There was a certain amount of discussion about dates: is it really the end of the century, the Millennium? Will the computers go haywire, bringing planes out of the sky? Or are we in for another misjudged English party with damp squibs?
The burghers of Waltham Abbey are very good at getting their hangovers in early, before they start on the serious celebrations. The damp town is bilious, yellow-tongued. (Looking forward to the drama of the spring floods.) Anna agreed to run us up the Lea Valley, to drop us, once again, at Harold’s grave.
30 December 1999. Renchi is back at work. Kevin has vanished – taken up residence in the Welsh Harp? Our orbital walk might never have happened. Marc Atkins is prepared to reverse that first excursion, out from the Dome. To mend the mistake, his damaged foot. He’s dressed for action: woollen commando beanie, tartan scarf, slithery non-combatant jacket. Camera. Film in pocket. No bags. Nothing to carry. A trick Kevin never learnt.
This time, we collect Marc from Limehouse. I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings or delays. He is signing on as official war photographer: to witness the final and absolute dissolution of the Millennium Dome.
Unconvinced drizzle. It’s still dark. Sky-leakage. No notes to be kept. My photo journal is a reflex indulgence, now that Marc is present. The cold eye of the landscape valuer.
We climb the embankment to the M25. We check out the spot where Bill Drummond kissed tarmac. It’s quite emotional, this parting from an old friend. Not much road traffic, nothing on the river. The sound, back in the abbey, was so precise, in the cold early-morning air; reinforcing the status of the church as an island within an island. By the time we reach the Lee, that clarity is lost. A solitary blue hut. Marc fumbles in the dark, changing his film. Then, just as he clicks the back of the camera shut, lights come on. Harsh, white. The lock is wired. The hut lit like a target.
Neck twisted, left eye closed, Marc squats beside the road, resting his Nikon on the crash barrier. With these photographs, the status of the M25 changes: it becomes historic, monumental. Fixed. Previously, in snapshots and sketches, it was family. No obligation to perform. Belt and braces, knotted handkerchief on head. ‘Hold that’ was neither spoken, nor implied. Marc’s concentration, his technique, brings the motorway into the canon, sets it alongside roads in other countries. That’s the difference between a packet of colour snaps and a commissioned portrait. You gain dignity, lose accident.
Already, we can see the blinking pyramid at the summit of the Canary Wharf tower, lined up with pylons and the black rule of water. RIFLES pub at Enfield Lock wishes: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL. Santa’s head like a trophy, above the Lee Enfield on the awning. Bagged one.
Too wet to dawdle. We push on towards Ponders End. A rose-red wall bellies out in a way that appeals to Marc. It’s topped with broken glass and razor wire. To protect a Flour Mill?
Ponders End, I like to think, is the model for Gerald Kersh’s Fowlers End. The 1958 novel by the prolific Kersh has always been Michael Moorcock’s favourite: ‘Everything in it is designed to reach the smallest possible audience – unpopular subject – sleazy characters – very funny.’ Moorcock wrote a foreword when the book was reissued. Fowlers End is the antidote to the whimsy of Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles, the charming stock company of British character actors in The Smallest Show on Earth. Which was released, to indulgent reviews and modest box-office success, in the year that Kersh’s ‘unpopular’ novel was published. Film and book exploit the same theme: the death of an independent cinema. One is sentimental, quirky and comic, while the other is deranged. Kersh is a master of haywire demotic, prose on the charge. At his best, as in Fowlers End, he achieves that impossible thing: he comes out as a Jewish Céline.
This is how you find Fowlers End – by going northward, step by step, into the neighbourhoods that most strongly repel you. The compass of your revulsion may flicker for a moment at the end of the Tottenham Court Road, especially on a rainy March morning…
Do not be led astray by this; go north to Edmonton and Ponders End. Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time. Further yet, bearing northeast, lies a graveyard of broken boilers and rusty wheels… where creatures that once were men live in abandoned railway carriages…
Here the city gives up the game.
This is it.
Fowlers End is a special kind of tundra that supports nothing gracious in the way of flora and fauna… Even the dogs are throw-backs to their yellow-eyed predatory ancestors that slunk in the trail of sub-men and ate filth. There is a High Street about a hundred yards long, and the most woebegone railway terminal on the face of the earth…
Flattering but true, Kersh’s travelogue needs no revision. Ponders End is a knot in the railway, roadkill returned to life. There’s a pub called the Falcon, with a yellow field gun parked outside; presumably ‘borrowed’ from the Small Arms Factory at Enfield. The gun strikes a sinister note, as it fails to protect a trashed telephone kiosk and a crop of tower blocks, SORRY NO TRAVELLERS. Reasonable advice. But sticking a howitzer on the pavement is excessive.
