Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (11 page)

But the major artworks, self-sponsored galleries of opposition, occur at the back of the fence, and on the unexposed panels of giant off-highway hoardings. Two artists in particular, white boys emerging from the squatting and warehouse-occupying nexus, have undertaken astonishing projects: mile after mile of two-headed crocodiles, grinning gum-pink skulls, clenched Philip Guston fists. A punk codex using industrial quantities of emulsion to revise railway bridges and condemned factories. We are here, they shout: Sweet Toof and Cyclops. Ghost-ride mouths eating the rubble of development, the melancholy soup of black propaganda.

You have to believe that the muralists of Hackney Wick are responding to Daniel Pinchbeck’s apocalyptic text:
2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy.
Pinchbeck is convinced that the year of the London Olympics is an ‘end date’. Stone calendars warn of the dying of one great cycle of time, of environmental catastrophe. The neurosis of stadium-building is nothing more than an unconscious desire to prepare sites for ritual sacrifice: Westfield ziggurats, Barratt pyramids. That horror mantra whispers once more in its echo chamber.

Berlin ’36: The setting in which boy soldiers will be executed for cowardice in the last days of the Third Reich. In the forest that surrounds the Olympiastadion.

Mexico City ’68: President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is instructed by Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, to deal with protests inspired by this moment of global attention. ‘The Olympic tradition is at stake,’ Brundage warns. Ordaz orders 10,000 troops of the Olympic Battalion, accompanied by light tanks and water cannons, to occupy Ciudad Universitaria. The final reckoning, the death toll, according to John Ross in
El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City
, is 325. A figure confirmed by a
Guardian
journalist buried under a heap of corpses on the second floor of the university building. Two thousand protesters are arrested, stripped to their underwear and held in secure pens in a military camp. Black power salutes, the gloved hands of podium athletes. Future newsreels.

Munich ’72: The city of putsches is remembered for the massacre of eleven Israelis, athletes and coaches, by members of the Black September group. A secure Olympic village. Admired architecture. Hooded figures on balconies. Bungled response. Hijacked Lufthansa airliner. Revenge assassinations in an operation known as ‘Wrath of God’. Documentary feature films. Exorcism by Oscars.

The spray-can artists are not responding to remote legends, their work has a feral intensity. Zany, psychedelic bestiaries informed by pre-Columbian models, more Robert Crumb than Diego Rivera. The social message is: Look at me. Admire me. Give me a show on Brick Lane.

Painted eyes on the walls of the Lord Napier pub melt in an acid attack, but are never extinguished. In every crack and crevice among the crumbling detritus of the Wick, snakes and teeth appear. Priapic buddleia. Vagina dentata.

Coming home one evening, I encountered a group of muralists on the Olympic front line near Whitepost Lane. I was impressed by their quiet efficiency, the speed with which they underpainted, squared up and set to with roller brushes. The boy in charge issued terse instructions. He stood off, letting apprentices fill in the background, before he stepped forward to finesse signature wings and flames. Within a few hours, digital snoops were cataloguing this latest exhibit as a potential CD cover. The process of spontaneous reproduction is the defining characteristic of the area. What begins on the wrong side of a temporary hoarding soon becomes the colourful backdrop of a TV cop show. By which time, the original wall has been obliterated under fresh tags and aerosol doodles.

The pressure of regeneration, force-fed by the Olympics, is such that zones once tolerant of impoverished artists have to turn every wastelot, every previously unnoticed ruin, to profit. To provide more theoretical housing, it is necessary to unhouse those who have already fended for themselves. Walking down the Regent’s Canal from Victoria Park, on the morning of 8 May 2008, I witnessed another eviction. Around thirty police, with attendant vans, bailiffs, hired muscle. Council officials in dark suits clutching protective clipboards. Loud bangs, crunched hinges: the door is battered down.

A towpath cyclist is enraged. ‘How long was that building empty? Twenty years? The squatters cleaned the whole place up, it was going to be a community centre.’

A barrel-fronted property, dressed in weeds and tendrils, between the Empress coach garage and the gas-holders. I noticed, a few years ago, a sticker on the cobwebbed window:
BACK THE BID
. Squatters reclaimed this ghostly shell, using Tibetan gods and prayer scrolls for blinds.

