London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  The Shepherd’s Bush Westfield drome achieves a critical non-mass. It’s an all-year-round winter wonderland made from synthetic ice. The scale and density is manageable without an induction course. The compass is not wholly subverted. Treat the skating-rink floors and celestial ceilings like a walk-through park and it’s harmless. The heavier Stratford version is much more of a black hole, a Gormenghast swallowing life as we know it for a dole of recycled air. The permanently interim quality of the surrounding post-Olympic terrain is a microclimate of choking dust – gouged pits, septic ponds, rubble dunes – mingling with infinitely small particles of sand from the Sahara. Already, this speculation is sub-zoning into knots of hanging-out/non-attending schoolkids sucking cans, lost souls from the rubber corridors of decommissioned hospitals, and misdirected travellers condemned to endless circuits while they search for an exit to daylight.

  The Shepherd’s Bush Westfield is kinder, but Andrew decides that he isn’t so hungry after all. And he’d rather piss in the woods on the edge of Wormwood Scrubs. We pass through the supermall, the former rail depot, and on to Wood Lane. I am astonished by the suspension of corporate sensitivity, post-Savile, responsible for a large hi-definition poster on the side of the BBC studios, where a crowd of unticketed folk are waiting to be let in as noise-makers for a games show. A twinkling octogenarian hoofer is tight to a very young blonde woman with a glitter ball in her hand. The pattern of reflections within the facets of the magic ball make it appear to contain multiple reproductions of the shrunken skull of Sooty the glove puppet. This sinister charity triage is completed by a bandaged cyclopean bear with jaundiced fur and a weak smile.

  Pausing in the echoing vault beneath Westway, thrummed by constant traffic overhead, and conscious of the fact that this pillared slab of concrete modernism is a barrier, a frontier before our trudge into the darkness of the Scrubs, we rested for a moment. Kötting rolled up his trouser legs. He massaged the knots out of calf muscles still pulsing with the energy drink that hit his exhausted meat like a jolt of Frankenstein’s stolen lightning.

  Revealed flesh, under the septic light of the motorway cavern, is a book, a graphic novel. Manga madness reminding me of that moment in Moby-Dick when Ishmael first encounters Queequeg. ‘It’s only his outside,’ Ishmael decides, ‘a man can be honest in any sort of skin.’

  Never shy of a photo opportunity, Andrew explained: ‘An abandoned self-adornment diary project.’ Maori tattoos adapting images and symbols from locations that formed part of his backstory. He had turned his arms and legs into an illuminated gospel, decorated with the comic strip of his life. Here is his daughter’s first drawing, an angel. And here some cave paintings from Scandinavia (where he worked as a lumberjack). Stone carvings from the South American odyssey. Along with natural wounds and scars. And teenage hurts exorcized in carved flesh. All this harm: before he discovered the solace of the sea, the numbing hours when the mind detaches from the punished body. Now he swam, I walked. Limped. Dragged. Floated.

  Road and railway and woodland merged as we came, in clammy early-evening darkness, burned at the edges by mean spill from light poles and urgent beams from cars, like a necklace of flaring and furtive cigarettes, along the sudden, mid-stretching width of Wormwood Scrubs. Surely one of the most evocative names in London. Like the title of a rejected novel by Evelyn Waugh. A public space dedicated to decline and fall. And weekend football noise. Peter Ackroyd, the living embodiment of literary London, gives interviews a Gissing spin by speaking of growing up, with a single parent, on a council estate ‘a stone’s throw from Wormwood Scrubs’. There is more poetry in that beginning than in acknowledging the claims of East Acton.

  The prison block is heritage-lit in the twilight like the ruins of a Norman castle. Part of the mystique of a reliable English penal institution is to have the right measure of dread in the name: Dartmoor, Belmarsh, Wormwood Scrubs. The suggestion of swamp or remote Conan Doyle moor is an advantage. We like this scrubby interlude, the shrouded path through the woods and the open land beyond. There is room for three of the architectural categories that have defined our walk: prison, hospital, football stadium. They are all clustered on the southern perimeter, facing Westway.

  We have tracked the silence of stadiums around the Overground, from Millwall’s Den to Stamford Bridge and Queen’s Park Rangers at White City. If we followed the Ginger Line spur north from Willesden Junction for three stops, we’d be at Wembley. There are prisons too, visible from the train window, or just out of sight: Pentonville, Brixton, Wandsworth, Wormwood Scrubs. It might be time, I tell Andrew, to establish a new lexicon.

