Breakfast is a priority on these walks. Which is something of a problem in the desert between the neck of the Isle of Dogs at East India Dock Road and our access point to the Lee Navigation towpath at Bow Lock. The landscape is provisional. Strategic planning runs up against sulking real estate, tacky old businesses that won’t fade away, inconvenience stores, revenants from Thomas Burke’s Chinatown. Marine provisioners have decayed into monosodium glutamate takeaways that leave you orange-tongued, raging with thirst. Merchant marine outfitters peddle cheap camping-gear, unisex jeans, diving suits for non-swimmers.
Bill Drummond is a good walker, long-striding, easy paced. He doesn’t go at it like a journalist, rushing the rush, overwhelmed by a bombardment of sense impressions. Atkins has his aches and pains, but he’ll plod on for as long as it takes. Not much, as yet, to photograph. A token view across the river, back to the Dome, from the spot that featured in EastEnders, the hotel where Ian Beale married Melanie.
East India Dock Road, with its evocative name, has a secondary identity as the A13, my favourite early-morning drive. The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; flyovers like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for their transporters. The A13 drains East London’s wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated. The wild nature graveyard in Newham. Inflatable, corn-yellow potato chips wobbling in their monster bucket outside McDonald’s in Dagenham. River fret over Rainham Marshes.
Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.
A high sierra of container units in rust colours and deep blues, chasms through which sunbeams splinter, wrecked double-decker buses with spider’s-web windows. Junk yards with leashed dogs. The Beam rivulet and the sorry Ingrebourne meander through spoilt fields, beneath the elevated highway (a road on stilts).
Where a road goes informs every inch of it; there is an irritability about the section we have to cross. Why are we heading north and not swinging east, following the hint spelt out by juggernauts? The ramps that lift you on to the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge are decorated with burnt-out motors – as if joy riders from Barking and Hornchurch knew they’d reached the end of the line. Fire the evidence. Leave the orbital motorway to major league crims.
The A13 shuffle through East London is like the credits sequence of the Mafia soap, The Sopranos; side-of-the-eye perspective, bridges, illegitimate businesses about to be overwhelmed by the big combos. Black smoke and blue smoke. Waste disposal. A well-chewed cigar. The motorway, when you reach it, has been infected by this shoddy progress; the drivers are up for it, hard men, warriors. Hear the screech of tyres as they carve across three lanes to hit the Sandy Lane ramp without losing momentum.
To drift through low cloud, through the harp strings of the suspension bridge, is to become a quotation; to see yourself from outside. From the Thames river path. Or the forecourt of the Ibis Hotel. A chunk of metal rattling over a concrete bandage. The toll booths on the far shore legitimise this transit. You need the ceremony of release. The motorway proper begins with mathematical nomenclature, Junction 1a, 1 b. No wonder the Bluewater quarry feels like one of the Channel ports. See bemused strollers searching for someone who speaks English.
But reach the M25 through the Surrey suburbs and it’s a different programme, another era. The Good Life, Ever Decreasing Circles. Anything with a pre-Lear Richard Briers. The motorway is perceived as a rude beast (germs from the east, asylum seekers, infected meat, rogue cargo).
The promoters, the strategists of the Lee Navigation path, hope that one day that path will carry walkers right to the Thames. They’re acquiring patches of land, potential sanctuaries. But, for now, we beat against the counter-currents of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach; snarled, south-flowing traffic (one lane in the tunnel before 9.30), fraught incomers heading north. Drummond remarks on the pompous splendour of an extinguished library, white stone and weeds. The kind of building that Atkins might once have photographed (rescued), but now doesn’t. I can hear his stomach grumbling. And I know it falls on me to find them a decent breakfast.
Drummond is a café man. An A13 aficionado. He spotted very early that Dagenham was the new Barcelona, the coming city of culture. Dagenham was the place to find a studio. Blight, wide pavements on which are parked gas-guzzling collectors’ motors. Rusty light from the river.
There’s nowhere better for the morning meditation, the crisp notebook. Strong tea, that’s Bill’s fuel. And plenty of it. He spends much of his life plotting in cafés, keeping one jump ahead of the trend spotters; seething, cackling. Issuing orders to abort yesterday’s mad fancies.
Out here, despite the romance of a 360-degree pan – railway, gas holders, river – there’s no whiff of roasted coffee, bacon-tongues crisping in a pan. The day is a London ordinary, pylon-punctured cloud base. Grey duvet flopping overhead.
Three Mills at Bromley-by-Bow is one of the showpieces of the Lee Valley Regional Park, a major photo opportunity for the heritage lobby. It’s an infallible rule that anything you spot on your rambles, anywhere you nominate, will be discovered; rescued, tarted up, divided into viable units. Cycling with the painter Jock McFadyen towards the Northern Sewage Outflow, the elevated Green Way to Beckton Alp, I began to understand how the system worked. McFadyen, a perky observer, auditioner of unlikely prospects (abandoned cinemas, trashed snooker halls, drinking clubs), leapt from his French machine. He’d clocked a ruin on the wilderness promontory where the Hertford Union Canal flows into the River Lea. An islet much favoured by herons. I imagined, when McFadyen began to blaze away with his camera, that he was gathering material for a future painting. Nothing of the sort. The artist was sussing a property. These days the huge canvas is of secondary interest. Paintings are no more than blow-ups of estate agents’ window displays. They’re done, the best of them, with a lust for possession. Speculations that got away.
If this was Kent, you’d look for oast houses. Structures designed for a purpose, drying hops, take on a second life: women drowsy, aroused; men tilting golden liquid in a tall glass. From the car park of the Tesco superstore, we acknowledge the clocktower of Three Mills, the drying kilns. (I’ve done the tour, seen the flood pool, the four twenty-foot-in-diameter water-wheels; listened to the creaks and groans. I’ve admired the shape of the building, the bare boards. The work that is now a show, a museum piece.)
There’s a café, brasserie or wine bar, with window looking out on Abbey Creek, on the junction of various streams, backwaters: Limehouse Cut, the Lea, City Mill river, Channelsea. A shuttle of silver trains over Gasworks Bridge. Industrial ghosts are loud here, but the café exists to serve media folk from the studios. And it isn’t open. It used to be the bottling plant of a distillery, another kind of mill, a gin mill. Water, the flow of the Lea impounded, was a great resource. Now it comes in blue bottles, carbonated. We make do with a Tesco sandwich and a carton of something. Atkins, the veggie, takes his sugar hit from a choc bar.
The island around Three Mills will be the epicentre of a new media empire; the intoxicating sweep of the landscape stimulating concept-generating faculties. You won’t actually see river, gas holders, exotic weeds, allotments, Bazalgette’s minarets in the mustard-Gothic cathedral of sewage, but they will inform the sensibilities of the programmers. Nicholson’s Gin Distillery, dark and forbidding, kept the workers anaesthetised, took the edge off middle-class anxiety. Nothing changes. The distillery peddles a different kind of fantasy, a new addiction: Big Brother. Prison Portakabins for jaded peepers. The TV show in which nothing happens on a twenty-four-hour feed.
