Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Read online

  Everything begins with the fact of the river, the Lea and its tributaries. Like a wig of snakes. A dark stream sidling, fag in mouth, towards the Thames at Bow Creek; foam-flecked, coot-occupied, enduring its drench of industrial pollution, cars with the ambition of becoming submarines, skinned bears, overexcited urban planners. Men like Lou Sherman, the Mayor of Hackney in 1961, whose messianic schemes clashed with the modest expectations of twitchers, allotment holders, dowsers and edgeland wanderers. The Lea Valley was our Poland, fought over by eco-romantics, entrenched Stalinists and political visionaries with a compulsion to erect plasterboard barriers, electrical fences.

  Laurie Elks, in an investigation published in Hackney History (2008), tracks the makeover neurosis of the Lee Valley Regional Park back to source. They mean well, the invaders from the Town Hall, and they fight tooth and nail to secure their legacy. When I met Elks, the smiling, hovering custodian of St Augustine’s Tower, that remnant of Templar Hackney, he offered me, as we stood on the roof, facing east towards the emerging Olympic Park, a copy of his essay. I respected Laurie’s engagement with the bell tower, which was open to visitors on the last Sunday of every month. He challenged interlopers, with a polite cough, to explain themselves, the backstory of their lives, in the shadow of the church. Were we faking it, exploiting locality? Or did we have something to offer, in cash or influence? It wouldn’t be hard to picture the gaunt ecclesiastical relic and its keeper as twin entities, the building existing to hide a man who had become the spirit of place. The tight bore of the tower, a blind lighthouse plugging the passage from Mare Street to Clapton, reverberates with the loud mechanism of a clock. Having been squeezed in the spiral ascent, elbows drawn close, before an awkward tumble through a low door to the leaded roof, the totality of the cityscape, the panoramic spread of Hackney, is overwhelming. Any two persons, clutching the rail, will struggle to articulate scraps of knowledge against the impulse never to return to ground, except by the shortest possible route, a wild leap. Laurie’s area of special interest, the Regional Park, nudges our gaze, past watercress beds that became the car park of the Tesco superstore, to the cranes, mud mountains and skeletal hoop of the Olympic Stadium.

  They couldn’t leave the eastern margin of the borough alone. Patrick Abercrombie, the conceptualist of London’s post-war city of orbital motorways, bright new schools, lidos, the one that never happened, eyed up the Lea Valley. His Greater London Plan of 1945 was a blueprint, benevolently patronizing, for future crimes and myopic blunders. They will not accept, the politicians, that the beautifully executed proposal, with its fold-out maps and paragraphs of utopian copywriting, is all that is required: a charm against the night, an object for contemplation. You do not have to summon the bulldozers after reading Blake’s Jerusalem. There is no requirement to set a budget, to fiddle a penny on the rates. Much better to inspect maquettes of impossible marinas, miniature Persian gardens, Babel towers that balance on the palm of your hand. The trajectory from Abercrombie’s reasoned proposal to the insidious CGI promos of the 2012 Olympic dream is inevitable. The long march towards a theme park without a theme.

  August 1961: Mayor Sherman hires a boat and rounds up the town clerks of West Ham, Leyton, Walthamstow and Tottenham, for a Lea voyage, stuttering between locks, nosing through weed beds and electric-green duckweed blankets. An Hieronymus Bosch outing, stiff dignitaries rattling their metaphorical chains of office, nibbling and swilling, convivial and concerned, through territory so assured in its indifference to progress that it cries out for revision. Sherman is attended by his sidekick, Hackney’s town clerk Len Huddy. They are the Laurel and Hardy of this stupendous wheeze: rescuing a lost landscape by making an urban park; a necklace of leisure facilities running from Broxbourne, through reservoirs and reed marshes, to the Thames. Sherman’s riparian picnic, a sightseeing drift to the gentle chug of the motor, anticipates backriver circuits laid on to promote the 2012 Olympics.

  Novelists of the Abercrombie period, returning from war, recalled the golden hours of childhood, camping trips to Epping Forest or rides out along the Lea Valley. It’s an important mythology, having an escape, fields and woods, so easily accessible by cheap public transport, or by mounting a boneshaker bicycle. Even Harold Pinter, who lived in Clapton, and who took care to bleed specifics of place out of his glinting psychodramas, paid his dues to the Lea, to Victoria Park and Hackney Marshes. Wide skies under which to nurse grievances, to argue with himself, to exorcize pressure. By walking and rehearsing interior monologues. Walking and betraying. Walking where there were no eyes, no witnesses.

