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22/06/2009 09:38LRB Iain Sinclair: Upriver

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H O M E S U B S C R I B E L O G O U T C O N T A C T S S E A R C H

LRB 25 June 2009 Iain Sinclair

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Upriver

Iain SinclairThames: Sacred RiverbyPeter Ackroyd Buy this book

This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall;

a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping

heavily into the street. The wall weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon

deposits and grime is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, copshows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison. The polluted acres of the

Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company were re-created, after war and bomb

damage, as Haggerston Park. The man in the black coat, barely pausing to steady

himself, dives into the spasmodic traffic; motorists unable to believe their luck that

the lights are working and the permanent utility trenches have migrated a couple of

hundred yards to the south. He scuttles away, rucksack on stooped shoulders,

distancing himself from his earlier disguise as wall-walker, acrobat; a workaday

man of the crowd. But even with the rucksack wrong colour, wrong shape the

man stands out: too furtive, too fiercely concentrated, fleeing the scene rather than

jogging or striding like the fortunate denizens of the multi-balconied Adelaide

Wharf, a spanking new canalside development in loudly upbeat colours. He lacks

the compulsory bicycle. The rare flat-dwellers without acrylic helmets, released by

security gates, move at an effortless pace, clicking through the gears, not registering

where they are but where they ought to be, wired for input, noise infusions, lip-

synching interior monologues. The human flys rucksack is stuffed, skew, sleepingbag dangling like a spare arm. He may well have been an early-rising, walk-to-work

rambler, appreciative of the ruled shadow-lines of the trees, the suddenly

voluptuous blossom season; a man like myself, determined to respect his regular

route in denial of the padlocked park gates. Rough sleepers, in these pinched days,

have disappeared. Regiments of Polish builders have returned, according to

rumour, to their native land. Portions of the high wall are mattressed in a tumble of

wisteria, helpful to escapees. But the jumper is no botanist, no philosopher of wild

places. Hes away before the dog accompanists are let into a green oasis that
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operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay

the night.

Low-level flats, from an era of less boastful regeneration, are set back from the road

behind cushions of coarse grass, teardrop flower-beds planted in an attractively

random fashion. The latest blocks, blindly monolithic, devour pavements and

abolish bus stops. They aspire to an occult geometry of capital: Queensbridge

Quarter, Dalston Square. Everything is contained, separate, protected from flow and

drift. No junk mail, please. No doorstep hawkers. No doorsteps. The big idea is to

build in-station car parks, to control pedestrian permeability, so that clients of the

transport system exit directly into a shopping mall. Where possible, a supermarket

operator underwrites the whole development, erecting towers on site, so that

Hackney becomes a suburb of Tesco, with streets, permanently under cosmetic

revision, replaced by 24-hour aisles. Light and weather you can control. Behaviour

is monitored by a discreet surveillance technology.

On the rough lawn in front of the improved Haggerston flats, there is a chart,

behind misted glass, in a wooden cabinet designed for community notices: a

premature map of the Olympic Legacy. I move closer, but the text is still

indecipherable and the spectral blot representing a portion of the Lower Lea Valley,

shrouded in surrounding folds of grey, reminds me of the Hoo Peninsula, a

secretive landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now.I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyds notion that the Thames is a river like the

Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. The river

itself becomes a tremulous deity, he asserts. I carried Ackroyds epic, Thames:

Sacred River, as I made a series of expeditions along the permitted riverpath from

mouth to source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the

more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. When you start

separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!

Having triumphantly ghosted Londons autobiography, Ackroyds obvious follow-up

was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage between the eternal

verities of deep England and the world ocean. Drawing on the example of Hilaire

Bellocs The Historic Thames: A Portrait of Englands Greatest River(1907),

Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror

for national identity. The river is a constant in history and the river is history, of a

persuasion that reminds me of childhood favourites such as Henrietta Marshalls

Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and glossed as A History of England


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for Boys and Girls. With its royal-blue cloth and heraldic shield, its text broken

down into Jamie Oliver-sized portions suitable for juvenile digestion, this book is

remembered for its illustrations by A.S. Forrest, a succession of poignant tableaux

like a village hall pageant. The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes,

murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront

Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the

Metropolitan Polices Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step

ashore. Rough, rude men had been sent all over the country to gather the

iniquitous poll tax and the mood was ugly. Ackroyd mentions the incident, adding

that the waters of Deptford refreshed the rebellious followers of Wat Tyler and, at a

later date, the rebels under Jack Cade. Perkin Warbeck, who features in Marshalls

son et lumire procession, is noticed by Ackroyd in the act of meeting his adherents

by the banks of the Ravensbourne. No other tributary of the Thames, he writes,has such a history of insurrection and bloodshed. One of the distinguishing

features of Ackroyds Thames is recurrence; landscape is revised, personages come

and go, the nature of the river never changes. The myth is animist, conservative and

sensitive to the traditions of the old faith, Catholicism, as it is recovered from the

residue of dissolved monasteries, forgotten shrines, sites of expulsion and exile.

