Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (45 page)

I spoke to Brigid about swans, the walk I had just completed with Andrew Kötting. And the swan sculpture in the conservatory, behind the chair where she sat for her lunch. ‘The journey is symbolic,’ she said. ‘There is a pursuit and there is the running away. Maybe our whole journey is to become ready, leaving all our baggage behind.’

When I was leaving, standing at the door, she told me that I wasn’t the journalist she had expected. She saw other qualities. Ballard, in
The Kindness of Women
, put it more succinctly. He understood, all too well, the unreality of waiting on a country station for the short ride back to town. ‘You’ve been in England for eighteen years and you still look as if you’ve stepped off the wrong train.’

Milk is the subtlest of insults.

– Don DeLillo

I remember R. D. Laing, in July 1967, sitting at the back of the Roundhouse, talking about the artist and illustrator Tomi Ungerer. How he relished the state of siege, living close to 42nd Street in the heart of Manhattan. ‘He’s dressed in military uniform. He is conscious of the smog biting into his eyes, destroying his skin, eroding his lungs. He’s aware all the time of the enormous pollution, the noise. It’s impossible to smell anything any more because all the interior environments are air-conditioned and pumped with the most sickly scent. You can’t smell each other’s sweat. You don’t know who to trust.’

Now, forty years on, I understood Ungerer’s attitude: homoeopathic doses of horror to prepare ourselves for the dark day. Circumambulations of the Olympic Park were becoming an addiction. Richard Mabey, author of
The Unofficial Countryside
, a book I twinned with Ballard’s
Crash
as the great edgeland testimonials of the 1970s, accompanied me on another forlorn excursion. He travelled with binoculars, not a camera. He pointed out the feathery clumps of fennel growing at the cropped margin of the canal, near the Mare Street bridge. He told me that coots and ducks would be unaffected by radioactive spillage into the water table. They breed quite happily, and often, in the teeth of eco-disaster. He was impressed by the duckweed lawns clotting the Lea, near Old Ford Lock. The telling moment on this walk came with our arrival at the stack of yellow containers that operate, in playfully ironic mode, as café, viewing platform and learning centre, on the Greenway overlooking the Olympic Stadium. We explored a thicket that ran along the side of the railway, where wild nature, profligate and without imposed narrative, thrived in blossom and berry. Hacking our way out of the tunnel, we emerged on a strip of bare, baked earth beside the yellow tin box. Mabey examined, in grim fascination, a cluster of dying saplings. At which point, a young woman emerged from the education centre to tick him off for having the temerity to intrude on the few yards of precious ground reserved for the education of the disadvantaged children of the Olympic boroughs. Richard pointed out that the pathetic plantings were choked of sustenance, uncared for, coughing their last. And if she really wanted to let the children see something grow, all she had to do was take down the rickety exclusion fence and a fruiting, thrusting wilderness would sweep across from the embankment.

Among the cargoes regularly transported down the railway line, through the heart of London’s major development, the site where countless thousands will soon be arriving from across the globe for the great B&Q self-assembly Olympics, are flasks containing highly radioactive nuclear fuel-rods, shipped from Sizewell in Suffolk, and Dungeness in Kent, to Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast. When the Nuclear Trains Action Group (NTAG) contacted the Olympic Development Authority to ask if these convoys would continue to run through the period of the Games, they received no reply. Mayor Johnson knows nothing, remains silent. He has other, more pressing problems.

A protest rally, marching from Victoria Park to Stratford Station, staged a ‘die-in’ in front of the CGI Westfield promotional panels, well aware of the official Olympic clock clicking down the seconds like the nuclear triggers in Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr Strangelove.
Such oddities are part of a conflicted topography: protest into art, political rhetoric into psychotic babble. The Angel Lane bridge over the railway, the route we walked from Chobham Farm to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal and the High Street, has been demolished. Mounds of scoured earth appear overnight, mountain ranges of a rigid formality thrown up by some new collision of the earth’s tectonic plates.