  Sherman’s legacy was confirmed by the Lee Valley Regional Park Act in 1967. The Duke of Edinburgh was tapped up to act as cheerleader, a man who could be relied upon to chivvy doubters, while pitching the brochure for a nation of leisure warriors. Professional hobbyists (they can afford it), our royals have always enjoyed a special relationship with the Olympics, taking part, sitting on committees, making speeches. Now the Lea Valley would be an engine for regeneration. Proposals were floated for a ‘sea-front’ promenade, tree-lined, with pubs, cafés and restaurants, from which to delight in the passage of regular ‘water-buses with gay awnings’. There would be pleasure gardens, cinemas, dance halls, boating lakes, bike tracks. And slapped down in Mill Meads, to rise out of dereliction like an anticipation of Anish Kapoor’s 2012 helter-skelter monument, was that symbol of the 1960s, Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace. Kapoor’s £19-million proposal had the curious title of the ArcelorMittal Orbit, making it sound like the X-ray of some hideous shunt on the M25, underwritten by Europe’s richest man, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. The pitch was size, nothing beyond that. Bigger than Gormley’s Angel of the North, the Meccano stack was the Angel’s twisted calliper.

  Joan Littlewood’s never-built pleasure dome failed for the opposite reason: too much was asked of it, it contained the world. Littlewood was an inspirational theatre director, an irritant, a goad, the best kind of cross-river cultural migrant. Her power base was in the wrong Stratford, the Essex one, while her home was a substantial property on the edge of Blackheath. After working with the guerrilla Theatre of Action in Manchester, she collaborated with Gerry Raffles on the Theatre Workshop in East London. Banned from broadcasting on the BBC, because of her alleged association with the Communist Party, she asserted the integrity of her double life, between bohemian suburbia and agitprop drama, by pointing out that she remained under surveillance by the secret services from 1939 to the late 1950s, when her Stratford shows began to transfer to the West End. The idea of the Fun Palace, conceived and developed with the architect Cedric Price, was a blueprint for all future Lea Valley schemes: ambitious, exciting as a proposal, and impossible to achieve.

  In architects’ drawings, this 150-foot tall, open-frame playpen resembled an Ikea warehouse, the distinguishing structure of future edgelands: the blank-walled storage shed. An all-purpose unit modelled on a Kleenex dispenser. The Fun Palace would, like the asbestos-saturated Palace of the Republic, in Marx-Engels Platz, East Berlin, be all things to all men: debating chamber, bowling alley, boozer. A non-space given interest by ramps, travelators, walkways and ‘variable escalators’. As in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, it would take you several visits to work out a way of navigating from one floor, one viewing platform, to the next. The Fun Palace, unlike the Millennium Dome, had the good sense to remain a series of drawings, PR puffs and rhetoric from culture hustlers. An heroic failure charming us with its non-existence. The thing that doesn’t happen displaces its own weight in our imaginations.

  Wick Woodland, where tinkers and travellers parked their caravans under the motorway bridge, was nominated for a Japanese garden, an English eighteenth-century garden and a landing stage. The planners of the Civic Trust, unconvinced by the need for separate cycle tracks, lobbied for a series of recreational centres linked by a four-lane, dual-carriageway park road. An eco-friendly green highway of the kind originally proposed by Abercrombie. ‘A pleasant drive is hard to find,
’ said the commissioned engineers, Sir William Halcrow and Partners. And where better than an urban parkland motorway, up on stilts in the spirit of J. G. Ballard, a tarmac causeway across the marshes?

  Financial constrictions, the difficulty of sustaining the alliance between the boroughs, between local and central government, dished most of the options. The 1979 Broxbourne rowing centre came with so much baggage from the council that it was left, permanently, in the pending file. Most of the grand schemes crumbled and failed, before settling into their comfort zones: as ruins, squatted husks, discontinued adventure parks, graffiti auditions. In September 2008, as budgets were trimmed to fund the biggest extravaganza of them all, the Broxbourne Leisure Centre was closed. Leisure was being privatized. Elite athletes would swallow whatever loose change could be found, to offer them a reasonable chance of bringing home the medals that would promote Britain as a viable world power.

