London Overground (15 page)

The original task at Lots Road was to supply electricity to London Underground. The generating station, built on Chelsea Creek, became operational in 1905. It burned 700 tonnes of coal a day. In 2013, the developer Hutchison Whampoa
Properties took over the eight-acre site. Boris Johnson tooled down to give his blessing to the rebranding as ‘Chelsea Waterfront'. Plans are afoot to build the new (and ill-conceived) Thames Tideway super sewer right alongside. A case of excessive sanitation for promised but as-yet-unbuilt apartments.

Much of the former electricity-generating plant has been adapted into space for desirable cushions, drapes and other necessary but expensive accoutrements of fashionable life. Most of the former pubs and corner shops have adjusted to the coming climate. Newish antiques of the better sort. Auction houses far grander than the plunder they are attempting to flog. Hand-woven rugs from the margins of war zones. Tables that cost more than three of the terraced houses of the 1960s.

Everything is pouring into the definitive non-place that calls itself
CHELSEA HARBOUR.
The approach to this fortunate enclave, beyond a rank of waiting taxis for those who won't be braving the Overground station at Imperial Wharf, is a sheet of glass down which water constantly pours. I read it, one letter lost in my own shadow, as
CHELSEA ARBOUR.
A bower. An orchard of millennial balconies. A brochure come to life without the human element. You can go in, but you'll soon subside in a coffee outlet like a canteen in a fading television franchise.

The original Chelsea Harbour tower with the witch's hat, where Michael Caine was rumoured to be in residence, a formidable early-morning walker, looked astonished to be surrounded by so many other buildings. If the tower were to be pictured as a person, it would be Don Quixote in the paintings by Honoré Daumier. A windmill, in a silly helmet, tilting at itself.

And that is what we are now, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: my ridiculous, head-down charges at illusory enemies and Kötting's more grounded clowning. The whole picaresque
extravaganza of treating the railway as a metaphor was collapsing around us. Chelsea Harbour put satire out of business.

I flipped my Cervantes and stabbed a finger. ‘These Preparations being made, he found his Designs ripe for Action, and thought it now a Crime to deny himself any longer to the injur'd World, that wanted such a Deliverer.'

You wonder why Princess Di, in Oxford-blue
FLY ATLANTIC
sweatshirt, long bare legs, white socks, morning-after diva glasses (anticipating funerals), at the wheel of her dark green Audi Cabriolet, schlepped all the way from Kensington Palace to borderline Fulham, out of Barbara Cart-land into J. G. Ballard-ville, to work up a becoming flush in a leisure centre open to all manner of indecently wealthy riverside casuals with time on their hands, as well as the occasional over-entitled rugby professional from the other side, from middle-class Barnes, or Putney, where resting actors play at domesticity? Was she slumming for romance? For a trademark toss of the floppy mane and stutter of tribute from fellow member Hugh Grant – who is busy sipping ethical coffee and skimming the tabloids for actionable sleights? Anyone for tennis?

Chelsea Harbour was a late-Thatcher dragnet for new money, commissioned with a champagne party, in April 1987, held on two pontoons floating rather precariously on the newly flooded ‘marina'. Invitations went out to representatives of sport, celebrity, business; all the opportunists prepared to decamp to a triangular island between the Thames, Counter's Creek and an active railway embankment – which featured, at that time, no stopping point to let off proles until you reached West Brompton. Therefore: excellent parking facilities for gym members. And no bicycles, not then. Ranks of Audi Cabriolets, sleek BMWs, Chelsea tractors. Diana could have availed herself of the private gymnasia reserved for royalty, but she was drawn, without much resistance, to the pre-breakfast, body-image
narcissism of the coming millennium people: semi-retired thesps, televisual travel promoters, cosmetic surgeons, fashionable dentists, Olympic oarsmen waiting on a sufficiently visible role with one of the better charities. As much as anything, Di's commute was to do with the enactment of that eyes-down scuttle between open-top German motor and the secure entrance to Chelsea Harbour Club.

For brief periods, boats called in at that harbour. A river service connecting outreach Fulham with choice bits of the heritage city – Charing Cross, Tower of London, Greenwich – was in operation when I passed through at the period when I was researching
Lights Out for the Territory
in the mid-1990s. This was a voyage that never failed to lift the spirits, as powerful craft surged, low to the water, offering unrivalled vistas of historic real estate.
Without commentary.
The river trip was a boost to the senses, not a feat of endurance. Now, dragging myself to the deserted pier with a mute Andrew Kötting, on a necessary fact-finding mission, I learn that the padlocks won't be coming off the gates until the Harbour-dwellers are ready to return from City and Docklands. River transport is exclusive to the rush hour. Chelsea Harbour, in the afternoon, is funereal. It has outlived its time. Novelty, when it goes just off the boil, is oppressive and slightly embarrassing: like yesterday's fashions before they achieve retro cool.

