London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  On the darkening February afternoon, when I stand beside Kötting, rubbernecking through the window of the Chelsea Harbour gym and swimming pool, there is no way of recovering the ambiance of the urgent 1990s, when this windswept approach was staked out by photographers. Diana must have relished getting them up so early. Now the gym is deserted and the pool is occupied by a good father, a dark, powerful man lapping steadily, backstroke, with one arm, a small boy clutching his chest. The stump of the missing arm is cupped in what looks like a black silk stocking. Despite this handicap, and the burden of the perfectly calm child, he barely disturbs the clear water.

  This is not London, or not the London of coal docks and power stations and the dumping of contaminated materials, and women renting narrow bunk beds in dormitories on Lots Road. Chelsea Harbour, attached to the artery of the Ginger Line by the new Imperial Wharf Station, trades on its separateness. Today, at this curfew hour, the spaces beneath the glazed domes, like newsreels of Riviera hotels and baroque casinos, are empty. Showrooms heaped with carpets are proofs of their own redundancy. Even the birdhouse chatter of mobile phones has died away. The fantastic aviary of tasteful design, every drape and lamp required for decorating a riverside apartment, has been abandoned, as if to some Ballardian catastrophe. The crystal world fairy tale of Chelsea Harbour has put us all to sleep. A late-afternoon chill from the sluggish reaches of the river makes our daggers of breath tinkle like glass.

  When the nicotine wars at the gym were over (to smoke or not to smoke), and the women who drifted down in their Jimmy Choo shoes and fur coats had been banished, the Harbour colony fell into a lethargy too deep for fiction. There are zones along the Overground undone by encounters with visionary novelists. Brixton, charmed by Angela Carter, decided against attaching itself to the Overground promotion. Chelsea Harbour, fixed at the turn of the millennium by J. G. Ballard, accepted a railway halt as the price for release from the mythology imposed upon it.

  The ramp leading from the reality of Lots Road to the Overground is a causeway of unconvinced interventions, not quite sculpture, not quite propaganda. For a couple of hundred yards, the Imperial Wharf approach is the drive into town from a new airport in a new country, using up its Euro budget.

  A line of taxis, engines thumping. A giant pair of severed grey hands dumped in a mesh cage for potential refurbishment. Green-and-blue periscope towers. Novelty flats built in expectation of the railway effect. Blind roundabouts. Contradictory road markings. Humming vaults where machines are housed to keep the whole complicated ecosystem breathing.

  Chelsea Harbour is not Ballard’s Chelsea Marina, but it stands in the same relation to railway London. Ballard’s disaffected middle-class terrorists don’t do trains, they have the suburban fetish for car ownership. For muddy weekends in Gloucestershire and Norfolk. When the winter rains came, flooding the Thames Valley, turning Shepperton roads into rivers, Ballard’s drowned world was realized. The meteorological catastrophes of his early novels overwhelmed the place where so much of his work had been contemplated, cooked, produced. In the way that Mortlake is marked by the presence of the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee, and the destruction by fire of his library, Shepperton, without the living Ballard in Old Charlton Road, is obliged to confirm those feats of imagination. Droughts, floods, Heathrow paranoia, motorway catastrophes: reality limps along, trying to keep pace with the exiled author’s handwritten pages. Ballard extracted future scripts from the amniotic reservoir of his spinal canal.

  Chelsea Harbour was a set, built as a set, refusing cultural memory. Colonists were slow moving, subdued, tranquillized by a lack of affect: actors waiting for their words to be delivered. There was none of the repressed discontent, the eros of incipient revolutionary action, Ballard locates among the community of Chelsea Marina in his satiric novel. Investors who had bought into this riverside package failed to live up to their fictional avatars, they didn’t have that energy.

  Millennium People is the central panel of a triptych of interrelated novels. It is bookended by Super-Cannes (2000) and Kingdom Come (2006). Locations shift but the moves are established: an ordinary sensual man, suffering from loss, anomie, in a drifting second marriage, is drawn into the subversive, potentially lethal games of a messianic psychopath, rogue scientist. A sweat-drenched driver in leather flying jacket or slept-in suit. A haunter of airport slip roads and long-stay car parks. ‘The areas peripheral to great airports,’ Ballard told me, when I interviewed him in 1998, ‘are identical all over the world … two-storey factories, flat housing, warehouses.’