  The excitement of winning the bid for the World Athletics Championships of 2005 was premature. The development package for the stretch of the Lee Valley that touches on the satellite estates and retail parks of Waltham Abbey and the M25 corridor couldn’t be made to work in time. Westfield didn’t fancy a superstore in Picketts Lock. One hundred million pounds was promised by the Sports Council (now rebranded as Sport England). It wasn’t enough. Somebody took one of those corporate helicopter rides over the territory and noticed the awkward proximity of the London Waste facility at Edmonton. The smokestack belching its toxic filth over the proposed 43,000-seater stadium. The project was abandoned. A disaster was not allowed, not then, to become a catastrophe. Total financial meltdown. Debts that would never be cleared.

  The Duke of Edinburgh, making the opening address to the Civic Trust, in Hackney Town Hall, back in 1964, revealed that he frequently overflew the Lea Valley in his crested helicopter. ‘The place on the whole,’ he said, ‘is a pretty average mess.’

  Chobham Farm

  We come off the road, through the gate, across the mud, into the farm: Chobham Farm. A progression of clapped-out warehouses, divided into high-stacked alleys, set hard against a mesh fence and the spread of the Stratford rail yards, sidings, national and international freight terminals. A hub. A junction. A defunct investment portfolio. A clanking, hissing, weed-and-wild-flower theme park of labour history and social stagnation, in close proximity to all the other cemeteries and memorial gardens in that convenient fold of the map, between the new tower-block estates of Hackney and the collided villages, swollen hamlets and dispersal zones of late-industrial Essex.

  If you have seen Robert Hamer’s 1947 film, It Always Rains on Sunday, you’ll appreciate the romance of East London rail yards; the night-and-fog drama of a fugitive dodging through shunting coal trains, leaping over glistening tracks, to demonstrate, in his doomed flight, the scale and majesty of these forbidden places. A mundane, workaday reality overwhelmed by metaphor: ramps, cattle cars, misty haloes around light poles, agitated guard dogs. The poetry of the rail zone works everywhere. The French with their yellow cigarettes and zinc-bar passions, train drivers seething with lust and rage: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. American Beats making poetry of the ironhorse highways of the Far West: Allen Ginsberg sitting beside Jack Kerouac, ‘under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive’, to eulogize a soul-shuddering sunset. Kerouac and Neal Cassady, those brakemen of language, struggling to keep alive the ride-the-rails hobo myths, in a time of war-world innocence. Short-term labourers addicted to dry-mouthed Benzedrine riffs and the holy legends of trailer parks and wood fires under bridges. Young men reconnecting with old landscapes.

  The reality of Chobham Farm was very soon apparent; we were a disposable element at the bottom of the food chain in a speculative operation that might collapse at any moment, and whose legacy would be strikes, picket lines, low wages, aggravation. At first we were general labourers, beasts of burden, unloading containers and loading lorries. Slippery, brown-paper sacks of talcum powder that bent awkwardly in our arms, like small drunk children, slithering away from the grip: one sack at a time was too easy, three sacks impossible to control. Bags burst. We slid and skidded. The ghosts of defunct railway lines came under the perimeter fence and into the sheds. We tripped on raised metal, stubbed our toes on sharp-edged concrete pillars. We wrestled dripping barrels of putrid animal stuff, suspended in vinegar. We cut our fingers on the wire bands holding together rancid sheep casings. We were confused but willing, overwhelmed by the richness and strangeness of this location, charmed by the exoticism of our workmates. They asked few questions, made no judgements; all of them prepared, as we were, to wait and watch.

  Faces. Chobham faces. Lived-in, puzzled and generous faces of men confronting a camera. The little, lithe, ‘Cape Coloured’ South African with the beanie cap pulled down to his eyebrows in autumn warmth; the dazzling smile of supersize false teeth like the fenders of a Detroit motor on a Dagenham forecourt. They joshed him, the others. And he took it in good part, until young Freddie snatched off his cap. Baz had been a sailor, Merchant Marine, he dressed in expectation of foul weather, a clear unblinking gaze scanning the Stratford horizon for signs of trouble. In breaks, between jobs, I leant against his forklift, while he advised me, in a whisper, to make the best of the situation, but to be ready, as soon as opportunity presented itself, to move on. Never trust the bosses beyond the next pay packet. As casuals, we had to report back to the Holborn office, after work on a Thursday, to pick up our wages: £15 for a week of early starts, dirt, hard graft and no facilities.