  FOOTBALL STADIUM. A large, unexplained oval structure left empty for much of the time. Often unfinished in appearance, scaffolding seemingly integral to the design. Numerous designated parking bays but few cars. The stadium is never the right size, either too small for anticipated capacity (and revenue stream), or too large (club in decline, waiting on overseas investment). If a desired capacity is achieved, the owners will lobby for a move to a better site, preferably the unwanted shell of some Olympic ghost or legacy power station. The Football Stadium should therefore be understood, not as a focus for local passions, but as a property speculation; future apartments trading on the club’s mythology. A sideline in scattering the ashes of supporters allows the club to forge links with a suitable crematorium.

  PRISON. Inconvenient real estate in which the boarders refuse to pay their way. Solidly built and expensive to demolish. Suitable for privatization and outsourcing. If possible, as at Oxford, where the old castle prison has been rebranded as Malmaison, a boutique hotel, use some imagination. ‘Don’t worry about doing porridge,’ the brochure says. ‘This is the one hotel in Oxford city centre where you’ll be happy to get a long stretch!’

  HOSPITAL. An instrument for inflating bureaucracy. Scandals justify enquiries. Failed enquiries demand further enquiries. An infinite process. Rationalize, close down, leave in limbo until the property market takes an interest. See St Clement’s, Mile End Road: Victorian workhouse, asylum, arts venue with tunnels for urban explorers, major regeneration project (with minor public housing element). Promised public housing = Achieved public relations.

  We found numerous abandoned umbrellas in this strip of woodland, and alongside the railway embankment, when we emerged on Scrubs Lane. It was as if a regiment of well-prepared walkers, perhaps striding as we were towards the station at Willesden Junction, encountered English weather for the first time and flung away their token instruments of protection. At the first gust, these black satin bells blow inside out. Funereal silks, punctured by thorns, have parachuted into the railway corridor, alongside the usual blue cans and unrequired newspapers. I thought, again, of Will Self’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel: we had accessed a theme-park trail that would lead, inevitably, to the great central corridor of Friern Barnet asylum. ‘Any symbols – words, numerals, pictorial – were experienced as a sort of map, one that if concentrated on became a map of a map that was itself a further map.’

  The umbrella, Self reminds us, is the thing to be forgotten, left behind. See the metal ferule scraping marks in the dirt, names, dates, memories: to be erased in the next shower.

  Willesden Junction, mother of railways, welcomes us with giant sheds, car auctions, book distributors. It is comforting to be returning to the western equivalent of Hackney Wick, as it once was, a working place, out on the edge, with road and rail connections. It’s good to see rickety stacks of pallet boards that are not art. Kötting eyes a Chinese restaurant, but this is not the moment to pause. It’s going to take a healthy push to reef in the Overground line all the way east to Finchley Road & Frognal, in the dark, shadowing burial grounds: Kensal Green Cemetery, Willesden Lane Cemetery, Hampstead Cemetery. He settles for a sticky-choc lump so stiff and fusty it’s like licking a crowbar dipped in sugared mud. With a RED BULL chaser.

  There’s just enough light lemon-squeezed from the bulbs of the sodium orchard by the long station wall to snat
ch the photograph. GET YOUR ROCK SALT HERE. SUPPORTING THE PROSTATE CANCER CHARITY. Somewhere on the road Andrew has picked up a shocking-pink monkey with green face and cheeky tongue. He tucks it under his arm. And we strike off down Palermo Road. Most of the world, he says, is dark matter. ‘You can’t see it or touch it or feel it. But you can smell it. Every last inch of the way.’ Anxiety. Leaf death. Chip papers. Resurrection.

  The Experience of Light

  It was too dark at Willesden Junction to appreciate the flood pool of rail tracks; the way that steel tributaries from south and east converge, interconnect, overlap, and stream towards the western horizon in a unified tidal bore. On this stone bridge, in the early 1960s, Leon Kossoff stood, in a state of emotional turbulence, taking measure of the challenge, the panoramic sweep and its painterly potential.

