Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (24 page)

Much of the Thames bank was allowed to vegetate among the spectres of heritaged history, riverboat pilots peddling nursery myths, Traitors’ Gate to Houses of Parliament, until the land hunger of Thatcherism recognized this absence of narrative as the primary trigger for regeneration. In Peter Ackroyd’s philosophy of time as a vortex, the invention of ‘Docklands’ signalled a return to the old-fashioned values of piracy. Empty docks were reborn, by a process of internal colonization, as a new commercial empire: the Spanish Main on our doorstep. Planning regulations for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded to facilitate a shelf of Hong Kong towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of
Fitzcarraldo
, a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts: Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth, post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral.

But the reimagining of the Thames was not limited to East Greenwich, conceptual settlements were also imposed on vacant brownfield sites along the floodplain in Essex and Kent. Every act of demolition required a rebooting of history: as hospital or asylum vanishes, we thirst for stories of Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury or Pocahontas coming ashore, in her dying fever, at Gravesend. The documented records of the lives of those unfortunates shipped out to cholera hospitals on Dartford Marshes, or secure madhouses in the slipstream of the M25, can be dumped in a skip. Politicized history is a panacea, comforting the bereft, treating us, again and again, to the same consoling fables.

The tributaries of the Thames are the veins and arteries of a finely balanced ecosystem: this is another Ackroyd proposition. They are anthropomorphized, made into supplicants, handmaidens to the titular stream. The Lea quits its sylvan source to endure a penance of foul industries, travellers’ camps, waste-disposal plants, ‘until eventually it finds its surcease at Bow Creek’. Ackroyd responded positively to the regeneration of areas where deepwater docks lay idle and warehouses were occupied by artists and premature economic migrants.

London is unchanging. The golden-hour liveliness of Canary Wharf bankers, as they fan out through a chain of dockside bars, under the shelter of those ubiquitous patio-heater palm trees, is a revival of the riverbank life, at the time of the 1812 Ratcliffe Highway murders described by De Quincey: ‘manifold ruffianism’. Where the film-making poet Derek Jarman saw Silvertown with its abandoned flour mills as a site for dervish dances and the orgiastic rituals of a punk apocalypse, Ackroyd underwrote the rhetoric of regeneration with a post-historic parade of music-hall grotesques, satanic architects and angel-conversing alchemists. He provided political opportunism with a sympathetic mythology. Ripples of psychotic breakdown, financial and ecological catastrophe, located by J. G. Ballard in the hermetic towers of
High-Rise
(1975), were limned by Ackroyd, with characteristic generosity, as the first green shoots of recovery for a poisoned wasteland. Ballard’s dog-roasting balcony dwellers inhabit a premature version of the Thatcherite Docklands that
Thames: Sacred River
labours to re-enchant. By describing, in such cool forensic prose, the worst that can happen, Ballard purifies the ground, making the new estates inevitable, but devoid of spirit. Darkness has been experienced, and survived, in the act of writing. Conversely, Peter Ackroyd, with his heroic and uplifting attempt to neutralize the pains of history by suspending them in a cyclical charivari, ensures that the bad thing, the thing most feared, will return.

With his faith in London as an organic entity forever renewing itself, Ackroyd looks kindly on the official script for the 2012 Olympics. Torch-bearing processions, naked gladiators, flat-pack stadia, are right back in vogue. ‘The river,’ Ackroyd says, ‘will once more become the highway of the nation.’ Jarman is dead, leaving behind, as his testament, the film of a blank blue screen, the empty transcendence of the coming Olympic fence. A captured sky. Punks and anarchists expelled from their Hackney Wick warehouses, caravans, rubbish skips. Doctor Dee is not at home.

To get back to the Thames I had to follow one of the less celebrated streams, the Northern Sewage Outfall, now rebranded as the Olympic Park Greenway. It seemed appropriate to visit the Beckton dispersal area, in part as a walk dedicated to Ballard, to whom I would report, and in part as an investigation of an emerging topography of sheds, retail parks and landscaped gardens made from decommissioned industrial sites. A zone whose defining structure was ExCel London, a green-glazed slab on the Royal Docks, alongside the City Airport; a spacious and secure hangar in which to stage arms fairs and conferences that bewail, at shameless expense, the collapsing money metaphor. The bill for the G20 dinner for 200 VIPs, their assorted interpreters and security operatives, came to £500,000. It was calculated that each diner glugged through £140 of fine wine.

