Despite the trend for labelling certain areas as ‘outstanding’, notions of what constitutes a beautiful landscape are prone to quiet shifts of fashion. Take a recent example, that of the Fens. Before the 1980s, there were not a great many people who would have regarded the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire as attractive places to visit, still less as a walking destination. The level lines of the horizon, the perspective of the straight rivers and ditches, added to the black soil and the wide, often grey skies, were considered to induce a mild form of depression. Many strange stories, about the region and its people, were in circulation.
Daniel Defoe took against the area in his eighteenth century tour: ‘but for the Healthyness or Pleasantness of it, I have no more to say than this, that I was very glad to get out of it, and out of the rest of the Fen country; for ’tis a horrid air for a stranger to breathe in.’ This was a landscape of strange folk tales, of Jack o’ lanterns and Will o’ the wisps. It had a sense of the unheimlich about it, something just beyond the edge of comfort. Could it really have taken just one novel to have swept away those views? Oddly enough, I think I can make the case that Graham Swift’s bestselling, critically acclaimed novel Waterland, published in 1983, did more to rescue the region and turn it into a honeypot for visitors and walkers than any amount of local tourist board advertising could have done. Richly layered with history, Waterland was the story of the Fens past and present. Even now it makes me think of fishing for eels at midnight.
Something similar is now happening to the hitherto deeply unloved sumplands of the Thames Estuary. What once was a place synonymous with both ugliness and illness is now being looked at in a subtly different way by many curious walkers. Flatlands punctuated with pylons, oil holders, even the occasional crisp, dirty orange, burnt out shell of a car in the mud of the river foreshore. A few years ago, most would have turned away from all these with a shudder. Now, such things intrigue and hold the eye. Before we explore why this should be, it is worth returning briefly to the eighteenth century, when the aesthetics of natural landscape were being formed.
In the late-eighteenth century, as the men of the Ordnance Survey were transporting great optical measuring instruments of bronze around the country, there were other inventions used by gentlemen of leisure through which to peruse nature’s works. Some, such as the camera obscura – the projection on to a flat white screen or canvas of an outdoor scene, by means of mirrors – are still with us in spirit. The obscura was a means of observing the immediate surroundings not only in comfort but also an unusual amount of detail from an interior vantage point and allowing a bird’s eye view – the philosophical forerunner of the BBC’s Springwatch. There was also a device invented by the painter James de Loutherbourg, called the Eidophusikon. This created a sort of panorama which featured, according to Brownlow, ‘moving pictures … shown within a proscenium, by means of a combination of Argand lamps, coloured gauzes, lacquered glass and receding planes which reproduced scenes with realistic atmospheric effects.’ The notion was to summon, with a sort of primitive three-dimensional effect, images of ideal landscapes.
The most intriguing of all these instruments was one that gentlemen and ladies would take with them on their excursions: the Claude Glass, named after the seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorraine. This was a small tinted convex mirror, with a black backing, which imbued the landscape with ideal qualities – golden-hued – of a Claude painting. The peripatetic Reverend Gilpin noted its uses while travelling in a coach:
They are like the visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms, and colours in brightest array, fleet before us; and if the transient glance of a good composition happen to unite with them, we should give any price to fix and appropriate the scene.1
The poet Thomas Gray used a similar instrument and, after his tour of the Lakes in 1769 with the contraption, is quoted about one rather dicey incident, by Brownlow: ‘I fell down on my back across a dirty lane with my glass open in one hand, but broke only my knuckles; stay’d never the less, and saw the sun set in all its glory.’ It now seems rather extraordinary that men of fine taste should feel the need to view landscapes through a certain trick mirror, with coloured glass, rather than simply enjoying the unadorned view. Yet in that age of Capability Brown, Humphry Repton, and the Landscape Movement, certain notions concerning perspective and symmetry were obviously lingering. Even a prospect like that of the Lake District was considered to look better if viewed through a man-made device.
