In his 2001 novel Millennium People J.G. Ballard made an apocalyptic dystopia of Chelsea Harbour, wreathing the ugly pagoda of its central tower with the smoke from the Volvos and Range Rovers set on fire by its revolting tenants: bored, nihilistic bourgeois; spectacularists seeking some vivification in violence. I now realise, on this very walk, that Jim has made this Thames littoral his own. Not that he really cares about London per se, although, looked at another way, he is the purest psychogeographer of us all, ever dissolving the particular and the historical in the transient and the psychic. Making states into states of mind. From Terry Farrell’s spec office block — now occupied by the Secret Service — to Chelsea Harbour, and on upriver, the last fifteen years have seen a great and glassy burgeoning of these — Jim’s mind children — ‘luxury’ developments. At first rectilinear and concrete, latterly faced with ‘weathered’ boards, to give them that authentic ‘wharf’ feel, the apartment blocks would be just as at home in Malmö or on the Mediterranean.
I won’t get very far if memories, dreams and reflections continue to obscure this bright, late November morning. In the 1960s, even a decade after the Clean Air Act, I can still remember there being London ‘particulars’ so thick we had to feel our way along the privet hedges back home from the Tube station. These are cloudy memories of a foggy past, but all is clear on the embankment beside Lord Norman Foster’s atelier; even at this hour young architects are a’CADing, and through the white graticule of the blind I can see neat, white models of towns, plotted in wood and plastic. These are graphic, apprehensible, unlike the two-millennia-old moraine I’m struggling across.
Thankfully, past Battersea Bridge things clear a little. I’m gathering pace and breasting the ebb tide of commuters walking, jogging and cycling along the riverside path. I am the reverse commuter, for while they head from the suburbs into the city centre, I pack my briefcase and walk to work on the periphery; it’s there that I stake my claim, mine my words. I’m gathering pace — and satisfactorily losing definition. Soon I’ll be Ballardian myself, my name a prosaic Anglo-Saxon puzzle — Vaughan, Ventriss, Laing — which, even when solved, will tell you only my profession and my class.
But at St Mary’s, Battersea, a perfect jewel of a late eighteenth-century church, I’m derailed once more. A stiletto steeple stabs up from this solid yet airy building. At the foot of the small, irregular churchyard, the barges of urban shedonists are permanently moored; while all around mount the gleaming bluffs of still more luxury apartments. Somewhere inside these there are dot-com start-up millionaires, smearing on lube and despair, whereas inside St Mary’s, 220-odd years ago, William Blake married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a local market gardener. She signed the register with an unenigmatic ‘X’. Blake — what would he have made of walking to New York? Blake, of whose work it’s been said: this is what a bad artist would produce if he were to be a genius.
I see the church door is open — it’s always been locked when I’ve passed this way before — so I enter, to hear the creed intoned by a crop-headed curate: ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son. .’ and then the whispered gentility of the all-female congregation’s response. In the vestibule there are handy umbrellas to keep these dry communicants still drier. The church’s interior is as expected: manila envelopes lain out for donations, jam jars containing weedy specimens, and a dangling chandelier as organic as a beehive. This is the desiccated diminuendo of the Church of England; what began in the moist rage of paterfamilias manqué is ending with a little parched glory for the (absent) father.
I think Blake would’ve depicted the walk to New York thus: with me a small figure, crushed beneath the dead weight of the blue sky, while across this loose swathe the fuselages of the aircraft coming in to land at Heathrow are struggling to separate from one another, like the proto-Muybridge, time-lapse etchings that the bad genius made of angels and human traffic. The nose cones of 747s and airbuses stretched apart, between them stria of ectoplasm, time-goo.
At Battersea Reach the riverbanks draw back. Think Rotterdam, and the kindergarten Cubism of Dutch contemporary architecture, yet bowdlerised still further by the cost considerations of these London developers, the complacent edificers of Kingfisher and Oyster wharves. The world is getting hotter; hotter right here as I head inland, sopping up monoxide as I circumambulate the gyroscopic advertising hoarding that dangles above the roundabout at the end of Wandsworth Bridge. Maybe I should buy the Navman sat-nav advertised on a fly-poster, a snip at £149.99, inclusive of free set-up and demo? With a satellite navigation system, I need never again inhabit the physical world; I can simply look from dash-mounted screen to windscreen and back again, as I drive — on instrumentation alone — from my office workstation to my domestic entertainment system. What a blessed relief.
Blessed relief from Jew’s Lane and the gnomon of a lamp-post, its hard shadow lying across a cycle path, defined by paint as thick as toothpaste. Blessed relief from the old London brick of a Fuller’s pub, that’s advertised, bizarrely, by a sign depicting a giant hand picking up an ocean-going liner. London Pride — that’s Fuller’s finest tipple. In my drinking days I had plenty of it — pride, that is. Blessed relief from the Wandsworth waste depot: yellowy container-loads of composted shit, blood and obsolete electrical goods, being winched out over the river, then down on to barges, that in turn will be pushed through the twisting colon of the Thames, downriver.
Here, the Wandle, one of London’s lost rivers, joins the Thames. Two years ago, in the summer, I turned left at this fluvial junction and followed its course upstream, past William Morris’s wallpaper factory at Merton and Lady Hamilton’s house. A female psychogeographer, if ever there was one, Emma diverted the Wandle to run through her grounds, and dubbed it ‘the Nile’ in honour of her lopsided squeeze. I went on, past where the Wandle rises at Carshalton, thence to Croydon, thence up and on to the North Downs, where, at a curious feature called the Norr Chalk Pinnacle, I could see the entire lower valley of the Thames spread out before me: the flybuzz of aircraft circling over Heathrow, the tiny minarets of the city, the Jew’s harp of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, vibrating at Dartford.
I plodded on, down into the Surrey weald, up into the Ashdown Forest, down into the Sussex weald and up again on to the South Downs. I didn’t stop until I reached Newhaven on the south coast, three days after I’d quit the Thames. I’ve been doing this for a few years now: stepping from my London house and stalking a hundred miles or so into the hinterland. In middle age I no longer want to know where I’m going — only where I’ve been all these years.
This summer I walked from where I live now, to where I was born, to where I grew up, to where I was at school, to where I was at university. Stockwell — Charing Cross — Hampstead Garden Suburb — Finchley — Oxford. My own Trieste — Zurich — Paris, the itinerary of an internal exile. When I was a teenager I assumed that I’d travel — and far. Then my father emigrated, my mother died and my brothers moved abroad, while I remained here, in London. Now I realise I never wanted to travel at all, simply get away from — what psychotherapeutic geographers dub — my Family of Origin. How good of them to leave me in vacant possession of an entire metropolis, so that I could furnish it with my own memories, dreams and reflections.