Hence the Berlin effect, checkpoints, border guards, security cameras. A faint whiff of celebrity blends with the bindweed drench, the marsh gas, and that sharp smell that braking trains give off. Celebrity is fear, testosterone, oestrogen, unease. Celebrity is heat. Remove it from its natural habitat, the heart of the city (club, restaurant), and it rots, stinks. Celebrity is having a bunch of people standing around on the pavement, waiting while you eat.
At the back of Three Mills, Xerox celebrity hurts. It hurts place. The point of this area is to be obscure, a discovery any urban wanderer can make. Overgrown paths, turf islands. The imagination can reach out towards ambiguity. Find yourself by accident on the Northern Sewage Outfall path (now designated a ‘Green Way’) and you can follow the march of pylons, relish privileged views across West Ham; Canary Wharf glimpsed through the gravestones and memorials of the East London Cemetery. You can make your way, with the tide of shit, towards the A13 and the Thames. Gas, electricity, water, elements that shape the grid. Polluted streams picking a route, unacknowledged, through disposable landscapes.
When I walked around Channelsea creek with Chris Petit, who was carrying a small Sony DV camera, we were tracked by a security guard with a large dog, a German shepherd. When we stopped, they stopped. Petit was very taken with a silver building like an upturned boat. It had no design features, no detail, no architect’s signature; that’s what Petit liked. The absence of windows. The way it stood in the middle of nothing, minding its own business.
I felt some sympathy for the dog handler. How much fun could it be following two men who appear to have all the time in the world and nothing better to do with it than to stare at a large aluminium kennel? Security is a growth industry. It’s the job you get if you’re running away from something. Doctors and diplomats, asylum seekers. With their mobiles. Wired to an unseen control. Putting in the hours. It used to be a glamorous career choice, celebrity hoodlums like Dave Courtney, Lennie McClean, working the door. Getting dolled up for gangland funerals. The Look: long black coat, shaved head, earring, dark glasses. But the Look crossed the line into camp, self-consciousness, when Vinnie Jones took over the franchise, designer knucklebreaker. The new villains are pimping for film deals, closeted with ghosts, while they Archer their drab CVs.
The Channelsea guards are depressed. They are the real prisoners. The fame-succubi inside the huts are being watched. Somebody loves them. Somebody wants to eavesdrop on their dim lives and tiny ambitions. Nobody gives a toss about the watchers, the hang-around-the-gate uniforms. They can’t skive off. They’re surrounded by a thicket of gently panning CCTV cameras. Nobody comes here. Then, for one night a week, the world switches on to see who will be expelled, made to walk the plank, the bridge that takes them back to reality, the Three Mills studio.
I like this bridge. It doesn’t wobble. And it’s got an ironic title: Prescott Channel. Mud, surveillance, dereliction. The best skies in London. The nightmare of the New Labour suits, the mean spectacles who blink at life like a software package, smoothed and revised. Channelsea has no use for consensus, market research, Best Value. Channelsea is off-limits.
I spent a Saturday afternoon, in the rain, observing a pair of middle-aged mudlarks, up to the elbows in liquid sewage. One of them dragged an old tin bath out into the river, at low tide. The other worked with a sieve like a grizzled prospector, Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They spent hours laboriously sifting shit, hoping for the odd ring or coin. And I stuck with them, watching. This was about as far as you could travel from John Prescott. He couldn’t, even if it were explained to him, find anywhere to place such humans. Demographically, they had pulled it off. They didn’t register.
In the past I’ve taken photographs of the picket fence outside The Big Breakfast cottage at Old Ford Lock. But I can’t resist repeating myself. The messages change so quickly. Every white-painted blade is covered with names, telephone numbers. NICK CARTER IS THE FATHER OF MY BABY. TAMMY SEAMARK LIKES FREE SEX (WITH ALL SORTS). DENISE VAN OUTEN IS A BITCH, SEE YOU SEEM, OR ELSE. Shorthand stalker fantasies. The cottage, which marks the end of the Lee Valley Media Zone (goodbye soaps, goodbye hysteria), has lost its edge. Dead TV. In time a blue plaque to Denise Van Outen (‘lived here from 2 September 1996 to 1 Jan 1999’) will appear, playing games with fuddy-duddy notions of heritage and culture. An ironic memorial to the absence of memory. An Alice in Wonder land makeover. Giant toadstools, paddling pools, artificial grass. You gaze over the picket fence and the surveillance cameras, the security guards, stare right back at you. The lock-keeper’s cottage, beginning as a rural fantasy (sinister in Charles Dickens, jolly in H.G. Wells), ends in self-parody, colours louder than life, a cottage industry on magic mushrooms. The bricks are too bright, which isn’t surprising, they’re wallpaper. The security man in his little hut, guarding the pool and the synthetic grass, is too bored to bother with us, the crusty trio staring hungrily at his thermos and miniature pork pies.
Asylum seekers, border jumpers, paroled humans, those without status: they collect a uniform, lousy wages, an area to patrol, a free TV monitor playing real-time absences. In Don DeLillo’s ghost story, The Body Artist, there’s a woman who hangs on to her sanity by snacking on a ‘live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane blacktop’. Somewhere unknown, Finland. ‘Twenty-four hours a day.’ A prison fantasy, the weary body hauling itself upright to peer into a frosty window. ‘She imagined that someone might masturbate to this.’
Security is (mostly) unactivated masturbation. Low arousal tapes, low definition: you watch the landscape breathe. The canal at night. Wavering reflections of sodium lamps.
The media zone of the Lee Navigation deals, as it has always dealt, with waste disposal. Junk. I wait for a time when there will be digital mudlarks rummaging through exhausted footage for images to extract, fool’s gold dropped down the toilet bowls of the culture.
Hackney Marshes are pretty familiar. I had a great job once, painting white lines on the football pitches. A Forth Bridge task: start on Monday morning, under those epic skies, trolleying thick gunge, fighting the impulse to indulge in spiral patterns. Every Saturday and Sunday coarse footballers would obliterate my handiwork. Begin again.
Fat, glossy crows, cat-sized, scavenge the sward. Seagulls swoop on golf balls. They perch on crossbars, spot a knobbly egg and dive. Dozens of balls are lost in the thick grass where the Marshes slope up to Homerton Road. The walker feels small tramping towards a pylon-punctured horizon. Exposed on this broad table of land. The Friends Bridge, designed by Whitby, Bird and Partners, a way of getting across the Lea as it loops towards the Navigation, is a welcome destination.
The tough and functional steel and wood structure exposes the pretensions of the wobbly millennial effort, the spidery span that was supposed to carry pedestrians from St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. This bridge works. Its scarlet paint will survive the spray-can bandits. A straight path across honest planks, pale as sand, is counterbalanced by a red steel carapace (like Dalí’s fat lip sofa). The bridge understands its mythical function: to give the pilgrim, who has laboured to find it, access to a nature reserve, a slice of protected wilderness.
