In the Edward Jenner Museum, near Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, are a number of exhibits donated by Joyce Green Hospital. There is a stereoscopic viewer through which the visitor gazes, expecting some example of Victorian or Edwardian topography. Morally uplifting landscapes. Alpine scenery. A Scottish lake. A spa town. The effect is three-dimensional, nicotine-stained sepia. But the stereoscope defies expectation. Dr J.B. Byles, compiling material to illustrate a book by Dr Ricketts, photographed the action of poxes in intimate detail. Skin as a map, a meteorology of infection; flushed and angry (like those charts that divide London into zones of comparative poverty).
Dr Burne is proud of Joyce Green’s paradise gardens, contrived and planted against prevailing conditions, on the edge of a salt marsh. He rattles out the Latin names as he swerves through the estate, pointing with his stick, swooping on some previously unnoticed growth. Walnut trees. Juniper bushes thick with strange fruit, cigarette butts (flicked from the staff room window). There are memorials to surgeons and gate-keepers and a seat dedicated to the Joyce Green gardener, Harry Hopkins.
Hopkins carried through the arboretum conceived by the Medical Superintendent Dr A.F. Cameron. Between 1919 and 1935, he transformed rough, windswept grounds into ‘a little paradise’; the subject of a glowing testimony by Arthur Hellyer, one-time patient and gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. ‘A garden filled with as fine a collection of exotic trees and shrubs as you would be likely to find anywhere near London, except in the most renowned places or at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.’ A grove of eight Koelreuteria panicu lata. Sprays of small yellow flowers and the ‘curious bladder-like fruit’ that follow them. A young paulowinia. Magnolias by the score. A thicket of yuccas.
The three of us sit on Hopkins’s bench, a curve of wooden slats, sheltering in a V of weathered bricks. Someone has left wildflowers in a bottle. Beneath the bench, in heavy clusters, are cigarette stubs. It’s obvious, standing back, that Harry Hopkins’s memorial duplicates the winged design of the hospital. A cabbalistic conceit: outside as inside, a system of magical equivalents. Within this grove, the spirit of the old gardener (picture him in First War uniform, cap and moustache) is present: curated by Doc Burne who never goes anywhere without a pruning knife. If any part of this secret garden is to survive, it will be down to Burne, and whatever he can replant or graft in his own soil.
Time is not on his side. Burne’s expedition has to be conducted at a clip; out of the hospital grounds and down, by overgrown tramlines, to the vanished Long Reach Smallpox Hospital. The river-road where plague ships anchored.
A long green lane, straggly hedges; incongruous tarmac. The black skin is worn away, revealing the underlying pattern of bricks. We step over the first chalked graffito: BNP. Horses stick their heads through gaps in the hedge. ‘If they’ve got a blanket,’ Burne says, ‘riding school. If not, gypsy.’
Chalk signatures, territorial assertions, come at regular intervals. We are walking down what was once a private railway, linking the isolation units with Joyce Green. Long Reach had its own jetty, demolished in the Seventies. Smallpox ships, paddle-steamers such as the Atlas, would make regular voyages from Rotherhithe; there were beds for up to 250 patients. Scrubbed deck planks, a hiss of gas, the stink of sulphur. Whole streets, infected warrens and rookeries, could be evacuated. At first guilty housing was sealed like a ghetto, hung with plague flags. And then, with some degree of secrecy, the sick were shipped out.
‘She was a short fat town girl,’ Burne chuckled. ‘Panorama sent her down. Heels and all.’ We were scrambling over rubble mounds, hacking through a thorn wood. ‘It was twilight by the time she got here. A terrible scream, an owl. I asked if she’d like to see the Long Reach mortuary cesspit. She ran. When the programme went out, they used one sentence.’
Bushes heavy with white blossom. We find the cesspit, now hidden, lost in the brambles like a holy well. Dr Burne, forging ahead, can only be distinguished from Renchi by the walking stick and the bright yellow gloves.
Bikers love riverside earthworks, the high banks that keep the Thames out. Burne doesn’t disapprove. A burnt-out car is a rusted antiquity, older than the stories the doctor tells. Older than the plague ghosts.
We stand at the river’s edge, taking in the whole broad sweep, Queen Elizabeth II Bridge to the oil storage tanks at Purfleet. Myths grew up around the Atlas, when she used to anchor off Greenhithe. Children of the time, now elderly patients in the hospital, were interviewed by Dr Burne. They remembered coffin ships which they confused with the Dickensian prison hulks.