These lavish gatherings, behind closed doors, have their uses. Tony Blair, it was later revealed, had secured the Olympics for London, by jetting off to Sardinia to kiss the ring of the Italian prime minister and media magnate, at the villa where he had enjoyed so much hospitality. Signor Berlusconi, piratical bandana protecting his latest scalp rethink, took a breather from a round of hectic entertaining, to listen sympathetically to Blair’s petition. It was a scene straight from
The Godfather.
‘You are my friend. I promise nothing but I see if I can help.’

Colourful block-buildings hunkered into naked escarpments. Shiny boulevards going nowhere. Virgin developments whose balconies are teased by incoming air traffic. They fan out from the sinister ExCel aquarium. The bombed gasworks in which Stanley Kubrick restaged the Vietnam War have been overlaid with off-highway shopping colonies that can be read as a pop-up catalogue of our consumer habits and addictions: an archaeological trawl from the ruins of the Woolworths barn alongside the arsenic-poisoned hump of Beckton Alp to the superstores of Gallions Reach. Some of these enterprises disappear before they can be mapped. The aisles are broader than the lanes of the adjacent A13. Breakfast substitutes are available at any hour of day or night. When you are allowed to walk freely, without challenge, along the flank of ExCel London, there is nothing happening. Nobody at home. No flame-throwers or manacles on display. A cliff of glass, like frozen rain, filtering interior palm forests. ExCel is unexplained: like a plant house teleported from Kew Gardens. No point in sending the postcard to Ballard, he did it for
New Worlds
in the 1960s.

The sacredness of the Thames beyond Beckton is not easy to quantify. It is a territory where the gravitas of the river excuses layer after layer of botched political initiatives, strategic malfunctions, half-completed or newly abandoned developments. The scheme for a bridge that would have connected the North and South Circular roads, and given London a second orbital motorway, was aborted by Boris Johnson: it was too closely associated with the former mayor, Ken Livingstone. Thames Gateway is a geographical area and a philosophy for which Johnson has no enthusiasm. Boris champions the
Eagle-
comic wheeze of an airstrip-island at the mouth of the river, out beyond Sheppey. Where wind farms compete in weirdness with sea forts, those platforms on stilts, deserted by radio pirates, hippie communes and the secret state.

I reported to Ballard on how the retail parks give way, after a strip of tolerated wilderness, to an unfinished road guarded by off-watch police cars, whose edgy occupants are hiding their faces in the jaws of jumbo burgers. Near the river, secure buildings disguise their identity and purpose, they are indistinguishable from outer-rim universities or open prisons. One of these sleek sheds confesses to dealing in Logistics and Management. The motivation behind all this clamour is Olympic overspill. ‘Thames Gateway: The Shape of Things to Come.’

The cover of the brochure is a split-screen illustration. A female athlete, arms raised aloft in a triumphalist V. And on the facing page, three tower blocks ramping from a riverside marina. Here, in CGI hyperreality, is the promised legacy. ‘World-class sporting facilities will be available for use by the local public. The largest new park in London since the Victorian Era – the size of Hyde Park – will provide a delightful new local facility.’ Meanwhile: you can buy into Gladedale’s waterside apartments, where double-glazing keeps out the roar of planes bellying in over the Thames, before skidding on to tarmac at the City Airport. ‘Get the Buzz’ is the unfortunate strap-line. The bridge on which you stand, keeping your head down to watch jets banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, has been named in honour of Sir Steve Redgrave.

After hacking through brambles, detouring around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey monolith of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts with identity badges were lunching beside the river, dipping lethargically into yellow cartons. ‘It’s all we can find,’ one of them said. ‘We have to go to Gallions Reach, there is nothing within five miles.’ They elected to take the air, looking across at Woolwich and Thamesmead, where new estates grow like bindweed: near-neighbours to HM Prison Belmarsh, that upgrading of the Dickensian convict hulks. Buhler Sortex, so they told me, make food-processing machines. They render meat. The original factory was in Stratford, where they enjoyed pubs, cafés, some life. It was compulsorily purchased as part of the initial Olympic push. They were relocated to this empty quarter, between the sewage works and Royal Albert Dock.