Back on the canal path, at the point where Eastway crosses the Navigation, we encounter one of those oracular concrete caverns. Reflected light sports in the grooves, REGGIE KRAY FOR MAYOR OF LONDON. There’s a reversed swastika (with the number 23), a scarlet skull and a single bone crossed by an arrow. The panels of the wall have been finished in a sort of refined pebbledash: a beach framed for exhibition.
Under the bridge, weed-slippery skeletons of motorcycles, dredged from the filthy water, have been laid out. I’ve seen travellers, barechested, prudish in old trousers, diving for scrap. Ropes and hooks. Mounds of antique iron. Bicycles, prams. Immune to Weil’s disease, rat bites, they submerge, time after time, in the mucilage, the electric-green scum.
The triangle of the Marshgate Recreation Ground is in the process of a rethink. Its history, summarised on a board, has been action-painted into oblivion. The newly planted patch has been christened: ‘Wick Woodland’.
Along the avenue of peeling London planes, caravans have been parked. Cars. And bits of cars. An inhabited junkyard, a moveable suburb. Bureaucratic toleration pushed to its limits by the construction of waste towers, mounds of black tyres. The travellers, barred from upwardly mobile riverside pubs, anathematised by eco-planners, have found a use for this leftover arrowhead of ground. They’ve Balkanised it. Fouled it. Used it. They’ve helped to clean the Lee Navigation. And they’ve done it without grants or ten-year business plans. Obviously, they’re doomed. They’ll be moved on. Strategic planting will win the day. For now tidy citizens might wince as they pass through this corridor of filth, avert their eyes; missing the improvised beauty of the accidental – a collision between a band of traffic on its high curve, new plantings, woodchip walkways, benches on which to contemplate the scene.
The mystery of the Navigation, where the Marshes confront rows of neat canalside hutches, was best captured by Rachel Whiteread in her monochrome plates, taken on the day when the Sixties’ tower blocks were blown up. Whiteread’s photographs celebrate silence; small boats on the river, crowds on the banks. Tents. A revivalist mob watching vertical history crumple and disappear.
As we pass the Middlesex Filter beds (closed) and move towards the weir, close to Lea Bridge Road, by the Princess of Wales pub, I try out a Fortean Times myth on Bill Drummond: how two headless, skinned bears were found floating at this spot. Children reported a yeti-like sighting, in a snowstorm on the Marshes. Paw prints were discovered and photographed. There was talk of circuses, gypsies – but no animals were reported missing. The implication was that the beasts had scavenged in Epping Forest, for picnic scraps, discarded burger cartons, roots and berries. Then started to forage further afield.
The floating things looked human but on the wrong scale, evolutionary accidents. Grey-pink. Flesh like a body condom. The paws had been lopped off, leaving the sorry creatures without proper means of identification. Interspecies monsters. The heads were never recovered. They vanished into London’s cabinet of curiosities, along with the skulls of Emanuel Swedenborg and John Williams (the suicided suspect in the Ratcliffe Highway Murders), the phantom hat of gangland victim Jack McVitie.
Heads as trophies. The bears were redundant once the heads had been hacked off. Were they decorating some Leaside pub? Or were they nailed to the wall of a neo-baronial ranch in Chigwell? Did they fulfil some shamanistic requirement, bear spirits raised as guides? Heads had long been used, in London’s underworld, as occult sources of power, botched voodoo displays. Instead of Dahomean carpets of skulls around the throne of a high king, the boiled poll of a smalltime informer, a rival.
East London’s waterway system, dank canals, had canteens of blood-rusty cutlery in them, weapons that continued to sing about forgotten crimes. Knives that begged to confess, plea-bargain. Customised shotguns. Arsenals of suspect weaponry. The police diving team was an everyday sight on the Hackney Cut and the Lee Navigation; wet suits, air bubbles, ropes. Dark fishing after the latest bin bag floater had been hauled ashore. I’ve watched them, with thermoses of coffee, thick sandwiches, cranking a car from the river. Not like Taggart. No hardbitten dialogue, no cynical pathologist dragged from a Burns night dinner. A small team taking a blow in the sunshine.
It’s more disturbing when heads start reappearing. I’m never happy with empty alcoves on English baroque monuments. It’s too easy to picture the Jacobite heads on Temple Bar. The spikes on London Bridge. Nobody liked it when Billy Moseley’s head turned up in a bundle of newspapers, in a Gents’ lavatory in Islington, up on the ridge overlooking the valley of the Fleet. It was clear, from the frosted flesh, that Billy had spent time in a deepfreeze. Less clear as to why he aborted his ill-advised cryogenic experiment.
It wasn’t just rubble under the marshes. There were legions of the unregistered dead. Children, animals. Foetuses. All, as I pictured it, headless. As a qualification. To preserve anonymity. Meat without eyes. Without souls.
*
I’ve been promising Bill and Marc a notable breakfast in the café by Springfield Park and I’m praying that it will be open. Bill, a connoisseur of cafés, knows the place. It’s where he meets his early mentor, the actor (director, philosopher, madman) Ken Campbell. A Liverpool connection. Campbell lives near the park. I’ve passed the house, without realising that it was his, noticed the tribal masks and fetish figures in the window. Hackney Marshes is a good backdrop for this latterday pataphysician with his alarming caterpillar eyebrows. Sit down with Campbell at an outside table and you are in company with a Ben Jonson clown, a whirlwind of cataclysmic energy; you realise, caught by that stare, those white, bottletop eyes, that the man is stonecold sane. He talks tickertape but his argument is rehearsed and organised; years of improvised performances, multilayered monologues, have honed his pitch. Fast as morse – but intelligible if you give yourself up to him. He puffs a small cigar. Sucks noisily at his mug of tea. He takes his role as spirit of place very seriously.
The river, as it flows beneath the gentle rise of Springfield Park, that Middle European reservation where orthodox Jews yatter on benches, reminds Campbell of a trip he made by coracle to the source of the Lea. The river slows consciousness. I could never survive in Ken Campbell’s retreat. I wouldn’t write a word. I’d spend my mornings at a table in the café, skying, watching patterns of flow, oil spill psychedelia. But Campbell’s a native, you feel the realpolitik of Leytonstone in everything he says.
He put on a durational, science fiction epic at Three Mills. And now he’s up for a ‘pidgin’ Macbeth at the Middlesex Filter Beds. He’s right. There’s a sense of theatre about these abandoned industrial spaces; trenches, dark water, tumbled concrete menhirs. The experience of going up west for an overpriced musical, a rejigged Priestley, is hell. Move the National Theatre to Walthamstow Marshes.
From his days as a pop-eyed stooge for Warren Mitchell, a bent lawyer for G.F. Newman, or anything that called for extreme physicality, Campbell graduated into a professional explainer (nutty experiments, Citroën ads). Whatever it takes to fund his own brand of spectacle and monologue, Campbell’s up for it. He’s not shy of self-promotion. Pidgin as a world-language is his current obsession.
