London Overground (5 page)

Descending to the station entrance, we are blown against a mesh fence jangling with padlocks, a brazen orchard customized with loving messages.
MY HENRY
. The fence establishes the point at which the railway zone refuses access to inappropriate pedestrians. It is under option, awaiting the next tranche of finance. Blank grey walls lift from a tolerated field of cinders.

Wall art intensifies, punkish, playful, or hoping to be invited inside. Queen Elizabeth II, with her postage-stamp face, is ripped to naked brick. Flowered Mexican skulls. A plaster cast with a gaping bandaged mouth: the death mask of William Blake.
NEVER FORGET
. And then, on one empty lot, a troop of
hushed, camera-lofting urbanists, fake-fur'd, leopard-printed, stalled beneath an endwall, messianic portrait of Usain Bolt. They are being lectured, authoritatively, by a spray-paint scholar. Bolt is realistically rendered, speared by a psychedelic shower of heavenly beams: as if a high sun were blazing through a stained-glass window on a new prophet. The lecturer's critique compared and contrasted lesser pieces, gryphons and scaly apocalyptic beasts, with the religiose virtuosity of the Olympic demigod. Mere tags were not tolerated. Amateur daubs were scorned or patronized. The tour moved on through the constantly replenished open-air gallery of Shoreditch and Brick Lane. Every demolition was a fresh opportunity. Every enclosure. Every corrugated-iron fence. The orbital railway, without fuss or expenditure, had become the patron of London's most active display of walls, recorded and evaluated, but as yet beyond the reach of the next Saatchi. Although Saatchi, his hands around the throat of Nigella Lawson, does feature on this great shifting Doom mural. Pixels of newsprint converted into something like a smudged frame from Derek Jarman's
Caravaggio
.

My spirits revive at Hare Marsh, on the railway crossing opposite the old villains' pub, the Carpenters Arms. This high-sided bridge has been a territorial marker for so many years. Emanuel Litvinoff in his memoir,
Journey through a Small Planet
, describes the bridge as a rite of passage, out of adolescence towards self-knowledge, another country. The author photograph on the back of the dustwrapper has the dapper Litvinoff posing, in two-button check suit, cravat, with hooded eyes, narrow sideburns, on the Cheshire Street steps of the bridge, heading south towards Whitechapel.

The spread of the railway – all those tracks out of Liverpool Street, before they divide – is exhilarating. Anti-vandal devices,
a rim of spinning fish hooks, confirm the impression of a border post, one of the more obscure entries to East Berlin. Litvinoff often spoke about how his family, his neighbours in the Fuller Street tenement, held to the sense of existing in a village, with Bethnal Green Road and Whitechapel Road as neighbouring townships, and the West End, Soho, Bloomsbury, more alien and remote than Warsaw, Kishinev, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.

Fording the great riverine span of the tracks, down that narrow metal passage with the cacophony of sprayed tags and obscenities, was to experience one of London's great viewing points. Nobody has made a monumental painting of the type Leon Kossoff delivered from his railway bridge at Willesden Junction. The tidal rush of curving tracks and the stumpy towers of the City against a darkening sky. The spinning hooks of the anti-vandal barrier were a tracery of thorns frozen into steel. Most of the new bridges on the Overground circuit are constructed to abort vision, deny ocular trespass. You'd need to be Usain Bolt or a seven-foot basketball player to get a glimpse of the restored line running from Dalston Junction to Haggerston. Where there is the ghost of a chance of craning on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of a train, they'll add another course of bricks, dress the wall with a pelmet of blue board. Railways have to be heard, felt in the disturbed air.

Which is why Kossoff's paintings are so heart-rending: ordinary life transformed into a reality as absolute as Turner. The domestic narratives delineated by Litvinoff, and by the novelist Alexander Baron in
King Dido
, the sexual initiations, ritualistic fist fights, petty crimes, market trades, cruel poverty, are swallowed in the rectangular frame of a high-angle vision of the great west-flowing railway.