The nursery version of the mess of history offered to the English children of 1905

was still playing in the years of austerity after the Second World War, when the

imperialist dream was being reduced, painfully, to a heap of bloody fragments. Our

Island Story, by the 1960s, was a pariah: Forrests melancholy illustrations were

stripped from copies of the book and mounted to catch the eye of serial

sentimentalists in antique markets. Charles I, a cloaked and lace-collared dandy,

strolls across the park to his execution. Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in

The French Lieutenants Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in

the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close attention from a child protection

unit. All very saccharine, morbid and outmoded until the disregarded and

rundown riverscape was recognised as a prime regeneration project. The corpse-

fishers ofOur Mutual Friendwere recast as heritage television, while planning

regulations for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the

construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed

visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatchers Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands

across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsbys Marshes. The

obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was a remake ofFitzcarraldo, a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle-


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steamer over a steep hill in order to get around an inconvenient bend in the river,

the point being to bring Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading

post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long

and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena: a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts,

artists presumed dead or missing in action, for Norma Desmond divas and the real

Michael Jackson, a trembling skin-graft mask cursed with eternal youth. Parrot-

scream arias and the cough of angry engines, as punters try to exit the gridlocked

car park, carry across a broad expanse of oily water. Thames, Amazon, Congo:

crumbling regimes like nothing better than a rumble in the jungle. A world-class

photo-opportunity summit in some hangar on the edge of a dock, between old

railway lines and a new airport. A major exclusion zone around a place nobody has

any good reason to visit. A geography that only makes sense when viewed from a

helicopter.

The reimagining of downriver stretches of the Thames was not limited to East

Greenwich: fantasy settlements were imposed on vacant brownfield sites along the

floodplain in Essex and Kent. Every act of demolition, every fresh-minted estate,

required a recalibrating of history: as a hospital or asylum vanishes, we thirst for

stories of Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury or Pocahontas coming ashore, in her dying

fever, at Gravesend. The documented records of the lives of those unfortunates

shipped out to cholera hospitals on Dartford Marshes, or secure madhouses in the

slipstream of the M25, can be dumped in a skip. Politicised history is a panacea,

comforting the bereft, treating us, again and again, to the same consoling fables.

Laminated boards appearing around loudly hyped newt reservations or permitted

greenways, punchy and partial summaries of an approved narrative of the past,

found their equivalent in the 2005 reissue ofOur Island Story by the right-wing

think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph,

appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. They responded by

sending in an astonishing 25,000. There were messages of endorsement from

Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty historian Andrew Roberts; theEconomist

saluted the new edition as impeccably postmodern; 5000 free copies were

distributed to schools, a Trojan horse for early indoctrination in traditional values

that would be reinforced by emphatic TV explainers vamping through the palaces

and bedchambers of the Tudors. Supporting copy, put out by Civitas, warned that

people, including politicians of all parties, are worried by the failure of many young

people now to engage with the institutions of the free society they live in. Deniedaccess to the pieties ofOur Island Story, a generation of misguided eco-protesters


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and climate-camp activists might find themselves on the wrong island, at

Kingsnorth Power Station on Grain, kettled between Medway and Thames, waiting

to be filmed, fingerprinted and battered by the successors, as Ackroyd might see it,

of Richard IIs Blackheath enforcers. There is always a TSG presence, only the

uniforms change. Now identification numbers vanish from shoulders and medics

carry extendible batons.

One of Ackroyds enduring qualities is a sensitivity to national mood, from the

gothic ofHawksmoor, anticipating the colonisation of Spitalfields by neo-Georgians

hungry for a justifying myth, to the pitching of the Thames as a sacred river

(against strong evidence to the contrary). Back in 1982, Ackroyds slender first

novel was located on the banks of the river. The Great Fire of London was

remarkable for prophesying, five years ahead of the event, Christine Edzards

double-decker film ofLittle Dorrit. Here was a correspondence, a playful vortex of

invention and coincidence in the style that Ackroyd would make familiar through

bestselling biographies, histories and offshoot television documentaries. There is a

characteristic tone he employs when, wrapped in a long dark coat and propped on

boat or bridge, he is called on to impersonate himself, author of the city, actor-

manager to the dark mysteries of a music-hall empire hovering at the outer limits of

visibility. With rhetorical flourish and rolling cadences, he traces significant

connections: How slight its beginnings, how confident its continuing course, how

ineluctable its destination within the great ocean. What has happened once will

happen again. The poetry of the Thames has always emphasised its affiliations with

human purpose and with human realities.