With his soft black hat and his small cigars, he’s a piratical, actor/manager figure. The bushy eyebrows have, unilaterally, declared their independence. He has to cope with a tangle of dogs and leads, stagy business that involves feeding them a constant stream of broken biscuits. His teeth are magnificently shipwrecked, the colour of ancient dominoes. He’s performed as a duck in Alice in Wonderland, with Ken Dodd as a rat; he’s given underwater concerts with Heathcote Williams. He wears a Dreamcatcher T-shirt. He raps through the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech in pidgin to the amazement of the riverside loungers.
The café serves filter coffee and has calamari on the breakfast menu. We settle in, calling for additional rounds of tea and toast. Drummond is scribbling in his notebook. He tells us about The Unabomber Manifesto. ‘Today,’ he would write, in his account of the walk, ‘I’m a born-again would-be terrorist.’ From that landmine laugh, you might believe it. The look is right: sensible, corduroy, with pale-rimmed specs. What’s in that rucksack? (He carries it looped over one shoulder, so that it doesn’t actually qualify as a twitcher’s pouch.) Bona fide terrorists are lab technicians, junior lecturers, schoolteachers with a grievance. Bill has some of that, but he’s too tall, too much of a walker. He knows his wildlife. As we strolled alongside the Marshes, the reservoir embankments, he pointed out grey wagtail, dunnock. We aren’t going to challenge him. Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren’t seagulls. He’s telling Drummond about his time as a Heavy Metal roadie.
*
Gradually, landscape induces confidences. The cycle gates become less of an irritation. Road bridges energise us, traffic noise plays against pastoral tedium. Ferry Hale Road, Forest Road. On my first walks up the Lea, I used to think that an old fisherman’s pub, here on the fringe of Walthamstow, was truly rustic. Izaak Walton in the back bar stuffing a pike. There must have been a ferry somewhere near this clapboard ghost. A haunt of narrowboat skippers and their dogs.
The site is now distinguished by a frivolous display of marine architecture. It thinks it’s on the Algarve: balconies, furled parasols, greenery dripping from window ledges, blue glass. The Heron Hospitality Centre. Even the herons are embarrassed by it, they spindle away to Tottenham Marsh. Perch, in solitude, on convenient branches, trying to pretend – which is impossible given their size, the design faults – that they’re not really there. Neo-Romantic doodles, scissor-beaks and Anglepoise knees.
Drummond is gobsmacked. Hand on hip, he tries to make sense of this latte-coloured folly. Why would anyone position a glass and plaster box alongside a scummy lock on the high road to Walthamstow and Epping Forest? Blatant white space-ism: architects ignore the implications of where their buildings will be sited. Nothing exists beyond the frame of an idealised sketch. Invertebrate people with identikit faces lounging on an imaginary deck. There’s no road, no marsh, no industry.
It’s enough to get Drummond started on another of his current projects, a heart-of-darkness voyage up the Congo with Mark Manning (aka Zodiac Mindwarp). Along with the inevitable Gimpo (covert camera). The African voyage, with all its logistical problems (paranoia, corruption, disease, river-stink), is the second part of a wildly ambitious trilogy. One: a journey through Finland towards the North Pole, with an icon of Elvis Presley. Two: the Conrad revival. Three: the final (terminal) trip to the moon.
Jessie Weston’s tag – ‘the otherworld is not a myth, but a reality’ – underwrites everything Drummond attempts. Plotting his adventures is better, much better, than carrying them out. The moon jaunt involves a swim, clutching a buoyancy barrel or life preserver, from Cuba to Cape Canaveral. The next bit is vague: blag themselves aboard Apollo-whatever, or lift off by force of will (a Georges Méliès stunt). The moon’s a dead rock and also a state of mind. The secret history of popular music (which Drummond celebrates) couldn’t exist without it – as a rhyme, a simile. Rhymes are dangerous things, forging connections which can never be broken. Rhymes are addictive. They clog up the memory files.
If Florida doesn’t work out (troubled back story: exiled Cubans, Chicago hoods, hit men; the missing sliver of Kennedy’s skull), Drummond and Manning will move on to Peru. Straight lines in the desert, clear skies. They’ll take every pharmaceutical, mushroom, cactus extract, loco weed, they can get their hands on. That should do it, bring the moon down. Until they can snort its dust.
There wasn’t much definition in the sky. Pylons and earthworks, water you can’t see. The occasional horse hoping for a handout. I thought of Jock McFadyen’s painting Horse Lamenting the Invention of the Motor Car (1985). A blue pantomime beast with a bandaged foreleg on a carpet of wasted turf, surrounded by a stream of toy cars. David Cohen called McFadyen ‘the Stubbs of the automobile’.
The reservoir nags of the Lea Valley, scab-eyed and shaggy, are cousins to animals that live on Dublin housing estates. They stretch necks over barbed wire fences, toss at an irritation of fleas. Wet brown eyes couldn’t be set further apart, without falling off. The horses have a melancholy presence, never finding a comfortable direction in which to set their too heavy heads.
Atkins is beginning to limp. This walk is a relatively gentle one, but for some reason – perhaps the monotony of the track, the uneven pebbles – it hurts the unwary.
Drummond can’t decide if our expedition is asking the right questions. The land is too anonymous, no major blight, a steady stream of I–Spy water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp).
I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action.
The situation, at the junction of the North Circular and the Lee Valley Trading Estate, is readable. It’s what we are used to, what we advocate; faux-Americana, waste disposal, spray from twelve-wheeled rigs. Powerhouse, Currys. A Mercedes franchise. Signs and signatures. Zany neon calligraphy. Warehouses parasitical on the road, on the notion of movement, easy parking. Old riverside enterprises that basked in obscurity have been forced to come to terms with brutalist tin, container units with ideas above their station. The aesthetic of the North Circular retail park favours colours that play, ironically, with notions of the pastoral: lime-green (pond weed), yellow (oil seed rape), blood-red. Road names aren’t literary, they’re chemical. Argon Road is a memory trace of Edmonton’s contribution to the manufacture of fluorescent lamps. Light is troubled, unnatural. The scarlet scream of the furniture warehouse fights with the graded slate-greys of the road, the river and the sky.
I love it. I like frontiers. Zones that float, unobserved, over other zones. Road users have no sense of the Lee Navigation, they’re goal-orientated. Going somewhere. Noticing Atkins, foot on barrier, perched in the central reservation, snapping away, drivers in their high cabs see a nuisance, an obstacle. A potential snoop. They’d be happy to run him down. Atkins sees a speedy blur, abstraction, the chimney of London Waste Ltd blasting steam.
Visible evil. Pollution from a low-level castle, remaindered Gothic. Better and better. The London Waste facility is battleship-grey, a colour that is supposed to make it invisible in the prevailing climate: rain, exhaust fumes, collapsed skies. The expectation is that on an average Edmonton morning, diesel fug and precipitation will disguise the 100-foot tower of the biggest incinerator in Britain.
