Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (28 page)

A set of ‘executive apartments’, Rushgrove Gate, was fabricated in Woolwich by Imagine Homes, a company run by Grant Bovey, husband of television presenter Anthea Turner. So far, so Ballardian. But the force of place, as Anna Minton revealed in
Ground Control
, undid this pipe dream. Bovey announced that all the flats had been sold ‘off-plan’ before they had been placed on the market. Units in the riverside tower we visited for the Ballard radio programme were selling fast, the lady with the dangerous heels told me: £350,000 a pop and they are fighting to bag them. One day soon there will be a high-speed riverboat service, a new bridge across the Thames. Woolwich has secured some Olympic gunplay, target shooting, to underwrite its pretensions. But, just at this moment, the glass stack is primped and polished and as empty as the aftermath of a fire drill. They’re happy to let a radio gang mooch about for hours, while they wait for the next off-piste speculator.

Bovey pulled off a considerable coup in flogging the entire block, in a single package, to an investment company called Veritas. A company with whom he was on excellent terms: he happened to own it. The
Financial Times
revealed that, in the six-week period when the Woolwich apartments were on offer, not one sale had actually been made. The only enquiries came from companies trading in accommodation for homeless people. Investors, Minton points out, receive an excellent return from local councils paying a premium to make up for the tragic shortfall in social housing.

When I hiked through Woolwich with my wife, we recognized the furthest point at which the cultural outflow from the Millennium Dome, that admix of flash-art and hucksterism, was manifest. The Royal Arsenal, armourers to Empire, had converted their barracks and parade ground into apartments, bistro-bars and nude male figures. Rusting sub-Gormley artworks in a defensive circle. The sculptural troop stood on the cobbles, waiting for the word of command, ready to storm the converted storehouse where James Wyatt was once Surveyor of Ordnance. A chipped statue of the Duke of Wellington was relocated, with a new dedication by the Prince of Wales, on 16 June 2005. Was his royal highness doubling up, after a visit to the sewage treatment plant?

Shortly before the O2 Arena opened to the public, I arranged to meet Chris Petit for a day’s walk, between the shamed Dome and the restored Wembley Stadium. In doing so, all unknowingly, we anticipated the progress of the Olympic torch, with its shuttle across town, avoiding Free Tibet demonstrators, jumping on and off unscheduled buses. Petit had some interesting ideas about the relationship between the philosophies of New Labour and the National Socialists in the Germany of the 1930s. I wanted to test my faith in the northwest passage, as a metaphor and a practical solution. We would walk out of my knowledge and through districts of London where Petit had perched at earlier stages of his fitful career.

Psychogeographers talked up the northwest passage as a residue of Tudor England, the period when Dr John Dee could be both an imperial map-maker and an alchemist, a man primed to receive the dictation of angels. With time, the myth of escape moved away from records of expeditions mounted for their trade potential by Sir Hugh Willoughby, Stephen and William Borough. It was a high-risk enterprise, this squeezing through ice floes, over the top of the world, between Atlantic and Pacific, searching for the ‘Arctic Grail’. Englishmen, from Sir Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, ventured in uncharted oceans. The Franklin expedition, like a missing chapter from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, solicited catastrophe. Rumours of cannibalism. Fatty human traces in blackened kettles. Frozen air clamping hard on human vanity.

The cost of walking through riverside territory anchored by the flaccid Dome is disorientation: no firm horizon, history subverted at every turn. Wanting to brief Petit, and to test my pocket recorder, I suggested a pause in Greenwich for a cup of coffee.

‘When did you come up with this theory about Nazi techniques of spin and control influencing Blair and his gang?’

‘There was no immediate moment of realization. I noticed how New Labour developed the habit of forming a divisive bureaucracy in the way that the National Socialists did, in the Hitler period. All those mysterious quangos. I made the banal observation that New Labour was a young party in the way that the Third Reich was new and untested, most of those guys were in their thirties or forties. And as a result they saw themselves as strangely unaccountable. Jonathan Meades pointed to the fact that the Nazis were all foreign in the way that New Labour are Scottish. Hitler was Austrian. Meades listed a whole lot of them. Uncanny parallels.’

‘Was Blair anything more than a game-show host with messianic pretensions?’ I said.

