Barratt Homes — whose crane did for the bus driver — are putting up new apartments here in anticipation of the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s behemoth dominates this quarter of London — perhaps, psychically, the entire city. The footprint of the building is larger than Trafalgar Square; the main turbine hall could engulf Wren’s St Paul’s, dome and all. Its distinctive, inverse-pool-table shape squats on the beer-soaked pub carpet of the London sky, yet for almost a quarter-century now the hulk has been hollowed out: an awesome shell of a Modernist ruin.
While the old Power Station could engulf St Paul’s, it does eat developers. There’s something cheering in the way it gobbles them up. First it was Robert McAlpine, the construction tycoon and Tory Party Treasurer, and now the Hwangs, the brothers who run Park, a Hong Kong-based property consortium, have been ingurgitated. They were bruiting their plans about town for a while: they were going to stuff the hulk with luxury flats, multiplex cinemas, design studios, hotels, conference centres and restaurants. Ah, restaurants! When the Hwangs’ PR flak took me round the sight, we went up on to the roof and he pointed to the top of one of the signature chimneys: ‘There’s going to be a circular restaurant in there,’ he said. ‘The most exclusive in London, only sixteen diners, round a single table accessed by a lift.’
The only thing that got eaten was his bosses. The costs mounted. The Power Station is built from thousands upon thousands of courses of muddy London bricks. It’s as close to a Babylonian ziggurat as any twentieth-century building could be. The mortar between these bricks perished during the Power Station’s working life. As it’s a listed building, any developers are under an obligation to preserve its fabric extant; and when they buy the building they all swear they will, even if it means repointing every single brick. But the truth is, you couldn’t repoint Battersea Power Station even if you had every bricklayer in Romania to hand.
Now the Hwangs have flogged it to an Irish consortium, Treasury Holdings, and the new owners are making all the same noises they once did, little burps and lip smacks of developing satiety. A Council spokesman says, ‘It’s early days’, but I say the table’s already set in the chimney-top restaurant, and developer is on the menu.
The foolish purchasers of Barratt Homes’ apartments — who promise on their billboards that prospective residents will be next to the most exciting new development in the city — will instead live out their mortgages confronted by this crumbling, acid-corroded behemoth.
So Battersea Power Station stands, as a dead weight, pinioning the Thames littoral. As I stride alongside it and look to the north-east, I see the glinting tiara of the London Eye Ferris wheel, poking above the jumble of warehouse units and the Cringle Dock Waste Management Centre. Beside the Eye are the golden finials of the Houses of Parliament: Walt Disney and Sir Walter Scott collaborate on a fantasia of a democracy. The hoardings screening off the foreground of the Power Station are plastered with tag lines: ‘A is for Art’, ‘F is for Fashion’, ‘H is for Homes’ — such inspiring remedial instruction.
In Battersea Park a few commuters are hurrying along the gravel paths and potholed roadways. The gondola that adverts the Gondola Café is heeled over in the muddy waters of the boating lake. On the far shore rises the rockery, where my smaller children like to clamber in teensy ravines choked with empty beer cans. So the sublime ends. I work my way down through the glades and avenues, a Victorian conception of a municipal garden-for-all, imposed atop this old shambles where once gypsies camped and knackers boiled horses’ corpses down for glue.
It’s always thus: the first few hours of a long walk out of London. Gummed up with memories and referentia, my very psyche not only feels sticky — but thickening by the yard. It occurs to me that if I am akin to any literary traveller, it’s Laurence Sterne, oscillating in the moment, dizzied by impressions and unable to make it from the remise door to the Calais Inn, let alone progress into France and Italy.
A recent re-landscaping of the Park has raised hillocks; grassy lipomas curve parenthetically around new public toilets that are, themselves, modishly curvilinear and walled with glass bricks. Winter pansies flare in serried ranks. Yet to my eye the ornamental troughs filled with scuzzy water, the boxy shrub holders decorated with sheet metal cut into flame shapes and the circlets of flagpoles, are more present. No tumulus nouveau can obscure these: the remnants of the old Battersea Funfair that I revered as a child.
A school friend’s tenth birthday party. His father drove us down here from Highgate in his E-Type Jaguar. The father and his two sons — all three had tight globes of curly hair; Jewfros, you might say. He gave all us kids a fifty pence coin to spend — shocking largesse; the pentagonal heft of the novelty currency, sharp in my hand. I couldn’t wait to spend it on the Watersplash ride. I wasn’t surprised when, a quarter-century later, this cool, beneficent dude emerged as one of the chief benefactors of Tony Blair’s New Labour.
Or fazed by The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a British sci-fi film, made in the year of my birth, which swam on to TV during my dopey years in the late seventies. The protagonists are on the rollercoaster at Battersea Funfair when the Thames transmogrifies into a sheet of flame. A joint of Moroccan hash and hokey special effects — what could be finer? And now? Why, the parallax of time — which draws formerly distant events into tight proximity — has quite as much force as the nuclear tests that, in the film, push the earth from its axis and send it careering towards the sun. 1961, then 1971, now 2006 — the futuristic lineaments of the 1950s Funfair withstand the passage of the decades, while all about them insect joggers buzz and blip.
I recall the summer of 1989, and the wedding of some friends held in the lee of the Peace Pagoda, at that time a new and startling structure, like the Albert Memorial squatted in by four svelte Buddhas. I remember — what seemed to me — a rancorous speech by the bride’s father. I put a version of it into my novella, Cock. Then it’s a decade later, and I’m lifting one of my kids up on to the top tier of the Pagoda, so he or she can consort with the Prince of Non-Attachment. It was raining, a Parks Police car came sidling up the avenue and one of the cops hailed us through a megaphone: ‘Get down off the Buddha!’
Now, proceeding, I see over there the little plantation of trees beside Albert Bridge. My friend John McVicar, once the most wanted man in Britain — latterly not much wanted at all, so he moved to Bulgaria to hunt wild boar — planted a tree here for his late mother. It would’ve been in the mid-1990s. Could it be that inapposite conifer, the quick green fuse of which lances through cast-iron railings? Below the Thames unrolls the smooth production line of its ebb tide, upon which are bolted together garbage scows heading down from Wandsworth.
Perhaps. Oscar and Jimmy walk on the far side of the river, plotting nocturnes, proleptically graffiti-spraying butterflies. Over towards Chelsea shines the single, gold ball atop the Chelsea Harbour development. This was the motif — the ball rises and falls with the tide, like a ball cock in a cistern — with which I opened my 1997 novel Great Apes. Chelsea Harbour, an integrated development of luxury flats and costly retail outlets. Think gym, think gated, think Eurotrash. Michael Caine had a restaurant here — perhaps he still does — certainly, it would be fair to say that his entire acting career led up to this imposture. The chirpy Cockney rhymer: ‘My name is ’arry Palmer, I run a restaurant in Chelsea ’arbour.’