Our
zigzagging descent takes us into liminal land, disputed, ruined, recovering: with the virtue of escaping surveillance, slipping away from official heritage promotion.
It isn't happening yet.
Railway arches are breeze-blocked, developers have mesh-fenced unredeemed earth mounds: with warnings from ‘professionals in security' about ‘advanced forensic marketing'. Strict corners of nowhere are schizophrenically divided between the next urban improvement and tired green space with horses and play-farm trappings.

The guerrilla artist specializing in snake-necked, sharp-beaked, black-and-white emus has worked some
trompe l'oeil
trickery to present his hairy creature as emerging from a hole in the railway embankment, above a stack of black rubber tyres. We are at the point where our track goes underground. To stay with the orbital circuit we'll have to dowse. I know that Whitechapel is the next station. And I can see the silhouette of the enlarged Royal London Hospital. What happens after we are excluded from the sight and sound of the railway is guesswork. We won't experience, as I did on my attempt to walk around the M25, acoustic footprints, the hum of the road carrying back over winter fields.

A WIZARD SHOULD KNOW BETTER
. Here was a graffito worth recording. Kötting is fired by what he sees as the Tarkovsky aspect of this stretch:
Stalker.
He has to have a number of projects cooking at any one time to keep the black dog at bay. It helps if the new venture is more difficult, more absurd and improbable than the last. If he has swum with his brothers across the English Channel, he'll go it alone from Hastings to Land's End. The darkness inside is a form of tremendous energy; stray humans encountered on our walk are buffeted, pitched against fences, left breathless in his wake. The scheme he's chewing at is set underground, the deserted caverns and brick arches of the railway inspire him to sketch a little of what
he wants to attempt. A procession of mummers, Jack in the Green folklorists, morris dancers, straw bears, bikers, pirates, holy fools, will climb through a French forest to a cave. In heretic country. Near Mont-Ségur. Tortured history. Kötting will enter the cave and, if possible, remain there for forty days and forty nights (according to biblical precedent). Beyond this, a measure of Tarkovsky crawling and dragging through flooded cellars, carcinogenic wasteland, is advocated. I therefore position the film-maker against the grey fence. Another parallel-world tag:
THE CAVE MAN
. Our shattered narrative beginning to fit like a fun-house mirror: his
Underland
and my
Overground
. The elevated railway circuit is also a tunnel.

I told Andrew about the poet Douglas Oliver's book:
In the Cave of Suicession
. Like Kötting, Doug was using darkness to exorcize darkness. He climbs into the abandoned Peak District lead mine known as ‘Suicide Cave', a worm edging towards his elective oracle, with impossible questions to be asked if not answered. ‘The inquirer carried into the main entrance a torch, two fat candles, typewriter and paper, bottle of beer, bag of crisps, boat oar, length of rope, pair of binoculars, and a “sacrificial cake” bought at a Derby bakers' a few hours previously.' Rattling away at the typewriter, in lightless confinement, mistakes in transcription were made. And retained. As part of the texture of the experiment. ‘I have no more ambition for this text. I renounce it,' the supplicant says. ‘Now we are beginning,' the oracle replies.

Andrew will never read this book. And I know that he won't read it. But it needs to be referenced. I need to borrow some of the luminescence of Doug's poem and some of the difficulty. Kötting's cave squat will be both a performance, an endurance test, a way of provoking the shadows on the wall into a form of primitive cinema – and a ritual for not being at home, trapped within his entombing body, the way it ages and
endures. The son of his father and the father of the reverberating voices in his head.

A NEW WORLD CLASS, AFFORDABLE RAILWAY
. A boast painted down the side of the only way left to cross the tracks and gain access to Whitechapel Station. Here is a hub brought to prominence by the Overground link and the tunnelling required for the epic and unnecessary Crossrail project. A project that has already claimed its sacrificial victims: cyclists crushed by earth-moving trucks. Where are they taking all that gouged earth, that bone-rich clay? The old station with its labyrinthine layers, romanced in Jock McFadyen's paintings, has nothing as advanced as a lift service. Which is an inconvenience for the halt and the lame, the incapacitated, and the heavily pregnant women making for the Royal London Hospital. If your injury is traumatic enough, you will land on the roof, collected by a red helicopter. But the station remains trapped between eras: regular Overground shuttles, links to a hobbled District Line service, antiquated stairs, exposed sky, rags and tatters blowing in strange hollows of exposed pipes, with ferns, cobwebs, pyjama jackets and sparking wires.