At the junction of the Hertford Union Canal and the Lea Navigation, I came across an Olympic art manifestation which stopped me in my tracks. Here at last was a conceptual piece that took the breath away. Between Whitepost Lane and Old Ford, water gushed, cascaded, out of the enclosed site, through the fence, into the turbid and duckweed-infested canal. New barriers had been erected to deny access to potential paddlers heading for the main stadium. It was shapely, the way the water folded, curved and shimmered: a dwarf Niagara coming out of nowhere.

A jogger paused alongside me, hands on knees, taking in this unexpected water feature. ‘Twenty-eight years,’ he said. ‘And now this.’ He had come from Hong Kong and settled on an estate in Hackney Wick. Every morning he ran the same circuit, now his path was blocked. He never knew when he set out which way he would be allowed to return home, or if his home would still be standing. ‘There has never been such division between rich people and poor.’ He gestured towards the cliff of green-glazed windows on the spit of ground opposite us: a man-made island, the triangle between the Hertford Union Canal, the Lea Navigation, and the A102 Blackwall Tunnel Approach.

This was no artwork, in the sense of being funded, approved: punctured Victorian pipes on the Olympic site. No water in the taps for much of Hackney. The security guards brought in to protect the rapidly assembled plywood barriers were old-fashioned bouncer types, amiable and suspicious, nervous of saying the wrong thing in an unfamiliar language. The inner ring, close to the stadium complex and the construction convoys, was still guarded by regiments of Joanna Lumley’s diminutive and unreadable Gurkhas.

It was only when I studied privately commissioned reports of investigations into the extensive radioactive contamination of the 2012 site that I appreciated the implication of the gushing pipes. The dispersal cell holding many tonnes of treated and untreated soil, in layers under a permeable skin, was positioned right here. As Ian Griffiths revealed in an article in the
Guardian
: ‘Documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) rules reveal that, contrary to government guidelines, waste from thorium and radium has been mixed with very low-level waste and buried in a so-called dispersal cell.’ A cell which was placed about 500 metres to the north of the Olympic stadium. The setting for the involuntary water feature.

Bill Parry-Davies convened a meeting at which Mike Wells, who had been sifting thousands of documents and invigilating the progress of construction activity with numerous photographs, gave a lucid and alarming account of his findings. You could not nominate, in all of London, more challenging ground for a landscape blitz, a ticking-clock assault on the devastated residue of industrial history: insecticide and fertilizer works, paint factories, distillers of gin, gas-mantle manufacturers, bone grinders, importers of fish-mush, seething dunes of radiant maggots.

Waste: dumped, buried. Disturbed. Distributed.

Decay.

Putrefaction.

Tyre mounds.

The crunched metal-and-glass of innumerable breakers’ yards hidden behind convolvulus-draped fences, under the flag of St George. Snarling dogs. Shirtless men smashing white goods with hammers.

And the dust.

The particulates. Hot cinders.

Blind warehouses with bundles of rags and damp paper waiting for insurance fires. Petrol reek. Black ash.

Oily smoke saturates cloth, fouls underwear.

In the dirt, they prospect: the pinstripe outsiders, compliant bureaucrats. Sanctioned buck-passers.

This was where London University carried out experiments with a now-decommissioned nuclear reactor. An area so far off the official map, so hidden within a nexus of dark waterways, that it functioned as the dumping ground of choice for what Parry-Davies refers to as ‘uncontrolled deposits of radioactive thorium’. In an OPEN-Dalston blog, Bill presents a photograph by Mike Wells showing ‘clouds of dust, and a skip with unsealed bags of asbestos material, during demolition of the Clays Lane Estate’.