The film director in The Great Fire of London, the one who recognises the

commercial potential ofLittle Dorrit, of the soon to be developed riverside of fake

dungeons, re-created Shakespearean theatres, farmers markets, is called, with

alliterative and poetic overkill, Spenser Spender. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I

end my song. In conjuring Eliots footnoting of the Elizabethan poet in The Waste

Land, Ackroyd suggests a genealogy of river writers, an assemblage of quotation

and reference. He also prepared the ground for the Eliot biography that followed

two years later; a biography in which he commends the poets ability so to arrange

various literary texts that they seem to form a coherent order among themselves.

This manufacture of a coherent narrative from accidental elements is what is

happening on the south bank of the Thames, from the pomposity of City Hall to the

opportunistic funland of the London Eye and the fish tanks and fast-food franchises

of County Hall, the former seat of local government. Stretches of the official path


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along the river are marked, along with living-statue performance artists and street

musicians, with uplifting quotations from approved poets set into the paving stones.

Ackroyd always had a rare gift for leakage, publishing the fable before the thing

happens, carrying out a programme of research that led London towards its next

neurotic culture shift, not backwards into a revelation from some unnoticed aspect

of the past. The Great Fire of London, modest and playful, points directly at the

later epic of the Thames. Ackroyd is the writer who defines the precise moment at

which locality becomes location.

With an apprenticeship served in Cambridge Modernism, contacts and alliances

with New York poets, slim volumes put out by Andrew Croziers Ferry Press,

Ackroyd knew more than enough about the glittering particulars of Charles Olson

and William Carlos Williams to give them their due, while gliding effortlessly in

another direction. One of the characters in The Great Fire of London calms his

rising panic by swimming lap after lap in a neighbourhood pool, a facility conscious

of its uncertain status, its imminent dissolution. The sounds and shouts of the pool

seemed to him like echoes of a madhouse, a vast chamber of disorder. Local

amenities, if they cannot explain themselves in a single sentence, vanish. That state

of limbo, past and present interwoven, is where Ackroyd navigates. Predatory film-

makers, a group who are most comfortable starting with the remake, stealing,

borrowing, demonstrating their affinities, could read Ackroyd as a guidebook. They

optioned and reoptioned his novels but never found a way to crack the problem of

structure: it wasnt about dialogue or narrative arc, yet the more you tinkered the

less there was. Talking of Eliot, Ackroyd noticed that his genius for organisation

sometimes conceals a peculiar lack of content. Location is all about disguising this

lack of content, smoke and mirrors, by demonstrating how one place, shot with

enough care, looks just like another. The drab Southwark ofLittle Dorritand the

Marshalsea Prison, exploited by Ackroyd, adapted itself within a decade into a

standard cop-show backdrop. By 2001 it was a suitable lodging for Rene Zellweger

inBridget Joness Diary. Christine Edzard set up her studio, a cottage industry for

costume and artefacts, along the river in Rotherhithe.

Only Ackroyd, with his system of recurrences and interconnections, could see the

river as Londons unifying metaphor. He left the caf and walked beside the

Thames, he wrote, bringing his first novel to its conclusion.

The river was still, as though gathering to itself the white and orange beams of

the street lamps which were reflected in its darkness . . . Spenser Spender was


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filled with a sensation of lightness, as though his own body were moving out, too,

across the water, implicated in the lives of these human beings who trudged

slowly through the dark.

The tributaries of the Thames and the lost rivers are the veins and arteries of a

finely balanced ecosystem. This is another Ackroyd proposition. And again they are

anthropomorphised, made into supplicants, handmaidens to the titular stream. The

long-suffering Lea quits its sylvan source to endure a penance of foul industries,

travellers camps, waste disposal plants, until eventually it finds its surcease at Bow

Creek. Ackroyd responds positively to the regeneration of areas where deepwater

docks lay idle for so long and warehouses were occupied by artists and premature

economic migrants:

Both banks of the Thames were rejuvenated. There are now large blocks of

apartments where there were once derelict wharves. The old canals of the docks

have been replaced with marinas. Shopping areas, apartments, public houses and

walkways are now, for example, situated where once St Katharines Dock lay

huddled beneath the Tower . . . The neighbourhood of the river is recovering its

ancient exuberance and energy, and is reverting to its existence before the

residents and houses were displaced by the building of the docks in the 19th

century.