  ‘Join the firm, full-time,’ Baz said. ‘Don’t give those bastards a slice of your money for nothing.’

  He was saving. He was plotting. Kitbag packed beneath the bed. He kept his own counsel. He never read a newspaper.

  Liam, the smiling, pink-faced Irish checker with the red hair, shoulders too solid for his donkey jacket, had no problem with typecasting: conviviality, physical strength, a temper. He would give you the chat, a loud ‘How you doing now?’, to signal the end of conversation, not the beginning; there was another agenda beyond the bonhomie of the yards and I would never be a party to it. Another lorry to stack: boxes, tea chests, slim packages, bundles of rods, washing machines, drums of honey. The first driver in the queue would present a docket, and the checker, on his forklift, would set off to locate the specified cargo in its numbered slot. We were doing dockwork, four miles inland from the Thames. Once a week, no choice about it, we paid our dues to the Transport and General Workers’ Union. A mark on the pink card. The only way out of the drudgery was politics. If I had to do this for life, I would exploit my gift for bullshit, never letting facts get in the way of a good story, and become a spokesman, a fixer. As a labourer, I was willing but handless.

  After a month or so, Renchi dropped out. Tom, calmed by the regular slap of the brown envelope, the simple tasks that defined a soothingly proscribed world, decided to stay on. Chobham was an inland voyage, an interlude of physical labour, a palliative to mental torment. The Hackney phone might ring while he was out here, behind the wire, inside the gloomy warehouse, a private space where nobody could find him. It would ring in an empty room. He wouldn’t have to agonize over taking the job, hacking out another script. They might pick up on one of his Hammer Films outlines: revenging plants maddened by the greed of humankind, vampires who read Thoreau and made their own coffins out of recycled packing cases. But he would never hear that terrible bell. He would not be at home to answer the call. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, E15, was an oasis, a Zen monastery. With the mystique of rail tracks, the yarns of itinerant workers, the flood and flux of cargoes, Tom was journeying without going anywhere. The ponytailed hippie-pirate drivers, gold rings in the ear, joints burning yellow fingers, spoke of the open road: India, Nepal. It was enough. We sat in the sunshine, in our rags, books in pockets, mesh fence supporting our aching backs, and admired the persistence of giant sunflowers growing out of oily gravel. We would sign on, we would stay for the winter. Perhaps for ever.

&n
bsp; Looking back now, watching the 8mm films, the story breaks down into two elements: faces and terrain. Our films are mercifully silent. But I miss the voices of those Chobham men, the monologues and sharp banter that I struggle to recover.

  The Cob, I remember him. I gave him that name and it stuck. After the Welsh cob ponies, short-legged, strong in the back. Uncomplaining. The Cob was a welcome addition to any work gang; shirt off, jeans with cowboy turn-ups, scars and tattoos, constant motion. The times when there was nothing to do, contemplative, roll-up intervals between lorries, hurt him. He jumped on and off tailgates. He hurdled barrels. He rolled drums and then kicked them back where they came from. He did robotic press-ups in the mud, calling out numbers. He shadow-boxed. He punched holes in rotten wood. Then the shout – YES! – and another tottering stack of tea chests to manhandle, another rattle of pipes and random packages. The jagged tin edges of the chests slashed the Cob’s palms. He licked his wounds and grinned like Dracula.

  Mick watched him. He was as strong, physically, but he wouldn’t venture one drop of sweat more than was strictly necessary. There was something held back and threatening in Mick’s silence; the way he stood, arms folded, at the edge of alien conversations – cinema, books, newspaper babble – and studied our faces. Mercury-grey eyes. The twitch of his lips, at the pretension, the absurdity. In tea breaks, Mick became the dominant presence, as others like the Cob and Liam, through a furious response to the challenge of moving obstacles from one place to another, did when we serviced the queue of lorries from far-flung places.

  A packing case stamped ROCKLEA QUEENSLAND becomes an improvised card table. Cribbage. Pegs in a board. Mick’s stubby hands: an indelible compass rose blue-inked over a river system of veins. A bird with spread wings. Four needle-sketched diamonds echoed by the playing cards spread, face up, by his thick fingers. A stained white mug with broken handle. Mick knows how to occupy dead time. He has come straight from prison to Chobham. He’s waiting to get away and talks about Canada. The card games are a useful interlude in which, without specifics, dates and methods, to plot future crimes. They say he killed a man in a pub brawl. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t talk about women.