The Lee is manufacturing War of the Worlds fungus; it’s kraken-clogged, choked with green scum. A woman is chucking sliced bread from the window of her new flat, straight into the water. Gulls and ducks squabble. Rats dart from canalside undergrowth to carry off spilt crumbs.
The camp under the Eastway bridge has been abandoned, the council have got the travellers out. Wick Wood: another war zone. Padded car seats. Precarious stacks of tyres. Sections of carpet. Washing machines. Gutted cars. Caravans. Bundles of sodden newspapers: POLITICA.
WHERE ARE YOU? A cancelled map. Filth flung from speeding vehicles spreads over the embankment. Marc poses at the roadside in his once-white shoes.
We’re on home turf, Hackney to Thames. No surprises. I can’t believe how quickly we’ve come back. Everything is in suspension, post-Christmas, pre-Millennium. A red-on-red poster, Soviet pastiche, promotes George Michael: SONGS FROM THE LAST CENTURY. The canal is silted, lifeless. Without colour. A sepia negation, it defies the idea of colour, the folk memory.
The Lee Valley Media Zone has abdicated, retired to its second home. The picket fence around the Big Breakfast cottage is black with names, the fishing pixie leers like a child molester. A poster for Peter Greenaway’s 81/2 Women is peeling from one of the piers of the Bow Flyover. The wine bar in the Three Mills complex is shut.
Rain rattles on the roof of a blue and black tent. What we have, on this muddy canalside paddock, is a replica of the Dome. A circus tent in which acrobats have been rehearsing for the Big Night. NEW YORK!! NEW YORK!! screams red-bulb lettering. We can investigate the virtual Dome for nothing. They’ve been flooded out, they’ve gone. Condensation dripping from sodden canvas. The desertion of the circus animals. Rehearsals are over. This tent can be broken, shifted. The misery is finite. Nobody is watching, nobody cares. Nobody will hold them to account.
It’s one o’clock and we’ve made it to the Isle of Dogs. Marc’s limping; he’s not too bad, a slight thigh strain. Liquid City. We slither, steaming, into the pub: an old favourite, the Gun in Blackwall Way. Traditional riverside hospitality always on offer: no hot food, stale crisps, nobody at the bar, locked balcony. A place so fiction-friendly that I can never remember what happened the last time I dropped in and what happened in my novel Downriver.
Such light as this day ever pretended to has abdicated. We carry our drinks to a table. We look out, directly, on the other Dome, the money pit to which all the celebrities in town have been invited. A royal knees-up due to kick off in twenty-four hours. The Gun’s spiked, a couple of pickled regulars sniffling into their half-pints, tomorrow it will be heaving. Anything with a view of the river has been booked solid. We’ll start the party now. Order the Jamesons, the beers. Drink to the Dome’s damnation.
When we arrived at the spot where they’d filmed the EastEnders wedding, near the Ibis Hotel, the Dome was an alien form; a spoiler. It ruined the low level riverscape, the dingy mystique of Bugsby’s Marshes. It looked like a collapsed birthday cake from the now-disappeared bakers on Kingsland Road, a special order. Yellow candles in a mound of icing sugar. It sagged. It should never have been left out in the rain. Miss Havisham, back from the Kentish marshes, in all her decayed and inappropriate finery.
Two hours later, our table, dressed with a red Christmas cloth, was filled with glasses. Six of them in front of Marc – and one in his hand. The Nikon is also on the table, along with a box of matches and the mobile phone.
We’ve dried off, warmed up. I trot through to the bar for another round, ask for doubles. This is it. The moment has finally arrived. At the cusp of a new millennium, I’ll do it: make my first cellphone call. Dome-watch is turning into a session. It feels historic. I want to invite Anna to join us (I don’t fancy walking home along the Grand Union in the rain).
The professional drinkers are staying with the big screen, the river looks better when it’s electronically processed. We’re all pals by this time. We get fresh glasses with every round. I study framed river maps while I wait; remember old trips, with Paul Burwell and Brian Catling, to Tilbury, Sheppey, Southend.
When Anna, in coat, sits down ‘for a moment’ and is still in the chair an hour later, we realise that time is draining faster than we can record it. The vortex is about to reverse, spin counterclockwise down the plughole. The bride feast on the far bank, fairy lights, beams from helicopters, will turn into a wake.
My binoculars pass hand-to-hand. ‘You taking pictures for the papers? We’ve had ’em coming in all week,’ says an old soak, wobbling towards the Gents. Marc grips a cigar between his teeth, as he designs his shot. When he has licked the last granule of dust from his crisp packet, the Limehouse photographer flattens the eviscerated envelope. He smoothes the lining with the back of his hand, alchemises the tablecloth, red to silver.