In other words, to go forward we must go back. London is unchanging. The golden

hour liveliness of Canary Wharfs bankers, speculators and journalists, as they

spread through a chain of generic dockside bars, under the shelter of those

ubiquitous patio-heater palm trees, is a revival of the riverbank life described by De

Quincey at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders: manifold ruffianism

shrouded impenetrably under the mixed hats and turbans of men whose past was

untraceable to any European eye. Where the film-maker Derek Jarman, a figure

who might have broken free from the fevered microclimate ofThe Great Fire of

London, saw the downriver reaches of Silvertown, with its abandoned flour mills, as

a site for dervish dances and the rituals of a punk apocalypse, Ackroyd underwrote

a rhetoric of regeneration, providing political opportunism with a sympathetic

mythology. Intimations of psychotic breakdown, financial and ecological

catastrophe, located by J.G. Ballard in the hermetic towers ofHigh-Rise (1975),

were limned by Ackroyd, with characteristic generosity, as the first green shoots of

recovery for a toxic wasteland. Ballards dog-eating balcony-dwellers inhabit apremature version of the Thatcherite Docklands that Thames: Sacred Riverworks


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hard to re-enchant. Glass curtain-walling and telecommunication aerials, Ballard

wrote, were obscured by the traffic smog, blurring Laings memories of the past.

From this miasma, the lightshow of pollution, Ackroyds spectres are formed and

the icons of a new doctrine revealed. Fragments from mystery religions combine

with thrusting manifestations of corporate finance to compose a sculpture park in

which anonymous drones labour and play. Cesar Pellis Canary Wharf tower is a

square prism with pyramidal top in the traditional form of the obelisk. Pelli is

Nicholas Hawksmoor reborn, dominating the eastern reaches of London, the rusty,

algae-clogged backwaters of the Lea, with hieratic Egyptian quotations. That New

Labour pavilion, the Millennium Dome, is presented as a talisman, covered by the

largest roof in the world. If Ackroyds landmark amulet, the great dome, offers a

magical force-field operating in conjunction with its near neighbour the Thames

Barrier, then the charm is taking a long time to work for those who are not

subscribers to the vision of the Thames as a tabula rasa on which to experiment

with occult manifestos of rebirth and rescripted history. The ennobled architects,

who are also political consultants and grand-scheme promoters, confirm their

allegiance as Ackroyd points out through their choice of title. Lord Rogers of

Riverside, author of the Dome. Lord Foster of Thames Bank with his wobbly bridge.

It is inevitable that Ackroyd, with his belief in eternal recurrence, in London as an

organic entity forever renewing itself from the darkest sources, looks kindly on theofficial script for the 2012 Olympics. Myths and symbols torch-bearing

processions, naked gladiators, flatpack stadia echoing Roman amphitheatres are

back in vogue. The aim is to avoid niggling local difficulties, the specifics of place, in

order to forge a computer-generated fiction of national revival (by way of supersize

shopping malls, media centres, committee-designed public parks in place of scabby

edgeland wilderness):

The siting of the Olympic Games of 2012 in Stratford, and the rest of the EastEnd of London, will materially help the development and refurbishment of the

river as a principal urban resource. There have already been signs of new

industries, and new forms of industry, converging upon its banks. In particular

the high-technology electronics companies have arrived in the Thames Valley,

and there are many industrial parks placed beside the river . . . London will then

once more become a river city . . . The river will once more become the highway

of the nation.

Perhaps he is right. Like so many people in the Olympic boroughs, Id got too close


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jeremiads, I thirsted to be out in the air. It wasnt just schoolteachers, doctors,

social workers, half of London was medicated: Valium, Prozac, Xanax. Managed

terror. And the other half was jogging down the narrow canal towpath, dodging

cyclists who were forced into traffic, turned away from a safe route that was being

relaid, yet again, as a way of securing continued budget. Pushy coots perched on the

ruins of the last canal-bank makeover, barking at intruders. A pair of fond geese

inspected the ledge where they would take turns, over a month or so, to fail to

incubate an egg. The water looked worse than it had for years: like something out of

a specimen bottle, flecked and dusty on the surface, fetid beneath. I was almost at

Limehouse Basin before I spotted the first chicks of the season: the influence of the

dirty, living Thames ameliorating the thorium-enhanced run-off from the Olympic

Park.

Slogans have been revised on the wall near the new bridge that carries the old

railway down to Broad Street; the one declared redundant in the mid-1980s when

they wanted to replace a thriving commuter station with the pastiched New York ice

rink of Broadgate Centre. A route that is deemed necessary once more, thanks to

the Olympic transport hub at Dalston Junction, the reconnected station twinning us

with Croydon. No longer is the innocence of G. Davis affirmed in large white letters.

