Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (27 page)

The Beckton story has been told, but Kubrick’s raid on the Kentish side of the river is less familiar. Frewin was responding to ground already dressed with submarine pens, pillboxes, forts and quarries. War shadows were there, overgrown with edgeland jungles.

‘One of the best locations I found for
Full Metal Jacket
was the track leading from Cliffe to the Napoleonic fort on the Thames,’ Tony told me. ‘We returned it to Vietnam: refugees, palm trees, helicopters, US marines, tanks. A stunning shot.’

I like the way he says ‘returned’, as if the marshes had been Vietnam before, implicated in the conflict, waiting for the procession of ghostly marines and burning children to become visible. Making that stereophonic soundtrack, the clatter of helicopter blades, part of the fabric of a Napoleonic fort. The broken landscape of lakes and disused quarries around which we now struggled in a laborious detour.

I encouraged Anna, who was beginning to flag as we drudged over endless fields and paddocks, with reminiscences of the Clarendon Hotel in Gravesend, where I hoped to find us a bed for the night. Scramble bikes chewed tracks into half-demolished forts and batteries. We made our connection with the permitted Saxon Shore Path. The old port, where so many ships once waited on the tide, had suffered a terrible collapse – which some natives, when I asked them about it, blamed on the Bluewater retail park. The last mile into town was a classic of withheld funding, trickle-down entropy; a tracking shot through rusting chains, corrugated sheds, and nettle-alleys between storage sheds. The Clarendon, where I sat drinking with Brian Catling, after a day exploring Tilbury, had closed. Stucco was chipping away from cream walls, exposing patches of damp brown. The hotel, like everything else in Gravesend, was up for revision.

Narrow streets with nautical amnesia skidded down to the river. Under a mural of the presentation of Pocahontas at the court of James I, attended by first-people Americans with punk hairstyles, we found a Sikh minicabber who offered us accommodation above a kebab house. Which turned out to be miles away, through unforgiving suburbs: in the direction we had just walked. Exhausted, fed on the meaty fumes with which the candlewick bedspread was saturated, we slept. Next morning, unwilling to add another taxi supplement to the cost of our lodging, we tramped back through ugly ribbon development, searching without success for an open café.

Clearing Gravesend early, having no good reason to stay, we reached the rebranded O2 Arena, the former Millennium Dome, on the outskirts of Greenwich, by the second night. It was a long day’s haul, about which much could be said, but most is better forgotten. Like the years of New Labour.

Going back to a tree, close to the pier, where I had buried my shard of brick overnight, I thought about how W. G. Sebald would have handled this situation. He speaks of launching a walk into emptiness: to dispel emptiness. He checks out of hospital with a nonchalant spring in the stride, as he contemplates the melancholy hours ahead, advancing, notebook and camera at the ready, through a ‘thinly populated countryside’. Those friends, those memories: Kafka, Michael Hamburger, Thomas Browne.

Gravesend was made for Sebald. For the way he crafted geography, banishing the tedious bits, the inevitable frustrations that can’t be turned to account. The journey becomes a monograph of significant encounters, non-spaces dignified through translation: Norfolk as a lyric poem of bereavement and alienation. Carpets of London rubble, terraces blitzed by squadrons who tracked the Thames, were removed, by convoys of lorries, to lay out East Anglian airfields for horrendous revenge raids on Germany.

But Gravesend, this Sebaldian opportunity, the starting point of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, the garrison commanded by ‘Chinese’ Gordon, martyr of Khartoum, would have to wait for another writer. I could feel the reproach in the planks of the jetty, in the hanging smoke from the power station on the Tilbury shore. A meditation on colonialism, on Lytton Strachey’s debunking of Gordon, would not be achieved or attempted. Not by me. Not today.

I met, on the streets of Whitechapel, and again in a Hackney church, an undervalued poet who had been a friend, a walking companion, of Sebald. He told me, when I questioned him about it, that he used to meet the German academic at Liverpool Street Station. He wasn’t quite sure, but he remembered Sebald having the use of a basement flat in Princelet Street. The Spitalfields poet conducted him on excursions to junkshops, where they scavenged for the postcards Sebald employed so deftly in his published texts. But there were solitary walks too, when the Norwich-based writer explored Jewish burial grounds and labyrinthine courts in search of another kind of emptiness; the provocation for sentences, measured paragraphs, interweavings of documentation and invention.