The Waste Zone, that’s one they left out of the brochure. You arrive at the edge of the city, out of sight of Canary Wharf, and you take a dump. Surgical waste, pus, poison, plague. Corruption. All the muck we spew out. It has to go somewhere. Edmonton seems a reasonable choice.
In October 2000, a group of Greenpeace protesters occupied the summit of the burning tower. Gridlock on the M25 is a modest fantasy compared to a blockage in the procedure for the destruction of clinical waste. The Edmonton furnaces dispose of 1,800 tons of putrid stuff, contaminated bandages, body tissue, dirty nappies, used hypodermic needles, every day. At the time of the protest, waste material was piling up in seven boroughs (Camden, Enfield, Barnet, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Waltham Forest). Hackney had its own long-running dispute, black bags burst on the streets, as a consequence of the council’s bankruptcy and cutbacks. Generations of braggadoccio incompetence, a system built on institutionalised malpractice.
Waste that couldn’t be shipped to Edmonton was transported to landfill sites in Essex and Huntingdon. Convoys took advantage of the M25, which increasingly functioned as an asteroid belt for London’s rubble, the unwanted mess of the building boom, the destruction of tower blocks, the frenzied creation of loft-living units along every waterway.
We’re intrigued by London Waste Ltd and their Edge of Darkness estate. What was once grey belt, the grime circuit inside the green belt, is now called upon to explain itself. Before the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, Euro slush funds and council tax tithes, it didn’t matter. Reclamation was never mentioned. Fish and fowl were there to be hunted. Dirty and dangerous industries provided employment, built cottages for the workers. Now we have Best Value.
The incineration industry, and the London Waste Ltd plant at Edmonton in particular, were investigated by television journalist Richard Watson, on behalf of the Newsnight programme. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste were guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with contaminated fly ash. The end product was then used in road building, and for the manufacture of the breeze blocks out of which the plethora of dormitory estates were being assembled. Waltham Abbey and its satellites as Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The defoliant Agent Orange, 50 million litres of which had been dropped by the Americans on Vietnam, registers around 900 nanograms of dioxin to one kilogram of soil. Mixed ash from the incinerators, used on chicken runs in Newcastle, registered 9,500 nanograms. Eggs concentrated the effect. They didn’t need shells. You could see right through them. Dioxins are carcinogenic. Combined with dust, when householders carry out repairs, hang paintings, drill holes in breeze blocks, they are guaranteed to keep future surgeries and hospices busy.
The Environment Agency fed the relevant minister, Michael Meacher, the usual soft soap. The firms responsible for working mixed ash into conglomerates used in surfacing new roads declined to reveal the location of their handiwork, the 12,000 tons of aggregate dropped on the landscape. Their spokesman, sweating lightly, sported a Buffalo Bill beard: frontiersman peddling a treaty to the Sioux. One major recipient of this dubious cargo was uncovered by Watson’s researches: the car park of the Ford plant at Dagenham. The A13, yet again, had something to make it glow at night. A topdressing of contaminated Edmonton ash.
‘No more dangerous than Guy Fawkes night,’ declared Meacher to the House. When ash, removed from Edmonton, was tested, it registered dioxin levels ten times higher than the figure floated by the Environment Agency.
Walking north towards Picketts Lock, we turn our backs on the incinerators, the smoke. Frame it out, it’s not there. Go with the Dufy doodle on the side of London Waste’s rectangular box, the company’s upbeat logo: limpid blue sky, lush grass, a pearl-grey building like a Norfolk church.
Edmonton is the Inferno and Picketts Lock the garden, the paradise park. In the past, on hot summer walks with my family, we used to come off the Navigation path for a swim at the Picketts Lock Leisure Complex. (How complex can leisure be?) This modest development, on the edge of a hacker’s golf course, was an oasis. It didn’t take itself too seriously and it filled the gap between the London Waste burning chimney and the Enfield Sewage Works.
The polyfilla theory of Leisure Complex placement, the old treaty between developers, land bandits, and improve-the-quality-of-life councillors, worked pretty well. Another chlorine-enhanced waterhole on ground nobody could think of any other way to exploit.
But that won’t wash in these thrusting millennial times. The name Picketts Lock starts to appear in the broadsheets – and it acquires a bright new apostrophe: Pickett’s Lock. Pickett’s Lock will be reinvented as a major sports stadium (convenient access to the M25). It will be the venue for the 2005 World Athletic Championships; thereby conferring enormous benefits on the Lea Valley; tourists, media, retail spin-offs. Computer-generated graphics omit the chimney at the end of the park, the smoke pall. Nobody is bad-mannered enough to mention the fact that London Waste have put in an application to extend their site. The application has been approved by Nick Raynsford, Minister for the Capital. It is awaiting final approval from Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers. (Poor man. It was going to get worse, much worse. Byers epitomised the New Labour attitude of glinting defiance. Fiercely tonsured and spectacled, tight-lipped, he would suffer assault by flashbulbs, while sitting bolt-upright in the back seat of a ministerial limo. He would be attacked by forests of furry microphones at the garden gate. He would be sideswiped from Trade and Industry to Transport. Pickett’s Lock to Purgatory. Official pooper-scooper. Ordered to clean up after all those years of misinformation, neglect and underinvestment. A man undone by his own spinners and fixers, he came, with every fresh appearance before the media inquisitors, to look more and more like a panicked automaton, a top-of-the-range cryogenic model of The Public Servant.)
When this matter is raised, the site’s owners (Lee Valley Regional Park Authority) become quite huffy, insisting that additional incinerators will ‘pose no risk’ to the health of athletes or spectators. ‘Better far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as venues for the Olympics,’ states Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing.
Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000–2010) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to emerging, modern competition.’ Horror: ‘25 years old’! Disgusting, obscene. Tear it down. The swimming pool and poolside café might look clean and friendly to the untrained eye, but they are older than David Beckham. The cinema, video arcade part of the enterprise will remain.
Which is a relief. This is a rather wonderful building, with a long straight approach, a tiled, mosaic walkway. The Alhambra of Enfield. A Moorish paradise of plashing water features, ordered abstraction, glass that reflects the passing clouds. Everything leads the eye to the cinema palace, lettering that looks like the announcement of a coming attraction: WELCOME TO LEE VALLEY. Cathedral windows catching cloud vapours, the floating dome of another burger bar.
Nothing is cramped and mean about this approach. The Pickett’s Lock multiplex is one of the wonders of our walk; we begin to understand how a commercial development can be integrated into the constantly shifting, constantly revised aspect of the Lea Valley. With its strategic use of dark glass and white panels, the generous space allowed between constituent elements in the overall design, Pickett’s Lock presents itself as a retreat, a respite from the journey. Buffered by the golf course, it remains hidden from the Navigation path. But, should you take the trouble to search it out, here is green water (swimming pool, ponds and basins); here is refreshment (motorway standard nosh, machine-dispensed coffee froth); here are public areas in which to sit and rest and study maps.