Plodding home from Stratford, after discovering that much of the Olympic Park was fated to become a termite shopping centre, I picked my way down what was left of Ruckholt Road and Eastway. They were taking down the blue fence. Panels were hacked out and dumped on a carpet of wood chips, around the stump of an inconvenient ash tree. The blue tourniquet had served its purpose. Plywood was being replaced by more of those virtual-reality panels: archers, swimmers, cheering crowds. High-definition digital photography and ethically challenged fakery.

Signs are unreadable, arrows point towards mesh fences and motorways. I try to cross the Quarter Mile Lane Bridge, but I’m soon engulfed in security checkpoints. They don’t understand the concept of walking, wandering without a fixed agenda.

‘You want a job?’

I’m about to become an example of positive discrimination, those slots reserved for decrepit locals.

‘See that caravan? Go down there and they’ll take you on. Start straight away.’

I’m tempted. Why not return to the era when I cycled out here, to paint white lines on 200 football pitches? And, before that, to Chobham Farm. After all these years, I was being offered regular employment: I could help to dismantle the blue fence of the Olympic Park.

Arriving at Victoria Park, in the golden hour, I am stopped by a troubled and short-sighted Chinese man. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He is flanked by five women of various ages and the same height, daughter to grandmother. They have lost something, somebody, and recognize me as a park regular, foot-dragging, respectably distressed.

‘A little man. No teeth. Not normal, simple. Very, very small.’

He was spotted, twice, last Thursday, by a dog-walker. Nothing since. This tiny simple man has disappeared. He carried an umbrella.

I don’t want to ask if he is Chinese.

‘Does he speak English?’

‘Not at all.’

A man seduced by crowds, a grand public event, noise: the ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’ free concert. He meandered into all that fuss and was never seen again.

Disappointed in my response, the bereaved family move east, in the direction of Hackney Wick, where everything vanishes or is revised. And nothing returns, in the same condition, to the territory it left behind.

The incident I’d witnessed by the canal, the collaboration of police and council bailiffs, was a commonplace of our early-morning walks. Raids happen at first light, youths congregate at dusk. ‘Pond life are out,’ say the watchers at their surveillance screens, stirring coffee mugs, leaning forward on their elbows. Life on the street is budget television and the police are the major producers. Digital technology at every demonstration. Hours of CCTV footage of suspect corners. Targets (drug actors) audition for remote viewers as the lack of action goes down: the circling bikes, the sprawling on benches, compulsive phone-babble. A virus from boxed sets of
The Wire
infects the canteen boredom of state-sponsored technicians: in shooting crime, you create it. Postcode soldiers yawn and scratch.

There was a powerful outwash from the Olympic Parkland. A cosmetic imperative. To set and reset paving slabs on busy boulevards. To plant bushes in unlikely places. To throw water at a few yards of tarmac. Nobody builds, they improve the image of construction. Loudly, and on camera, raiders break into the flats of low-level dealers. They evict squatters from doomed theatres and cafés. When stylish swings are installed, down by the canal, they become nests and hammocks for rough sleepers. ‘Working with the community to make a difference,’ says Tesco Express.

In Broadway Market there was an all-day-breakfast operation run by a Sicilian man, Tony Platia. A local facility of mixed reputation, popular with many, and true to this depressed backwater in the lean years of neglect and bureaucratic indifference. When the crunch came and Hackney Council’s £72-million black-hole finances were challenged by central government, an initiative was launched, whereby the usual motley of independent traders were sold out to serious but invisible developers. It simplifies the regenerationprocess. The legal arguments ran on for years. The Italian café, and the Nutritious Food Gallery managed by a Rastafarian, Lowell ‘Spirit’ Grant, were predictable casualties. Community activists, eco-warriors, journalists and professional malcontents occupied the café formerly known as
FRANCESCA’S
. White lettering on a green signboard.

It was a bitter winter. My gesture of support amounted to dragging around a heavy gas heater and a spare canister. The scene inside the boarded-up building was nostalgic, taking me straight back to the squatters of Redbridge in the late 1960s and the M11 extension protesters I’d visited during my
Lights Out for the Territory
wanderings in the 1980s. The certainty of defeat was ameliorated by lifeboat humour: hatches battened down, in it together, sharing a brew. Roll-ups. Caps and gloves indoors. Radio on. And a constant procession of image-makers. That was the difference now. The small group, enduring the elements, paying their respects to a building that would very soon disappear, appreciated that they were performing in a documentary. Crews arrived from Holland, Germany, Italy. Tony Platia, squat, hunched, zipped into black leather, stood beside the bespectacled, stocking-capped Arthur Shutter, spokesman for the occupying guerrillas. Emblems of a suppressed history.

