At first, Bluewater provokes such impulses. It’s like arriving at a Channel port; the transit point becomes a destination. Dover, Folkestone. The same grid of cars. The same concern about getting into the right stream. High white cliffs. Visible evidence of wartime activity; tunnels, huts, gun emplacements. Security (discreet but firm). The dizzy sense of impermanence, not being where you are; exhausted from travel and anticipating more of the same. Customs paranoia. Worries about having left your passport, tickets, green forms, in the kitchen drawer.
We set off in search of duty frees, an investigation of this inland port. It’s not England and it’s not France; it’s more like the US without the genetically modified mall addicts, the mutated burger herds. But Bluewater excursionists are not regarded as urban terrorists if they don’t buy buy buy. Thank God. Because nobody has the stamina to shop, to make a decision.
You meet trembling humans who have lost their cars: green zone or blue? The Heathrow experience, jet-lagged, combing the ranks, struggling with heavy bags: which terminal was it, which floor? Tilbury, the old port for London, with its many platforms and shuttle of trains, has died; an echoing ghost. Bluewater (no access by river) has sixty buses per hour, 130 trains per day, five taxi ranks and colour-coded car parks without number.
The design is stolen from the Victorian asylums, from Joyce Green Hospital: a broad V, within a box (or Rubik’s Cube). The three barbicans that command the points of the V are House of Fraser, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer. There is an upper and a lower mall. The temperature is unnatural; so temperate that it drives you mad. You can’t sweat. You’re blow-dried. You can’t breathe. Air is recycled as in an airliner. You’re supposed to make those air-terminal, duty-free, impulse purchases that you come to regret: shirts that never leave the bag, rubber-sealed bottles of cherries in brandy, lighters for those who don’t smoke. Airport consumption is reflex superstition: buy and live.
The toilets are too clean for England and they’re open; our cities have long since dispensed with such philanthropic frivolities, converting every pissy trench into a wine-bar or body-tanning facility. Bluewater is the only safe way to visit America, it’s the post-11 September destination of choice. Heathrow without the hassle. Then take your pick of: Santa Fe (‘South Western American restaurant and Cocktail Bar… authentic and exciting’), Ed’s (‘Authentic 50s American diner’), Tootsies (‘Authentic American family restaurant in a stylish setting’). Plus: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the multiplex with blockbuster buckets of popcorn and hogsheads of energy-boosting drinks. These days, only the fake is truly authentic.
Rachel Lichtenstein, author of Rodinsky’s Room, was dragged here to choose a wedding dress. She lived in Hackney, her mother in Southend: Bluewater was the obvious rendezvous. Twenty minutes on the malls and the ceremony was about to be called off, while Rachel fled to a house of study in the desert. A life of abstinence and prayer. Bluewater’s anodyne aquarium walkways provoke many such dramas. The Kenneth Baker anthology of uplifting poems, in relief on every wall, incubates rage. I was ready to tear out the tablets with my fingernails and smash them down on the heads of inoffensive mall-grazers.
A Tate Modern gallery of male underwear fails to satisfy Petit; a mournful shrug and he’s away through the revolving doors. It’s a great cultural event, melancholy as Wim Wenders, watching Petit work a retail outlet. Shopper as aesthete. He tracks, he drifts; he won’t stoop to examine a label or a price tag. The nostrils flare. The stern eyebrows twitch. Some hideous vulgarity, in terms of colour or texture, has been enacted. Behind the mask of disdain, this man is supremely alert, sunk into a trance of mesmeric concentration. Indifference as the ultimate accolade. Bluewater fails, Bluewater must be consigned – like some wretched film or novel – to silence, scorn: the heartrending sigh of a seeker who has reached out and grasped disappointment. A spoonful of volcanic dust. Petit quits the quarry like a vampire hunter promised wolves and fly-eating maniacs, then fobbed off with a drip of born-again vegans.
The displays of underwear, boots, lipstick – kit – have a disembodied sexuality. Palace of consumer fetishism as art gallery isn’t a perverse reading. The ‘Dalí Universe’ at London’s decommissioned County Hall is conducting a phone poll (call: 0901 151 0133) to decide on the best site for a ‘sculpture based on a Dalí painting’. Should Profile of Time be exhibited at Hampton Court Palace, in Kensington Gardens, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew – or at Bluewater? No contest. Bluewater, the posthumous dream of Walter Benjamin, is the clear favourite. The Dalí painting from which the sculpture has been concocted was first shown in 1931. Title? The Persistence of Memory.