Pickett’s Lock works best, as a concept, if you don’t step inside. If you avoid the full Americana of burger reek (foot-and-mouth barbecues with optional ketchup), popcorn buckets, arcade games in which you can attack the M25 as a virtual reality circuit, UP TO TWO PLAYERS MAY RACE AT ONCE. INSERT COINS. In fact, this sideshow at Pickett’s Lock represents the Best Value future for the motorway; grass it over and let would-be helldrivers take out their aggression on the machines.
This pleasing sense of being removed from the action, the imposed-from-above imperatives, that we must enjoy ourselves, take healthy (circular) walks, observe bittern and butterfly, nod sagely over ghosts of our industrial heritage, is fleeting. The builders, the earth-movers, the JCBs, will soon be rolling in; hacking up meadows to make way for another stadium, another crowd puller; more promised, but postponed pleasure.
Postponed indefinitely. New Labour couldn’t face another Dome situation. Another money pit. They waited for Bad News Day, 11 September 2001. Then slipped the announcement into the small print. The Pickett’s Lock athletic stadium was aborted. No mention of London Waste. Economic considerations only. The apostrophe was withdrawn like Princess Di’s royal status. Picketts Lock, now surrounded by an ever-growing retail park with suspiciously bright roads, could go back to being a community centre for a community of transients.
Why, I wondered, as we hit the stretch from Ponders End to Enfield Lock, were there no other walkers? As a Best Value attempt at drumming up clients for their recreational facilities, the Lee Valley marketing men were not having a good day. Most people who live for any length of time in East London, even Notting Hill journalists with friends in Clapton, or connections in Hoxton, claim to walk the Lea. Filter Beds, Springfield Park Marina, Waltham Abbey, they boast of an intimate knowledge. Any free moment, there they are, out in the fresh air, hammering north. But the towpath stays empty. A few dog walkers, the odd shorthaul cyclist. Where are the professionals, the psychogeographers, note-takers who produce guides to ‘The London Loop’ or the Green Way? Local historians uncovering our industrial heritage: do they work at night?
We’re on our own, exposed; under a cradle of sagging wires in a pylon avenue, on a red path. Marc’s foot is swollen and he’s beginning to lag behind. Bill Drummond is still buzzing; logging blackthorn blossom and brooding on his Unabomber assignment. The Lee Navigation, keeping us company for so many hours, provokes Drummond into a rhapsody on crashed cars, the road movie he made with Jimmy Cauty in homage to Chris Petit’s Radio On.
‘The film made Jimmy and I think you didn’t have to be Wim Wenders to make a road movie. So we made one and it was dire. And that put me off the whole notion of movie making for the rest of my life.’
On the path were rusted sculptures that should have been milestones. They’d been sponsored and delivered, but they didn’t belong. ‘Art,’ I muttered. ‘Watch out.’ Objects that draw attention to themselves signal trouble. We were walking into an area that wanted to disguise its true identity, deflect attention from its hot core.
Drummond already had too much of this day, too many anecdotes, too many pertinent observations. That night, on the train home, he would look over his notes, ‘crossing out anything descriptive’. Text is performance. The only memorial of the synapse-burn in which it is composed. ‘Zero characterisation,’ said Bill. Don’t burden yourself with the manufacture of copy-cat reality. The more I read Drummond’s short tales, the more I admired them; envied their insouciance. He’d learnt how to lie; a man sitting at a kitchen table with a mug of tea, talking about an episode that he feels compelled to relive or exorcise. Confessing his subterfuges, his strategies, he wins the confidence of the reader: trick and truth. His stories never outstay their welcome. The Drummond he reveals is the Drummond who writes. Writes himself into existence.
The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield Lock is an island colony, once enclosed, independent, now up for grabs. It’s surrounded by water so it has to be desirable real estate. The Italianate water tower, or clock tower, will be preserved and the low, barrack buildings transformed into first-time flats, housing stock. The nature of government land, out on the perimeter, changes. Originally, work was life, work was freedom (the cobbled causeway running towards what looks like a guard tower triggers an authentic concentration camp frisson); now work is secondary, it takes place elsewhere. Sleeping quarters have become the principal industry. Compulsory leisure again. The factory revealed as a hive of non-functional balconies, satellite-dishes monitoring dead water.
Enfield Lock is imperialist. It has signed the Official Secrets Act – in blood. A scaled-down version of Netley, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital on Southampton Water. Hospitals, ordnance, living quarters: the same pitch, the same hollow grandiloquence. Public footpaths, where they cross recently acquired government land, will be ‘extinguished’.
If you come east from the town of Enfield, from the station at Turkey Street, you march down Ordnance Road. This was the route the poet John Clare took, travelling in the other direction, when he walked away from the High Beach madhouse in Epping Forest. Powder-burns on privet. Suburban avenues, lacking pedestrians, with front gardens just big enough to take a parked car. Vandalised vehicles, cannibalised for spare parts, stay out on the street. There’s not much rubbish, no graffiti. Military rule is still in place.
The Royal Small Arms Factory was a Victorian establishment, post-Napoleonic Wars. Private traders couldn’t produce the quantity of guns required for maintaining a global empire. The cottages of Enfield Lock were built to house workers from the machine rooms and grinding mills. The River Lea was the energy source, driving two cast-iron water wheels. The name of the river and the name of the small country town on the Essex/Middlesex border came together to christen the magazine rifle familiar to generations of cadet forces, training and reserve battalions: the Lee Enfield. This multiple-round, bolt-action rifle, accurate to 600 metres, was the most famous product of the Enfield Lock factory, the brand leader. In the First War it was known as ‘the soldier’s friend’. The factory survived until 1987. To be replaced by what promotional material describes as ‘a stylish residential village’.
The developers, Fairview, take a relaxed view of the past. ‘New’ is a very flexible term. ENFIELD ISLAND VILLAGE, AN EXCITING NEW VILLAGE COMMUNITY. A captured fort. A workers’ colony for commuters who no longer have to live on site. The village isn’t new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is suddenly ‘stylish’. The Fairview panoramic drawing, removed from its hoarding, could illustrate a treatise on prison reform: a central tower and a never-ending length of yellow brick with mean window slits.
We’ve had our lunchtime drink. Marc’s rested his foot, which is now quite swollen. And Bill has grilled me on the motivation for my orbital circuit of the M25. Why counter clockwise he wants to know. I dodge that one by moving sideways into a discussion of J.G. Ballard and the western approaches. I admire the way that Ballard has stayed put in Shepperton, same house, same themes. He can hear the traffic, he can hear the planes overhead; he has no responsibility for either of them. Blinds drawn, brain in gear. Three hours a day at the typewriter. Future memories, prophetic TV.
The answer to Bill’s question has something to do with Italianate towers, the only surviving markers of hospitals and factories. Our walk is a way of winding the clock back. But I haven’t worked out the details. We haven’t set eyes yet on the M25. Like America to the Norsemen, it’s still a rumour.
If you knew nothing about the Small Arms Factory, and were wandering innocently along the towpath, you’d pick up the message: keep going. Government Road. Private Road. Barrier Ahead. The pub, Rifles, must be doing well; it has a car park the size of the Ford Motor Plant at Dagenham.