Rain seeps and slithers. The PONDERS END WORKING MENS CLUB, for all its pebbledash pretensions, can’t have many bona fide members. Who works? Five or six bright windows in a plantation of tower blocks. Recidivists used to perpetual illumination, overhead lights that can’t be switched off. Twenty-four-hour dealers. Insomniacs rummaging through medicine cabinets.
SALON SNIPPETS PAITIENT MODELS REQUIRED FOR FOILS/CUTTING + NAIL EXTENSIONS. Marc of course has experience in hairdressing. He shaves his own skull, cuts the hair of his partner (and anyone else who is up for it). But the deployment of ‘foils’ is a sophistication he hasn’t acquired. Colour pads pressed to the head in a curious rite.
Ponders End is bereft of the ‘paitient’, models or otherwise. The place is deserted. A Dalmatian picking through a heap of burst bin bags; wolf-red eyes. Noise is a constant: speeding trains, fork-lift trucks which bleep as they reverse, generators, sirens. An industrial soundtrack and no industry.
A trembling refugee, sheltering under the railway bridge, won’t admit that the town runs to a cafe. He shakes his head, astonished at the idea. A security man from the Flour Mill thinks that there might be somewhere ‘foreign’, ten minutes down the road.
He’s right. It is foreign. And schizophrenic. CLOSED CAFE OPEN. The fry-up is excellent (‘bubble and bacon’), the tables clean. It must be a front for something. We are the only customers. Marc loves Ponders End. ‘I only photograph empty railway lines, empty streets,’ he says. ‘People – I find a way to keep them out.’
Settled at his Formica desk, he taps messages into his new mobile phone; receives his first calls. He’s been given a £20,000 commission to photograph mathematicians. The show at the National Institute for Medical Research is clinched.
The harder the rain comes down, the faster we stride. We’re erasing everything we investigated on the original walk. The smoke from the burning stack at the London Waste facility in Edmonton is indistinguishable from river mist, spray from the elevated carriageway. The sky has dropped.
Under the canal bridge, where something aspirational has been attempted with cobbles, we find a pair of abandoned ankleboots. Marc rearranges them, darting about to find the best angle; as if, by the ritual of photography, he could conjure up the presence of the woman who kicked them off. Before vanishing for ever.
The blighted townscape, where North Circular passes over Lee, is unrevised. Carrier bags trapped in thorny thickets. Rubbish infiltrating chainlink fences. Yellow and black barriers. Humps in the road. A retail park. Flooded fields. Marc, on the central reservation, surfs wheel-spray, as he records volatile waves of traffic.
London rushes at us, tightens the cord. Kersh depicts a city swollen with bad gas, a straining belly eager to disgorge itself on unprotected ground: ‘Expanding city population, plus your expanding heavy industry, plus, of course, rising land values in your outlying suburbs. Well, that’s what I’m out here for.’ Predatory industrialists, compliant politicians. They live to work the margins, unloved land. As do writers and photographers, the thrill of the spurned. New narratives of dereliction.
The grey concrete walls of the sewage beds at Markfield Recreation Ground, South Tottenham, have been blitzed with aerosol colour, image and text. Robots. Androids. Beast-men with zap weaponry. Spike-breasted women in (blood splashed) bikini briefs. Tags. Spurts. Slogans. SHIT VEGAN. A communal album. Any artist is free to revise, improve, distort. Urban pictographs we don’t have time to decode.
The Lee is manufacturing War of the Worlds fungus; it’s kraken-clogged, choked with green scum. A woman is chucking sliced bread from the window of her new flat, straight into the water. Gulls and ducks squabble. Rats dart from canalside undergrowth to carry off spilt crumbs.
The camp under the Eastway bridge has been abandoned, the council have got the travellers out. Wick Wood: another war zone. Padded car seats. Precarious stacks of tyres. Sections of carpet. Washing machines. Gutted cars. Caravans. Bundles of sodden newspapers: POLITICA.
WHERE ARE YOU? A cancelled map. Filth flung from speeding vehicles spreads over the embankment. Marc poses at the roadside in his once-white shoes.
We’re on home turf, Hackney to Thames. No surprises. I can’t believe how quickly we’ve come back. Everything is in suspension, post-Christmas, pre-Millennium. A red-on-red poster, Soviet pastiche, promotes George Michael: SONGS FROM THE LAST CENTURY. The canal is silted, lifeless. Without colour. A sepia negation, it defies the idea of colour, the folk memory.
