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.