London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  The print shop is indicated with a directional arrow. But, curiously enough, there is no railway. Or bridge over Middleton Road. Or so I thought, until I got out a magnifying glass for a closer inspection. And then I realized that what I took for a decorative flourish down the spine of the book was in fact shorthand for the line running down towards the City. The railway was the armature supporting all the words and images. New flats were going up on Holly Street. ‘Anna was cheered by these signs of human habitation,’ I noted at that time. ‘But I am uneasy: the height, the isolation, some of the windows already broken.’

  Why hadn’t I investigated this burial ground before? Between the narrow house where the books were printed and the railway was a small, enclosed Jewish cemetery. I had been told by a rabbi with literary ambitions that the ground in which a Jew is buried belongs to that person until the end of days. Through the bars of the gate, it was possible to make out ranks of railway-facing slabs, obelisks like stone trees dwarfed by London planes and draped in ivy.

  The buzz of youth on Kingsland Road, the nocturnal energies of nail bars, pubs, Turkish grocers, knew nothing of the contemplative silence of the Jewish burial ground. Electrification made the street into a carnival of loud talk, laughter, and tablets tweeting and spitting universal gossip. Smokers in overexcited pavement knots. ‘Like like like,’ they shrill. The world is a simile; nothing is fixed and solid. The laughter of whippets: rains of shiny grey nitrous oxide cylinders. Inspiration for Gilbert & George as they march towards their chosen Hackney restaurant.

  Returned to the ginger glow of the Overground at Haggerston, the station that was our end as well as our beginning, I took the obligatory photograph. Andrew flexed his muscles. Rubbish was black-bagged around the bin. EXPECT DELAYS said the latest sign.

  Blood on the Tracks

  I was amused by the names they imposed on the latest reefs of development in ground-zero Haggerston, the tired public housing that had to be swept away to create post-architectural performances worthy of the orbital railway: sleep-shelves sold on the promise of the time it takes to get to Liverpool Street (‘18 minutes’), a better class of station. Those old brown blocks, like a congress of mechanics in nicotine overalls, were given mysteriously elegant calling cards derived from Samuel Richardson, father of the English novel: Clarissa Street, Pamela Street, Richardson Close, Samuel House, Harlowe House and the rest. The first wave of regeneration, between substantial, community-orientated blocks and the elevated railway, featured modest units, bits of garden, an imported urban-suburban estate. When they looked for a suitably inspirational name for a canalside ‘Close’, they picked Mary Seacole. Of Scottish and Creole descent, Seacole provided for wounded soldiers from the battlefields of Crimea. She managed a recovery station behind the lines and achieved great popularity through her reputation for generosity with allowances of alcohol. She returned to England, funds exhausted. She had no connection with Hackney. And never lived in the borough.

  What struck me when I set out, the Overground walk completed, to see what had happened while I’d been away, was how unreal everything was. A single day’s tramp had smoothed my eyes to porcelain eggs: like those of John Clare, in his distress, when he believed that he had lost his pupils. Stones had been set in his head. Rays of invading light brought no fresh intelligence. Identity had dissolved. The long walk from High Beach in Epping Forest to ‘rescue’ by farm cart in Werrington left Clare ‘homeless at home’. He had completed a futile circuit, from village to London, obscurity to exposure, with a delusional trudge back to a memory-place that was no longer there, a muse who was already dead. Patty, his earthly wife, tried him for a few months and found him wanting. The written account of the walk was a letter to Matthew Allen, his keeper. And a letter to Mary Joyce, his imaginary childhood love, chiding her for dying. He is done with living women. ‘The worst is the road to ruin and the best is nothing like a good Cow.’

  At a time when careers are scuppered over private emails (which are never private), and when councils are appointing guardians, salaries reflecting the dignity of their status, to prosecute ill-judged language in public office, it was something of a surprise to find the gleaming avenue through the latest railway flats being named after a notorious rapist. LOVELACE STREET (PRIVATE ROAD). Richardson’s Robert Lovelace keeps the virtuous Clarissa Harlowe for many months in a brothel. Assisted by the madame and the other whores, Lovelace drugs and rapes Clarissa. The madame is called Mrs Sinclair. But nobody has named a passageway, cul-de-sac, or excrescence of designer flats, after her. Not yet. Railway satellites are going up so fast, and selling off-plan before completion, so there is still a chance. The potential for exposure in the Hackney Citizen is very much alive. It’s like dedicating a crèche to Jimmy Savile.