In 1980 a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl wrote an essay based on stories told by her grandmother, Clara Couchman. ‘All Gran remembered was being carried at the dead of night in a red blanket by her parents through Greenhithe down to the water front. Then she was taken by rowing boat out to a big boat moored off Greenhithe Reach… It was dark and filthy. There were rats on board which you could hear scampering about in the night. It smelt of sulphur candles… People stayed on that ship for three weeks and if you were still alive a rowing boat was sent by relations out to the hulk. This ferryman was paid, and had to be paid well. He would call out your name for you.’
Nobody could visit Long Reach without passing through a regime of disinfection, carbolic baths. The system fell down, as always, on English notions of caste. Surgeons and doctors strolled around the checkpoints, unhindered. A gate-keeper who waved through Reuben Message, a Dartford meat vendor, lost his job. The delivery man developed smallpox.
Dr Burne fitted his narrative to the landscape we had struggled through in the dark and the rain. He led us around the hospital estate and out on to the marshes, showing how apparently random piles of stones, holes in the ground, bits of rail, broken gates, belonged to a living history.
The drench from the sewage farm came in columns. You didn’t smell it, you wore it. It invaded your clothing. Marsh Lane, so Burne told us, derived its name from Marsh Gas Lane. Huge gulls feasted on the sewage outflow, rode the tide, pecking at submerged delicacies. ‘Do you know how old I am?’ Burne challenged. ‘Eighty.’ He chuckled.
How had we missed it? From the chalk mound of Beacon Hill, a stone cairn on the embankment, the old straight track arrowed into the water tower of Joyce Green Hospital. A thin grey line between hefty, untrimmed hedges. What felt, on the night of the storm, like a march through a completely unstructured landscape now made sense. The view arranged itself into discrete elements. Remove the hospital, garden and tower, and balance is lost; orchards grow wild, there is no estate to give focus and meaning to an exploited wilderness.
Entry to Joyce Green, coming from Long Reach and the isolation wards, was by way of a wicket gate; a fever bell had to be rung. The bell was preserved, as Dr Burne would show us, in the hospital library: polished, with the crest of St George. ‘You realise,’ he said, understanding our reluctance to leave the riverside, ‘that the estate – gardens, woods, farm, hospital – has its own microclimate.’
It was true: the rain, soft and steady, had stopped. The suspension bridge hung over the Thames like a solid rainbow. ‘Look: Spanish oak, laurel, white daffodils. Bees and butterflies you won’t find anywhere else on the marshes. This place is the uniquest of the unique.’ He jabbed with his stick at a fallen tree, brought down across our path. ‘That proves it. Ivy kills.’
For Burne, ‘filthy plumes of smoke’ was an endearment. The power station had as much right to its position on the river as the sewage farm and the hospital – even though pollution bleached the leaves. Fuel had been stockpiled here in advance of the miners’ strike: Burne saw Thatcher’s strategy before it came into play. Know your own small patch and the rest of the world becomes readable.
*
The tour was over and we were about to head back into Dartford, but Dr Burne was reluctant to let us go. He wanted us to see everything. A humped bridge was the only way of crossing the busy bypass. ‘Tricky for cripples in wheelchairs,’ he said. The man who was too ol
d for euphemisms.
He led us – the rain was back – into a new estate that had swallowed up the superintendent’s villa. Bland units. Statistics to satisfy government white papers. Quota-fillers stacked on the road’s edge. Visitors to Joyce Green can no longer walk out of town and ambulances are as rare as albatrosses; what we see from the bridge are the gleaming buses. They appear, so Burne tells us, every ten minutes or so. The destination windows spell out the story: HOSPITAL – DARTFORD – BLUEWATER.
The small wasteland also has its microclimate: hail. Rattling off the road, my unprotected head. This abandoned spot, hidden at the back of the estate, was once the hospital’s burial ground. It’s on the old maps – ‘Joyce Green Cemetery’ – but will soon be deleted; the designation would be meaningless. Burne slashes at brambles with his stick, looking for a single gravestone.
He came down here, so he told us, from Staffordshire. He remembered picnics, early in his marriage, on Cannock Chase. He was appointed Consultant Pathologist in 1955. His wife’s family were Welsh. Two sons dead. One from diphtheria and the other from being sent ‘as a precaution’ to the diphtheria hospital.