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The security guards who questioned me, on previous expeditions, had decamped, crossed the river. The Thames port had slumped into its Conradian, between-tides limbo. Much of the available energy was expended on protesting about a glass stump: GRAVESEND SAYS NO TO TOWER. Or fretting over a mega-mosque on which, as bloggers fumed, Ken Livingstone wanted to spend £100m of taxpayers’ money. On all other topics, Gravesend yawned.

Empty camera boxes stare at brambles breaking through tarmac. Obscenities left unfinished when the aerosol ran out. Heritage prompts have been slapped on this exhausted whore of the river like nicotine patches: empty forts, stopped cannons, a dead princess (Native American). I never saw a town with so many hair salons. And so many men with heads like polished stones. They were shorn more frequently, and much closer, than sheep on the Grain marshes.

The highlight of the morning was a tour through the concrete works in Northfleet. Spokes of sunlight through grey dust, nobody challenges us. We pass under an arrangement of clattering pipes, chutes, drums. Ships park alongside a private dock in a web of shadows. At the heart of the operation is a statue of Britannia; helmeted, enthroned, magnificent in her detachment from the noise and the dirt, the men and the trucks who pay her no homage. She’s built on an Egyptian scale, a queen without a kingdom. Massive limbs are draped in angular folds. She had been conceived, under Vorticist influence, just after the First War. The statue is the only white object in a microclimate of grey, air you can barely force into the lungs. You feel it solidify. Another mile and we will be statues ourselves. Britannia commemorates the workers who died in the Great War, 1914–18. Names are visible but clogged with years of industrial pollution. Occupations are listed: Labourer, Gauger, Cooper, Horse-driver, Trotter, Stower, Clerk, Machinist, Trimmer, Warehouse Boy. Being here, powdered in the soft dust churned up by lorries, has preserved her integrity: a strange hieratic beauty. She does not age. She is not for turning.

The breakfast, at the coffee stall on the edge of the Ebbsfleet retail park, was one of the best of her life, so Anna reckoned. She may have been influenced by the need to rinse the dust from her mouth and the hours spent drudging through chalk quarries and streets from which all cafés and convenience stores had been excised. They have been obliterated in the push for a Channel Tunnel link, an Olympic staging post. The black hole that was Ebbsfleet is now the very model of the GP future-zone. Giant blue sheds. Frenzied roads. Long-haul lorry drivers staring at maps. A dozen men, gathered around a tea urn, texting furiously to find out where they are.

As we drizzle brown sauce over butter-melting, bacon-egg-sausage sandwiches, washed down by mugs of steaming coffee, we are interrogated by other diners. This river walk we are undertaking to London:
where’s that
? A woman, with the clear, ice-chip eyes of an Amundsen, tells us about her recent adventures in Bluewater. ‘I went early. There was nobody there. It was the end of the world.’ Drivers, with refrigerated cargoes, find themselves marooned at the breakfast stall when their satnavs give up the fight. You can’t navigate to a place that hasn’t happened yet.

NEXT STOP EUROPE.

A monster hoarding announces its abdication from the mess of downriver Kent. They want you to upgrade, at this point, to the CGI version of the road, the promo for Mark Wallinger’s 164-foot white horse, his mocking tribute to figures carved
into
hillsides by our mysterious ancestors. Chalk outlines that can only be viewed by shamanic flyers and superior beings on spaceships. The Wallinger nag, an inflated cornflake-packet toy, bestrides the Ebbsfleet quarry, and dominates both road and station, glorying in its scale and emptiness. As a travelling shot sweeps you around the iconic phantom, the promo reveals a spanking-new housing development. The look-at-me horse is intended to divert attention from a process of ripping, gouging, erasing. This dumb beast, twice as big as Antony Gormley’s crucified steel angel, is costed at £2 million. It doesn’t matter if it is actually built or not. It looks great in the movie. If it behaves like a police horse and lets one drop, the emerging Ebbsfleet estate will be buried in steaming compost.

We can smell the marshes but we can’t get at them. The warehouse zone, parasitical on the promise of Ebbsfleet’s European future, has expanded like a boom city, a gold-rush camp of provision warehouses and showrooms with nothing to show. Gravel beds have been laid out with Mexican plants and the sort of geometric ponds pioneered at motorway service stations. Anna asks a young man in peaked cap and blue uniform if he can point her in the direction of the river.