The payback for my trip to Bluewater is Petit’s company on our attempt to cross the Thames (22 October 1999). Research has made it abundantly clear: the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge cannot be negotiated on foot. Neither can we rush the Dartford Tunnel (like desperate asylum seekers from the Calais camp). The best option is a long detour, by river path, to Gravesend. A ferry trip. A slog from Tilbury to Grays (returning us to the bridge and the reborn M25).
Marc fails to make the seven a.m. meeting at London Bridge station. He’s been here before, walks recorded in his book Liquid City (Isle of Grain to Teddington). The novelty has worn off, feet have healed; he discriminates, picks outings worthy of his talent. That’s very reasonable, the images have been logged. Greenhithe, Ingress Park (its Capability Brown plantings handed over to Crest Nicholson), Northfleet, Gravesend: they are part of an earlier narrative. I won’t peddle an exhausted tale. Better to pick up where the motorway surges into Essex.
The problem is that video-time and shoot-from-the-hip photo-time are not compatible. Renchi and I have learnt to register detail as we walk; a steady and unspectacular progress. Breakfast, pub lunch, chats with folk met at the wayside. Nothing to break the trance. Video is trance. Once Petit’s finger starts to stroke the touch-screen, he’s gone. He’s inside the image.
Temple Hill throws up seductive views of river, motorway, suspension bridge: Petit might take an hour to find the right spot from which to film. Renchi can’t rein himself in. Look, look: blue and white POLICE tape in a field, Costa del Sol bungalows with new silver motors too big for the driveway. The Italianate tower of another captured hospital, WELCOME TO THAMESLINK PARK, ARCHERY HOUSE. Temple Hill is an entire landscape of ‘Archery’, brash and dissimulating. Loud with inaccurate précis, revised biography. Petit loves it, he scowls and he shoots. Renchi, anguished, frantic to be on the move, smiles. Walking and filming won’t work. That’s why Petit spends so much time on the road. You can’t go wrong; one hand rests lightly on the wheel, the other on the button of the Sony DV. Radio On. Bruce Gilbert mixes on cassette, news flashes from the radio. Out in the weather, stuck on the marshes in a steady downpour, the film-essayist surfers. He wants a narrative that can be reduced to a list. A shooting script.
1. On a ridge above the Dartford Crossing: the Sakis Hotel. A venue favoured by migrant US evangelists, operated by slot-machines. SUNDAY BRUNCH £16.95. 3 COURSE CARVERY & JAZZ BAND. EAT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN!
2. CROSSWAYS. Giant letters in a retail park. A plantation of pylons.
3. Approved industrial architecture: a windowless box. On an epic scale. The coming, off-highway aesthetic: neutrality. Absence of signature, ASDA BACKS BRITISH BEEF.
4. AMBIENT GOODS INWARD. Dead roads where container-transporters park. Limbo zones of rubbish in short grass, improvised culinary and sexual transactions.
5. Ingress Abbey as devastated mud, a building site.
6. Graffito on riverside wall: THATCHER OUT!
7. The cranes and hoists of Northfleet under a heavy sky. Petit eating a banana. A snail hanging from a spear of wet grass. A snail on Renchi’s shoe.
8. One hoarding: PELICAN FABRICATIONS, SEACON TERMINALS LIMITED, BRITANNIA REFINED METALS LIMITED, LONDON COACHES, FLAT-OUT KARTING, THAMES TIMBER.
9. The locked stadium of Dartford and Northfleet FC.
10. A Northfleet café with an
expressionist mural: industry returned to life in a smoky (yellow/red) apocalypse. The mural as a window on an alternative world.
11. A wall of figs in a Gravesend industrial estate.
12. A chalk quarry (caged walk) not yet converted into another Bluewater. Renchi suffers from mild, Petit from severe, attacks of vertigo.
13. Riverside houses with Belgian roofs, Corinthian capitals (inverted foliations), arched windows, ogee mouldings. Fallen into disrepair.
