Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (19 page)

To cheat the future and find out what was coming to Stratford, I headed further west: to Shepherd’s Bush. A giant Westfield mall had now opened, with the approval of Ken Livingstone, central government, style magazines, and anyone else with a weakness for the sublimely ridiculous. The madness to which we were terminally mortgaged had arrived in the disguise of a sleek, vanity-project swimming pool, looking as if it were there to demonstrate the readiness of some ambitious provincial city to welcome the Commonwealth Games (circa late 1950s, early 1960s). A chlorine-green block, brand identity in italicized script, rising out of one of those nuisance clumps of urban wilderness that occupy grunge nowheres between busy feeder roads. Doing nothing, up for grabs. The excuse for a traffic-jammed ramp. Westfield, this post-architectural storage shed, giving nothing away as to form or function, is both a beacon statement and a portal to the underexploited west of old suburbs and dormitory clusters. Vanished railway towns. Villages waiting for the canals to revive. The planning thesis being to free up congestion by taking more cars off the road: they will all be stacked (at a price) in Westfield’s limitless parking bays. You can connect, from the revamped Shepherd’s Bush station, with Croydon and Brighton. And if the journey ahead is fearsome enough, you’ll be in no hurry to leave. Westfield is a metaphor for eternity, as a waiting room, a zone you can’t escape, never having properly arrived.

When I fall into conversation with one of the dozens of photographers roaming this winter wonderland, he is astonished to learn that there will very soon be
another
Westfield, a duplicate of the duplicate: out east, in Stratford. This definitive non-space, a managed illusion, is nothing more than a rehearsal for the grandest project of them all, the zillion-pound consumer hive that is the only guaranteed legacy of the 2012 Olympics. The final solution, the great theory of everything, has achieved resolution: Westfield. Where art meets aspiration. A toy box constructed to look as if it had been put on earth to star in a disaster movie. To straddle a fault in the earth’s crust. To go up in flames. To come apart in waterfalls of tumbling, slow-motion glass.

No question about it, the funny-money retail cathedral is New Labour’s response to the meltdown of the financial markets. A spectator sport for those who can no longer afford to service the debt on their debt. Shops are strictly for browsing. The profit is in the car park. In coffee rewards. And fast-food pit stops for low-ranking BBC personnel taking any excuse to get out of White City: for a glimpse of sky, between studio labyrinth and this enclosed and airless city of non-penetrative consensual consumption.

Current political dogma chimes with Westfield’s philosophy, as revealed in a set of lavish promotional brochures, so self-important that you expect them to appear soon in some dealer’s rare-book catalogue: ‘Being and Buying. Lifestyle, not just product.’ Jean-Paul Sartre-lite for shopaholics. Walter Benjamin doing Saatchi-speak. A dying political regime, having presided over a shitstorm of mounting hysteria and unpoliced greed, lets us understand that it is our civic duty to shop until we drop. The twin Westfield estates, subsidized traffic islands, are the contemporary equivalent of the baroque churches Nicholas Hawksmoor thumped down in lawless riverbank regions of East London. Goodbye six-inch nails, mousetraps, brown paper, bottles of ink, sugar buns, evening newspapers. The anarchic horizontal pedestrianism of the Bush is superseded by the verticality of the secure monolith. Exclusion zones with parking for 4,500 cars. The selling point of Westfield is that it’s easy to get away, to go somewhere else. New station, new connections, new roads: when you are here, you are not
here
. It is barely worth struggling out of the car. Turn straight round, after that compulsory coffee hit, and you might beat the rush hour.

What my new photographer friend doesn’t get, the thing that makes him so nervous he needs help to secure his tripod, is the fact that he’s been snapping away for an hour and he hasn’t been arrested. There’s plenty of visible security, but they behave like Photoshop clones: other-worldly, have-a-nice-day smiles, open-handed waves. Retail parks of the old school, Lakeside or Bluewater, are defined by a total prohibition on freelance imagery. Lift a camera, as I once did, in the car park of Ikea at Thurrock, and you’ll get an insight into what the Berlin Wall was about. Try coming up with a coherent explanation of why it’s worth recording the pattern of lines on the grid of parking bays or the colours on the trolley of the Kwik Fit squeegee operatives. When they allow you to photograph anything that takes your fancy, you know something is out of kilter. You’ve accessed a whole new game. When there is nothing to hide, you are in the wrong place.

