Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (15 page)

The 2012 Olympics were a noisy sequel. The original Hackney Games had been witnessed by vast crowds. In 1857, James Baum, an impresario based at the White Lion public house in Wick Lane, created a running track on one acre of his own property. He organized boxing matches and the ‘Victoria Park Races’, a modest version of the current extravaganza. The White Lion track was made from gravel and followed the natural features of the ground. Spectators massed in the centre of the track or up on the railway embankment. There were long-distance pedestrian races, handicapped runs and wrestling bouts. A number of records were set. William ‘The Crow-catcher’ Lang came down from Middlesbrough in 1865, to take the world one-mile record with a time of four minutes seventeen and a half seconds. Not bad on an uneven track with an uphill section and a mob pressing tight to the verge. John ‘The Gateshead Clipper’ White established a six-mile record that stood for sixty years, before it was broken by Paavo Nurmi, the legendary Finn, in 1921.

The fame of the White Lion track was such that Louis Bennett, a Native American known as Deerfoot, crossed the Atlantic to challenge our English champions. Four thousand people, many arriving after the race started, travelled from Fenchurch Street Station. As the series progressed, crowds grew: 10,000 were expected when Baum put up his own version of the blue fence, around the back of the course, to secure it from freeloaders. The railway embankment was enclosed to form a grandstand. Private boxes were provided for the great and the good (the wealthy). ‘Every nook and crevice from which a glimpse of the contest could be obtained was occupied,’ reported the
Sporting Life
. ‘And no little merriment was caused by the repeated break downs of lottery platforms.’

Baum, as Warren Roe reports in a thoroughly researched piece in
Hackney History
, ‘was also a bit of a philanthropist, always keen to promote events that would benefit the poor and under-privileged’. He organized fund-raisers for the distressed cotton workers of Lancashire.

It couldn’t last. That moment of balance between the fading pastoral of the marshes and the industrial imperative of dye works and fish-curing sheds. The argument between Arthur Villiers, who wanted to see Eton Manor funds used for practical projects, clubs for urchins, and the Church authorities, who proposed the construction of a great tower, was a rehearsal for much that would follow. The vertical thrust of a single structure, dominating place by overlooking it, would be opposed, repeatedly, by horizontal energies: which are always democratic, free-flowing, uncontained.

Sneaking a glance at my watch, tracking every tick of time, fixed to my stiff chair in the limbo of the Eton Mission, I played over the stories I had read: the races run, the forgotten benefactors recovered through research by local historians in vanishing libraries. It was left to the
Sporting Life
to compose the tragic elegy.

‘Hackney Wick – alas! what a falling off! … The place has been allowed to fall into such a state of decay that it is enough to give one the horrors to look at it … The whole wears such a woebegone aspect as to plainly betoken that the once famed Hackney Wick must soon be numbered among the things that have been.’

Under the dust of development, the brutal imperatives of the current regime, I sickened. Books, paintings, and property, were a burden, symptoms of the disease. I wanted to walk away and to keep walking. I had not recovered from my orbital circuit, my tramp around the M25 motorway loop, that perfect icon of endlessness. I dosed myself with German road movies (better without thesubtitles). And Chinese poets, driven out of China, seeing London with fresh eyes. Yang Lian, relocated to Stamford Hill, contemplated the margins of the River Lea. ‘People he meets all his life are as unavoidable as this place.’

Lying awake at first light I hear the click of the letter box, the sound of a single item hitting bare boards. I do not leap from the bed: another bill. Small businesses are going under, which seems to be part of the great scheme of things. Talk to an established postman, if you can find one, and they’ll describe a gradual erosion of confidence, grotesque schemes thought out by computers and enforced by clipboard management: impossible rounds, no overtime, no incentives to deliver a decent service. The landscape, in the shadow of the Olympic Park, is in the process of being brought on-stream as a virtual paradise. The model is German, old East and older West: Honecker’s urban planners, the propaganda of Dr Goebbels. A surgical removal of stubborn traces of the local makes way for a mindless verticality. Statements of control. New blocks, lacking Berlin’s communal courtyards, are positioned for convenient access to the extended malls that will replace the free-flowing anarchy of the street market. Tessa Jowell, dismissing a critic of the Stratford grand project, remarked: ‘He’s a man who doesn’t like shopping.’