‘If you look at him now,’ Chris replied, ‘he’s like a shape-shifter. One can’t quite remember him. Thatcher, one has strong memories of: as a personality. Blair is a ghost.’

In his loden coat and brown trilby, Petit had the aspect of a character from that Geoffrey Household thriller
Rogue Male
. Public school. Regimental background. Name and rank only. It was tempting to think of him as a deerstalking assassin from the 1930s, after bigger prey: the Führer in his Alpine lodge. Petit favoured the jaded ennui of a colonial adventurer returned to a corrupt metropolis and warding off an imminent descent into melancholia and madness by some highland romp involving heretical Catholic conspiracies, golf courses and handcuffed Russian women with ladders in their sheer black stockings.

He was a terrific Household enthusiast. Household, Buchan, Erskine Childers. All that man-against-nature, future-war stuff. The locations. The detachment. The plain prose. He told me that Peter O’Toole, who gets Hitler in his crosshairs, in Clive Donner’s 1976 film of
Rogue Male
, did a bit of cricket coaching in the nets at his old school, Ampleforth.

‘O’Toole turned up just across the road from where I lived in Willesden Green. His house was not much different from the one we were in. The thing that cost him was a very expensive divorce. He had been in Church Row in Hampstead, a very nice Georgian house. But, like the rest of us, he finished up in Willesden Green, where he cultivated those fast-growing trees and put Mexican gaol-bars over the front window. He was the world’s worst driver. You’d occasionally see him coming straight at you.’

The Meades interpretation of New Labour politics inspired me to repeat viewings of Petit’s feature films. I realized that the underlying themes had been German all along: military occupation, cultural leakage, 24-hour cities of deep assignation.
Radio On
, the 1979 road movie, London to Bristol, was wholly European: a stranger’s eye on English landscape. The back-to-back German films that followed –
Flight to Berlin
and
Chinese Boxes
– were weirdly posthumous. They know, before the credits roll, the game is up. They predict what
Radio On
has already achieved. And they are interesting enough to be saved from the oblivion of an afterlife on DVD. Which gave Petit considerable satisfaction. Unseen (and unchallenged), his lost works acquired a mythical status. He appreciated, before the rest of us, that there was only one city. And its name was Zeroville. In time hip young German critics flew to London to search him out. They discovered ‘a grey-bearded Godard-like’ figure of luminous integrity, the walls of his modest flat covered with a collage of photographs, maps, dates, quotations. A film, without budget, that nobody had to make. The only commission worth accepting, Chris said, is the one that is self-assigned.

We had one day, crossing London, to test my fixation on the northwest passage. Petit, it was soon revealed, favoured a swerve to the east: the flat countries, polders and dikes. The Baltic, Poland. He spoke of the willed flights of writers who plunged headlong into the fire. Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Francis Stuart stumbling towards spectral after-images of Dostoevsky in the ruins of Stalingrad. I babbled about surfing the curvature of space–time. About an escape from Hackney.

The trick in this territory is to keep the O2 Arena on your blind side. At a distance, the big tent squats comfortably among yellow-grey chemical alps, rotting jetties and sliced-up cargo boats. Leave the thing alone and it might work. The surrounding area, fenced off, dressed with unexplained structures, is a precursor of the coming ecology of the collapsed grand project. Hard to decide, as CCTV cameras swivel, if it’s an English Guantánamo or a car-boot sale waiting to happen. Left to its own devices – at considerable cost to our pockets and to the reputations of everybody involved – the Dome exclusion zone is a notable addition to the downriver microclimate: spears of grass breaking through tarmac, artworks degrading into their industrial origins. Toy-town estates in primary colours laid out in contradiction of everything that envelops them. The Dome reeks of compulsory celebration, yellow candles stabbed into icing sugar. The original gas-holder, with its skeletal armature, is the wrapping around a wedding cake that has turned to dust. Nowhere better to smell the rancid hormones of the next terrorist outrage than in fumes coming off stalled traffic trying to squeeze into the Blackwall Tunnel.