Somehow it was possible, darting across Whitechapel Road, through the hospital car park, beyond the bleak Safestore facility where my cans of degrading 16mm film are hoarded in an expensive tin box, to believe that we are directly above the Overground tracks. An M. C. Escher paradox. Keep walking, stay on the move without reference to maps, and the throbbing train travels with you, communicates. But there are no railway arches, no caves to commerce. Safestore, selling its services as ‘self storage', is a booming business operating out of a posthumous yard, a secure parking lot with a few broken-wheeled trolleys and a set of inefficient industrial lifts. The self I was storing was my memory-bank, home movies going back
to childhood, student films, visual diaries of our early life in Hackney.

I liked the geographic coincidence of the relation of my Safestore archive to the Royal London Hospital, with its library of locality, its early X-ray mementoes, its cast of the Elephant Man's deformities. The Whitechapel triptych was completed by the minatory Tower House, Jack London's ‘Monster Doss House' from
The People of the Abyss.
The history of poverty within this gaunt, twin-towered building, from the lodging of respectable migrants to squatting addicts and squalor, achieved its inevitable outcome in its present revision to a set of private pods with a pastiched art deco doorway. A nudging invocation of the wrong mood and the wrong period.

On Sidney Square we found a white ghost bike, a memorial to an accident victim, a dead man called Andrew.

Shadwell is the point where the Overground connects with the DLR, the unmanned fairground ride to Docklands, the City Airport, the ExCel Centre and Beckton. Navigating towards Wapping and the river, we operated on instinct. The traffic flow was all west–east, roads and railways. It was a perversion to carve south from Whitechapel through Shadwell to Wapping, collecting our Overground-station snapshots like Boy Scout badges. But we were on the right track, the vibrations in the ground compensated for the absence of railway arches, visible cradles of electrified wire.

I began to notice a series of circular brochs, like brick remnants of some remote industrial era breaking through paving slabs and phantom clusters of public housing. The Shadwell brochs were not survivors of an Iron Age Orkneyian cult brought in on the Thames, but they had the same kind of essential beauty: sophistication as the simplest solution. If we strain our ears, we can pick up an oracular whisper of trains, or
ancestors, or primal winds, in the open-topped funnel of brick. Ventilation shafts, I guessed, for the buried Overground. Broch by broch, we closed on Wapping and the first big decision of the day. How to cross the Thames?

The unseen railway was working its magic. Walking through the sprawl and spread of London without losing hope, or the lineaments of personal identity, requires a framing narrative. A thread. A device on which to hang anecdotes and observations. There is a contagious urban neurosis: to collect decommissioned Tube stations, or to climb to the roof of secure towers, thereby acknowledging the potency of this novel architecture of cruelty. A fractured alphabet of gigantism dominating views that can only be achieved from protected penthouses. The Overground, even when it is lost from sight, is a ladder of initiation. If we could get inside one of the circular brochs, we would become part of another script. We would be making a premature start on Kötting's
Underland
project. Morlock-world was within easy reach, if we heaved ourselves over the lip of a ventilation shaft.

Not today, not now. Our separate madnesses cancelled each other out, bringing us to a truce of sanity:
keep walking
. Major detours had to be set aside if we were to complete the thirty-five-mile circuit in a single day. If we were to achieve whatever answer the oracle of foot-foundered determination would gift us.

My notion of pushing downriver to the Rotherhithe Tunnel is set aside. The morning is running away from us. We'll ride beneath the Thames, taking the Overground for one stop from Wapping. After that, it is a trail between the little known and the unknown. And a return for Andrew to home turf, the first years with Leila, the weekend market stall, the gym, the Millwall mob at the Den.

‘
Top of the Pops
, a pickled egg, Beckett before bed,' he said.
After days scrap-hunting in a Transit van. Now, as he paces the narrow station platform, a landing stage for our linking voyage, he quotes Gilles Ivain: ‘All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a
closed
landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us towards the past.'