‘Roads surrounding the 23-acre mall were in chaos last night with up to mile-long tailbacks,’ reported the
Evening Standard.
‘Motorists complained of half-hour queues to travel just a few hundred yards.’ And this despite a £200-million upgrade on the traffic infrastructure (closures, eternal road works). The major jam is in reaching the jam, escaping the low-ceilinged short-term-Heathrow parking bays. It’s a form of a reality TV endurance test, played out on 680 CCTV cameras. ‘I’m a consumer, get me out of here.’

Journos and puffers eager to take on any excursion that gets them out of the house came to a near unanimous verdict on the Westfield experience: wow! They loved it, almost as much as they once loved the Millennium Dome. ‘Never had occasion to go near such a thing before, but it’s rather jolly. The food,
you can eat it
.’ Tame hacks suspend reflexes conditioned by dismal expectations of motorway service stations and airport holding pens to deliver their tributes to bling enterprise, strictly-come-shopping frivolity. Blizzards of top-dollar PR – ‘think try-out zones, pop-up stores’ – launch the vast permafrost barn like a James Bond film premiere. Like the Turner Prize on ice. A complimentary champagne bar soliciting thank-you notes in the form of column inches.

The western suburbs are parasitical on Heathrow, not Kensington or Knightsbridge. The new Shepherd’s Bush mall (twenty minutes by cab from check-in) is a duty-free zone, an improved and extended version of the downtime limbo of waiting-for-your-flight-to-be-called. More shopping, less flying. It’s as if they took the former West London Terminal at Cromwell Road and filled it with discounted Harrods stock for a year-long sale. Then reassigned upbeat hostesses in combat make-up, heels and name tags to point out the nearest exits. Heathrow is as much a period piece as J. G. Ballard’s favoured emporium, the Bentall Centre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The model for his fundamentalist mall in
Kingdom Come.
Airports are so solipsistic these days, so embarrassed about their role as bucket-shop service stations, less glamorous than the Watford Gap, that they have taken to hiring philosophers to make them sound more interesting. Like prisons, oil rigs and Championship football clubs, Heathrow made a play for our sympathies by signing a writer in residence. Hoping that, in a flush of positive media coverage, we would forget about the mountains of lost luggage somewhere in Italy and the escalators that refused to escalate. Ballard reckoned that airport roads are the same everywhere: sheds, generic hotels, car lots, pharmaceutical companies. And a vague sense of dread. Will Self, a literalist, examined the thesis by walking it.

Westfield is an extension of the Westway, that vestigial road in the sky. The landing strip of a flight simulator. A Ballard theme park from the time of
Concrete Island
. A teasing figment of a Bauhaus potentiality that never happened.

Escaping London, suddenly privileged drivers note Ernö Goldfinger’s 31-storey brutalist stack, the Trellick Tower: which was completed in 1972, two years before the publication of Ballard’s novel, his recasting of Daniel Defoe. Robert Maitland, prisoner of
Concrete Island
, suffers a blow-out to the front near-side wheel of his Jaguar, before plunging down an embankment, ‘six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway’. Taking that invented spur for the Shepherd’s Bush slip road and its connection with the western motorway, six hundred yards would land the confused motorist somewhere in the future Westfield site. Maitland is an architect. Westfield is his posthumous dream.

‘Rising above the crowded nineteenth-century squares and grim stucco terraces, this massive concrete motion-sculpture is an heroically isolated fragment of the modern city London might have become,’ Ballard wrote in his contribution to a collection of fragments known as
London: City of Disappearances.
‘Westway, like Angkor Wat, is a stone dream that will never awake. As you hurtle along this concrete deck you briefly join the twentieth century and become a citizen of a virtual city-state borne on a rush of radial tyres.’

By describing what he saw before him, a vision of multiple realities, Ballard located Westfield before it was conceived, before it achieved its optimum state as a laptop doodle. Construction was unnecessary and ill advised. Fiction road-tests the future without obligation to buy. Novels, dreams that do not fade, hook themselves on the perimeter fence of the culture like flapping rook wings of black plastic. First the variants appear, consciously and subconsciously, in other books. Then films, television. And, finally, GP architecture: the art of original quotation. Robert Maitland’s Jaguar, catastrophe in suspension, surfaces (along with the Defoe reference) in Chris Petit’s 1993 novel,
Robinson.
The narrator, falling-down drunk, is taken into a multi-storey car park, given the keys to a Jag, and invited to put his foot down when he hits the Westway.