George is certainly not OK. The obituaries are in for a life of bad timing: he was

caught at the wheel of a getaway van outside the Bank of Cyprus on the Seven

Sisters Road in Holloway, 16 months after his release by the home secretary on the

grounds that his conviction for a robbery at the London Electricity Board in Ilford

was unsafe. New graffiti tell the world that Ian Tomlinson, an unfortunate

pedestrian caught up in the G20 protests in the City, was murdered by the police.

The calligraphy is elegant, the punctuation emphatic.

A strange and rather Ackroydian incident occurred as I walked past the railings of

St John the Baptist Catholic church. I began to imagine that the young woman in

the expensive leather jacket, just ahead of me, was limping slightly, favouring her

right leg; a manicured hand brushing against the spot on the upper thigh where my

nagging pain was located. As I gained on her, the limp became more pronounced

and at the same time my own discomfort eased. By the time I crossed into

Templecombe Road, she was hobbled, resting at the curb, while I skipped like a

lamb. An act of transference that left me obscurely guilty. And which seemed to

conjure, as a direct consequence, a cats cradle of blue and white incident tape.

There is an agreement in Hackney: the police come out early, mobhanded, squad

cars, vans, a works outing, and the postcode gangs (or negative youth affiliations)


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wait for twilight, a treaty arranged to avoid unnecessary aggravation. Those

screaming sirens act as courtesy calls, giving dealers plenty of warning to remove

themselves before they become tedious paperwork. Much policework these days is

training in guerrilla documentation, an alternative film school. When the rumpus is

over, its a war of competitive imagery: digital logging by the men in the flak jackets

and soft-edged mobile-phone sweeps by climate camp protesters.

Casual pedestrianism is perceived as subversion. A few days after the death of Ian

Tomlinson, I was walking down Grey Eagle Street in Spitalfields on my way to the

City (strange things had been happening to my bank account, which was being

emptied by a man I had never heard of, but who bypassed the security systems

effortlessly). The pavement ran out, as pavements do, and I found myself squeezed

against the wall by a white police van. There was plenty of room inside. Do you

mind telling me what you are doing in Grey Eagle Street sir? I did have a

shoulder bag and I was wearing jeans, a crumpled jacket and trainers. Not an

obvious candidate for car theft, nor yet a punter, without a vehicle, for the twilight

prostitutes who would not appear for another two or three hours. It was the crime

of walking and then pausing, as I had to, when the pavement vanished.

The sacredness of the Thames beyond Beckton is not easy to identify. Without

question, this landscape is closer to Ballard than to Ackroyd. It is a territory where

the river excuses layer after layer of political initiatives, strategic malfunctions andhalf-completed or newly abandoned developments. A scheme for a bridge that

would have connected the North and South Circular roads, and given London a

second orbital motorway, was aborted by Boris Johnson: it was too closely

associated with the former mayor, Ken Livingstone. Thames Gateway is a

geographical area and a philosophy for which Johnson has no enthusiasm. Boris

champions theEagle comic wheeze of an airstrip-island at the mouth of the river,

out beyond Sheppey.

I reported to Ballard on the way the retail parks (budget warehouses dressed with

mock funnels like a beached armada) give way, after a strip of wilderness, to an

empty road guarded by off-watch police cars, whose occupants graze on jumbo

burgers. Near the river, secure buildings disguise their identity and purpose,

indistinguishable from outer-rim universities or open prisons. One of these sleek

sheds confesses to dealing in Logistics and Management. The motivation behind all

this clamour is Olympic overspill. The copywriting is Wellsian: The Thames

Gateway: The Shape of Things to Come. The cover of the brochure is a split-screen


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illustration, a female athlete on a pink track, arms raised aloft in a triumphalist V,

and three new tower blocks on a riverside marina. Here, in computer-generated

hyperreality, is the promised legacy. World-class sporting facilities will be available

for use by the local public. The largest new park in London since the Victorian Era

the size of Hyde Park will provide a delightful new local facility. Meanwhile:

you can buy into Gladedales waterside apartments, where double-glazing will keep

out the roar of planes coming low over the Thames before skidding onto tarmac at

City Airport. Get the Buzz is the unfortunate slogan. The current bridge, on which

you can stand, keeping your head down, while you watch Swiss Air jets banking

steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, is named in

honour of Sir Stephen Redgrave.