14. A fibre-optic colony. Guarded by a lighthouse topped with concrete water tank.
15. Graffito on tile wall: EAT THE ESTABLISHMENT.
16. A microphone, on a tripod, set up on a traffic island.
17. A chaplet of sunflowers woven into a chainlink fence. WARNING GUARD DOGS ON PATROL. KEEP OUT.
18. Memorial tablet to Pocahontas (in bell-shaped hat).
19. The Gravesend-Tilbury Ferry: Princess Pocahontas.
We’re out, at last, on the grey Thames, at the mouth of the estuary. The voyage towards Essex feels like a mistake. The small craft has to push against the tide. Sky and river merge. Our walk through Surrey and Kent dissolves. We are returned to the familiar shabby narratives of Tilbury (dockside, fort, World’s End pub). To piebald horses roaming a Dutch landscape of irrigation ditches and rifle ranges.
As the light goes, Petit falls further and further behind; he is trying to make a video-record of salient dereliction (high dock walls, weed-strewn railway tracks, hangdog lamp-standards). We tramp towards Grays. There’s no river path, we have to stick with the Dock Approach Road. Tower blocks wink across rough heath. Steady traffic. Everything is visible and nothing is revealed. There must have been a reason once for Grays, but it’s been forgotten. Subdued, we wait for the Fenchurch Street train.
Blood & Oil
Carfax to Waltham Abbey
1
Film-essayist Patrick Keiller, who knows about such things, says that Grays once had a wonderful cinema, on a par with the Kilburn State. Now the State of Kilburn can sneer at its riverside rival: Grays is beyond resuscitation. A body bag lined with asbestos.
19 October 1999: we stepped on to the platform to a (glove-in-mouth) tannoy babble that sounded like the three-minute warning. At Fenchurch Street the ticket machines were out of order, trains were running late and station security were shaking down a couple of estuarine chancers (trying to slip into town without the necessary paperwork). The woman behind the plexiglass screen couldn’t hear what Renchi said, couldn’t imagine why anyone, so early in the morning, would want to travel towards Grays. The point of Grays is that you leave before first light, return after sunset – avoid all eye-contact.
Don’t misunderstand me, I love the place: it’s pre-fictional, post-historic. It has slipped out of the guidebook and into the Gothic anthology. Laughable attempts at civic revival – pedestrianised walkways, covered markets upgraded to prolapsed malls – do nothing to diminish the galloping entropy. The Stalinist turret of Keiller’s favourite cinema – STATE – is visible from the station. Dirty brown bricks, deeply scored creases: the aspect of a power station, of Bankside before the makeover.
WHO IS THE DISTRICT CONTROLLER???? Graffito on the underpass. Grays is a breakaway republic, the Uzbekistan of the Estuary. Grays has Tattoo Studios (‘Over 18’s Only Please!’) and food so fast that it avoids the mediation of the microwave, travelling directly from slaughterhouse floor to fast-breeding salmonella culture. Retail facilities behave like uninhabited multi-storey car parks. Trade goods are rejects from car boot sales.
But Grays has something that gives it life and pedigree, Grays has the River Thames. The sky to the east, on this damp morning, could be illuminated by searchlights: a pissy-gold cloud base flushing to a raider’s dawn. Nautical pubs are imposing but clapped out. The signboard for The Rising Sun has weathered into a Monet Xerox, Tower Bridge drowning in thin syrup.
The essential qualities of this riparian settlement have not been lost. James Thome, writing in 1876, sketches Grays as: ‘old, irregular, and, like all those small Thames ports, lazy-looking and dirty’. Grays lived off chalk: when they’d finished digging it out for conversion into lime and cement, carting it on to the roads of Essex, they moved into retail landfill – Lakeside, Thurrock.
‘Of all the accursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism,’ wrote Arthur Young in 1757, ‘none ever equalled that from Billericay to the “King’s Head” at Tilbury… the ruts are of an incredible depth… and to add to all the infamous circumstances which occur to plague a traveller, I must not forget eternally meeting with chalk wagons, themselves frequently stuck fast until a collection of them are in the same situation, so that twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out, one by one.’
The days of the cement factories and the futile attempts to promote Grays as a sailing resort, a marina, are over: river gives way to road. We’ve taken our hit of nostalgia, hanging about the dock gates, photographing steam stacks, cranes, jetties. It’s time to follow the Thames path, west, towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, the motorway.