The white envelope, with the latest bill, addressed by hand, had wedged itself neatly into a crack between floorboards. Where I left it, quivering slightly, when I walked out to meet the Chinese-British photographer Ian Teh. A man whose surname my monoglot laptop sniffily corrected to the definite article.

After the incident – we’ll return to that later – film crews arrived on my doorstep from all over Europe. America too. A brief item on the
Today
programme, followed by a blog from the presenter, making a bullet-point summary of a long-winded essay I’d written months ago, provoked an Olympic feeding frenzy. Belgians, Germans, Italians, French: civilized and serious-minded communicators solicited a guided stroll through the dust storm. Their reports might run for as long as two minutes, probably less, so they were never going to walk the entire blue-fence circuit. A hired people carrier, stacked with camera boxes and tripods, would park on Wick Lane, near the barrier with the weave of memorial flowers. The presenter, after checking hair and make-up in a hand mirror, would follow me on to the Greenway. They never got further than the site where the skeletal stadium was emerging from the clay like a waking crocodile. Wraparound weirdness overwhelmed the cultural tourists, huge skies the like of which they had not previously encountered. Concrete funnels dispensing liquid slurry into a perpetual stream of trucks. Rinsed earth in mounds. Swaying cranes. New developments with picture windows mesmerized by the virulent green of the duckweed-clogged canals and backrivers.

‘I am becoming paranoid for people like yourself who regularly visit or live on land around the Olympic Park,’ Bill Parry-Davies told me. ‘The Lloyds Shoot tip is where some really nasty stuff was found, a forgotten dump situated on the Olympic arena site. The West Ham tip and the banks of culverts also appear to have been randomly covered with radioactive substances. God only knows what they dredged out of the Lea.’

Much of the work, so it appears from an article by Ted Jeory and David Jarvis in the
Daily Express
, was to facilitate the construction of a massive bunker, ‘the size of half a football pitch’. It was hidden beneath an approach ramp, ‘next to a site where new homes will be built before the 2012 Games’. Toxic soil, 7,300 tonnes of it, lined with a plastic membrane, was buried in a ‘disposal cell’, between the railway station and the river. Residue from luminous watch dials, churned up in the development process, leached into the water table. Thorium, a radioactive isotope, has an estimated half-life of fourteen billion years. But who’s counting?

Olivier Pascal-Moussellard, from the Paris magazine
Télérama
, came over to do an interview, as part of a special London issue. Checking his copy, on his return, Olivier rang me: ‘Is it really so bad?’ The London issue was intended to promote the place, to prove that we are not just beefeater heritage and Oxford Street shopping. (Now you can shop at Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush or a quarry in Thames Gateway.) ‘Have you perhaps been a little negative in your opinions? Can you strike an optimistic note for the future?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘The quality of the complaints has improved. Now we have an active response in the edgelands. More anger, more subversion than I’ve seen in decades. Thatcher brought about the punk moment. Nude Labour have midwifed the 2012 apocalypse.’

The London offered by
Télérama
was a pop version of that design classic, Harry Beck’s Underground map, with Charles Saatchi as the destination hub in the west and ‘Peter’ Doherty in the east. The significant geographical zones are: Hackney, Brixton, Chelsea, Kilburn, Notting Hill, Ilford, Paddington, Charing Cross Road. Ian Teh wanted me to point him in the direction of images that would do justice to my reinvigorated borough. A problematic assignment.

Teh moved lightly and easily, it was hard to know if he was a stranger in this place or if, holding back, he wanted to see it through my eyes. This was 1 April, the Day of Fools in the City, the G20 shindig: an economic summit confronted by protestors. Climate camps had been attempted in Bishopsgate and squats invaded by police enforcers. I decided not to walk down there, as a witness, on the assumption that the morning would pass off peacefully and that the dramas would come, with the usual kettling, thuggery and violence, later in the day; when boredom, frustration and a warped sense of entitlement let unidentified paramilitaries off the leash.