After hacking through brambles, picking a path around Magellan Boulevard,

Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the

perimeter fence of the steel-grey block of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp

blue shirts with laminated identity badges were lunching beside the river, dipping

lethargically into yellow cartons. Its all we can get, one of them said. We have to

go to the retail park, there is nothing else within five miles. They chose to avoid the

canteen, to take the air by the Thames, looking across at Woolwich and

Thamesmead, where estates grow up like bindweed, near neighbours to HM Prison

Belmarsh, that upgrading of the convict hulks. Buhler Sortex, they told me, make

food processing machines. They render meat. The old factory was in Stratford,

where there was a busy town centre, pubs, cafs, some life. It was compulsorily

purchased as part of the Olympic push. They had been relocated to this bleak exile

in a conveniently empty quarter, between the sewage works and Royal Albert Dock.

After the buddleia and the butterflies of the permitted riverside strip, I headed west

towards Silvertown and the Thames Barrier. If you travel thinking about a

particular writer, he will map the mental landscape through which you pass. Even

the photographs I was taking came from another era, a roll of black and white film

that had been sitting on my desk for years. Out of nowhere, on a long stretch of

closed-down nautical enterprises and small dockers pubs, a decorative Chinese

arch appeared like the gateway to a secret city: loon fung now open. eat at our

noodle bar. White stone lions. A warehouse displaying a profusion of richly scented

produce, packets of tea with exotic designs. Red-gold fish basked in bubbling tanks,

avoiding the gaze of potential diners. My meal of mushroom noodles, hot and

tasty, washed down with gunpowder tea, cost 3. I asked Ballard once: in all his

years in Shanghai, what was his favourite Chinese dish? Roast beef and Yorkshire


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pudding, he said. At home, we never touched the local food.

The purest Ballardian set, poised chronologically betweenHigh-Rise and

Millennium People, was an estate on the edge of the recently created Barrier Park

(architectural planting in the deep trenches of an old dock). The clocks seem to

pause, Ballard wrote, waiting for time to catch up with them . . . Money, always

harder-wearing than asphalt, helped to repave the streets. I came back to

Silvertown, to show this new park to my wife. Between the riverside gardens and

the estate was a flyover on concrete stilts and a grove of palm trees and spiky

bushes, discounted and left to its own devices. Through the tropical thicket, you

could see the silver helmets of the Thames Barrier, the river-fronting balconies of

stepped flats, and the gaunt backdrop of Jarmans Millennium Mills from The Last

of England. A snake, disturbed in the undergrowth, struck at my wifes foot. When

she got home, she found two neat puncture marks. The worst of the venom, she

reckoned, was absorbed by the webbing of her boot.

I told Ballard about a leaflet I had picked up in the caf at Barrier Park. It explained

that one of the incomers to the flats had decided to operate his own neighbourhood

watch system, by initiating a surveillance film club. Other members of the

community could contact him by email and they would share images, caught on

mobile phones, recording the behaviour of suspicious youths. An image bank would

be established and the anonymity of the snoops preserved. As we penetrated thejungle, the wild garden with its cracked concrete paths and ramps, we knew that we

were on film. Somebody would have to try and explain our eccentric incursion. I

found a photocopying shop in Bethnal Green Road to duplicate a few sheets of my

snapshots to go with the letter to Ballard. The young Asian girl who operated the

machine, with no particular enthusiasm, came suddenly to life. The flats on the

edge of the Royal Albert Dock, that was where she lived. What a mistake! The

isolation. The lack of community. The drive to Gallions Reach retail park for a pint

of milk. She had lived all her life in the buzz of Bethnal Green and then her family

fell for the idea of a riverside apartment. Now she looked forward to coming to

work, coming home.

Peter Ackroyd begins at source, the first trickle, Cotswold springs. He opens with a

Gradgrinding deluge of facts: length, comparison with other rivers, number of

bridges, average flow, velocity of current. Then moves rapidly to river as metaphor.

So that the two tendencies, the empirical and the poetic, coexist, informing and

challenging each other, striking examples found to confirm flights of fancy. And all


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the time he is walking, from limestone causeway to salt marshes, but keeping the

accidents and epiphanies of these private excursions out of his narrative. The only

vignette he offers from the long trudge is presented as a river omen, a superstition.

The present author has found on the river wall by Erith the following objects laid

out in ritual fashion a knife with a blue handle, with blood on the blade, a white

T-shirt with bloodstains upon it, and a roll of Sellotape. Hikers, less sensitive to

correspondences, taking the knife for fishermans kit, would moan, coming out of

Erith onto the Crayford Marshes, about the tedious detour, those extra miles along

the snaky Darent to the A206 and back, because there is no footbridge. How

afternoons disappear, among huts, paddocks of travellers shaggy horses, driftwood

fires, scrambler bikes and wavering golden beds of reeds.