  How those namers give themselves away! The Haggerston Baths swimming pool, opened in 1903, and once a much-loved local resource, has been boarded up for years, blind-windowed, allowed to decay, so that funds could be siphoned into more glamorous projects. Imagine the tightness of my smile, when I discovered on this ramble of reorientation, that the path alongside the pool has now been declared a protected right of way: SWIMMERS LANE (PRIVATE ROAD). No apostrophe. No irony. The boast is not heritage, it’s outrage. Private Road! The public footpath to a public facility, swimming pool, slipper bath, laundry, is doubly stolen. Along with all established rights of passage through the flats. Not for nothing is the glass block at the end of Lovelace Street (which is no street) called Spinner House.

  Negotiating the canyon between the Overground and the parasitical bicycle-rack flats is to drift, sometimes on original cobbles, sometimes on an interim carpet, through a gallery of toxic Me-ism: the constantly revised doodles of spray-stencil egotists with their crews and bag-carriers. Along one hidden stretch, just off Whiston Road, where a single sprayist had assembled a series of oblique satiric panels, some joker trumped him by composing art-speak critiques and sticking them up like those explanatory cards from Tate Modern. The illegitimate show lasted a couple of days, before wrecking balls, improving the image of destruction, took them out.

  Another graffito – IF YOU CYCLE, RING TWICE FOR BORIS – was gone in an hour. A neat white rectangle of civic redaction. Which local taggers instantly defaced with script that looked like knitting with barbed wire.

  My rather melancholy tour of reintegration with locality, after the turbo-thrust of a day hiking with Kötting, was broken by a coffee stop at the flat of a film-maker with whom I had collaborated in the past. Managed gloom was this man’s métier: days could be productively disposed of in calculating the precise degree of stubble required for an appearance before a dedicated handful of enthusiasts, at some post-educational bunker in the Elephant & Castle, where he would slump, cosh-microphone in hand, raincoat collar up, pronouncing, like a radio voice letting us know the bomb has dropped, on the death of cinema. Nothing was being commissioned. His respected producer was laid up in Germany after a back operation. There had been a fantastical forty minutes on the phone with Christopher Walken, coming to the realization that this was it. The call was the film. The status of being unfunded was the world as it was always going to be. Films without film. Novels that degrade into research files: names, numbers. Everything is archive; nothing is live. Committed activists are out there making collections of abandoned shopping lists. And photographing plastic bags caught on security fences.

  And then, out of nowhere, a mirage, a solar bounce of fool’s gold: Boris Johnson in the flesh at Old Street, barking like a seal, shaking the straw of his signature fringe from cold eyes. He is in full cry, stuttering with mangled emphasis, saluting the economic boosterism of Silicon Roundabout. London’s celebrity mayor lumbered and swayed, finding his land legs after leaping down from the bike, before marching with intent towards a knot of summoned journalists. Boris is a canny hick, a street-smart bumpkin. The on-message symbol of the sacred bicycle, the chosen steed that will save our city, is creatively framed by tame camera crews, to keep out the car
avan of back-up taxis, black-windowed people carriers required to service tonight’s newsclip.

  Dull pavement chaff, such as myself, along with fast-food dribblers and snackers from Whitecross Street, are suckered in towards the pool of boosted light. Johnson, a stocky figure in a tight Sunday-grey chapel suit, deploys his yellow cycle helmet like the Plexiglas shield of a TSG policeman on kettling duty. He is childishly greedy for credit, loud in his approval of the viral pace of transformation of an ugly junction into a thriving nest of Internet hornets. The crowd love him, love the way he is just what he appears to be on television: a turn, a force of nature. You could bottle his sweat and sell it to a mid-morning mob frantic for selfies. ‘It’s really him,’ a woman phone-shrieks to her partner, who is running down the road from Hawksmoor’s obelisk at St Luke’s, to catch this precious moment.