  Some commentators, at the time of publication, were wary of this return to London, unsure about Ballard’s take on gated communities, the sinister interconnections of police and Secret State. Ballard, they felt, was not to be trusted as a critic of St John’s Wood, the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, the London Eye. They were quite wrong. As Millennium People demonstrates: Ballard is the London eye. Witness to a city in the process of losing its soul. The distinction between drowsy riparian settlements of the Thames Valley and the colonists at Chelsea Marina (neither in Chelsea, nor a marina) was meaningless. Ballard imported suburban anxieties into a capital traumatized between the anti-metropolitan stance of Margaret Thatcher and the bogus piety of Tony Blair and New Labour. War apologists operating with the dangerous notion that pantomimed sincerity is sincerity, that conviction is truth.

  Ballard’s deranged biker-vicar, addicted to the afterburn of whippings he has endured, is a revenant among the doorstep assassins of SW3. Fundamentalism of every stamp, including the fundamental decencies of the old Surrey stockbroker belt (now given over to Russian oligarchs and Premier League footballers), is suspect. Bourgeois marriage is a lie. Property is debt.

  ‘The major problem for contemporary civilization,’ Ballard said, ‘is finding somewhere to park.’ So firebomb a travel agency. Trash a video-rental store. Leave a fissile art book on the open shelves of the shop that is the true hub of Tate Modern: surrealism jumping off the page. ‘A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.’

  One aspect of Ballard’s years of apparent retreat in Shepperton – actually a strategic withdrawal to cut out inessentials and facilitate a ruthless production of texts – was his virtuosity with the telephone. Afternoons are passed in dialogue with some remote and unseen interrogator. Ballard riffs around rehearsals for the novels: provocative takes on US politics, Vietnam, Iraq, oil, pornography.

  ‘I sometimes think we’re entering a New Dark Age. The lights are full on, but there’s an inner darkness,’ he told V. Vale in 2004. ‘The flight of reason leaves people with these partly conscious notions that perhaps they can rely on the irrational. Psychopathology offers a better guarantor of freedom from cant and bullshit and sales commercials that fill the ether every moment of the day. One can almost choose to indulge in a mode of psychopathic behaviour without any sort of moral inhibition at all.’

  David Markham, the narrator of Millennium People, shares a special kind of visual addiction with the film-maker Luis Buñuel, an interest in the erotic potential of psychosomatic disability, his wife’s use of walking canes as a weapon of power. Cinema, infecting Ballard all the way back to childhood expeditions in Shanghai, through afternoons avoiding medical studies in Cambridge, becomes the defining aspect of millennial London: a prompt for acts of urban terrorism. Like the motorcar, cinema was a twentieth-century phenomenon: its usefulness was over, the heroic period was done. A sentimental attachment to past masters is now registered as a badge of bourgeois self-satisfaction.

  ‘I remembered the quirky young woman I had met at the National Film Theatre, and invited to a late screening of Antonioni’s Passenger,’ Ballard writes. Seduced by the lizardly sexuality of a film-studies lecturer with posters of Kurosawa samurai and the screaming woman from Battleship Potemkin on the walls of her unruly flat, Markham is soon a passenger of another kind, a participant in attacks on the institutions of river
bank culture. He becomes part of the outer circle of the group responsible for a bomb left in the National Film Theatre. If the Overground railway is a rough democracy, all classes, all tastes, then the oil-company-promoted galleries, theatres and cinemas of the South Bank are an exploitation of the river. The Thames is a hierarchy of power and property, from the downriver towers of High-Rise to the bungalows of Shepperton, by way of Chelsea Marina. The circuit of the orbital railway, like the M25 motorway, links east and west, ghetto and suburb. Train journeys mingle inner and outer topographies; cinematic reveries in the spirit of Patrick Keiller with a neurotic picking at iPhones and Kindles. Chelsea Harbour is about stasis and false memory. Ballard’s translation makes that concept into a fever chart of incipient violence, a spill point for embattled investors.

  Readers who had tracked Ballard’s work for years, and taken his published interviews at face value, trusted him as a guide to the airport margin, the terrain covered by those lists he delivered: science parks, retail parks, golf courses, executive housing, pharmaceutical-research facilities, motorway junctions. The internalized geography of the final Ballard novel, Kingdom Come, was the apotheosis of the M25. A supermall is the ideal setting for a mirthless comedy of messianic consumerism. Millennium People was more troubling because it played its fate game in a city that Ballard had always told us was devoid of interest. A suitable location for apocalyptic fantasy of the sort previously contrived by Richard Jefferies in After London (1885). Jefferies imagined his own drowned world, a poisonous swamp occupied by stunted inbreeds. Ballard, at the start of his career, concentrated on what would happen on the far side of ecological cataclysm: London frozen, burnt, returned to the Mesozoic era. He compared his favoured Westway overpass with the ruined temples of Ankor Wat: ‘a stone dream that will never awake’.