My instinct was to follow the example of Patrick Wright, whose television journey,

The River: The Thames in Our Time (1999), starts on the open sea, with the

offshore forts, before making landfall on the Isle of Grain. Ackroyd believes that the

source is the place of enchantment, where the boundary between the visible and the

invisible realms is to be found. Wright begins with what he knows, the North Kent

coast. After pirate radio stations and a note about the remarkable number of

denizens of the Isle of Sheppey who have fitted their houses with rolled steel joists,

he opts for the potential apocalypse of the Richard Montgomery , an American

Liberty ship which went down at the mouth of the Medway in 1944 with 1500 tons

of explosives on board. And which might still, at any moment, take Sheerness off

the map.

The journey towards the source is the journey backwards, away from human

history, Ackroyd pronounces. But that is the journey I decide to take; the legend of

Grain, from Hogarths drunken boat party, through Robert Hamers moody film The

Long Memory (1952), to the climate camp protests at Kingsnorth, was history

enough for me. Ackroyd provided my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on

the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the Thames

merges with the North Sea. From London Stone the ships set their course for the

Nore lightship and the waves of the ocean. The song of the Thames has ended.

Walking west, away from the creek, a wide-sky epic from Allhallows to Gravesend,

then detouring around the Darent, cursing the repeated losses of the riverpath to

private development, I reached Ballards Shepperton. I had done five days of my

tramp before niggling doubt sent me back to Grain: the true pilgrimage, in the

Ackroydian spirit, could begin only after touching the London Stone. I had stepped

off from the wrong side of the creek, a stones throw from the symbolic beacon, but


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it wouldnt do. It is a mysterious, and an ambiguous, place, Ackroyd says. Where

does the river end and the sea begin? Crow Stone on the Essex shore and London

Stone in Kent, an imaginary line joins them: this is all the information Ackroyd has

to offer. How he reached the stone on his own expedition, and how he felt after so

many miles, is not revealed. The Isle of Grain is omitted from the concluding

section of his book, An Alternative Topography.

Studying the Ordnance Survey map for the Thames Estuary, I saw no good reason

why I couldnt walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to

the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain

Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue

rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then

they hit you with tank traps, warning notices. military firing range keep out.

Rusting metal poles looped with fresh barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by a

sharp-angled Vorticist alphabet of obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange

lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Foothpaths

doubling back into aggregate dunes, darkly shadowed lakes and refuse dumps.

Cattle, on strips of land between tricky creeks, might be part of a real farm or target

practice. Across the marshes, the smokestacks of constantly belching power

stations. When the coastal path failed, I tried the quiet back road: running up

against ponds reserved for the angling club of Marconi Electronic Systems, the

privileged fishermen of BAE Systems. A huddle of police cottages monitored access

to North Level Marsh and the London Stone. private MOD road. residents and

visitors to police cottages only. I backtracked, walked for hours and eventually

found myself, once more, on the wrong side of the Yantlet, near the colony of huts

and holiday homes where my original walk started. The only stones to be found

were a blunt obelisk commemorating the completion of the Raising of the Thames

Flood Defences between 1975-85 and a compacted cairn, like the remains of a

fireplace after a bomb blast, from which the plaque had been removed.

Children of the middle classes, friends of my own children, were getting their first

experience of counter-terrorism, increased levels of state paranoia. Well-meaning,

university-educated, self-elected friends of the planet were experiencing dawn raids,

the trashed flat, seizure of books, papers, laptops. They were being arrested,

processed, released or brought to trial. Sometimes before the contemplated action

happened. They were pressured into becoming informers or stooges. In the age of

retro-reality, they time-travelled to a 1960s mindset: tapped phones, spooks with

cameras in a van across the road, infiltrators in every group, agents provocateurs


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heating up demonstrations. The fiercest reaction was initiated against opponents of

the energy industry. This was where the crunch would surely come, and the

politicians were taking no chances. If your face appeared in the movie of the

Kingsnorth Climate Camp, the tribes opposing E.ONs proposed coal-fired power

station, you could expect a visit at your home address. Kent police, who held

individual protesters arriving at the camp, often for more than an hour, while they

were searched and photographed, defended their actions. Helicopters hovered

throughout the night. Ministers responding to media criticism made much of the 70

officers who suffered injury during the battle of Grain. When the relevant

documents were acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed

that only 12 of the injuries had any direct connection with the demonstration. Other

war wounds included being stung on the finger by a wasp, succumbing to

heatstroke, lower back pain from sitting too long in a car, nasty headaches and loosebowels.

I was trudging into Reading on my reverse Ackroyd walk, amused by the sight of a

rowing eight so preoccupied by their furious activity that they wedged themselves in

a thin channel cut through the ice, oars scraping plaintively and impotently, when I

realised that I would have to return to the Yantlet Creek. The sighting of the

London Stone across the narrow rivulet was an inadequate response, my walk

through the salt marshes counted for nothing: touch was required. The unvisited

obelisk, 54 km from London Bridge, marks the downstream limit of the authority of

the City of London Corporation. The fact that it lodged on forbidden ground made

it more appealing; if I failed in this quest, my expedition was rendered meaningless.