‘There is supposed to be a lake somewhere around here,’ he says, ‘but I’ve never seen it myself.’

‘The Thames? It’s a very large river.’

‘Sorry.’

Negotiating a tight avenue of self-reflecting glass is like putting your trust in a corporate brochure. We find ourselves back on the river path. Around the headland of the Swanscombe Marshes is the skeletal span of the QEII Bridge, twin lines of stalled traffic, sunlight glinting on windscreens. The warehouseman’s imaginary lake is busy with container ships stacked with new cars, or heading downstream towards gravel-dredging operations and concrete works.

The walk dissolves into pylon prairies, scrapyard suburbs, decommissioned fever hospitals, landfill dumps – and constant attempts, against the grain of natural resistance, to throw up riverside towers and estates. Ingress Abbey is now a gated community. Greenhithe a tolerated village. There are more retail parks. More surveyors. The Crossness Sewage Treatment Works features a splash of landmark architecture that reminds me of Terry Farrell and his dockside intervention in Hull: a fat block with a curved back, a whale jigsaw made from glass panels.

‘Handling enough sewage to fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools every haul,’ boasts the notice. And I can believe it: teal, sheldrake, oystercatcher, curlew and redshank, they are all out there. Feeding on the sludge, paddling through meaty London-waste mud. Crossness copywriting comes in Braille for sight-impaired wanderers: ‘Industry and wildlife will be your companions.’

The last time we passed this way, we were held for an hour, thanks to an ‘incident’ in the sewage farm. Which the embarrassed copper, pressured by aggrieved hikers and cyclists, finally revealed as a visit from the Prince of Wales. We witnessed the big black car, the procession of outriders and helicopters. The suited dignitaries, frozen on the steps, breaking into excited chatter as the cavalcade swept through the gates. A tray of MBEs in the post.

But that’s where we were now, ejected from new developments, clomping around token wildlife reservations, deafened by planes on a holding pattern, or swooping low towards the City Airport at Silvertown. Anna Minton in her 2009 polemic,
Ground Control
, prepares us for the coming nuisance from above. Stratford City, the Westfield supermall, are about to launch a new urban-control device, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Drones operated by the American military for spying and assassination in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is expected, according to Dr Kirstie Ball, a surveillance specialist, that the flying cameras, tried and tested in the Olympic Park, will become a permanent feature of London life. By 2012 there will be no perceptible difference in techniques of control employed in war zones and in homeland development zones: making the world a safer place for shopping.

If you manage to stay upright on a balcony as springy as a ship’s gangplank, in wind that rips around this eighteen-floor obstruction, the view of the Woolwich Ferry is unimpeachable: downriver London at its reeking, clanking best. Red sun, grey water. The conceit, that this new tower will make an adequate stand-in for Ballard’s
High-Rise
, doesn’t play. A couple of twists in the Thames, beyond the Barrier, and it’s already too far. The tension in Ballard’s 1975 novel comes from its severed connection with long-established reservations of money and influence. His gated community, in its vertical stack, is specifically located on the north bank, two miles from the City. The view, across the river from
High-Rise
, is dressed with concert halls, medical schools, television studios. In other words, Ballard has folded the map, conflating the South Bank culture-zone, between old and new versions of St Thomas’ Hospital, with the coming Docklands development. The whole story of landscape piracy neatly packaged in a single panoramic shot. A scrupulous economy of means, as always.

And now a radio programme, responding to real-estate spin, decides that one freakish tower block, overlooking the river, is as good as any other. Walls are made from ricepaper. Furniture is minimalist, scaled down to create the illusion of space. Mirrors do what they can. The hanging silver-ghost TV is skinnier than a postcard. The show flat is like a room in an airport hotel: with the expectation that you’ll stay for about the same amount of time as you’d get in compensation for missing a connecting flight.

Discussing
High-Rise
in Woolwich, we are doing what Ballard did all those years ago, nudging the narrative a few miles further out, into unwritten territory where the consequences of warped utopianism are not yet visible. Those who have been seduced by the lifestyle pitch, averting their eyes from what is actually going on, are not Ballard’s alienated professionals, his architects, psychiatrists, graphic designers. Those premature New Labourites have headed in the other direction, towards Chelsea Harbour, Putney and Richmond. That’s the rule. Live upstream of Westminster and invest your bonus east of Tower Bridge.