There were always going to be some areas, though, that would be beyond even these phantasmagorias, where picturesque notions of ruins and decay would be dispelled sharply by a utilitarian bleakness. So we turn to the case of the Thames Estuary – a deeply uncherished, depressed landscape praised by very few. Two hundred years ago, London’s docks gradually gave way in the east to a vista of grey spongy marshes and slopping inlets. On the south side of the river, the Isles of Grain and Sheppey acquired reputations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for miasma and disease.
Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, famously declares that ‘this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’; and indeed Conrad himself lived in that dark place, in the Essex village of Stanford-le-Hope, for a while. Today, on the north side of the estuary, the formerly drab Rainham Marsh – landfill site, shooting ranges, fat seagulls, bored teenagers, sullen pylons – has been appropriated by the RSPB (complete with a trendy timber-built twitching block). The birdwatchers have noticed that the area actually contains a breathtaking amount of biodiversity not only in terms of birds, but also insects and much-loved rarities like the water-vole. Neighbouring Purfleet is getting some sort of Royal Opera House spin-off effort; even the town of Grays, dominated by the nearby oil depot, and by the inescapable Queen Elizabeth II Dartford Bridge, now has a certain culty cachet thanks to its most famous son, the comedian Russell Brand.
On the Kent side, by comparison, the Isles of Grain and Sheppey maintain their reputations for a slightly eerie remoteness and quietness. Grain, and the area around Cliffe, generally known as the Hoo peninsula, is especially fascinating, for it inspired one of the most famous landscapes in English fiction: that of young Pip Pirrip in Great Expectations.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea … this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard … the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding upon it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea.
As I get off the train at Higham, and turn right to find myself, after just 200 yards or so, in very gentle, flat grey countryside, in the murk of a late December day, it seems to me that there can be little dispute that the real location of Pip’s shivering nightmare was the village of Cooling, some four miles off. Other candidates have been put forward, but most agree that this still weirdly cut off spot, complete not only with old church and churchyard but also the ruined remnants of a castle, is the most likely.
My aim is to see it on exactly the same sort of day that Pip was describing in that opening chapter – a low winter’s afternoon in the old churchyard, by the five little children’s graves that inspired Dickens directly. Later, Pip relates that despite a sign pointing towards his village, no one ever seemed to follow that pointing wooden finger. This would also seem to be the case today.
Incidentally, before heading to that church, a very swift local diversion will take you faster to a river’s edge with a unique and perhaps not altogether comfortable atmosphere. If you bear left towards a village called Church Street, the road will pass unexpected orchards, and you will find yourself crossing a single railway line, which still carries freight and coal, back and forth from a vast, pale industrial operation somewhere in the distance. Beyond this line is the marsh country; there are ditches and embankments and black rivulets, and cocoa brown muddy paths running through narrow aisles of prickly hawthorns. There is a nice parallel, on a winter’s afternoon, between Pip’s later, almost hallucinatory, glimpses of big sailing ships apparently moving across the land, and the sight that greets me now of a huge oil tanker, seemingly gliding across the grass nearby. A few yards on, and you can see that there is a stubby green embankment and dyke to be climbed; and that when you do so, you are very suddenly looking at the wide and silent Thames, northwards across to the Essex shoreline. The vessels that move through these waters do so incredibly quietly; the main noise you hear is that of skinny marsh birds, wheeling and crying. In the middle-distance is a prospect that seems to mirror the ominous black prison hulks of Pip’s day: the dark rectangular bulk of Tilbury Power Station on the north shore. At night, this power station glows from within, a benign vanilla light is reflected on the rushing tidal water. In the day, it is here as a reminder that this is still a working river.