True to the Ackroydian spirit, I pitched it pretty high: the stone had become the

ultimate symbol, to reach it was to release the riverside reaches from a cloud of

unknowing. Covert land piracy, lies supported by computer-generated evidence, the

fantasies of swinish politicians.

Before parking in the village of Grain, beyond the unwelcoming pub named after

William Hogarths rollicking peregrination of 1732, I drove to Kingsnorth through a

landscape of roads too well made to be comfortable; private railways screened by

poplars, chimneys, smooth silos, lagoons that looked like oil slicks and corrugated

fields where silver lakes were exposed as sheets of crop-forcing plastic. When I left

the car outside a yellow-signed caf in a reservation of rubber-shredding sheds, the

early morning lanes and grazing marshes were somehow bereft. E.ON UK was

demonstrating all the standard strategies of exclusion: cameras, warnings, a yellow-

tabard security gang manning checkpoints, and high fences around a nature


17/19


18/19



and sadistically bland commander in cap, hands clasped behind his back.

But it wasnt quite over. At an art event in a squatted charity mission in Hackney

Wick, I bumped into the photographer Stephen Gill. I wondered if Stephen was up

for a kayak voyage across the Yantlet. A week later, at 6.30 a.m., we dragged the

inflatable, paddles, life-jackets, camera bags, down the track from All Hallows. The

mouth of the Thames Estuary was choppy, white crests and a gusting east wind. The

tide was out. Stephen noticed how the big ships, in an orderly queue, were riding at

anchor in the deep channel, off Southend. The Yantlet Creek was a fast-flowing

trickle, banked with mud. Lets go for it, I said. We dumped our kit and waded out,

jumping from insecure foothold to foothold, to arrive on a sandy beach of Crusoe

novelty. Not a footprint. Formal lines of seaweed, shell, plastic tidewrack,

wildflower fringe. The London Stone on its slippery islet is a fossil-embossed

obelisk perched on a plinth of stone and calcified wood. Bring your boat and the

water parts. This weathered stone tooth is like the last surviving monument to a

drowned city. There is a memorial aspect, but nobody can remember who or what is

being celebrated. The higher the name on the obelisk, the more it is obliterated. Its

almost as if the sailors on a sinking raft carved their titles on the mast. Captain

William Ian Pigott. Captain B.J. Sullivan. Rear-Admiral Horatio Thomas Austin.

Lost witnesses to a walk that I could now resume in good heart.

I treated Gill to a major fry-up at the Kingsnorth caf. The rubber-strippingoperation had a yellow truck parked at the gate: HOGARTH TYRE SHREDDERS.

An Ackroydian coincidence? The owner, proud of his heritage, admitted that the

painter was his inspiration, the way he nailed the follies and foibles of a corrupt

society. This man commuted to Grain, daily, from a home near the Chiswick

roundabout. It was Hogarths Chiswick aspect that he was commemorating. The

Grain part of the story had passed him by. You learn something every day. The big

tyres cost 1000 each. Minor flaws are easily smoothed over and the reconditioned

jobs can be knocked out at 300 a pop.

After a farewell stroll on Grain, introducing Gill to an endlessly fascinating

topography, we would return to London. Coming through the zone of dunes and

solitary trees poking out of rubble islands, we paused at the perimeter fence of the

military firing range. If these tidal marshes are so dangerous, why are cattle allowed

to roam? Why do horses stick their inquisitive noses over gates that mark the

demolition boundary? A kiosk, its window-flap rattling in the wind, has been

perched on stilts. An unmanned forward observation post that looked like a


19/19


Page 19 of 19http://www lrb co uk/v31/n12/print/sinc01 html

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Ltd., 1997-2009 < Home ^ Top terms & conditions privacy

portable toilet for the rock festival that would never come. The brand name was

stamped, grey on grey, above the steel-shuttered window: OLYMPIC.

Iain SinclairsHackney, That Rose-Red Empire, a documentary fiction, appeared

earlier this year.

Other articles by this contributor:

Diary Out of Essex

Deadad On the Promenade

The poet steamed Iain Sinclair reads Tom Raworth

The Olympics Scam The Razing of East London

Hopi Mean Time Jim Sallis

In Hackney Steve Dilworth

All change. This train is cancelled Iain Sinclair tries to get to the Dome

A Hit of Rus in Urbe Iain Sinclair explores the Lea Valley
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Unmanned Forward Observation Post That Looked Like

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