Accepting defeat, another day, more of the same, I have attached that time bracelet: my Swiss Railway Watch. Hours big and black enough to register. The date window is a little eccentric, after 31 it runs on to 32, 33, trying to stretch the dying month. To wear a watch is to accept a form of tagging. There are appointments, duties, places to be at certain hours, the exercise walk, the coffee hit, ten minutes with DeLillo, back to work. Watchstraps don't last, they sweat through, lose their teeth, but that gives me an excuse to return to a cave of electrical goods on Bethnal Green Road. A new strap is a new beginning. Another stretch on the elective Swiss railway.

Walking all day, and especially when walking with Andrew Kötting, I never look at the watch. Mean time is suspended, we calculate by degrees of hunger. Andrew's form of relentless energy requires regular fuel intakes, cheek-stretching buns, chocolate bars, blue tins to suck. ‘Anyone got a spare Scotch egg?' The convenient aspect of location filming is that if there is any kind of budget, you get a runner. A pleasant young
woman, with a backstory and private interests of her own, capable of withstanding the banter. And a person who can be sent out into the countryside, swamp or desert, moor or mountain, to return every couple of hours with a tray of hot food, marked coffee containers with correctly recorded doses of milk and sugar.

The white moon of the Swiss Railway Watch with its schematic black sleepers, its red conductor's baton, is a relief tattoo. The external symbol of a beating heart. A modest design possession like a small portable Mondrian.
Mondaine.
Even the name sounds like that spontaneous purchase you carry home from Tate Modern in lieu of a stolen Richter.

We turn left out of Rotherhithe. After I've photographed Kötting and noted the understated symmetry of the station, the windows in satisfying proportions, Moorish eyebrow-curves that seem to reference both wavelets on the Thames and the best kind of railway arch, we double back to the river. I remember what it felt like to look across the water from the other side, the north shore, when I was trying to write about the early Narrow Street developer who chained himself to the slimy wall and waited for the tide to swallow him.

‘Rotherhithe was not a place to which he had previously given much consideration. It looked foreign, and somewhat estranged from itself. The significance of this apparently random assembly of buildings awed him. He became aware of patterns, meanings, distributions of unexpended energy. His sense of colour was overwhelmingly
personal
. It hurt. It hurt his blood.'

Andrew could never get on with
Downriver.
At the time he was assembling his short Thames comedy,
Jaunt
, friends told him that he should try my book. He might be able to steal a few lines. He tried. He hated it. Kötting was a voracious reader,
he carried books on trains and boats and planes. Sometimes he opened them. A paragraph at a time, a sentence. A word:
confabulation.
That's why he loved Beckett: the white spaces. But the essential flaw in
Downriver
is that he didn't appear in it. Early on, I'd called that novel ‘a grimoire of rivers and railways'. And I've never really advanced from there. Rivers and railways as a system of divination, invocations of supernatural entities, angels, spirits, demons.

The Thames bounced light. On the diminishing Rotherhithe beach, fathers encouraged their sons to dig for Roman pottery, pilgrims' tokens, broken stems of clay pipes. To die here, out with the tide, as my
Downriver
character did, was to solicit a special blessing. The river does take us beyond ourselves. An hour witnessing the interplay of water and sunlight is remission from whatever follows. Bury the watch in the claggy slop or tramp a teasing narrative out of the false river of the Overground.

My compass bearings are shot. The Thames floats us, lifts our lumbering feet. We navigate territory that is straining for some way to salute a maritime past: deepwater docks, the cargoes of the world, sailors' pubs, dockworkers' terraces. The promoters want a way to crane that picturesque version of the past into a CGI landscape of shopping centres, libraries unencumbered by books, community arts.

As a lad, Andrew came down here to deliver messages. Posing at Canada Water for his station photograph, he shoves his fingers into his ears. A spontaneous but effective gesture: the noise of this hub, buses, cars, vans. A wanton accumulation of effects with no processing mind, no editor. In his thick Black Forest suit, Kötting stands transfixed, acting and becoming Werner Herzog's Kaspar Hauser, the changeling, the holy innocent from the 1974 film
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
Kaspar arrives in the Karlsruhe of 1812 as if hearing the traffic of
Canada Water, a stowaway out of Hamburg trapped in the wrong century with no Swiss Railway Watch. Andrew, like Hauser, might have been hidden for years in a cellar, and now exposed to a place he dreamed as a youth in the wide-eyed innocence of his first job. He can't move or blink or pull his fingers from his ears.