Princess Diana, handsome, burnished, high-bred, but amputated of those boring ‘Royal Highness' trappings, was a star without a confirmed project. Her in-development movie was conceptual, a modelled walk from car to gym. Camera-vultures were allowed to perch on ladders, at a safe distance, simmering their
Sunset Boulevard
fantasies, and shouting vulgar encouragement. The young woman who commanded the world's attention trotted gamely through to the next entanglement like a promotional clip for a David Lloyd Leisure Club. Most of
the male population of Britain, it seems, confessed to dreaming, lasciviously, about either Margaret Thatcher (as Ballard did), in an SM scenario better not imagined, or the offering of a strong shoulder to the spurned princess.

Eager courtiers acquired from Chelsea Harbour exercise-machine proximity, and elsewhere around town, if taken one at a time, by profession and appearance, fit nicely within the Mills and Boon template: surgeon, riding instructor, motor-trade salesman, personal-security muscle, art broker, England rugby captain. The talent list, as an erotic collective, with most of them married, indicates a pattern of behaviour that belongs to Ballard's ‘Chelsea Marina': the casual, off-kilter sexual collisions and shifting alliances of his 2003 novel,
Millennium People.

At the Harbour Club, freed from her tiresome husband and his coterie of toothpaste-squeezing attendants, his fusty obsessions with architecture and organic farming, his obligations to an inherited regime of duty (with sidebar entitlements), Diana opted to go American. A nice reminder of what those colonists did to George III. If she gave the
FLY ATLANTIC
top a rest, she favoured a white variant branded with
HARVARD
. The firm-calved blonde in the dark glasses, in perpetual transit between place of exercise and coffee outlet, with a detour to drop off the kids, is ersatz US East Coast summer season. In the Diana years, Chelsea Harbour was the place to chill between holidays. It had to look like you were always a week back from the Hamptons. And waiting to get on court for a knock-up with Tim Henman.

But the more telling revenge on Diana's unfaithful husband was instinctive, not plotted: it was architectural. Chelsea Harbour, ambitious infill from a generic brochure (‘luxury' apartments, ‘luxury' hotel, offices, showrooms, bijou marina), was top dressing on the rubble of an ex-British Rail coal yard and a Victorian coaling dock. Black mounds to feed the trains
up on the embankment. Generations of dumped contamination provided the right radioactive compost for mushroom development, with room for a seventy-five-berth marina, apartments, commercial space, and that witch's hat stack with the pyramid at the summit. The signature Belvedere Tower, visible for miles, was a building in translation; a draughtsman's joke made literal.

The royal letter-writer, HRH, disgruntled of Highgrove, would have abominated the whole speculation, encroaching as it did on the Thames of Turner and Whistler: if he had recognized it as being architecture at all. The scope for carbuncular metaphors and references to East Berlin secret police barracks was limited. Chelsea Harbour was post-vernacular, pre-postmodern. Another nice gig for Bovis Homes Group and the P&O & Global Investment Trust. Maritime operatives contriving a fabulous harbour, an upstream Gibraltar with cruise-boat facilities. It would make perfect sense for Chelsea Harbour to align itself with Crimea by voting to join the empire of the oligarchs. It's twelve minutes' walk from Stamford Bridge and the citadel of Roman Abramovich. Unfortunately, Ambramovich's yacht is too big to fit into the marina. To compensate, several of the blocks pastiche that floating-gin-palace style.

Oliver Hoare, a man from the shallows of the art trade, schooled in discretion, was a millennium person out of the pages of Ballard's Chelsea novel. Even his name has the authentic Ballardian stamp, English as a hard biscuit, but caught in a double bind: puritanical first name, libidinous surname. Officer class, privately educated, no distinguishing features. Ballard's remedial professionals – architects, makers of commercials, doctors, spookish bureaucrats – don't actually work; they're recovering, in remission, sitting on the balcony. These are men of means living in secure compounds with
access to the gym by 7 a.m. Which is where, at the Chelsea Harbour Club, Hoare met Diana. He flogged Islamic art to the world's biggest collector, Sheikh Al Thani of Qatar. When the broker was caught up in an investigation into financial irregularities, it emerged from forensic examination of invoices that he had supplied the Sheikh with artworks worth more than £20 million. Under threats from his wife, heiress to a French oil fortune, the dealer broke off his friendship with the Princess, an alleged consummation of shared exercise regimes and fine dining.

On the darkening February afternoon, when I stand beside Kötting, rubbernecking through the window of the Chelsea Harbour gym and swimming pool, there is no way of recovering the ambiance of the urgent 1990s, when this windswept approach was staked out by photographers. Diana must have relished getting them up so early. Now the gym is deserted and the pool is occupied by a good father, a dark, powerful man lapping steadily, backstroke, with one arm, a small boy clutching his chest. The stump of the missing arm is cupped in what looks like a black silk stocking. Despite this handicap, and the burden of the perfectly calm child, he barely disturbs the clear water.