Back on the road from Higham, eastwards to Pip’s churchyard at Cooling (Dickens quite frequently alighted at Higham station) you are drawn into another genre of landscape, of gentle hills and rows of shivering poplars and rich ploughed soil and flat fields glowing emerald with winter greens. There are green signposts everywhere signalling very properly laid out footpaths, complete with their own serial numbers. Equally though, as you reach the top of this gentle incline, near the villages of Cliffe and Cooling, you once more enter a world that seems a little less relaxed. There are remarkable numbers of signs on the edges of fields warning that there is ‘no right of access’ to them. On this shivery day, with the echoing pops of distant gunshots carried on the gelid breeze, this is a tiny area that seems very keen on keeping itself to itself. On the road from Cliffe to Cooling – looking out over a vast expanse of frosted cabbages and kale – you also catch glimpses of oil refinery chimneys, of the squat white cylinders of oil holders, so reminiscent of 1950s Quatermass sci-fi thrillers. These lie across the river; once more we see Pip’s optical illusion, not merely of big buildings, but of vast oil tankers moving in a stately fashion apparently through marshy rivulets.
As I reach the all important church – St James’, Cooling – the sky is bright though the wind is as raw as that conjured by Dickens. Here are the five little lozenge shaped horizontal gravestones alluded to in that first chapter; here are the trees that bowed and creaked under the wind and so frightened our young hero; and there in the distance, are the marshes. All-Hallows! Is there anywhere else in England with such a delightfully Gothic name? Here is the great tombstone that one can very easily imagine Magwitch hiding behind, and dangling Pip upside down from. Yet there is one thing Dickens has failed to mention – and that is just how pretty the church is. Perhaps such structures back then seemed more commonplace, and therefore utilitarian as opposed to aesthetically pleasing. Unusually for a country church these days, it is kept open most of the time, even though it is a very long while since any proper services were held in here. Inside there is a rich silence, though one might also imagine it in the darkness of a stormy day, as one perhaps takes shelter, and watches the reds in the stained glass window at the back glowing a dull blood ruby.
Just 100 years ago, this area had an evil reputation that would have kept a great many away, and that was for disease. The five little graves in that churchyard were for the Comport children, each killed by ‘marsh fever’ or ‘the ague’ or, as is now thought, by malaria carried by mosquitoes. The estuary was one of the busiest waterways in the world, carrying vessels from all parts of the globe; the mosquitoes, it seems, came with them.
The last recorded case of malaria on Grain was as late as 1918, thought to have been brought to the area by soldiers returning from Greece. An eighteenth-century historian wrote of marsh-dwelling people, that ‘it is not unusual to see a poor man, his wife, and whole family of five or six children hovering over their fire in their hovel, shaking with an ague all at the same time.’2 In Great Expectations, one of the escapee convicts is found by Pip hiding in the marshes, and is similarly shivering with fever. The irony is that the man might well be better off aboard the prison hulk than out here in this wilderness of disease.
Such stuff is catnip to the modern walker. Much in the way that we see the eighteenth-century Romantic imagination being sparked by views of ‘ruins’ and ‘wastes’ – decaying roofless monasteries, derelict woodland chapels – so the modern post-industrial imagination is drawn to a place which seems to be in some ways an eddy of time – a weirdly silent place that, despite being surrounded with the tokens of old messy industry, seems somehow to have sidestepped that age, and remains haunted with memories of miasma and mists. The attractions of melancholy can never be overstated. Often the walker is not simply looking for the uplift of bright wild flowers, or the simple pleasures of hilltop views: they are looking for something a little more complex to ponder. A dreary landscape cannot depress the spirits of the curious; nor can its baleful qualities follow the walker back home.
A little further east, towards the mighty power station at Kingsnorth and the big dock of Thamesport, there is an unloved stretch of former industrial land where an oil refinery once stood; the soil is still infused with all sorts of toxic chemicals. It is very strictly fenced off and no one has had access to it since about 1985. Ironically, this one discrete area – devoid of human-kind – now teems with wildlife that can be found almost nowhere else. Conservationists are calling it a ‘miniature lost world’. Inhabitants include the white eye-stripe hover-fly, the brown-banded carder bee, and Mellet’s downy-back beetle. Here the rambler is not up against angry farmers, but against implacable security guards watching monitor screens, police surveillance and blank-faced corporations. This, for some ramblers, makes the lure of the area stronger. Have they not the straightforward liberty to explore this little known shoreline? There is also the enthusiasm of pressure groups like BugLife, which seek to catalogue and protect rare species of insect and the interest that their work generates attracts yet more walkers.