Questioned about this sequence, Petit said that, at the time of writing, Ballard was not a direct influence. He was remembering his own film,
Radio On.
Being high on a tower block, suffering from vertigo, getting the panoramic shot of a car leaving town. ‘The car,’ he wrote, ‘seemed to drive itself, responding to the merest suggestion, whispering forward with us cocooned in leather-bound silence, protected behind the cinemascope windscreen.’

Robinson
opens with twin epigrams. One is from Ballard: ‘Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.’ The other is from the poet Weldon Kees, a man who vanished, perhaps jumping from a bridge, perhaps changing identity. Kees writes of: ‘Robinson alone … staring at a wall.’ At the unreadable blankness of Westfield? A barrier separating retail drifters on their elevated terraces from the ghosts of the hinterland, the crazed drivers flirting with suicide. And reading London’s disposable ruins as recovered temples in the Cambodian jungle.

‘A thin yellow light lay across the island,’ Ballard wrote, ‘an unpleasant haze that seemed to rise from the grass, festering over the ground as if over a wound that had never healed.’

A strip of land, trapped between stilted urban clearway and snarled feeder roads, ripe for the virus of investment capital. The block-building could be, but is not, a flagship hospital. A bug-breeding facility storing otherwise eliminated Victorian poverty plagues. A rumour factory like its neighbour, the White City BBC complex, where sweating politicians are being patted with powder, before going into a glass cubicle. Where they will be ventriloquized by sharp young men, outside the window, waving clipboards, nodding or miming throat-cut gestures.

Westfield does what airports do and does it better: the escalators work, you don’t lose your luggage, there’s a wide choice of near-food. And, above everything, swimming and swirling, there is:
light
. ‘Very eclectic, very bold, very London.’ Miniature clouds caught in the triangular panels of a celestial roof. Manufactured light. Imported light. Quotation light: waterfall-chandeliers of fizz and flash, star-fields of shimmer and glint. A ballroom of the vanities. We should be waltzing through the galleries, admiring our own reflections, not creeping like zombies in diving shoes.

I started to write a letter to Ballard, describing the Westfield set in terms of
Kingdom Come,
and all the other fictions and essays he had produced, in anticipation of this event. But it was pointless. The space had substance as somewhere imagined, not experienced. Psychopathic potentialities, tried and tested in Ballard’s honed language formulae, made the
fact
of the mall seem dull and obvious. It is not that his stories prophesied a certain type of architectural folly: they made such things redundant, ridiculous. And therefore perfectly suited to the landscape into which Australian developers had brokered a loud introduction. The trick with Ballard’s invented architects, Robert Maitland in
Concrete Island
, Anthony Royal in
High-Rise
, is that they don’t build anything; they suffer the consequences of building. Materially successful, detached, they are the equivalents of the deracinated poets who populate the mythology of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Poets are speakers, silenced by the world: invisibles. Architects are watchers, connoisseurs of entropy, appreciating from a high balcony the physics of smoke and sunlight across a burning city.

‘I remembered my last moments in the dome,’ Ballard wrote in
Kingdom Come
, ‘looking back at the fires that raced along the high galleries from one store to the next … I watched the spectators around me, standing silently at the railing … In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.’

I’ve never been much good at recognizing a division between fiction and reality, past and future, this place and that place. Does it help to know that Chris Petit, ransacking his memory-bank for
Robinson
, recalled the Jaguar he bought, second hand, on the day of his son’s birth in 1984? Does the tyre that blew on Ballard’s Ford Zephyr lose legitimacy by being shifted from Chiswick to the Westway? Photographs taken, after the crash, leave the vehicle, according to the author, looking fit for Athens or Havana. Petit, speaking of days riding around East Berlin in a white Jaguar, the only one in town, is smoothing the routine for a future novel. Ballard has frequently credited his friend and partner, Claire Walsh, as something more than the inspiration for the character Catherine in
Crash
: Claire
is
Catherine. ‘Shall I call her Claire?’ he asked. ‘Better not.’ But the narrator remains: James Ballard.