Security personnel are rehearsing the arrival of the nobs, the royals. Bulbs wink on tent poles, for the benefit of flights into the City Airport at Silvertown. A final run-through for the Millennium show, the loud hurrah. Jeeps, red carpet. Stand-ins for Blair and Mandelson (the former ‘single shareholder’), Lord Falconer. The deputed Blair clone hasn’t got the walk right. ‘A man whose shoes are too small.’ (As poet Geoffrey Hill has it.) A yea-saying preacher, arms thrown wide, who pays other people to steer him away from the shit.
This is better than tomorrow. A grandstand view for the price of a few drinks. No crush. No fighting your way on to the Jubilee Line. No hanging about for hours on Stratford station. No arm-wrestling with sour royalty, during a joyless deconstruction of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
The coloured streamers above the bar are reflected in the window. The Dome is an invader crashed into the swamp on Planet Britain. Wrecked on our floating island, the aircraft carrier that Piety Blair has made us. Cod ritual always favours the Thames: the knighting of Francis Chichester at Greenwich, CIA product-placement dramas filmed (back-to-back with Jane Austen) in the Royal Naval College. Churchill’s funeral barge. The Millennium Wheel (the London Eye) which wasn’t ready on the night. The bridge that wobbled. The promised ‘river of fire’. Ceremonies invented to paper over civic discontent.
One year from now, on Christmas Eve, I would return to the Dome. They’d slashed the entry price to £1. Tourist shops were selling off their souvenir tat at knockdown prices. I filled three Christmas stockings with Dome kitsch for less than £15. It was still raining. At least 101 stuffed Dalmatians were hanging by the neck from deserted sideshow booths. Coke dispensers were empty. A YEAR OF CELEBRATION: THIS MACHINE IS NOT IN SERVICE.
Time spent here shamed the visitor. I’ve never been anywhere so dispiriting. TUNNEL OF LOVE/KISS ME SUCK. Small groups, mainly Indian or Bangladeshi, ignored the barely functioning zones to asset-strip souvenir shops.
CITY OF LONDON PRESENTS: MONEY. Due to the incident which took place on Tuesday 7th November, unfortunately the Millennium Jewels Exhibit will not be open to the public until further notice. On behalf of the Dome and De Beers we apologise for any disappointment caused.
On the glistening path, where we saw the understudies make their entrance on the day before the millennial eve, I ran into the last of the celebrities: Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson. In the form of cardboard cut-outs. Punting a specially commissioned Blackadder ‘special’, large-screen TV to make excursionists feel at home.
Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud was the only object that made any attempt to address the reality of this site: metal filings (that alluded to riverside scrap yards) magicked into a man-shaped cloud. Against a grey sky. This figure, the spirit of place, evolves – as you walk, or drift with the tide. It gives form to inherited melancholy.
The Prayer Space is situated in Harrison Building opposite Millennium Jewels. Nobody is praying. The jewels had to be removed, after a bunch of South London chancers tried to ram the tent with a JCB. An operation sold to the cops from the start. The only high attendance day at the Dome – busybusy crowds mugging like crazy – came when plainclothes police were dressed as tourists and
workmen, while they waited for the bandits to make their move.
It would get worse. Government (and the usual quangos) hoped we’d forget about the Dome – until the developers arrived. By November 2001, the deserted and unloved site was haemorrhaging an estimated £240,000 a month. In that year, statisticians reckoned, £21.5 million had gone down the tubes: on a skeleton maintenance staff and all those empty car parks. Even in the Bad News flood around 11 September, nobody could devise an ‘on message’ boost for the Teflon marquee.
Lord Falconer, invisible minder, unenthusiastic scapegoat, kept his own council. Could anything be done? Rumour spoke of the strategy employed on other burnt-out industrial spaces, the conversion of the tent into a club, a rave facility. Send for naughty Dave Courtney. Or perhaps a theme park? An ice rink? A medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, expressed an interest. As did the Meridian Delta consortium. Marc Atkins might well be prepared to stage a major photographic retrospective. Graveyards, reforgotten authors, nudes and obelisks.
The Arthur Daleys of New Labour intended one thing, as had been obvious from the start: a sell-out. Three hundred acres of Greenwich peninsula real estate, cleaned up with lottery funds, brownfield recovery grants and the rest, available for development. New housing. Chafford Hundred comes to town. With multiplex and the eco-friendly Sainsbury’s on its doorstep.
One more drink. A last look through the binoculars. They switch the illuminations on and off. Everything checked. Nothing can go wrong – can it? Will Self, a fan of the M25, said that the mistake with the Dome was that it played safe. It was too modest. It should have spread itself to envelop the whole of London, right out to the motorway. An invisible membrane. A city of zones and freak shows separated from the rest of England. Ford Madox Ford’s old fantasy finally activated.