  Remounting, photo-op concluded, chosen entrepreneurs dismissed, Boris wobbles into the maelstrom of the Old Street roundabout, trouser cuffs flapping, naked ankles exposed, helmet wedged tight enough on golden thatch to obscure vision, while HGV drivers honk and motorists jeer, some swerving as they feint to bag this headline trophy. The mayor is immune, without shame, protected by a combination of innocence and feral cunning. I don’t know if he pauses, once he’s out of range of the cameras, to be picked up by one of the petrol-guzzling taxis, but my instinct is that he stays on the bike. That he takes it all the way back to the river.

  ‘He’s dead, but he’s still breathing.’ A quotation I have used from time to time, and scribbled across a set of photographs of Andrew Kötting perched in a thorn tree, became one of the phrases the film-maker looped and tested, soundlessly, as he swam up out of the sump hole, the fathomless abyss at the base of consciousness.

  He wasn’t dead on the Old Kent Road, but it was a close thing. He left half his body’s ration of blood sprayed across cockney blacktop. When I was plodding out, assembling material to discover what the oracle of the Overground walk had told me about the present condition of London, Andrew simply scrubbed off the experience and deflated his blisters with salty wallows in the winter sea, and delirious motorbike swoops across the mist-shrouded Romney Marsh to his professional job at Canterbury. He raided London, beating on reluctant funders, shaking coins from the stitched pockets of arts bureaucrats, bear-hugging friends, doing funny voices for Bangladeshi waiters, visiting the sick, performing at the Purcell Rooms on the South Bank. After a session with his favoured sound designer and audio engineer, the monkishly bearded Phillipe Ciompi, Andrew leathered up and fought to manhandle his bike through the evening traffic towards Old Kent Road and his usual pilgrim route back home to St Leonards.

  The hit came at 9 p.m., at the junction with Rotherhithe New Road. ‘The route which I would normally have taken back to the Pepys Estate.’ Andrew was snaking down the inside lane and then – crunch – he was light: thunderflashes, starbursts, neon ants spelling out idiot equations. The metallic ring of detached phrases spat against white tiles: ‘Get up, you maggot.’ ‘He’s dead!’ ‘It’s a crime reconstruction in a different place.’

  The left elbow was mangled, facing the wrong way. The heavy machine came down on top of him. The silver spear of the wing mirror pierced his thigh. He fountained, he leaked. He was already out of it, lifted from London. He was fortunate in his choice of an accident spot: Old Kent Road was lively with traditional bother, yowling with squad cars. A competent Polish policewoman got to him very quickly and did all the right things.

  He might have rewound the tape of our Overground march by taking a red helicopter to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. There wasn’t time. They wanted, if they could, to save the leg. And everything that went with it. Andrew thinks he remembers some of the sentences they spoke as they drove him, sirens on, lights flashing, to Denmark Hill: King’s College Hospital, right on the railway tracks. The place he swam to – beyond pain, beyond medication – was the park he had walked across a few weeks before the collision. Jeremy Harding, in his introduction to a new Penguin selection of Rimbaud’s poetry, stressed the role that epic hikes play in the shaping of poetry. The walks ‘only stopped with the onset of a terrible pain in his right leg that presaged his death’.

  Leila McMillan kept friends informed of the victim’s progress. ‘I haven’t attached a picture this time as the last ones I took had his scary wound visible and that might just make you go weak at the knees!’ It was a spectacular gouge, a sinkhole. The man had no modesty in his physical traumas. He wanted an articulate gash, a puncture that screamed. A bloody mouth in his thigh. He enjoyed the cocktail of morphine derivatives and approved highs dripping into the acoustic mash-up of memories, Herzog film fragments, and drunken English folk songs that kept him floating over Ruskin’s lost Arcadia in Denmark Hill. But a few days was enough. The replays of our orbital circuit, sometimes on foot, sometimes mounted on a plastic swan, tightened the ligature that kept what was left of his blood in the scratched carapace of his biker’s uniform. When they asked if he could wiggle his toes, he flopped from the bed and reeled away to the bathroom. ‘Not a pretty sight,’ Leila said. ‘He has one of those bum-revealing gowns on.’