  ‘I regard the city as a semi-extinct form,’ Ballard told me. ‘London is basically a nineteenth-century city. And the habits of mind appropriate to the nineteenth century, which survive into the novels set in London in the twentieth century, aren’t really appropriate to understanding what is going on today.’

  Horror is incubated in the labyrinth of an estate agent’s glossy brochure, in CGI panoramas of estates that will never be built, populated by smiling people who have never lived. Victor Gollancz, Ballard’s formidable early publisher, took him to lunch at the Ivy, telling him how much he had enjoyed The Drowned World, even though it was stolen from Conrad. At that time, as Ballard admitted, he had read nothing by the Polish author. Influence can act through sensitivity to place, as much as through close reading. The Chelsea bombers of Millennium People inherit the virus from the Soho anarchists of Conrad, as displayed in The Secret Agent (1907). The microclimate of Kötting’s Deptford, as exploited by Paul Theroux in The Family Arsenal (1976), is part of the same lineage. Sedentary writers, coming to terms with the unquantifiable mystery of London, discover an inclination towards nihilistic violence. ‘If you think blowing up Nelson’s column is crazy why did you put the bomb in Euston?’ says one of Theroux’s characters. Reports of anarchist incidents, random killings in quiet Berkshire towns, bombs in department stores and railway terminals, shape the trajectory of literary fiction; fictions that, by some inexplicable magic, become mantic, prophesying – and making inevitable – future disasters.

  A hypnagogic foreshadowing of tabloid headlines is one of Ballard’s disturbing gifts. His aerodynamic prose has journalists ringing him for quotes every time there is a car crash in an underpass. The framing material of Millennium People is built from a close reading of recent outrages: the unsolved murder of the television presenter Jill Dando on her Fulham doorstep, the Hungerford killings by Michael Ryan, the massacre of sixteen children and one adult at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March 1996. Ballard’s Chelsea Marina cultists, disaffected middle-class professionals, treat the Dando assassination as a re-enactment. The prose has the inevitability of that archive clip, the CCTV footage of Dando forever emerging from a Hammersmith store with a newly acquired stapler. Ballard’s rogue paediatrician, Richard Gould, heretical prophet of the group, makes regular pilgrimages to Hungerford.

  The names Ballard gives his actors are always significant. What do we make of David Markham, the mediating consciousness of Millennium People? Is the ‘Markham’ bit a nod towards Ballard’s early supporter and Hampstead friend, Kingsley Amis? Amis, under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’, wrote the posthumous James Bond novel Colonel Sun. The sun, seen as part of the Japanese flag on the cover of Empire of the Sun, has a symbolic role to play in Millennium People. There is an epiphany for Richard Gould, after the doorstep shooting of the Dando character in Fulham, when he lifts his arms and salutes the burning gold orb behind the canopy of shivering leaves in the trees in Bishop’s Park.

  After Ballard’s mad clergyman has thrown his revolver into the Thames, he vanishes ‘into the infinite space of Greater London, a terrain beyond all maps’. At that intersection of time and place, when books and charts can no longer be trusted, a pared-down narrative becomes uncanny. Five years after the publication of the novel, there was a tragic incident in Chelsea that could have been lifted straight from the pages of Millennium People. A barrister, Mark Saunders, living in a quiet residential square, just off King’s Road, fired his shotgun indiscriminately at neighbours. The police were called. One of the eyewitnesses, Jane Winkworth, was in the square’s private garden, working on shoe designs. Her clients, newspapers reported, had included Diana, Princess of Wales, and, more recently, Kate Middleton. A police marksman returned fire and Mr Saunders received a fatal wound. The incident happened in Markham Square.

  ‘The sirens sounded for many days,’ Ballard wrote, ‘a melancholy tocsin that became the aural signature of west London.’ Producing his novel, right on the hinge of the new millennium, he demonstrated, yet again, a gift for travelling both ways in time, teaching us how to read the runes and how to confront the best as well as the worst of ourselves.