The poetry of bleakness is obviously not new. When I first read Great Expectations, as a teenager, and on every subsequent reading, the impressions I gained of this landscape were as follows: icy, windy, flat, colourless, remote, not pretty, watery, marshy, rather hostile, inimical to any sort of comfort. Of course Dickens was only using this area as the launching point for his imagination, and we also have to bear in mind that the novel was set many decades before 1860, when it was written. Still, the landscape we have now is one of a very singular beauty and it is no wonder the locals of Cliffe, Cooling, and Hadstow so vociferously oppose another London airport being sited here. The local community has understandably reached for the great untouchable defence of the modern age: biodiversity. Before coming here, I had assumed that there were simply too few people living in the area to care one way or another. Now I see, as a walker, that the people who do live around here guard it with a kind of intense jealousy.
There is something about estuaries, wrote Joseph Conrad in 1906, ‘that appeal[s] strongly to an adventurous imagination.’ And even in his day, there was not much that was pleasing to the eye on this incredibly busy stretch of river, though ‘the dispiriting ugliness’ was only ‘a repulsive mask’:
The estuary of the Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open, spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange air of mysteriousness that hangs about it to this very day … here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the foreshore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles.3
Fear is not a commonplace emotion among recreational walkers, yet there are some places that hold a distinctly odd atmosphere. Among them is the riverside stonework of Cliffe Fort, looking out over the estuary. Originally built in 1860 as a defensive position on the river, and added to in the 1940s for the Second World War, this vast, abandoned, ruined structure is somehow supremely unwelcoming – especially to the solitary walker on a dim winter’s afternoon. Inside, the old fort still has vaulted corridors, heavy stone cellars and courtyards that crackle with glass; outside, its glass-less, darkened windows face out on to the grey water like old blind eyes.
Incidentally, you feel a similar sense of abandonment on the north bank of the Thames too, on the Essex river path that winds from Purfleet to Grays, underneath the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge and past an oil depot. This path – on the immediate face of it – is extremely displeasing; a blend of concrete embankments, rusted barbed wire, rotting jetties and, a few yards inland, huge mysterious metal structures, industrial cathedrals with dizzyingly tall chimneys and mazes of pipelines. But that is exactly the element that gives this landscape a new, intriguing aesthetic dimension. As with all those eighteenth-century writers and poets, the walker is faced with the sublime, and all the ‘terror’ that it conjures up. Instead of dark unconquerable mountains, the sublime in this landscape is formed of nameless industry, some of it now closed down, decaying: clanging metal, rust and silos. This territory is alien to most walkers, and many respond to it with a form of pleasurable unease. We imagine blight, and noise, and the strange tang of pervasive chemical smells. Even as these vast structures continue their obscure functions in silence, their overbearing presence still utterly dominates the riverscape. Here, on this dingy concrete path, there is a very faint echo of that old Noel Coward line: ‘Ghosts beside our starlit Thames, who lived and loved and died’. There is another key element of the sublime on this Thames path: sheer, unadulterated awe. It comes from the most unlikely source. Seen from a great distance, there is something delicate and almost fragile about the Queen Elizabeth Bridge as it arcs high above the water. Walk along this riverside path and at one point you find yourself standing directly beneath it. Look up and you will find yourself almost falling over; the vertigo is so powerful as to make you recoil. Far above your head – some 150 feet or so? – is the dark concrete underside of this mighty construction. You have nothing to fall from, and your feet are firm. Yet look upwards again, your head right back, and you might well find your insides gripped with something akin to panic. It is fantastically irrational, and fascinating. More than this, it is curiously satisfying.