The Lee Valley Media Zone has abdicated, retired to its second home. The picket fence around the Big Breakfast cottage is black with names, the fishing pixie leers like a child molester. A poster for Peter Greenaway’s 81/2 Women is peeling from one of the piers of the Bow Flyover. The wine bar in the Three Mills complex is shut.
Rain rattles on the roof of a blue and black tent. What we have, on this muddy canalside paddock, is a replica of the Dome. A circus tent in which acrobats have been rehearsing for the Big Night. NEW YORK!! NEW YORK!! screams red-bulb lettering. We can investigate the virtual Dome for nothing. They’ve been flooded out, they’ve gone. Condensation dripping from sodden canvas. The desertion of the circus animals. Rehearsals are over. This tent can be broken, shifted. The misery is finite. Nobody is watching, nobody cares. Nobody will hold them to account.
It’s one o’clock and we’ve made it to the Isle of Dogs. Marc’s limping; he’s not too bad, a slight thigh strain. Liquid City. We slither, steaming, into the pub: an old favourite, the Gun in Blackwall Way. Traditional riverside hospitality always on offer: no hot food, stale crisps, nobody at the bar, locked balcony. A place so fiction-friendly that I can never remember what happened the last time I dropped in and what happened in my novel Downriver.
Such light as this day ever pretended to has abdicated. We carry our drinks to a table. We look out, directly, on the other Dome, the money pit to which all the celebrities in town have been invited. A royal knees-up due to kick off in twenty-four hours. The Gun’s spiked, a couple of pickled regulars sniffling into their half-pints, tomorrow it will be heaving. Anything with a view of the river has been booked solid. We’ll start the party now. Order the Jamesons, the beers. Drink to the Dome’s damnation.
When we arrived at the spot where they’d filmed the EastEnders wedding, near the Ibis Hotel, the Dome was an alien form; a spoiler. It ruined the low level riverscape, the dingy mystique of Bugsby’s Marshes. It looked like a collapsed birthday cake from the now-disappeared bakers on Kingsland Road, a special order. Yellow candles in a mound of icing sugar. It sagged. It should never have been left out in the rain. Miss Havisham, back from the Kentish marshes, in all her decayed and inappropriate finery.
Two hours later, our table, dressed with a red Christmas cloth, was filled with glasses. Six of them in front of Marc – and one in his hand. The Nikon is also on the table, along with a box of matches and the mobile phone.
We’ve dried off, warmed up. I trot through to the bar for another round, ask for doubles. This is it. The moment has finally arrived. At the cusp of a new millennium, I’ll do it: make my first cellphone call. Dome-watch is turning into a session. It feels historic. I want to invite Anna to join us (I don’t fancy walking home along the Grand Union in the rain).
The professional drinkers are staying with the big screen, the river looks better when it’s electronically processed. We’re all pals by this time. We get fresh glasses with every round. I study framed river maps while I wait; remember old trips, with Paul Burwell and Brian Catling, to Tilbury, Sheppey, Southend.
When Anna, in coat, sits down ‘for a moment’ and is still in the chair an hour later, we realise that time is draining faster than we can record it. The vortex is about to reverse, spin counterclockwise down the plughole. The bride feast on the far bank, fairy lights, beams from helicopters, will turn into a wake.
My binoculars pass hand-to-hand. ‘You taking pictures for the papers? We’ve had ’em coming in all week,’ says an old soak, wobbling towards the Gents. Marc grips a cigar between his teeth, as he designs his shot. When he has licked the last granule of dust from his crisp packet, the Limehouse photographer flattens the eviscerated envelope. He smoothes the lining with the back of his hand, alchemises the tablecloth, red to silver.
Security personnel are rehearsing the arrival of the nobs, the royals. Bulbs wink on tent poles, for the benefit of flights into the City Airport at Silvertown. A final run-through for the Millennium show, the loud hurrah. Jeeps, red carpet. Stand-ins for Blair and Mandelson (the former ‘single shareholder’), Lord Falconer. The deputed Blair clone hasn’t got the walk right. ‘A man whose shoes are too small.’ (As poet Geoffrey Hill has it.) A yea-saying preacher, arms thrown wide, who pays other people to steer him away from the shit.