  Andrew decided, as soon as he crept back to something like functioning consciousness, to come off the morphine and ketamine and the painkillers. Braced on the arm, his left leg stitched like one of the less attractive victims of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he paid his respects to the doctors and nurses by freeing up a bed and being driven to the seaside. ‘The NHS is the saviour of all things civilized,’ he emailed. ‘My flashbacks are black rectangles.’ He arranged for the collection of bloodstained and shredded clothes that might prove the excuse for a gallery installation.

  Mr Kötting, the future Straw Bear, was returned to his basement kitchen by the seaside, high on pain, not analgesics, and plotting the next moves. ‘I dabble with the vertical,’ he reported, ‘but invariably remain horizontal.’ One of his daughter Eden’s helpers, brisking downstairs, came unsuspecting on the wound, the ankle-to-underpants flesh trough in all its pulsing red-blue exposure. She made it to the back door, to fresh air, just in time.

  Cargo cult offerings in the form of books, saucepans of chicken broth, DVDs, chocolates, flowers, cheeses, piled up at the door, in anticipation of a voodoo sacrifice. By the time I paid a visit, a week or so after he had discharged himself from the hospital, Andrew was on his foot. The spare leg looked like the debris of a shark attack, stapled to his swimming shorts as a token rudder. His left arm, fetishized in black straps and pads, was robotic, prosthetic. Who would have thought the young man had so much tarmac in him? His head, the blunt bone helmet of it, had done considerable damage to the kerb. He doesn’t really know what happened and witnesses at that time of night on the Old Kent Road are not famous for coming forward with statements.

  Four days of the mind map had vanished and there was no recovering them. He went somewhere else. The film of the ambulance ride, the surgery, the trauma ward, muttering doctors, alarmed family, was not of his making. The chosen location for the collision alarmed me, provoking memories of the morning of the Overground walk, when we paused, at the point where the railway crosses the A2, and looked down Old Kent Road to the place where the accident would happen; before moving on to Peckham Rye, Denmark Hill and King’s College Hospital. And I couldn’t help dredging, beyond that, fuzzy recollections of nights reeling home to Hackney after dining too well and drinking too much at the home of Brian Catling, on the other side of this road. A couple of hundred yards from the blood-soaked junction. There was a notebook poem from that time called ‘A Handshake on the Telephone’. It began with a quote from Genesis P-Orridge, about dreams being descriptions of how things really are. ‘They are accurate. As real as a car smashing a cat in the road.’ I associated this Camberwell territory with shifting focus, inebriation, rucks, roadkill. ‘Consciousness extinguished on a wheel,’ I wrote. ‘You do not / die of it or lose one single life. And where the beams cross / an accident awaits the supplicant.’
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  Andrew spurned leg coverings, to show off the wound, describing it, to strangers on the street, as the aftermath of a battle with a marine predator. When forced to wear trousers for some lecture or assault on a commissioning editor, he dropped them like a red-nose clown.

  Now he hobbled to the stove to make me a cup of coffee. And explained how he intended, at the end of the week, to drag himself into a Hastings cave, in hospital gown, to project images from Pyrenean caverns – bison, aurochs, antlered shamen – on the damp walls.

  I photographed the over-shiny, razored leg. There were puncture holes on either side of a central track of thread, angler’s twine, with which they had stitched up the evidence of their fishing for veins. Sculpted, in ridges of angry flesh, was the perfect symbol of our walk, a railway map in meat. A fly, miming the action of a furious washing of hands, licked and sampled. Before setting off on an epic journey down the film-maker’s mutilated thigh.

  Acknowledgements

  The day’s tramp around the London Overground circuit wouldn’t have happened, or not in this way, without the presence and witness of Andrew Kötting. For better or worse, he made the labour of documentation and debate into a mind-film. He resurrected never-forgotten Deptford days and Camberwell nights. And like the unfortunate lady tapped so frequently for dropsy, and now resting in a stone tank in Bunhill Fields, he never repined at his case.

  I am grateful to Anonymous Bosch, pinhole wizard, for returning with me to a number of significant locations, to make a record of things that should have happened. He is an unrivalled tapper of ghosts and spectral traces.