‘It’s the ultimate stupidity,’ he said. ‘What they’re proposing for Joyce Green and West Hill. The loss will be incalculable. The work done in the elimination of smallpox was one of the most important medical achievements of the century.’
We were drenched. He didn’t want to leave that place. It might be his final visit.
‘Do you know that smallpox cultures have been stored in Russia and America? Total insanity. If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you. One day they’ll get out. Sold off to any fanatic with spare change.’ When the paradise gardens of Harry Hopkins have returned to marshland, the Joyce Green viruses will be immortal.
With images of bio-terrorism as a parting gift, we thank Dr Burne and walk over Temple Hill to Dartford. The hail stops as soon as we quit the burial ground. There are notices plastered all over town about the Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Jagger has done an Alleyn. Like the Elizabethan actor and theatre promoter, Edward Alleyn, Jagger has manoeuvred himself from lowlife mountebank to man of property and status. Alleyn founded Dulwich College, Jagger got his name on a Millennium project school-hall.
We stopped for lunch in the Wat Tyler, as a way of reading the mood of the Dartforders. WAT BURGER, CHIPS & SALAD.£3.30. ‘And a pint of Peasants.’
A chainsmoking woman sat by the door, her nose in a Wilbur Smith. A pensioned skinhead, grey as anthracite, vast belly sagging out of T-shirt, stared at the floor; two inches of warm beer untouched. A Hamlet cigar salesman was practising a stand-up routine at the bar. Two lads, competitively slaughtered, asked if there were any new vodkas that week. On the wall, above our table, was an advert: a man wheeling a manacled mermaid in a lobster trap.
11
Coming off the bridge, in light rain, we’re carved up by a biker. He’s in a hurry. The message on his vest says: BLOOD. He’s probably lost the Darent Valley Hospital, somewhere among the chalk quarries. He’s detouring towards Bluewater. One of Dracula’s outriders, I reckon. Emergency supplies for retail vampires.
We can’t cross back into Essex without making the Blue-water pilgrimage, setting foot in the Wellsian pit. The Martians used laser technology, carpet-bombs, eco-terrorism. Their successors, the planners and promoters of the Bluewater space station (‘a non-smoking environment’), are more subtle. Blueness is the right subliminal message: heavenly ceiling, sparkling sea. Bluewater is aspirational. Profoundly conservative. Blue-water is the measure that separates those who belong, who know the rules and the language, from the sweaty, unshaven mob who rush the Channel Tunnel. Bluewater is the perfect name for ‘the most innovative and exciting shopping and leisure destination in Europe today’. Bluewater is where the Martians of the New Millennium have landed (the Dome business on Bugsby’s Marshes was just a rehearsal). They have learnt their lesson: they don’t move out from the crater to threaten London, they let London invade them. Excursionists arriving at the chalk quarry, to the east of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, find themselves in a sort of processing plant, or customs post for asylum seekers. A channel port (on go-slow). Bluewater skulks in the desert like the set for a Star Wars sequel. Humans, having negotiated the precipitous descent, are reluctant to get out of their vehicles.
Pausing, on the lip of the pit, I saw the weird beauty of this excavation. Virtual water, glass fountains and imported sand have replaced the tired Kentish shore as the favoured day trip for Cockneys. Bluewater is the new Margate. The sickly London child Samuel Palmer was sent to the Isle of Thanet to convalesce; sea bathing and sermons. T.S. Eliot nursed his soul-sickness at the Albermarle Hotel in Cliftonville. Such indulgences have been suspended: now perfectly healthy urbanites, primed by subtly placed road signs, descend on Junction 2 of the M25. BLUEWATER. No need for further explanation, the name is enough. Retail paradise. No visas required. City of glass in a kaolin bowl. But the effect of this Martian pod cluster, this ecumenical Disneyland of tinsel-Gaudí, is enervating. Arrive in rude health, buzzing with energy, and a few minutes trawling the overheated malls, losing all sense of direction, overwhelmed by excess of consumer opportunity (choice/no choice), will bring you to your knees. Or to one of the many off-mall pit stops. The headache kicks in: which coffee from a list of thirty? (They all taste the same.)
Bluewater is the contrary of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Instead of a high place in which interestingly tubercular eccentrics rehash the great European themes, here is a hole in the ground in which ordinary, unsuspecting citizens crack up, develop the downmarket equivalent of yuppie flu. They wander the levels, under the soft cosh of muzak, feeling the lifeforce drain. These are the Retail Undead. De-blooded victims of the Purfleet kiss. Travellers in limbo. Suspended between life and death (an extension of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge).