In the Leabank Square Estate, from which the Chinese jogger had emerged for his restorative morning circuit, mediating rather than remediating the territory, residents were concerned about dust from the Olympic site. ‘A recognized pathway to contamination,’ Parry-Davies said, ‘is by a person inhaling radioactive dust particles. Thorium is particularly hazardous.’ On the estate, as the summer barbecue season opened, families found themselves ‘literally eating’ a relish of airborne dust, a mega-chilli bite on their steaks and sausages. When their worries were published on a website, the ODA threatened the Leabank whistle-blower with legal proceedings. And sent in a dust-sweeping vehicle to patrol the yellow-brick avenues.

Rumours were rife. I was told that the only consequence of the remediating exercise was to spread low-level radioactivity across the entire landscape of the Olympic enclosure, the divided fiefdoms of competing contractors. Toxic soil removed from the stadium was stored alongside bundles of Japanese knotweed, suggesting delirious
Quatermass
mutations, vegetal Triffid creatures slouching towards Westfield to be born. Richard Mabey pointed out that all Japanese knotweed, along the Lea, is female; the bounteous harem of a single potent male plant.

The Olympic Park was a newsreel of the fall of Berlin run backwards, from present boasts about urban renewal to the bombed and blasted killing fields, as the Russian advance decimated a pitiful remnant of boy soldiers, cripples and SS fanatics, in the Götterdämmerung endgame of Hitler’s insane vision of a capital made from neoclassical facsimiles. In the Reichssportfeld, beside Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Stadium, tanks, emerging from the woods, demolished trenches dug for military rehearsals. A sergeant, in command of a ragtag group of frightened children, had the only bazooka. When he stood up to fire it, his head was blown from his shoulders. What remains in these ravished topographies is a category of war-zone architecture: concrete bunkers, electrified fences, unexplained posts, burnt-out warehouses, stripped woodland, fouled water. Grand Project development is accidental archaeology. A seance with ruins.

On Dalston Lane I met the globetrotting Sicilian photographer Mimi Mollica, a native of Hackney Wick. He swerved through the traffic to embrace me: a friendly face in a bleak environment. Many of his Wick neighbours had been expelled; the free-floating anarcho-communal days were over. There was a general drift in the direction of Berlin: more space, a vibrant culture. With the capture of Hackney, there was now a clear direction of travel: Berlin or Dagenham. Go east, young man. With his rent pitched at an impossible level, Mimi relocated to one of the generic blocks on Dalston Lane. A pristine apartment in all probability conceived by a Russian developer. If I wanted to follow the story, I would have to mug up my Fritz Lang DVDs and book a flight to Berlin.

‘You have a name for your book?’ Mimi said.

‘
Ghost Milk
.’

‘What does this mean?

‘CGI smears on the blue fence. Real juice from a virtual host. Embalming fluid. A soup of photographic negatives. Soul food for the dead. The universal element in which we sink and swim.’

‘Crazy, Mr Sinclair,’ Mimi said. ‘Crazy again.’

Great cities take a day. This is the test of a great city.

– Don DeLillo

Descending through cloud cover over Berlin-Tegel, I feel the jolt as weary metaphors turn themselves inside out. For so many years, discussing London’s edgelands, the lazy reflex has been to refer this embattled topography, and the mindset responsible for it, to the old East Germany. A dystopian myth:
Germany, Year Zero.
The circle of invaders massing around a capital that was always separate from the rest of the country; more dissidents, more anarchists, an island-state mentality.

Ghosts press, taking up the spare seats, provoking memory-films of a place I have never visited. This thin-skinned cigar tube, in which we suck up dead air, craning our necks to view cloud reefs outside the portholes, is populated with earlier Tegel pilgrims, their masks stitched from celluloid. Before Peter Falk flew into town, as a shop-soiled angel, in
Wings of Desire
by Wim Wenders, the granite lump of Eddie Constantine did the job for Chris Petit in
Flight to Berlin.
‘My film is erasure,’ Petit said, ‘but it pre-dates Wenders, in terms of dealing with the city. Wim was hanging around at the time. He cut the trailer.’