Like Michael Moorcock, the other great memory-man from this side of the river, Andrew began with that most Dickensian of occupations, boy messenger. The city favours these apprenticeships, testing the best by offering them the freedom of the morning, close to the smell of the docks, where they are tasked with searching out mysterious buildings, eccentric clerks, minor Circumlocution Office hirelings barricaded behind dusty ledgers.

‘I came down this road. There was a big fire. That building is still there. It wasn't me.'

Norway Dock. Greenland Dock. Rebranded, in alliance with the Overground Railway, as Canada Water. A retail hub from an earlier generation than Westfield, Palaeozoic to Mesozoic. We cross a bridge to enter the shopping zone, as we crossed the railway in Cheshire Street. Kötting is upbeat about the development; he has come here, in former times, to buy sports kit, budget trainers. The whole deal is cheerfully budget, South London vernacular, easy in security. Canada Water has a heritage name, an aspirational connection with the money-laundering private fiefdoms on the north bank: Cross Harbour, South Quay, Heron Quays, Canary Wharf. Canada Water trades on the confusion of strangers, simpletons who go underground on the Overground, only to emerge in Rotherhithe, thinking they have made it to the
Bladerunner
set of Thatcher's Docklands. There is a social gulf between the unmanned DLR carriages on their Expo rides through icy bankers' towers and the Overground cargo haulers trundling towards New Cross
or Queens Road Peckham. Rotherhithe is a tumour, a non-malignant nodule, a hump cut off by the red strip of the railway, infiltrated by docks given over to retail parks and leisure boats.

At Surrey Quays, no true quayside but a significant branching point on the Overground, Kötting is coming closer to his beloved Deptford. He can smell it. He can smell bacon in the pan. Gastric residues bubble and fizz, intestinal anticipation leaks in warm detonations of sage and honey, filtered through wet tweed. He shakes his thornproof trousers to disperse gaseous damage. Time for breakfast.

The station is post-architectural, a glass-fronted bus shelter with an upgrade. Rotherhithe was a proper station, a considered brick construction, a railway mosque respecting the dignity of travel. Surrey Quays is all function. A borehole for the retail island of Canada Water.

If we hadn't been stalking the Overground, we would have sampled Southwark Park. The park is the best kind of green blot, it enhances the experience of passing through, drifting, slowing down, taking a clean, resinous breath before the next slam of diesel, nicotine and fox-licked jerk chicken. This oasis for the unaligned urban wanderer, a South London equivalent of Louis Aragon's Buttes-Chaumont from
Paris Peasant
, or one of Arthur Machen's lost paradise gardens, is a resource for the neighbourhood, all ages, all temperaments. Long-dead cricket heroes are remembered. Henry Poole's draped caryatides, rescued from Rotherhithe Town Hall, have found refuge among the shrubs. Late-rising urban athletes and sabbatical drug dealers work out on free equipment. Swans dress a small lake. There is a café with few pretensions. And two art galleries. One of them, Dilston Grove, is a former chapel where Kötting has been given space to present performances, evidence of
projects, pinhole portraits, doctored maps, vitrines of scavenged feathers, tide-smoothed bricks, defaced books.

The unfussy tranquillity of Southwark Park, a park that does not waste energy bigging itself up, keeps the surrounding terrain in balance. Andrew recalls patting the hot saddle of his motorbike. And sitting at an outside table to wait for friends. He does not howl. He grins. Aragon caught the atmosphere: ‘I ask myself what is dead within me and what is still effectual.' A quick snort of nature under the sails of the trees, along the sightlines of branching paths, around the lake, makes the pain manageable. But when he has to return to the street, the French poet ‘acts the dog and bawls for the dead'.

The imaginary lines of influence these walkers leave behind, their neurotic sensitivity to sights and smells, become a set of mental rails linking parks, cemeteries, deserted pubs, rooms where forgotten writers once lodged. Hidden allotments, yards of distressed garden statuary. When Aragon quit his park, he inscribed evidence of the real, in order to re-anchor himself in a particular place at a particular time:
RAILWAYS. OUTER-CIRCLE LINES. STATIONS: BELLEVILLE-VILLETTE. PONT-DE-FLANDRE
.