Chris Petit, a longtime stockpiler of business park and off-highway imagery, is persuaded from his bunker by the promise of a run to Bluewater. (He will then accompany Renchi and I on our pedestrian journey to the north bank of the Thames – however that is to be managed.) We get a ride down my favourite road, the A13, a spin over the bridge in the Merc with blue-tinted windows. The world looks better that way, clouds acquire definition. Supporting cables, mad eyelashes, blink against the climbing sun.
Bluewater has parking space for 13,000 cars. Coming into London on a weekend afternoon, between Junctions 4 and 2 of the M25, you know that this isn’t enough. The motorway is clogged, costive. Bluewater has no public parking space. Spend or move on. Pedestrians will never make the descent. They are treated like Morlocks. Any unwelcome incursion will show up on a state-of-the-art security system that cost £1.6 million. There are 350 CCTV cameras watching you wherever you go. Silent, deadly, they drain your essence. Miles of fibre-optic cable. Walls of 28” and 38” monitors. Follow the winding road down into the quarry and you’re in the movie. The release print is CinemaScope, but that’s an illusion, a drive-in fantasy; the true spectacle is the rolling wall of monitor screens, drugged shoppers leaving ectoplasmic contrails. The Bluewater complex is linked to the Dartford Interchange, the bridge, the tunnel; 200 cameras pour images on to digital tape that allows thirty-one days of continuous recording. Lift an Olympus Superzoom 120, a Sony DV, and the uniforms will pounce. No souvenirs from this car park. The movie belongs to Bluewater™. Leisure-terror, that’s what frightens them. You might walk away with a Polaroid shot of the fountain, a revolving door, the markings in the car park. (Empty bay reserved for sponsors, politicians, quango vermin.)
Bluewater is what is known as a ‘car park-led’ project; most of the quarry floor is parking space, the strange retro-futurist construction (by a firm of architects called Benoy) is tacked on, a desert camp. Taliban chic: a very expensive (£370 million) hideaway in a deep chalk bunker. Temporary permanence. The shopping centre shares this characteristic with Lord Rogers’s Millennium Dome. To gel with restless M25 conscio
usness, Bluewater has been designed to feel like a one-night stopover, an oasis for migrants. The huge tents that once sheltered London’s smallpox cases on Temple Hill are the inspiration for this collision of ribbed domes and curved windows. The American architectural consultant Eric Kuhne, invited to talk up the site, spoke of ‘a new kind of city’. A ‘resort’. Rest and recreation for vacationers.
A form of petrol-guzzling tourism has evolved: Bluewater is a Ballardian resort (Vermilion Sands), shopping is secondary, punters come here to be part of the spectacle. The North Kent quarry is an unanchored destination: nobody is quite sure where it is. It’s never in the same place twice. The surrounding road systems are so complex – FOLLOW THE SIGN FOR CANTERBURY– trippers can’t work out which side of the Thames they’re on. They arrive exhausted. They depart half-dead. They’ve taken part in the experience of travel. They’ve seen the car park. Too weary to walk, they stumble into the ‘leisure village’ with its artificial day-for-night lighting. The place is a gigantic upgrade of Margate’s Dreamland arcade: glittery cargo behind glass, get-lucky trash you don’t want (but try to win), fast food. Bluewater combines slot-machine avenues with fun fair rides: escalators, lifts, cinemas, indoor jungles, pools, boating lakes, climbing walls and even, yes, cycle hire and a ‘discovery trail’. Your ‘hosts’ (welcome, campers) are trained in sign language. There are Braille maps and personal guides for the visually impaired.
From above, Bluewater looks fine: sunlight glancing off pastiched oast houses. Petit doesn’t risk a smile, he uncreases his Jesuitical frown. There is purpose to his expedition, he wants to buy a pair of Y-fronts; but this is no simple commercial transaction, he has roamed half the country, from Cribbs Causeway (outside Bristol) to Asda (Eastbourne), to Lakeside (Thurrock). No joy. The man is a perfectionist. One day, so he believes, he will discover the M&S grail: right weight, style, fit. The Look. The correct gear for the proverbial road accident: no shameful moment on the trolley, if he finds himself taken into Darent Valley Hospital.
London Orbital Page 46