  Born on City Road in Islington, and growing up in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney, Kossoff became a railway migrant, shifting his studio from Dalston Lane to a builder’s shed in Willesden Junction. The railway was his muse and he was its most potent recorder and supplicant. Where Turner and Whistler paid witness to the shifting light of the Chelsea reaches of the Thames that we had passed through earlier that afternoon, Kossoff positioned himself in quiet rooms, in areas of demolition and reconstitution, to record the material force of London’s railway system. Which he saw as an organic entity, a living thing.

  After our orbital circuit was completed, I had to come back. In yellow twilight, under puddles of artificial light, we tried to align the view from the bridge on Old Oak Lane with Kossoff’s monumental charcoal drawings of Willesden Junction from 1962. But the grunge nocturnes of the day’s walk with Andrew Kötting were infected by the rogue film-maker’s enthusiasm for Tarkovsky’s Stalker and the Amazonian madness of Werner Herzog. He started doing the voices: the railway was a jungle and the birds and trees screamed with pain. The gantries and signal poles punctuating Kossoff’s drawings became black Tyburns, hoists for containers of radioactive cargoes. Andrew’s riffs absorbed a post-apocalyptic geometry of unexplained sheds and sidings.

  The perimeter fence of the station at Willesden Junction defines the point of transit from road use to a sunken railside community. Passengers dissolve on concrete ramps and metal-sided walkways. Recorded announcements, in no recognizable language, are muffled by the acrid smoke of evening. Night cancels time. Whatever discomfort we have experienced from hours of pounding pavements, and hours more stretching ahead of us, is absolved with the loss of detail, the blurring of outline: orange-gold blots of surveillance electricity burn aureoles in natural darkness. We turn back, cross the busy road, and head east, with the sense that, at long last, we are coming home. And we feel good about it. Andrew kisses the monkey.

  Old Oak Lane, in late morning, in weak spring sunshine, was a very different beast. I decided to take a day away from writing up my Ginger Line notes, to investigate the geography of those Willesden paintings. I spent some time, up on my toes, trying to convince myself that this was indeed the place where Kossoff perched to make his preliminary drawings. In the aftermath of our orbital walk, it was a necessary period of adjustment; coming back, by way of the Overground, on my own, to take a walk from the site where Kossoff worked with such intent in the 1960s to his present home and studio in Willesden Green. In recent times he has produced a series of more domestic, affectionate paintings of the railway at the bottom of his garden, the gnarled and supported limb of a cherry tree that filters out the insistent presence of the whispering invader.

  Kossoff is not a tall man. He wouldn’t be able to hold his drawing board in the place where I had my elbows. The Willesden Junction painting of 1966, with its soaring blues, would have been made in the new studio in Willesden Green. The charcoal drawings of the earlier period are about width and movement, with nothing actually in motion apart from the clouds. And the painter’s hand. His nerves. The rapidly retreating perspective of the railway-ladders delivers a history of past and future momentum. A graph of action and reaction. A series of probing muscular spasms digging at the paper. Nothing is referenced by these motifs, this darkness, beyond darkness itself. The Abyss looking right back.

  My view from the railway bridge was of resistant bushes, huge yellow hoists, reddish stones, rusty poles and blue-grey mesh fences. If I wanted anything close to the letterbox intensity of Kossoff’s Willesden vision, I had to adapt an extreme telephoto mode, so that the overhead gantries are foreshortened, bleeding into a sequence of bridges, while horizontal diamond patterns of metalwork are countered by the curves of the track.

  NO ACCESS TO EUROTERMINAL.

  I poke about, trying to orientate myself, and hoping to identify the builder who rented Kossoff a draughty space in which to work. Hippie dope transfers have been plastered to the official sign, confirming its Euro credentials. DINAFEM. ORIGINAL AMNESIA. MOST AWARDED SATIVA FROM HOLLAND. HIGH LIFE CUP WINNER. Elective amnesia of the deadlands. Railside sheds have been made ready for cargoes from everywhere. Of local builders and solitary painters, no trace.

  On the map it’s no great distance from Willesden Junction to Willesden Green, but Kossoff, as I soon discovered, was achieving a large cultural step: from the rough and tumble of proudly depressed Harlesden to the tranquillity of railway-fringe suburbs nudging Kilburn and aspiring to Finchley & Frognal.