The path, which begins with a paved promenade, soon declines into a Barratt estate, dressed as an open-air exhibition of ‘computer generated impressions’. This is a strikingly schizophrenic effect: you get the Thames as it is, cloacal, rusty, tired – and, at the same time, you are confronted with computer-generated projections (Grays as it ought to be). A blue-river fantasy feeds directly into khaki drift; a young couple, first-time buyers, stride hand in hand down the riverfront parade towards a line of virgin Barratt villas. Future grass for present mud. The magic mirror of the Barratt hoarding works like Prozac, taking the edge from blight. Pink stone, a cloudless sky; toy boats gussying up a dead river.
Barratt World is hallucinogenic: mushroom villages, Noddy in Essex. No hurt. Cohabiting couples in gainful employment. Regency stripe wallpaper. Red sofa – on which a woman in a green dress sprawls, teasing a coffee cup. Her partner, in immaculate blue shirt (two buttons undone), leans forward. He has another (empty) coffee cup. They are fresh, fragrant. Unblemished. If it wasn’t for the coffee cups, they’d be rutting like stags. If everything goes well, and they upgrade from the one-bedroom apartment in Block H of Lightermans Quay (at £86,995) to the two-bedroom apartment at £104,995, they’ll acquire the two sinister kids who invade their love nest with a breakfast tray (single red rose, refill of imaginary coffee).
Lightermans Quay has its own map, roads like veins flowing into the A13. Only three destinations are admitted: Southend, Lakeside and the M25. The furthest points of reference are Tilbury and Chadwell St Mary (where Daniel Defoe invested in a tile works – and lost £3,000). ‘A calm and tranquil setting with appealing riverside walks,’ the promoters claim. ‘This whole part of the riverfront is steeped in history.’ Which the builders are doing their best to disguise. What counts is ease of access to Junction 30/31 of the M25 and the ten-minute drive to ‘the huge shopping complex of Lakeside’.
Ten minutes’ walk, on the other hand, carries the excursionist into a wilderness of tall chimneys, chainlink fences, partly demolished block buildings, dank ponds, thorn bushes, coarse grass. The latest units of the housing development, frightened Dutch cottages, shelter on the very edge of a soon-to-be-demolished brownfield site. O’Rourke and Associates are swinging their hammers at the garden gate, bulldozing mounds of rubble, coating the ‘double-glazed external windows’ in fine dust.
We meet a game old boy, sniffing the tide. A weatherbeaten unident in a flat cap who deeply regrets the destruction of the wild orchards that once marked the river path. ‘Better than Vicky Park, it was.’ He’s been in Grays since he came back from the war. His house in Canning Town had been bombed. It wasn’t there, nor was his wife. She’d been relocated. But he couldn’t reconcile himself to the exile. ‘Sod all life. They do what they want with the river. Criminal.’
As for the Barratt hutches…‘Kennels,’ he spat. ‘Hear everything they say next door. Stretch an
d you put your elbow through the wall.’ They don’t build these estates, they grow them overnight.
A younger man with a large dog joined us. A reluctant citizen of Chafford Hundred, a former Canvey Island fisherman. ‘Lego homes,’ he reckoned. ‘They come in kits.’ He sounded less enthusiastic than Buckminster Fuller for the flatpack lifestyle. Euro regulations had done for his trade. He pointed to the fast-flowing water. ‘I can remember when this was a river of soles.’ River of Souls! Golden scintillae riding the wavecrests. We saw it: a floodtide of immortals surging to the west. Before we realised what he meant: soles, fish he could no longer net. The river’s bounty, his living.
Chafford Hundred – ‘The most coveted address in Britain’ (Evening Standard, 12 September 2001) – was a plague on the landscape. So the sole-fisher reckoned. The future he would have to endure. A bright new ‘commuter-belt village’ whacked down on a hillock overlooking a defunct port, a highroad whose vitality had been leeched by Lakeside, Thurrock. Patrick Keiller, conducting a personal survey into housing, found much to admire in Chafford Hundred.
‘Who lives there?’
Hammered by government statistics, I needed to know. Who were these putative householders, where did they come from? I rang Keiller.
‘Divorce,’ Patrick said. ‘And extended life expectancy. Single parents. Split families.’
A colony of the disenchanted in a panorama of disenchantment. Amnesiaville. It would take more than divorce or death to get me to Chafford Hundred. But one of the Barratt apartments at Grays? Riverview, ‘audio entryphone system’, elective isolation, ‘thirty-five minutes by train to Fenchurch Street’ – what could be better? As a studio, a writing space. If I could lift myself into the right socio-economic bracket. Grays was aspirational, a spoof balcony on which to contemplate the river of souls.
London Orbital Page 47