We couldn’t get drunk, but we were very mellow. Boneless. It took a long time to hft a glass. Anna had driven us through the Blackwall Tunnel at the start of all this and she was there for the last rites. We hadn’t walked around the perimeter of London, we had circumnavigated the Dome. At a safe distance. Away from its poisoned heritage. Its bad will, mendacity. The tent could consider itself exorcised. This was a rare quest for me, one that reached a fitting conclusion. Here at last was the grail. Up-ended on a swamp in East London. Glowing in the dark.
Acknowledgements
To Renchi Bicknell for his company on the walk around the M25; for his sketches, speculations, enthusiasm. To Kevin Jackson for a steady dripfeed of information, asides, bibliographic offprints. And to the hardy occasional, Marc Atkins, Bill Drummond, Chris Petit.
With thanks to those who took part in the secondary expeditions: Ivan Bicknell, Peter Carpenter (Epsom guide and William Curtis Hayward informant), Chris Darke, Jock McFayden, Lawrence Peskett, Anna Sinclair (and for those early-morning drives), Will Sinclair, Martin J. Wallen.
Material on the history, fabric and mythology of the M25 was supplied by John Sergeant. Pinky Ghundale’s good cheer and efficiency made the impossible possible. Thanks to Keith Griffiths for fronting a post-posthumous film on motorway reverie (the tape beyond ‘the final commission’).
For generously giving time for interviews, thanks to: J.G. Ballard, Dr J.C. Burne, Ken Campbell, Cicely Hadman, Ros Hadman, Jerry Jones, Rachel Lichtenstein, Bernard O’Mahoney, Beth Pedder, Tony Sangwine, John Whomes.
And thanks for gifts and deeds too numerous to specify to: Sara Allen, Julian Bell, Neil Belton, Vanessa Bicknell, Paul Burwell, Brian Catling, Miranda Collinge, Gini Dearden, Paul Devereux, Andrew Aidan Dun, Gareth Evans, Bruce Gilbert, Mike Goldmark, Jane Greenwood, Bill Griffiths, Brian Hinton, Susie Honeyman, Patrick Keiller, Dave McKean, Emma Matthews, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Chris and Haya Oakley, Effie Paleologou, John Richard Parker, John Procter, Joe Rosen, Robin Summers, Jonathan Thomson, Liat Uziyel, Claire Walsh, Patrick Wright.
Extracts from this book, in an earlier form, were published in the London Review of Books, The London Magazine and The River. A short section appears, courtesy of Michael Moorcock, on the website ‘Fantastic Metropolis’ and can be found on www.fantasticmetropolis.com.
Extended riffs on themes touched on in London Orbital were rehearsed in a sequence of books published in 1999. I think of these books as missing chapters of a larger whole, outstations.
(1) Sorry Meniscus (Excursions to the Millennium Dome). Profile Books. (Expeditions to the building site on Bugsby’s Marshes.) (2) Crash (David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’). British Film Institute. (Interview with Ballard, road speculations.) (3) Rodinsky’s Room. Granta. (An investigation carried out by Rachel Lichtenstein into the life and mythology of David Rodinsky.) (4) Dark Lanthorns (David Rodinsky as Psychogeographer). Goldmark, Uppingham.
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William Addison, Epping Forest (Its Literary and Historical Associations), London, 1945
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, London, 1969
______ Vermilion Sands, London, 1973
______ Crash, London, 1973
______ Running Wild, London, 1988
Griselda Barton and Michael Tong, Underriver (Samuel Palmer’s Golden Valley ), Westerham, 1995
Neil Belton, The Good Listener (Helen Bamber: A Life against Cruelty), London, 1998
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______ Stane, Place Book III, London, 1977
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______ Clive Bush, Out of Dissent (A Study of Five Contemporary British Poets), London, 1997
______ Clive Bush, ed., Worlds of New Measure (An Anthology of Five Contemporary British Poets), London, 1997
Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers (Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses), Charlottesville, Virginia, 1998
P.G. Hall, The Industries of London, London, 1962
Joy Hancox, The Byrom Collection (Renaissance Thought, the Royal Society and the Building of the Globe Theatre), London, 1992
William Hayward, It Never Gets Dark All Night, London, 1964
______ Between Two Rivers (Gloucestershire Poems), Wotton-under-Edge, 1999
______ David Jones, Letters to William Hayward, London, 1979
Joan Hessayon, Capel Bells, London, 1995
Bryan Hewitt, The Crocus King (E.A. Bowles of Myddleton House), Ware, 1997
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Radical Ideas during the English Revolution), London, 1972
______ The Century of Revolution (1603–1714), London, 1961
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A.R. Hope-Moncrieff, Essex, revised edn, London, 1926
Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘The Future in London’, from London Town, Past and Present by W.W. Hutchings, Vol. II, London, 1909
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