Rifles isn’t somewhere you’d drop into on a whim. The black plastic awning features weaponry in white silhouette, guns crossed like pirate bones. TRAVELLER NOT WELCOME. ‘Which traveller?’ I wondered. Has word of our excursion filtered down the Lea? OVER 21’s. SMART DRESS ONLY. Is it the migratory aspect that these Enfield islanders object to? Or the clothes? What were they expecting, red kerchiefs, broad leather belts, moleskin waistcoats?
Whatever it is they don’t like, we’ve got it. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. Do they know something we don’t? Are they expecting an invasion from the forest?
Enfield Lock has an embargo on courtesy. In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old track. Who walks? ‘There used to be a road,’ they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. ‘Village’ is the giveaway. Village is the sweetener that converts a toxic dump into a slumber colony. You can live ten minutes from Liverpool Street Station and be in a village. With CCTV, secure parking and uniformed guards.
The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes plc are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: ‘Strangers. Travellers.’
The FIND YOUR WAY AROUND ENFIELD ISLAND VILLAGE map doesn’t help. Interesting features are labelled ‘Future Phase’. You’d have to be a time-traveller to make sense of it. A progression of waterways like an aerial view of Venice, YOU ARE HERE. If you’re reading this notice, you’re fucked. That’s the message.
‘Building on toxic timebomb estate must be halted,’ said the London Evening Standard (12 January 2000). ‘A report published today calls for an immediate halt to a flagship 1,300-home housing development on heavily polluted land at the former Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock.’
The drift of the piece by Stewart Payne is that the Enfield Lock scheme was the model for the decontamination of a series of other brownfield sites, worked-out sheds, shacks and bunkers that once operated alongside London’s rivers and canals. A cosmetic scrape at the topsoil, a capping of the lower levels, wouldn’t do.
An attitude of mind that found its apotheosis in the Millennium Dome on Greenwich peninsula was evident throughout New Labour’s remapping of the outer belts, the ex-suburbs. Nobody can afford to live at the heart of the city, unless they are part of the money market (or its parasitical forms). The City of London is therefore the first Island Village; sealed off, protected, with its own security. Middle-grade workers and service industry Transit van operatives will be pushed out towards the motorway fringes. The hollow centre will then be divided up: solid industrial stock, warehouses and lofts, will go to high-income players (City, media); Georgian properties (formerly multiple-occupied) will recover their original status (and double as film sets for costume dramas); jerrybuilt estates will go to the disenfranchised underclass, junkies and asylum seekers.
Unsafe as Houses: Urban Renaissance or Toxic Timebomb (Exposing the methods and means of building Britain’s homes on contaminated land). A report, commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Enfield Lock Action Group Association, revealed that planning permission had been granted before questions about contamination had been resolved. Planning permission was, in fact, granted on the basis of information supplied by the developers. Enfield Council’s chief planning officer, Martin Jarvis, stepped down from that role. He soon found a new position: as a director of Fairview Homes. He was among familiar faces. His son also worked for Fairview, as did the daughter of Richard Course, chairman of the council’s environment committee.
‘Should I cover my shoulders?’
I returned to Enfield Lock, to a cottage in Government Road, with the filmmakers Chris Petit and John Sergeant. We had arranged to record an interview with local activist Beth Pedder. Pedder lived on the edge of Enfield Island Village. She was one of the authors of the Unsafe as Houses report. Her testimony confirmed the impression I formed on the original walk with Bill Drummond and Marc Atkins: bad turf, suppressed history.
Pedder became involved with community politics when she started agitating against cars and for a school. ‘Our first issues were traffic and the overloading and log jamming of our local roads, already laden with industrial traffic. We worried over the lack of health care, and the lack of a new school for an Island development of 1,300+ new homes in an area already deprived of services.’
National journalists and television companies took an interest when the exploitation of brownfield sites was advocated as the solution to the housing problem by a telephone directory-sized report from an urban task force, chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside: Towards an Urban Renaissance. That’s Lord Rogers as in the Richard Rogers Partnership, Dome designers by appointment to Bugsby’s Marshes. Greenwich peninsula was showbiz brownfield, Peter Mandelson as Kubla Khan. Enfield Lock was left to Fairview Homes plc. They picked up the Royal Small Arms Factory makeover: land contaminated ‘with an Arsenic to Zinc range of chemical substances, plus explosives, oils and tars and the by-products of five gas works’.
In 1984 the Ministry of Defence, which controlled a major parcel of land (very loosely mapped) around Waltham Abbey, on both sides of the M25, decommissioned the Royal Small Arms Factory and sold it to British Aerospace (BAe). British Aerospace got together with Trafalgar House to launch a joint venture company, Lea Valley Developments (LVD). Limited tests were carried out on the contaminated land. In 1996 LVD sold the land to the housing wing of Hillsdown Holdings, Fairview New Homes.
Pedder found herself being interviewed for Panorama. ‘Wear black, cover your shoulders, get rid of the Pat Butcher earrings,’ she was told by the media Taliban. They didn’t want her coming over as a central casting hippie, a wacky-baccy anarchist of the suburbs. We didn’t care what she wore. Our motives were just as suspect. Pedder’s tattoos were a work of art: naked nymphs climbing out of lilies, with a few revisions and skin-graft cancellations elsewhere. Silver bracelets, rings. Black nail varnish.
None of which had anything to do with what she had to say, the seriousness of her research and the effectiveness of her pursuit of the true story. She couldn’t set foot in Enfield Island Village. Conservationists, bird-watchers and tree-lovers had been chased off by the hard hats. Some had been threatened with sticks. Beth kept at it, digging for facts, writing letters to ministers, asking to see documentation. If Pedder hung on, won the day, it couldn’t be long before Julia Roberts would be hired, painted tattoos and nose-stud, to battle the corporate giants in a Californian mock-up of Enfield Lock.
Beth spoke with feeling. ‘We were concerned that the MOD had produced no records for this site. We would be interested to know why.’ Enfield has a long tradition of enforced silence. ‘It was always a very secretive site. Ex-workers said that no one was allowed outside their own area. People didn’t have a clue what went on in other areas. We had one ex-worker who attested to the fact that the building she worked in was tested every month with a geiger-counter. They had large X-ray rooms and three lead-lined rooms with lead floors, lead ceilings. They had a rocket test tunnel that ran the length of the site. It had an internal railway. There were people with white coats and radiation badges who went further into the site than anyone else was allowed to go. Workers were blood-tested every month.’
The zone was known as the ‘Enfield Military Complex’.
Secret State parkland. Surrounded by water. Pedder was concerned that the local developers had no experience with contaminated land on this scale. ‘They didn’t have any MOD records. They didn’t at first acknowledge that there was much contamination, despite the fact that previous test results had shown high levels of mercury, lead, nickel, cadmium, chrome, copper, zinc. There are PCBs, high quantities of asbestos. They don’t even have a complete set of maps to show where the pipes run. There was a bash and burn policy with the MOD. They either burnt their leftovers, or they made them much smaller, bashed them up and buried them. A report was done by a Government body that expressed concern that the MOD didn’t have records for a lot of these sites, sites where radiation appeared to be present.’