After the first invasion by bailiffs and council-approved heavies, the squatters regrouped, waited, then moved in for a second time on Boxing Day. They repaired much of the damage and kept guard in shifts to repel the demolition crew. They were allowed to shiver through the worst of the weather, cocooned in sleeping bags like economic migrants bivouacking in the shrubs of Victoria Park. There were about forty people sustaining the occupation, more customers than Tony would serve on a good morning. The roof was patched, the wrecked building creaked back to life.

I was coming through the market on my dawn circuit when they smashed the door down, evicted the squatters, ripped through stairs and roof, rendering the space uninhabitable: except by guard dogs. Whatever survived the assault stood as an ugly symbol, among the retro boutiques, estate agents, nice bookshops, wine bars and delicatessens of Broadway Market: a bunker dressed in razor wire, metal door sticky with flyers. The developer, a Citibank broker called Roger Wratten, has several active properties on this street, but the old café, promoted as a community theatre, stays empty. A scar and a blight behind the fruit and veg stall which was there before all this madness started.

The distance between Broadway Market and Portobello Road lies in the nature of promotional films that trade on a form of topographical branding. Over in the west they get the sanitized absurdity of Richard Curtis’s feel-good
Notting Hill
, with its ethnic cleansing and bumbling New Tory toffs. We get David Cronenberg’s tattooed Russian hoodlums in
Eastern Promises
, the pantomime version of what is rumoured to be happening. The reinvested loose change of state industries, flogged off in the boot sale, after the collapse of Communism.

I tried the Broadway Market barber whose shop was dressed down for the film, but he didn’t have much to report. Some of the set designer’s green paint lasted as long as the razor-wire bunker. News-clippings about the movie were taped to the window. Through an interview conducted for a Hackney documentary, I discovered that my informant’s uncle owned the barber shop, the restaurant on the corner and a couple of other businesses; which he picked up for a few thousand pounds, back in the 1980s. The uncle preceded the artists into Beck Road. Now he had decamped, so I was told, to a large property, a farm with horses and kennels, on the other side of the river, above Thamesmead. Where he enjoyed a gracious retirement, living on his investments.

The final glimpse of Tony Platia, as reported by the journalist Oliver Duff, has him ‘huddled over an electric heater in the remains of his shop, avoiding the snowflakes coming through a hole in the ceiling’. Tony muses on the showers of banknotes that are supposed to fall from the sky as the 2012 effect brings inevitable benefits to the area.

‘It is people like me, local traders who fought very hard to bring Broadway Market back into a proper community, who should be celebrating the Olympics,’ Tony says. ‘All the developers want to do is take money coming into Hackney straight out of the area.’ To Moscow, the Bahamas, Saudi Arabia. Useful liquidity for picking up distressed Premier League football franchises. That is the other symbol, when you walk down the canal: the gleaming white nest of a stadium processed by corporate debt, in a wilderness of condemned terraces and discontinued industries.

Living with the threshold nuisance of pre-dawn sirens, the warning screech of police cars heading back to the canteen, made me responsive to a request from Robin Maddock, a Hackney-based photographer, that he show me a portfolio drawn from his experiences when accompanying the Stoke Newington Entry Squad on their raids.

Maddock was a photographer who looked like a photographer: young (to me), smart-casual, on the move. His captures, unlike my own snaps, were not part of a logging process, the laying down of an archive from which a more mediated account would be teased. There was nothing proprietary about the way Robin spread out the prints. They might have been taken by a stranger, an earlier version of himself that he barely recognized. Only now, in the act of telling the story, did certain details come to light. He was open about his doubts and difficulties, a talker uninhibited by not having his promotional pitch resolved and polished. A becoming hesitancy, a grasping for the right word, gave way to self-mocking laughter. He was most comfortable near the window. There was no obligation to lock down history. His work was about energy, the life of the streets, balanced by sudden epiphanies: the view from the green carpet of the Lea towards Canary Wharf. A way to position his characters against an ever-shifting backdrop.