  Before we took our leave of Chelsea Harbour and returned to the companionship of the railway – rails that whispered of Haggerston, Whitechapel, Surrey Quays – we inspected the misconceived piazza in which we found ourselves; a town square with no town, a non-space bereft of humans but overlooked by an infinity of blind windows with a bluish glaze. The open square felt committee designed, with no casting vote, and all options still on the table: herringbone-patterned bricks on which to walk, stock bricks the colour of dried mustard for the walls. A low-level lamp standard was hung with globes like Christmas-tree decorations. It was the season of uprooted forests; dead evergreens dropped under railway arches near London Fields.

  There was a shop, with a trade name blazoned on three awnings, offering lamps and lamp-holders: VAUGHAN. I thought of the poet of light and of borderlands between worlds, the haunted hours between night and day, Henry Vaughan: ‘Rove in that mighty and eternal light / Where no rude shade, or night / Shall dare approach us.’ And I thought of another Vaughan too, the ‘hoodlum scientist’ of Crash; the one whose windshield is set at an angle to express an ‘oblique and obsessive passage’ through the open spaces of Ballard’s troubled consciousness.

  Imperial Wharf to West Brompton

  We left the colony of the barely living, Chelsea Harbour, and we moved on towards a much more substantial enclosure, a city of the named dead, those who fought to stay with us, to make us aware of their suspended narratives.

  Reconnecting with Lots Road, we registered a specialist trade in tables too distinguished to be dirtied with food, oil paintings of questionable pedigree, and all the displayed plunder of forages through gardens and libraries, kitchens and bedrooms; the residue of persons of property who no longer had any use for it. They would not be burying it with them. Auction houses like private banks. Coffee enclaves, draped in subtle greenery, in which bidders and vendors debated percentages. And yawned. And fingernailed digital wafers. There were mews entrances to secret yards, quiet offices and spaces that hovered between top-end retail and s
neering exhibitionism.

  Here was a subterrain in which neither of us was at home; it lacked, as we did, serviceable anecdotes. We pushed through the confusion of King’s Road and Fulham Road, as they sprinted competitively, in parallel lanes, towards their point of abdication at Putney Bridge. You haul in the necessary connections until you arrive at some wholly unexpected destination: Sloane Square or the Royal Brompton Hospital (and painful recollection of Angela Carter’s gruelling sessions of chemotherapy).

  The Overground, after crossing the Thames – all change, please, at Clapham Junction – has a revived identity: high on its embankment, or down below, now screened by strategic planting, viewed over the lip of an established bridge, a rounded ledge of lichen blots and cracks filled with mosses. The line has been coerced into the orbital promotion, splashed with ginger, but it retains its older inclination, as a track for transporting coal; a link with the railway-harbour at Willesden Junction; a boundary marker for Kensington and Chelsea; a western rim for Brompton Cemetery.

  Before venturing into the burial ground, by way of South Lodge, we made a detour to its hollow neighbour, the Stamford Bridge football cathedral, autonomous province of the oligarch Abramovich: West London’s Crimea. The citizens here, paying heavily for their role as obedient spectators, voted some years back to throw in their lot with the exiled Russian billionaire, his associates and political connections. A fools’ plebiscite allowing them to do no more than clap in approval at the loss of identity.

  We noticed, at the perimeter of the deserted stadium, a wall on which a representation of a Euro-triumphant Chelsea team had been projected. A well-behaved queue, fathers with sons in branded shirts, was waiting its turn for the chance to pose for a photograph that would place a humble fan among the demigods, the Terrys and Drogbas. The emptiness of the high bowl, attended by security guards, gazed upon by devout pilgrims, was buffered by development: executive flats, two hotels, restaurants, bars, megastore. There was an attempt, which never took, to rebrand this plot of captured Fulham ground as ‘Chelsea Village’ or ‘The Village’; in just the way that upwardly mobile knots of Hackney, parasitical on parks or railway hubs, try to sound neo-pastoral by slapping an Oliver Goldsmith title on to a concrete mall or a bleak and windblown Barratt Homes piazza with spouting water feature. Locations without locality. The careless exuberance of Ridley Road street market becomes a ‘Shopping Village’, roofed over, policed; while at the same time, by some curious irony, grass-roots protestors, challenging the firebombing and inevitable demolition of a Georgian terrace, say that they are fighting to preserve the ambiance of a threatened village, a community of many faiths and origins.