This is not London, or not the London of coal docks and power stations and the dumping of contaminated materials, and women renting narrow bunk beds in dormitories on Lots Road. Chelsea Harbour, attached to the artery of the Ginger Line by the new Imperial Wharf Station, trades on its separateness. Today, at this curfew hour, the spaces beneath the glazed domes, like newsreels of Riviera hotels and baroque casinos, are empty. Showrooms heaped with carpets are proofs of their own redundancy. Even the birdhouse chatter of mobile phones has died away. The fantastic aviary of tasteful design, every
drape and lamp required for decorating a riverside apartment, has been abandoned, as if to some Ballardian catastrophe. The crystal world fairy tale of Chelsea Harbour has put us all to sleep. A late-afternoon chill from the sluggish reaches of the river makes our daggers of breath tinkle like glass.

When the nicotine wars at the gym were over (to smoke or not to smoke), and the women who drifted down in their Jimmy Choo shoes and fur coats had been banished, the Harbour colony fell into a lethargy too deep for fiction. There are zones along the Overground undone by encounters with visionary novelists. Brixton, charmed by Angela Carter, decided against attaching itself to the Overground promotion. Chelsea Harbour, fixed at the turn of the millennium by J. G. Ballard, accepted a railway halt as the price for release from the mythology imposed upon it.

The ramp leading from the reality of Lots Road to the Overground is a causeway of unconvinced interventions, not quite sculpture, not quite propaganda. For a couple of hundred yards, the Imperial Wharf approach is the drive into town from a new airport in a new country, using up its Euro budget.

A line of taxis, engines thumping. A giant pair of severed grey hands dumped in a mesh cage for potential refurbishment. Green-and-blue periscope towers. Novelty flats built in expectation of the railway effect. Blind roundabouts. Contradictory road markings. Humming vaults where machines are housed to keep the whole complicated ecosystem breathing.

Chelsea Harbour is not Ballard's Chelsea Marina, but it stands in the same relation to railway London. Ballard's disaffected middle-class terrorists don't do trains, they have the suburban fetish for car ownership. For muddy weekends in Gloucestershire and Norfolk. When the winter rains came, flooding the Thames Valley, turning Shepperton roads into rivers, Ballard's drowned world was realized. The meteorological
catastrophes of his early novels overwhelmed the place where so much of his work had been contemplated, cooked, produced. In the way that Mortlake is marked by the presence of the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee, and the destruction by fire of his library, Shepperton, without the living Ballard in Old Charlton Road, is obliged to confirm those feats of imagination. Droughts, floods, Heathrow paranoia, motorway catastrophes: reality limps along, trying to keep pace with the exiled author's handwritten pages. Ballard extracted future scripts from the amniotic reservoir of his spinal canal.

Chelsea Harbour was a set, built as a set, refusing cultural memory. Colonists were slow moving, subdued, tranquillized by a lack of affect: actors waiting for their words to be delivered. There was none of the repressed discontent, the eros of incipient revolutionary action, Ballard locates among the community of Chelsea Marina in his satiric novel
.
Investors who had bought into this riverside package failed to live up to their fictional avatars, they didn't have that energy.

Millennium People
is the central panel of a triptych of interrelated novels. It is bookended by
Super-Cannes
(2000) and
Kingdom Come
(2006). Locations shift but the moves are established: an ordinary sensual man, suffering from loss, anomie, in a drifting second marriage, is drawn into the subversive, potentially lethal games of a messianic psychopath, rogue scientist. A sweat-drenched driver in leather flying jacket or slept-in suit. A haunter of airport slip roads and long-stay car parks. ‘The areas peripheral to great airports,' Ballard told me, when I interviewed him in 1998, ‘are identical all over the world … two-storey factories, flat housing, warehouses.'

Some commentators, at the time of publication, were wary of this return to London, unsure about Ballard's take on gated communities, the sinister interconnections of police and Secret
State. Ballard, they felt, was not to be trusted as a critic of St John's Wood, the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, the London Eye. They were quite wrong. As
Millennium People
demonstrates:
Ballard is the London eye.
Witness to a city in the process of losing its soul. The distinction between drowsy riparian settlements of the Thames Valley and the colonists at Chelsea Marina (neither in Chelsea, nor a marina) was meaningless. Ballard imported suburban anxieties into a capital traumatized between the anti-metropolitan stance of Margaret Thatcher and the bogus piety of Tony Blair and New Labour. War apologists operating with the dangerous notion that pantomimed sincerity is sincerity, that conviction is truth.

Ballard's deranged biker-vicar, addicted to the afterburn of whippings he has endured, is a revenant among the doorstep assassins of SW3. Fundamentalism of every stamp, including the fundamental decencies of the old Surrey stockbroker belt (now given over to Russian oligarchs and Premier League footballers), is suspect. Bourgeois marriage is a lie. Property is debt.

‘The major problem for contemporary civilization,' Ballard said, ‘is finding somewhere to park.' So firebomb a travel agency. Trash a video-rental store. Leave a fissile art book on the open shelves of the shop that is the true hub of Tate Modern: surrealism jumping off the page. ‘A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.'