthodox art-school product. The finished film looks like a rough cut.