This is better than tomorrow. A grandstand view for the price of a few drinks. No crush. No fighting your way on to the Jubilee Line. No hanging about for hours on Stratford station. No arm-wrestling with sour royalty, during a joyless deconstruction of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
The coloured streamers above the bar are reflected in the window. The Dome is an invader crashed into the swamp on Planet Britain. Wrecked on our floating island, the aircraft carrier that Piety Blair has made us. Cod ritual always favours the Thames: the knighting of Francis Chichester at Greenwich, CIA product-placement dramas filmed (back-to-back with Jane Austen) in the Royal Naval College. Churchill’s funeral barge. The Millennium Wheel (the London Eye) which wasn’t ready on the night. The bridge that wobbled. The promised ‘river of fire’. Ceremonies invented to paper over civic discontent.
One year from now, on Christmas Eve, I would return to the Dome. They’d slashed the entry price to £1. Tourist shops were selling off their souvenir tat at knockdown prices. I filled three Christmas stockings with Dome kitsch for less than £15. It was still raining. At least 101 stuffed Dalmatians were hanging by the neck from deserted sideshow booths. Coke dispensers were empty. A YEAR OF CELEBRATION: THIS MACHINE IS NOT IN SERVICE.
Time spent here shamed the visitor. I’ve never been anywhere so dispiriting. TUNNEL OF LOVE/KISS ME SUCK. Small groups, mainly Indian or Bangladeshi, ignored the barely functioning zones to asset-strip souvenir shops.
CITY OF LONDON PRESENTS: MONEY. Due to the incident which took place on Tuesday 7th November, unfortunately the Millennium Jewels Exhibit will not be open to the public until further notice. On behalf of the Dome and De Beers we apologise for any disappointment caused.
On the glistening path, where we saw the understudies make their entrance on the day before the millennial eve, I ran into the last of the celebrities: Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson. In the form of cardboard cut-outs. Punting a specially commissioned Blackadder ‘special’, large-screen TV to make excursionists feel at home.
Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud was the only object that made any attempt to address the reality of this site: metal filings (that alluded to riverside scrap yards) magicked into a man-shaped cloud. Against a grey sky. This figure, the spirit of place, evolves – as you walk, or drift with the tide. It gives form to inherited melancholy.
The Prayer Space is situated in Harrison Building opposite Millennium Jewels. Nobody is praying. The jewels had to be removed, after a bunch of South London chancers tried to ram the tent with a JCB. An operation sold to the cops from the start. The only high attendance day at the Dome – busybusy crowds mugging like crazy – came when plainclothes police were dressed as tourists and workmen, while they waited for the bandits to make their move.
It would get worse. Government (and the usual quangos) hoped we’d forget about the Dome – until the developers arrived. By November 2001, the deserted and unloved site was haemorrhaging an estimated £240,000 a month. In that year, statisticians reckoned, £21.5 million had gone down the tubes: on a skeleton maintenance staff and all those empty car parks. Even in the Bad News flood around 11 September, nobody could devise an ‘on message’ boost for the Teflon marquee.
Lord Falconer, invisible minder, unenthusiastic scapegoat, kept his own council. Could anything be done? Rumour spoke of the strategy employed on other burnt-out industrial spaces, the conversion of the tent into a club, a rave facility. Send for naughty Dave Courtney. Or perhaps a theme park? An ice rink? A medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, expressed an interest. As did the Meridian Delta consortium. Marc Atkins might well be prepared to stage a major photographic retrospective. Graveyards, reforgotten authors, nudes and obelisks.
The Arthur Daleys of New Labour intended one thing, as had been obvious from the start: a sell-out. Three hundred acres of Greenwich peninsula real estate, cleaned up with lottery funds, brownfield recovery grants and the rest, available for development. New housing. Chafford Hundred comes to town. With multiplex and the eco-friendly Sainsbury’s on its doorstep.
One more drink. A last look through the binoculars. They switch the illuminations on and off. Everything checked. Nothing can go wrong – can it? Will Self, a fan of the M25, said that the mistake with the Dome was that it played safe. It was too modest. It should have spread itself to envelop the whole of London, right out to the motorway. An invisible membrane. A city of zones and freak shows separated from the rest of England. Ford Madox Ford’s old fantasy finally activated.
We couldn’t get drunk, but we were very mellow. Boneless. It took a long time to hft a glass. Anna had driven us through the Blackwall Tunnel at the start of all this and she was there for the last rites. We hadn’t walked around the perimeter of London, we had circumnavigated the Dome. At a safe distance. Away from its poisoned heritage. Its bad will, mendacity. The tent could consider itself exorcised. This was a rare quest for me, one that reached a fitting conclusion. Here at last was the grail. Up-ended on a swamp in East London. Glowing in the dark.