You know where you are when you know where to eat. Kötting has our breakfast lined up in an old haunt called La Cigale in Lower Road, Surrey Quays. A good choice. In a street of interest, undisturbed by the Canada Water mall or urgent traffic heading for Evelyn Street (memories of the seventeenth-century diarist), and the pull towards Greenwich and the east.

In 1661 John Evelyn published
Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke or London Dissipated.
Outside La Cigale, London is dissipated. Lost in fumes. Inside, settled in the window slot, Andrew demands another oxymoron:
very strong
cappuccino. The proprietor, barely awake, fiddling to get the machines functioning, insists that all his cappuccinos are of a
uniform strength and flavour. His reputation depends on it. And how would the overheated signor like to take his panini? ‘With gherkin. Mayo. Brown sauce. Both mustards: French, English. Horseradish. Onions. The lot.' Mr K mops his dripping brow with a bookie's spotted handkerchief.

We have tuned in to conflicting radio beacons. But we are receiving Deptford loud and clear, channelling another diarist: Sam Pepys. Bence House, Pepys Estate, is the council flat where Andrew brought Leila at the start of their joint venture. When Margaret Thatcher offered the chance to buy (and later sell), Andrew took it, despite Leila's sound socialist objections. It was the only way, so he asserted, to achieve living/working space: move out, move on, to St Leonards-on-Sea. Before the Hackney mob colonized it.

While we made our fourteen-hour walk around the circuit of the Overground Railway, Kötting composed fourteen ‘ponderings'. Songs of place. Trampish meditations.

Carry me home you old sea spray

Drag me back to a life with Deptford.

We were young in old Deptford.

When the wind blows east and the ferryman pulls away from the pier

He might carry me home to old Deptford.

It floods back, the romance: after a spell as a lumberjack in Sweden, it was lovely, loud, river-smelling Deptford. The view from the balcony. ‘South London, paradise …
GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT
… D&C Metals and Salter's Paper to the Dog and Bell and selling wicker furniture with Jack Sharp in Deptford Market … Evelyn Street in the rush hour. The city of lookback, the city of lookout! Speed bumps and bollards … But now to home. The flat. Red brick, yellow insides. An entrance at the rear. Puddled with piss in summertime and
blocked with adolescent bliss in wintertime. The lift gleams with spittle, the corridors with polish. Up on the sixth floor, the corridor, second on the left and in. Home, their home. Good-to-be-home home. Bence House, Pepys Estate, home.'

The joy of being out in the van. Banging heads in the gym. A corner of London that is all London. Andrew was a beachcomber of the southern suburbs. With a brown foam of strong cappuccino distinguishing his grey-flecked stubble like a petit mal seizure, Kötting recalls the distant wonder of banknotes: £7,000 cashmoney. In the hand. Down in Dulwich Village on the estate where Lady Thatcher lined up a retirement property, but couldn't bring herself to come over the river from Westminster.

‘We got the nod from Metal Mickey. Put in an estimate for a decorating job for the missus of one of the Brink's-Mat mob. They were spreading out across London, into Kent, like horseshit on rhubarb. Shenley was favourite, A20 and over. Junction 2, M25. Keeping the property bubble going all by theirselves. With trickledown bungs for local craftsmen.'

Catching sight of tenders from the upmarket West London firms in opposition, Andrew cranked his own estimate from £3,000 to £7,000 – and Jo, the former page 3 girl, bit his hand off. He rounded up a few loose brothers to make a quorum. And they did a good job. Gold leaf in the snooker room. Gold taps like spouting dolphins.

The Dulwich family, a close one, were all Joes: Big Joe (dad), Joey (first son), JJ (number-two son), Mr Joseph (accountant son from first marriage), Jo (trophy wife), JoJo (her dog) and Joe Stalin (attack mastiff).

‘Don't touch his soldiers, for fuckssake,' Jo warned. Lead soldiers, a museum-quality collection. Regiments, correct in every detail, occupied the shelves and cabinets of the games room. ‘Insured for two million.'