I like this bridge. It doesn’t wobble. And it’s got an ironic title: Prescott Channel. Mud, surveillance, dereliction. The best skies in London. The nightmare of the New Labour suits, the mean spectacles who blink at life like a software package, smoothed and revised. Channelsea has no use for consensus, market research, Best Value. Channelsea is off-limits.
I spent a Saturday afternoon, in the rain, observing a pair of middle-aged mudlarks, up to the elbows in liquid sewage. One of them dragged an old tin bath out into the river, at low tide. The other worked with a sieve like a grizzled prospector, Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They spent hours laboriously sifting shit, hoping for the odd ring or coin. And I stuck with them, watching. This was about as far as you could travel from John Prescott. He couldn’t, even if it were explained to him, find anywhere to place such humans. Demographically, they had pulled it off. They didn’t register.
In the past I’ve taken photographs of the picket fence outside The Big Breakfast cottage at Old Ford Lock. But I can’t resist repeating myself. The messages change so quickly. Every white-painted blade is covered with names, telephone numbers. NICK CARTER IS THE FATHER OF MY BABY. TAMMY SEAMARK LIKES FREE SEX (WITH ALL SORTS). DENISE VAN OUTEN IS A BITCH, SEE YOU SEEM, OR ELSE. Shorthand stalker fantasies. The cottage, which marks the end of the Lee Valley Media Zone (goodbye soaps, goodbye hysteria), has lost its edge. Dead TV. In time a blue plaque to Denise Van Outen (‘lived here from 2 September 1996 to 1 Jan 1999’) will appear, playing games with fuddy-duddy notions of heritage and culture. An ironic memorial to the absence of memory. An Alice in Wonder land makeover. Giant toadstools, paddling pools, artificial grass. You gaze over the picket fence and the surveillance cameras, the security guards, stare right back at you. The lock-keeper’s cottage, beginning as a rural fantasy (sinister in Charles Dickens, jolly in H.G. Wells), ends in self-parody, colours louder than life, a cottage industry on magic mushrooms. The bricks are too bright, which isn’t surprising, they’re wallpaper. The security man in his little hut, guarding the pool and the synthetic grass, is too bored to bother with us, the crusty trio staring hungrily at his thermos and miniature pork pies.
Asylum seekers, border jumpers, paroled humans, those without status: they collect a uniform, lousy wages, an area to patrol, a free TV monitor playing real-time absences. In Don DeLillo’s ghost story, The Body Artist, there’s a woman who hangs on to her sanity by snacking on a ‘live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane blacktop’. Somewhere unknown, Finland. ‘Twenty-four hours a day.’ A prison fantasy, the weary body hauling itself upright to peer into a frosty window. ‘She imagined that someone might masturbate to this.’
Security is (mostly) unactivated masturbation. Low arousal tapes, low definition: you watch the landscape breathe. The canal at night. Wavering reflections of sodium lamps.
The media zone of the Lee Navigation deals, as it has always dealt, with waste disposal. Junk. I wait for a time when there will be digital mudlarks rummaging through exhausted footage for images to extract, fool’s gold dropped down the toilet bowls of the culture.
Hackney Marshes are pretty familiar. I had a great job once, painting white lines on the football pitches. A Forth Bridge task: start on Monday morning, under those epic skies, trolleying thick gunge, fighting the impulse to indulge in spiral patterns. Every Saturday and Sunday coarse footballers would obliterate my handiwork. Begin again.
Fat, glossy crows, cat-sized, scavenge the sward. Seagulls swoop on golf balls. They perch on crossbars, spot a knobbly egg and dive. Dozens of balls are lost in the thick grass where the Marshes slope up to Homerton Road. The walker feels small tramping towards a pylon-punctured horizon. Exposed on this broad table of land. The Friends Bridge, designed by Whitby, Bird and Partners, a way of getting across the Lea as it loops towards the Navigation, is a welcome destination.
The tough and functional steel and wood structure exposes the pretensions of the wobbly millennial effort, the spidery span that was supposed to carry pedestrians from St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. This bridge works. Its scarlet paint will survive the spray-can bandits. A straight path across honest planks, pale as sand, is counterbalanced by a red steel carapace (like Dalí’s fat lip sofa). The bridge understands its mythical function: to give the pilgrim, who has laboured to find it, access to a nature reserve, a slice of protected wilderness.
Back on the canal path, at the point where Eastway crosses the Navigation, we encounter one of those oracular concrete caverns. Reflected light sports in the grooves, REGGIE KRAY FOR MAYOR OF LONDON. There’s a reversed swastika (with the number 23), a scarlet skull and a single bone crossed by an arrow. The panels of the wall have been finished in a sort of refined pebbledash: a beach framed for exhibition.
Under the bridge, weed-slippery skeletons of motorcycles, dredged from the filthy water, have been laid out. I’ve seen travellers, barechested, prudish in old trousers, diving for scrap. Ropes and hooks. Mounds of antique iron. Bicycles, prams. Immune to Weil’s disease, rat bites, they submerge, time after time, in the mucilage, the electric-green scum.
The triangle of the Marshgate Recreation Ground is in the process of a rethink. Its history, summarised on a board, has been action-painted into oblivion. The newly planted patch has been christened: ‘Wick Woodland’.
Along the avenue of peeling London planes, caravans have been parked. Cars. And bits of cars. An inhabited junkyard, a moveable suburb. Bureaucratic toleration pushed to its limits by the construction of waste towers, mounds of black tyres. The travellers, barred from upwardly mobile riverside pubs, anathematised by eco-planners, have found a use for this leftover arrowhead of ground. They’ve Balkanised it. Fouled it. Used it. They’ve helped to clean the Lee Navigation. And they’ve done it without grants or ten-year business plans. Obviously, they’re doomed. They’ll be moved on. Strategic planting will win the day. For now tidy citizens might wince as they pass through this corridor of filth, avert their eyes; missing the improvised beauty of the accidental — a collision between a band of traffic on its high curve, new plantings, woodchip walkways, benches on which to contemplate the scene.
The mystery of the Navigation, where the Marshes confront rows of neat canalside hutches, was best captured by Rachel Whiteread in her monochrome plates, taken on the day when the Sixties’ tower blocks were blown up. Whiteread’s photographs celebrate silence; small boats on the river, crowds on the banks. Tents. A revivalist mob watching vertical history crumple and disappear.
As we pass the Middlesex Filter beds (closed) and move towards the weir, close to Lea Bridge Road, by the Princess of Wales pub, I try out a Fortean Times myth on Bill Drummond: how two headless, skinned bears were found floating at this spot. Children reported a yeti-like sighting, in a snowstorm on the Marshes. Paw prints were discovered and photographed. There was talk of circuses, gypsies — but no animals were reported missing. The implication was that the beasts had scavenged in Epping Forest, for picnic scraps, discarded burger cartons, roots and berries. Then started to forage further afield.