  On the corner of Tubbs Road and Station Road, I noticed a fading trade sign still visible in the brickwork, high above a busy road junction. Ghost stencils of this type always remind me of Robert Tressell, the jobbing painter and author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Crafted boards, produced by Tressell for a modest fee, can now be found on display in Hastings Museum. The reputation forged by a righteously angry book saved these casual commissions from oblivion. In certain London districts, and Harlesden is one of them, trade signs are tolerated, unnoticed. In others, rising with the Ginger Line – Shoreditch, Peckham Rye – signs are valued heritage, repainted or pastiched. The elevation of this one proves that it was originally intended to be viewed from the railway. Part of that cinema of transit celebrated by Patrick Keiller and John Berger, advertising artworks exploiting suspended time at a hub station.

  CLAUDE BASTABLE, BUILDER. Upper-case lettering like a phantom credit sequence sliding across the carbonized railway bricks between eyebrowed windows gauzed in dead net. A substantial property in mourning for its previous identity. Was this Kossoff’s builder? There was plenty of room for a shed around the side on Tubbs Road. Or the potential for a high room in the house, overlooking the railway. Claude Bastable was a good name. Let us award him this act of enlightened patronage. And, if not Claude, one of his now-decamped descendants. Perhaps I was wrong? I read somewhere that it was not a builder’s shed but a derelict garage, with the railway bridge close at hand. ‘The studio itself,’ said Paul Moorhouse, who curated a Kossoff show at the Tate Gallery in 1996, ‘offered few comforts.’

  Harlesden is different. The Overground walk, made with Andrew Kötting, branching away at this point to narrow dormitory avenues, hugging the railway, and easily blocked by Ocado delivery vans, was concerned about libraries and locality. Quit the orbital circuit and gravity no longer pulls you towards the Finchley Road massif, emigrant cafés, and arts centres with morning coffee-group discussions. Following an outspur of the Overground, depicted in the brochure as an absolutely straight line heading for Watford Junction, was to transfer to another narrative entirely. But the chart was a lie, the Overground has a bias to the west. Leaving me in a limbo between systems. Leaving Harlesden like old Hackney, as an overwhelmed village of nations operating through small brave enterprises, fly-by-night cafés, charity caves, poundstretchers, perpetual roadworks, bus queues. Agent Orange boosterism had not yet arrived with the railway. The dominant element was the North Circular Road to which most of the white-van traffic tended. And the great blue tongue of the M1, a pioneering motorway born a couple of miles to the north. On the map, it seemed to erupt from a tarmac spring associated with the W
elsh Harp Reservoir.

  This was Brent. Ken Livingstone country. Mired in accusations of cronyism, suspect closeness to builders of high towers, promotion of Westfield and the Olympic circus (as a redevelopment smokescreen), the Thatcher-expelled boss of the Greater London Council took time out as MP for Brent East, before standing successfully for Mayor of London. Willesden Junction was an easy commute down the Bakerloo Line to Charing Cross: change for Waterloo (GLC) or Westminster. Brent, Livingstone’s chosen exile, was ripe with allotments, window displays made from tier after tier of fright wigs, nail parlours, cemeteries, dog parks. A terrain of newts and other curious pets, indoor hobbies. Ward politics and nonconforming churches. Barbershops and fast food. Meals consumed at bus stops. Thankfully, there were no Boris bicycles, no blue fences. No high-pumping corporate joggers in charity T-shirts.

  I stopped for a late breakfast in a Turkish place that serviced Chapman’s Park Industrial Estate. The quantity of food on the big plate would have fed a nuclear family for a week. The chips were excellent, like bundles of dry kindling. They had an oily, oaky aftertaste. The black solar disc of blood pudding sat heavy in me, as I sopped up the juices with soft white blotters of bread. It would have been fatal to rush this road feast. I sucked at a scalding pint of coffee and eavesdropped on the mild flirtation between a van driver and the girl who brought trays to the tables.

  ‘End of the day, you can’t top a Harvester.’

  Van men from the industrial estate used their delivery runs to the northern fringes of London as reconnaissance for suitable pubs and diners; weekend venues where generic platters could be judged on quantity and the absence of spices and peculiar vegetables, those shiny things that were neither peas nor beans. The driver’s wife was a vegetarian, so that worked pretty well. Divide the plate: he took the steak, sausage, pie, curry, grill, and she got the mushrooms and any spare-leaf salad thrown in as bulk.