You can define the ground between Greenwich and the Thames Barrier very easily: every inch has been either decommissioned or recommissioned. The Trinity Almshouses are slapped down against the brutal grey mass of a defunct power station that hasn’t decided what to do with itself. (The Tate Modern option is no longer available.) Chris Petit perks up. The monumental self-assurance of this blank wall inspires him to lift his mobile-phone camera, the eye in the palm of the hand. I like the way his images avoid cultural sponsorship and aspire to the point where they are unexploitable. Digital sketching. Of late, Petit speaks of a return to the era of home movies, chamber performances, films shot to be looped in empty rooms. A ghostly voice whispering over surveillance footage from misty retail parks, wet autobahns, frozen docks. The poetry of unacknowledged quotation. Of defeat without regret. When he discusses Céline’s flight from Paris – a hunted man limping on bamboo canes, between collapsed hotels and renegade contacts in a Götterdämmerung Berlin – there is a light in his eyes. For Chris, all roads lead east. Poetry and autopsy work well together. Dead places sing. This Wembley expedition is a farewell letter to the commissioning process.

Our river walk is about suspended permissions. That cargo ship carved up on the foreshore might be a Third World recycling operation or a visionary sculpture by Richard Wilson. Iron hulks rust in mud. Antique skiffs and wherries are colonized by dead nettles and meadowsweet. The stink of bone-boiling vats, brewing, the manufacture of chemicals, gave the East Greenwich peninsula its special quality. The smell soaks into your clothing, the pores of your skin. Rat-grey mounds of aggregate mask the unlovely Dome: a wind-propelled spacecraft abandoned on a lifeless planet. Nothing to sustain human existence. Nothing to exploit.

Coming to terms with our trajectory across London, Petit taps childhood memories of King Vidor’s 1940 epic,
Northwest Passage
: in which Spencer Tracy sets fire to a Red Indian village and fords a raging torrent by forming a human chain. Colour was the thing, back then, bright as a comic book. And the business of provisioning. That’s what Chris liked most in westerns, the bit where they ticked off the shopping list: salt pork, rifles, beans, coffee. That and the optional scene when the Indian maid goes down to the river for an early-morning dip.

The only naked figure on the foreshore is hidden within Antony Gormley’s
Quantum Cloud
. The artist’s phantom self takes shape as you move past the blizzard of scrap that contains it.
Quantum Cloud
is a slightly forlorn memento of the cultural confusion that attended the launch of the Millennium Dome. Petit recognizes the jetty, with its barriers and steady-stare of surveillance, as a processing facility for economic migrants. The logical use for a failed grand project, hidden behind a secure fence, is as a prison camp. He shivers at the memory of shuffling through airports with dubious paperwork and too many items of hand luggage. Your soul is left behind. You don’t resemble that stranger whose portrait is stuck in your passport.

Chris tells me that Céline describes this experience very well in
North
, a memoir published in England in 1972. Confronted by the authorities in a ruined Berlin, the crazed French doctor submits, along with his wife and his fellow collaborator, Robert Coquillaud, to a new set of photographs. The result is horrifying, like post-mortem Polaroids: faces have collapsed, the story of their escape engraved in flesh. Coquillaud acted in pre-war films like
Pépé le Moko
and
Le Quai des Brumes
, under the name of Le Vigan. After the Liberation, he spent several years in prison, before fleeing to Argentina, where he appeared in movies obscure enough to interest Petit. ‘A man I could have used in
Chinese Boxes
,’ he muttered.

I asked Chris about his own passage to Germany. What was he getting away from?

‘I first went to Berlin in ’76 or ’77 for the film festival. It was one of the few cities that I made a point of going back to. I was given a very good trip by
Melody Maker
, to write about German music. I said I’d do it if they let me take the train. I stayed in station hotels. I finished up in Berlin.’

‘How did it feel?’

‘Like an historical city, there was still a wall around it. I’d been shoved off as an army brat, aged seven, to the Ruhr, so there was a point of personal interest to the exercise. I was very much at home in a garrison town, which was divided into four states. An extremely nice city in which to drive. Berlin was a honeycomb, a city I needed to understand and to which I related.’

‘Comparing it to London, any major differences?’

‘There were loads of things missing. There was no bureaucracy, that was all in West Germany. The people were either very young or very old. And the old ones tended to be women, because all the men had died in the war. The middle-aged professional classes weren’t in Berlin. They were in the west where government was. It was always an odd city in terms of what you
didn’t
see. And the big shock of going back in 2009, after so many years, was being surrounded by men of my own age, fifty-year-olds, very prosperous. What they brought with them, in terms of restaurants, certain kinds of clothing, wasn’t there previously.’