The Environment Agency fed the relevant minister, Michael Meacher, the usual soft soap. The firms responsible for working mixed ash into conglomerates used in surfacing new roads declined to reveal the location of their handiwork, the 12,000 tons of aggregate dropped on the landscape. Their spokesman, sweating lightly, sported a Buffalo Bill beard: frontiersman peddling a treaty to the Sioux. One major recipient of this dubious cargo was uncovered by Watson’s researches: the car park of the Ford plant at Dagenham. The A13, yet again, had something to make it glow at night. A topdressing of contaminated Edmonton ash.
‘No more dangerous than Guy Fawkes night,’ declared Meacher to the House. When ash, removed from Edmonton, was tested, it registered dioxin levels ten times higher than the figure floated by the Environment Agency.
Walking north towards Picketts Lock, we turn our backs on the incinerators, the smoke. Frame it out, it’s not there. Go with the Dufy doodle on the side of London Waste’s rectangular box, the company’s upbeat logo: limpid blue sky, lush grass, a pearl-grey building like a Norfolk church.
Edmonton is the Inferno and Picketts Lock the garden, the paradise park. In the past, on hot summer walks with my family, we used to come off the Navigation path for a swim at the Picketts Lock Leisure Complex. (How complex can leisure be?) This modest development, on the edge of a hacker’s golf course, was an oasis. It didn’t take itself too seriously and it filled the gap between the London Waste burning chimney and the Enfield Sewage Works.
The polyfilla theory of Leisure Complex placement, the old treaty between developers, land bandits, and improve-the-quality-of-life councillors, worked pretty well. Another chlorine-enhanced waterhole on ground nobody could think of any other way to exploit.
But that won’t wash in these thrusting millennial times. The name Picketts Lock starts to appear in the broadsheets — and it acquires a bright new apostrophe: Pickett’s Lock. Pickett’s Lock will be reinvented as a major sports stadium (convenient access to the M25). It will be the venue for the 2005 World Athletic Championships; thereby conferring enormous benefits on the Lea Valley; tourists, media, retail spin-offs. Computer-generated graphics omit the chimney at the end of the park, the smoke pall. Nobody is bad-mannered enough to mention the fact that London Waste have put in an application to extend their site. The application has been approved by Nick Raynsford, Minister for the Capital. It is awaiting final approval from Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers. (Poor man. It was going to get worse, much worse. Byers epitomised the New Labour attitude of glinting defiance. Fiercely tonsured and spectacled, tight-lipped, he would suffer assault by flashbulbs, while sitting bolt-upright in the back seat of a ministerial limo. He would be attacked by forests of furry microphones at the garden gate. He would be sideswiped from Trade and Industry to Transport. Pickett’s Lock to Purgatory. Official pooper-scooper. Ordered to clean up after all those years of misinformation, neglect and underinvestment. A man undone by his own spinners and fixers, he came, with every fresh appearance before the media inquisitors, to look more and more like a panicked automaton, a top-of-the-range cryogenic model of The Public Servant.)
When this matter is raised, the site’s owners (Lee Valley Regional Park Authority) become quite huffy, insisting that additional incinerators will ‘pose no risk’ to the health of athletes or spectators. ‘Better far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as venues for the Olympics,’ states Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing.
Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000–2010) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to emerging, modern competition.’ Horror: ‘25 years old’! Disgusting, obscene. Tear it down. The swimming pool and poolside café might look clean and friendly to the untrained eye, but they are older than David Beckham. The cinema, video arcade part of the enterprise will remain.
Which is a relief. This is a rather wonderful building, with a long straight approach, a tiled, mosaic walkway. The Alhambra of Enfield. A Moorish paradise of plashing water features, ordered abstraction, glass that reflects the passing clouds. Everything leads the eye to the cinema palace, lettering that looks like the announcement of a coming attraction: WELCOME TO LEE VALLEY. Cathedral windows catching cloud vapours, the floating dome of another burger bar.
Nothing is cramped and mean about this approach. The Pickett’s Lock multiplex is one of the wonders of our walk; we begin to understand how a commercial development can be integrated into the constantly shifting, constantly revised aspect of the Lea Valley. With its strategic use of dark glass and white panels, the generous space allowed between constituent elements in the overall design, Pickett’s Lock presents itself as a retreat, a respite from the journey. Buffered by the golf course, it remains hidden from the Navigation path. But, should you take the trouble to search it out, here is green water (swimming pool, ponds and basins); here is refreshment (motorway standard nosh, machine-dispensed coffee froth); here are public areas in which to sit and rest and study maps.
Pickett’s Lock works best, as a concept, if you don’t step inside. If you avoid the full Americana of burger reek (foot-and-mouth barbecues with optional ketchup), popcorn buckets, arcade games in which you can attack the M25 as a virtual reality circuit, UP TO TWO PLAYERS MAY RACE AT ONCE. INSERT COINS. In fact, this sideshow at Pickett’s Lock represents the Best Value future for the motorway; grass it over and let would-be helldrivers take out their aggression on the machines.
This pleasing sense of being removed from the action, the imposed-from-above imperatives, that we must enjoy ourselves, take healthy (circular) walks, observe bittern and butterfly, nod sagely over ghosts of our industrial heritage, is fleeting. The builders, the earth-movers, the JCBs, will soon be rolling in; hacking up meadows to make way for another stadium, another crowd puller; more promised, but postponed pleasure.
Postponed indefinitely. New Labour couldn’t face another Dome situation. Another money pit. They waited for Bad News Day, 11 September 2001. Then slipped the announcement into the small print. The Pickett’s Lock athletic stadium was aborted. No mention of London Waste. Economic considerations only. The apostrophe was withdrawn like Princess Di’s royal status. Picketts Lock, now surrounded by an ever-growing retail park with suspiciously bright roads, could go back to being a community centre for a community of transients.
Why, I wondered, as we hit the stretch from Ponders End to Enfield Lock, were there no other walkers? As a Best Value attempt at drumming up clients for their recreational facilities, the Lee Valley marketing men were not having a good day. Most people who live for any length of time in East London, even Notting Hill journalists with friends in Clapton, or connections in Hoxton, claim to walk the Lea. Filter Beds, Springfield Park Marina, Waltham Abbey, they boast of an intimate knowledge. Any free moment, there they are, out in the fresh air, hammering north. But the towpath stays empty. A few dog walkers, the odd shorthaul cyclist. Where are the professionals, the psychogeographers, note-takers who produce guides to ‘The London Loop’ or the Green Way? Local historians uncovering our industrial heritage: do they work at night?
We’re on our own, exposed; under a cradle of sagging wires in a pylon avenue, on a red path. Marc’s foot is swollen and he’s beginning to lag behind. Bill Drummond is still buzzing; logging blackthorn blossom and brooding on his Unabomber assignment. The Lee Navigation, keeping us company for so many hours, provokes Drummond into a rhapsody on crashed cars, the road movie he made with Jimmy Cauty in homage to Chris Petit’s Radio On.