After the buddleia and butterflies of the permitted riverside strip, I headed west towards Silvertown and the Thames Barrier. If you travel, thinking about a particular writer, he will provide the chart for the mental landscape through which you pass. Even the photographs I was taking came from another era, a roll of outdated black-and-white film had been sitting on my desk for years. Out of nowhere, on a stretch of defunct nautical enterprises and blind-windowed dockers’ pubs, a Chinese arch appeared. Decorative and newly painted, the gateway to a secret city.

LOON FUNG NOW OPEN. EAT AT OUR NOODLE BAR
.

White stone lions with Harpo Marx wigs. A warehouse displaying a profusion of richly scented produce, packets of tea with exotic designs. Fat red-gold fish, in bubbling tanks, avoiding the eye of potential diners. My meal of mushroom noodles, ‘hot and tasty’, washed down with gunpowder tea, cost £3. I asked Ballard what, after all his years in Shanghai, was his favourite Chinese dish. ‘Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,’ he said. ‘At home, we never dreamt of eating the local food.’

The purest Ballardian set, poised chronologically between
High-Rise
and
Millennium People
, was an estate on the edge of the recently created Barrier Park (architectural planting in the deep trenches of an old dock). ‘The clocks seem to pause,’ Ballard wrote, ‘waiting for time to catch up with them … Money, always harder-wearing than asphalt, helped to repave the streets.’

I came back to Silvertown, to show this new park to my wife. Between the riverside gardens and the estate was a flyover on concrete stilts and a grove of palm trees, discounted and left to its own devices. Through the tropical thicket, you could make out the silver helmets of the Thames Barrier and Derek Jarman’s Millennium Mills from
The Last of England.
A snake, disturbed in the undergrowth, struck at Anna’s foot. When she got home, she found two neat puncture wounds. The worst of the venom, she reckoned, was absorbed by the webbing of her boot.

I told Ballard about a leaflet I picked up in the café at Barrier Park. It explained how one of the incomers to the flats had decided to operate his own neighbourhood-watch system, by forming a surveillance film club. Other members of the community could contact him by email and they would share footage, caught on mobile phones, recording the behaviour of suspect youths. An image bank would be established and the anonymity of the snoops preserved. As we penetrated the jungle, the wild garden with its cracked paths and ramps, we knew that we were on film. Somebody would have to try to explain our eccentric incursion.

I found a photocopying shop on Bethnal Green Road, to duplicate a few sheets of my snapshots, to go with the letter to Ballard. The young Asian girl who operated the machine came suddenly to life. The flats on the edge of Royal Albert Dock:
that was where she lived
. What a mistake! The isolation. The lack of community. The drive to Gallions Reach retail park for a bottle of milk. She had been all her life in the buzz of Bethnal Green, then her family fell for the idea of a riverside apartment. Now she looked forward to coming to work, coming home to London. Street markets, lovely tat. Rip-offs and banter. Bright bangles, ceremonial saris. A world that had made itself and thrived, adaptable and remorseless.

Peter Ackroyd begins at source, the first trickle, Cotswold springs. He opens with a deluge of facts: length, comparison with other rivers, number of bridges, average flow, velocity of current. Then moves rapidly to ‘river as metaphor’. So that the two tendencies, the empirical and the poetic, coexist: striking examples found to confirm flights of fancy. And all the time he is walking, from limestone causeway to salt marshes, but keeping the accidents and epiphanies of these private excursions out of his narrative. The only vignette he offers from the epic trudge is presented as a ‘river omen’, a superstition. At Erith he found a bloody blade, a stained white T-shirt and a roll of Sellotape. Hikers, less sensitive to correspondences, taking the knife for fisherman’s kit, would moan, coming out on the Crayford Marshes, about the tedious detour, those extra miles alongside the snaky Darent to the A206 and back: no footbridge. Afternoons disappear, among huts, paddocks of shaggy horses, driftwood fires, scrambler bikes and wavering golden beds of reeds.