The photographer concurred. ‘Nothing to shoot,’ he said, unwilling to compete with the massed cameras of the men in Plexiglas helmets, snoops in blacked-out vans. Image-harvesting is the favoured security technique: watch and wait, gather evidence for retrospective action. But the obsessive practice of recording an event, as it is happening, or before it happens, incubates paranoia. There is always the requirement to justify budget. Demonstrations, as the G20 battle proved, are simply image wars. Robotic surveillance footage in real time. Directed portraiture of potential malefactors, frozen headshots of figures isolated from the seething mob, is a process as deluded and obsolete as the taxonomies of criminals, lunatics and sub-humans by Alphonse Bertillon with his ‘Synoptic Table of Facial Expressions for the Purposes of Systematic Identification’ in 1895. Footage, as Pudovkin and the early theorists of film editing knew, can be organized to create guilt by association. If you are wired to hopped-up American cop-show TV as you sit around the station house, you go out to find it. Eyes bulging, fists bunched, weapons primed. The key actor is the cameraman. The sequence of events leading to the death of the unfortunate newspaper-seller Ian Tomlinson was revealed, not through the sworn statements of officers, or dubious medical reports, but through an accumulation of scatter-footage from the mobile phones of people in the crowd.

It’s almost impossible now to walk, by back ways, from Shoreditch to Dalston, Hoxton to Victoria Park, without encountering some species of film crew. Blood-splash forensics. Fashion shoot. Soap opera. Certain pubs, certain stretches of towpath, abandoned hospitals, are quotations: ghost milk. Invasive caravans of wardrobe and catering. Hurtful bursts of light. The priestly attendants in puffa-jacket black. The episodes of yawning, aggressive, public boredom.

I led Teh to a number of the standard Hackney photo opportunities, locations distressed and diminished by over-recording, but he would have none of it. ‘Light’s wrong.’ Most of the characters who turn up, flustered, between commissions, are only too happy to catch a bit of fence, a shimmer of canal, and away. Not this man, not at all: we weren’t even close. He didn’t touch his camera. And he asked no questions. Rather, I interrogated him. He told me about his Chinese coal-mine project, the coking plants at night. Dystopian realism at its most extreme. In a collection called
Dark Clouds
he demonstrated how the neon flicker and the hard bright surfaces of the Chinese economic miracle were rooted in coal dirt, sweating grey walls, brutally circumscribed lives.

I offered him, more as a trial shot than anything else, since he was reluctant to reveal any notion of what he was after, the canal bridge where Tony Lambrianou dumped the car keys after the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. You get water-shadows rippling on the curve of bricks. You get the immaculately painted sign for
RON’S EELS AND SHELL FISH
. (You don’t get Ron himself. His van has probably been declared a health risk; the pubs he serviced are boarded up.) The sign is a commissioned irony, an artwork trading on nostalgia. You get a slab of corrugated fencing:
TOWPATH CLOSED
. And you get the recent development, Adelaide Wharf, part-occupied and presenting rectangles of furtive electricity, blues, reds, oranges, to contrast with the dying of the afternoon.

Cat and Mutton Bridge? The view towards the gas-holders? Not worth breaking our stride, for even a moment. Development spasms in Broadway Market and along the canal were discreet, sensitively achieved, when compared with what Teh had witnessed in pre-Olympic Beijing, the banishments to remote tower blocks in gaps between orbital motorways. Communities based around courtyards, teeming with noise and life, were dispersed. One example of the old way was left, as heritage for tourists. Teh met an old man who travelled back, every week, to sit in the street, in the space where his former home had once stood. The new stadiums were unused. They had served their propaganda purpose.

Not one shot had been taken. This was becoming interesting. I was pushed to go beyond the story I had been peddling so long, stones stamped flat by repetition. There was a sentence in a piece I’d written for the
London Review of Books
about how the Victorian cobbles near the canal survived because we never developed a revolutionary class angry enough to tear them out, to smash the windows of council offices and police stations. The editors, passing no comment, cut the whole thing.

A cyclist, coming out of the canal-bridge café where they mended punctures and served ethical coffee, was heading south towards the City protests. ‘Basically, they’ve put all their eggs in the carbon-trading basket,’ he said. To a slim blonde girl in black bodysuit, trotting off to London Fields, a spotted-Dalmatian accessory at her heels.