This is also a path which accommodates teenagers accompanied by a thick fug of cannabis smoke: one of the more disagreeable and unnerving sights for the average walker. Yet even the awkwardness of this moment – middle-aged rambler passes sardonic hoodies, all parties watchful – can be part of the satisfaction of the day. It brings into focus the blank pale oil containers, squat and fat and silent; the colourful (and at times extraordinarily poetic) graffiti on that pockmarked concrete. It sharpens the beige smoky light reflected on the Thames, and heightens the delicate slurping noise of the river against the artificial banks. That odd tinge of sepia in the air is reminiscent both of old photographs, and of the idea of the Claude Glass.
Back on the estuary’s south side, on the Hoo peninsula, the river is said to have shifted a little since young Pip’s day; Cooling is now some two miles away from the water’s edge, whereas the water apparently used to lap rather closer. A curious element for walkers of a certain age is nostalgia; anyone visiting here forty years ago would have been less impressed with estuarine industry, and would have regarded it as noisy and polluting. But now, in our era of global banking, out-of-town retail centres, and identical offices, such industry now looks rather heroic and bold. In terms of current industry, look at the giant white globe that dominates a certain stretch of the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh. In the 1970s and 1980s this was, to many, a symbol of genuine horror, for it is the site of the Sizewell B nuclear power station. But time and familiarity do their own work and now there are equally as many people in the area, as well as visitors, who regard that same unearthly white globe as a thing of aesthetic pleasure.
One other – arguably outmoded – industrial feature of the British landscape that causes regular controversy among walkers and local residents alike is electricity pylons. There are parts of the Hoo peninsula where these dominate to an unusual degree; tall and angular, marching from several directions towards the power station. This is another leitmotif of the modern estuary; pylons everywhere, including some giants on the Essex side. Pylons were introduced to Britain in 1928; as you would expect, they received a chilly reception, despite being designed with the utmost care by the Central Electricity Board, and one Sir Reginald Blomfield. He had seen images of the pioneering square pylons of America, and he knew that such a shape would be altogether too alien and jarring here. So he set about designing that distinctive ‘pyramid’ or even ‘Christmas tree’ shape. It wasn’t enough. Among the protesting letter writers to The Times were Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Belloc and John Maynard Keynes. According to the Central Electricity Board, these signatories were ‘impractical aesthetes’. Their opposition was roundly ignored. And the CEB prevailed.
From around that period we also have a poem from Stephen Spender, simply entitled ‘The Pylons’: ‘Now over these small hills they have built/The concrete/That trails black wire;/Pylons, those pillars/Bare, like nude, giant girls that have no secret.’ Even as late as the 1950s, when lines of pylons were introduced to the wilder corners of Scotland, there were aesthetic objections and cries of horror from local conservationists and walking groups, claiming that the pylons would turn prospective visitors away. There is an incredibly evocative Giles cartoon from a 1950s edition of the Daily Express: it depicts a country view, in full, dark, rainy black ink. Under the grey skies and these torrents of rain, the landscape before us, all sodden fields and meadows, is jostling with the bare outlines of dozens of pylons; a line of them stretches grimly off over the horizon, like invading H. G. Wells aliens. To a conservative like Giles, such things represented a barbaric despoliation of the countryside – a Stalinist invasion of brutal industry. But in the case of the remoter Scottish Highlands, pylons were introducing electricity for the very first time.
In some quarters the passionate opposition to pylons continues, mainly in the face of a proposed new generation of super-pylons; twice the size of their antecedents, poised to sling their lines across the country and to loom over the flint-grey waves of the English Channel. Bill Bryson has been campaigning energetically against a new generation of such structures being erected in Wales. But there are some walkers who regard them almost as modern sculpture, and who carefully catalogue all the different types to be found around the countryside. As with most of these things, such enthusiasts can be found with tremendous ease on the Internet. In a small way, pylons stand as a metonym for the wider truth: that yesterday’s industrial outrage becomes today’s cherished landmark.