We drink our tea in a pleasant kitchen, in one of the workers’ cottages from the old days of the Small Arms Factory. We walk out into the garden. Look across a brown canal at the new estate. Pedder talks about the stink from the London Waste site at Edmonton. ‘With all incinerators, there’s a five-mile circumference within which you can suffer the effects.’ Smoke. Hanging clouds that never migrate. In the early days, Pedder contacted her MP, Tim Eggar. He phoned her back. ‘This is business,’ he said. ‘There’s big money involved.’ When Pedder pressed her case, Eggar replied: ‘Are you entirely stupid? Profit before people, that’s how the world works.’
Memory is trashed. ‘I was told by an ex-worker, at the time when the site was decommissioned, that MOD turned up and took away vast amounts of files. It looked like they had been ransacked, records and details scattered about the floor. They came and flooded the place. We understand the records were taken to Aylesbury. Without the MOD records we will never know. There could be anything. A lot of the substances are mobile in water. A lot of them are carcinogenic. Crown Immunity means the site was never inspected by a local authority. They weren’t covered by the rules for disposing of substances. The MOD’s accepted and published policy, they’ve admitted to it, was bash, burn, destroy.’
In the Government Road terrace, between Lee Navigation and the Small Arms canal, people have suffered the effects. Bad water. High levels of phenols. ‘Some of the residents had blistered mouths and hands, terrible headaches. They were suffering nausea, dizziness, general weakness and lethargy. The children were very ill. Those that had drunk bottled water recovered.’ Fairview Homes denied all responsibility.
Pedder got the phone calls. ‘Can you come down? We can’t breathe.’ She remembers walking along Government Road. ‘It was hitting you in the face and it was hurting. You couldn’t see. It was like grit. That was the asbestos.’ Fairview had knocked down Building 22. ‘A cloud floated towards the area of Government Road. I could see the smoke. I live probably quarter of a mile away and I could see the plume of black smoke rising up and forming this massive cloud.’
We went back inside. There were other, off-the-record stories. Connections were exposed. Things suspected but unproven. Names. Pedder was very emotional. She had a heavy investment in this story. She lived here. We would stroll back to the car park, move on.
Now our goal is in sight, beyond Rammey Marsh, traffic floating above water. Site clearance (leisure, commerce, heritage) pushes the horizon back. ‘A new country park is to be developed on the site of the former Royal Ordnance works,’ announces the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority’s Strategic Business Plan. ‘The site is immediately to the south of the M25, adjacent to major housing developments and strategically ideal for the Authority to pursue its remit to safeguard and expand the “Green Wedge” into London.’
This sounds like an uncomfortable procedure. Not just ‘soil amelioration’ and ‘imaginative and sensitive landscape design’ but the effort of will to rebrand a balding and sullen inter-zone, the motorway’s sandtrap, as a wildlife habitat, ‘a vibrant waterside park’. For years, Waltham Abbey has functioned like a putting course, a splash of shaved meadow surrounded by bunkers. It was a course that had to be played with a blindfold firmly in place. Much of the territory was unlisted. ‘Government Research Establishment’ to the east of the Navigation, ‘Sewage Works (Sludge Disposal)’ to the west.
In this red desert, sound moves from margin to margin: caterpillar-wheeled vehicles, mud gobblers, chainsaws, pneumatic drills. The delirious swooshing of the M25.
The bridge support, the thin line that carries all this traffic, is pale blue. The space beneath the bridge expands into a concrete cathedral, doors thrown open to light and landscape. Water transport gives way to road; the old loading bays are empty, a few pleasure boats and converted narrow boats are tied up against the east bank. Reflected light shivers on pale walls. Overhead, there is the constant thupp-thupp-thupp of the motorway. After heavy rain, the ground is puddled and boggy. Travellers haven’t settled here. The evidence is all of migration: extinguished fires, industrial-strength lager cans, aerosol messages.
Bill Drummond leads the rush up the embankment. The M25, after miles of walking the ditch, is a symbol of freedom. The Amazon. A slithery, ice-silver road in the sky. I have a moment of panic. Drummond’s bulging knapsack is still unexplained, no spare sweaters, no rain kit, no cameras. Is it possible? Could he? This obsession with the Unabomber. Are we going to find ourselves on the Six O’Clock News: TERRORIST OUTRAGE ON MOTORWAY? Bill spends time in a tower in Northern Ireland. Red Hand of Ulster? Scots Prod? A fanatic certainly. Capable of anything.
After a sharp climb, a fence hop, slipping on gravel and thin wet grass, Drummond reaches the roadside. He vaults the low barrier and performs a Calvinist version of the papal kiss. He puts his lips to tarmac, tastes the vibration of the orbiting traffic. Destination not detonation. I’m relieved and disappointed.
Sitting on the crash barrier, feet dangling on the sand-coloured hard shoulder, we are buffeted by backdraught: the road is a blur. Clockwise: Waltham Abbey and the forest. Anticlockwise: Paradise. A chocolate-brown notice: PARADISE WILDLIFE PARK. A Lascaux sketch of stag’s horns, an arrow. A shamanic invitation to the country of parks and gardens and paradises. Lee Valley Park.
Cars are streaming into the sunset, brake-lights bloody. Drummond wants to walk straight off down the road, west. A truck swerves and honks. I have to grab him, persuade him that I don’t intend to stay, dodging lorries in the half-dark, on the metal skin of the M25. That would be blasphemous. I’m going to stick to the countryside, as near as I can to the loop, straining to catch the hymn of traffic, hot diesel winds.
We’ll finish the day at the abbey, the grave of King Harold, but first we look back towards London. Sunshafts over a jagged horizon, towers and chimneys, unregistered ground. The mix as it always is: off-highway Americana, secret estates (Royal Gunpowder Mills, Small Arms Factory) rebranding themselves. British Aerospace. Waltham Point (‘New 48 Acre Industrial Park’) developed by the Kier Group and Norwich Union. Earthworks. Noise. Feeder roads that glow in the dark.
Beyond Waltham Abbey, proper countryside kicks in: the foot-and-mouth ribbons begin. The amphetamine buzz of the motorway changes everything: warehouses instead of shops, dormitory estates instead of hospitals. A road is a road is a road. When the M25 went underground, near Amesbury Bank on the northern edge of Epping Forest, they laid out a cricket pitch on the roof of the tunnel.
The road at night is a joy. You want to imagine it from space, a jewelled belt. As a thing of spirit, it works. As a vision, it inspires. There is only one flaw, you can’t use it. Shift from observer to client and the conceit falls apart. Follow the signs for LONDON ORBITAL in your car and consciousness takes a dive. The M25 has been conceived as an endurance test, a reason for staying at home. Aversion therapy. Attempt the full circuit and you’ll never drive again.