Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (29 page)

‘Was there much traffic, when you were making the films, across the Wall?’

‘I would say that the porous society, the meeting of the film world with various kinds of criminality, drugs, and so on, goes back to a combination of military occupation and the black market. Berlin was a city of transferences. When we were shooting
Chinese Boxes
– which was made for nothing – we couldn’t afford to hire a musician from the west. So we went east and used Günther Fischer, who was very high on the cultural ladder, completely webbed into the secret state system. You don’t end up, as we discovered later, in that position without being approved and connected. In 1984, I was cruising around East Berlin in Günther’s white Jaguar: wonderful! So all that thing of crossing borders, and that sense of it being a city of assignations, made it
more
Borgesian than Borges’s “tattered labyrinth” of London.’

There is no time to cut through the defensive ring, to enter the building site of the emerging O2 Arena. The hours are slipping away. Much of the post-architectural sprawl of the new millennium is about size, wrapping; Christo drapes hung over nothing very much. The David Beckham Academy has understood the requirements perfectly: a humped tent slung across two full-sized football pitches and available, at a price, for corporate hospitality. The whole deal is part of the AEG (Anschutz Entertainment Group) package. Beckham will promote the Dome and be transferred, for a substantial fee, to LA Galaxy, a football club in which Philip Anschutz has a significant stake.

On this bleak Monday morning, the academy is deserted. Leaflets flag up soccer training for local kids and five-a-side kick-abouts for bankers from across the river. Specialist medical care is provided: MRI scans, X-rays, ‘expert surgery’, consultations with Gary Lewin (physiotherapist to Arsenal and England). You have more chance of getting treated in the tent than in any of the threatened hospitals on the fringes of London.

When we investigate the interior, we are directed to a side chamber, a shrine of religious fetishes. Cabinets of plastic-patinated Beckham football slippers. Disembodied voices rehearsing the triumphs of the legend from Leytonstone. Semi-divine representations of the Boy David. Fame as a religion. Commandments made significant by repetition.
Impossible is Nothing
.
Positive Visions Lead to Positive Realities
. A doctrine that meets with the approval of Anschutz, a conservative Christian of the Evangelical Presbyterian persuasion.

The lines of spindly trees, long avenues diminishing into closed estates, remind Petit of a recent trip to Poland.

‘What was interesting about going to Auschwitz was its location. It’s exactly where the retail parks would now be. The shed is the answer to everything. The whole process was industrial. It did what New Labour did: decentralization. What you’ve got with National Socialism and New Labour is the rise of the architect. New Labour was all about architects, chefs and stand-up comics. At Auschwitz there was a travelling show called “Attack of the Clowns”. Quite chilling that.’

‘You see a parallel here?’

‘Himmler planned Auschwitz as an ecology park. He wanted the farm, he wanted the herb gardens. You could take the East Greenwich peninsula and put it in the middle of Poland. It would be a perfect fit.’

‘The wrong kind of planting?’

‘My prediction, after the collapse of the grand projects, is eco-fascism. If fascism is going to return, how will it look? How will they manage population control? My novel
The Human Pool
had quite a lot about how you deal with mass extermination. I think they’ll do it next time in the form of an epidemic. An uncontrolled epidemic.’

‘So we’ll all be running to the East?’

‘Poland is great. It’s completely unsponsored. If you’re going to do a remake of
Radio On
, set in 1979, you’d do it in Poland. I can understand why the Poles are so happy here. The motorway runs from Berlin to Auschwitz, straight through, no speed limit. Poland has exactly the quality that Callaghan’s England used to have. And the food is just as bad. The villages and the light are the same. The only difference, making it slightly Irish, is the presence of those churches, huge great churches. The giving of directions is Irish too. We were looking for this SS recreation centre. And we were sent on a wild goose chase. The only thing about the village I can remember is a bar called “Hate”. In English.’

Picking up the pace, we enjoy a proper road with charity shops and a grandiose cinema converted into a Chinese wholesaler. All the signs confirm that we are travelling in the right direction: a block of public housing on the shifty border of Greenwich and Deptford is called Ballard House. It is attended by a shrug of terminal businesses: off-licence, video hutch, Mace grocery. Deptford keeps it own company, happy to be divided from heritage Greenwich by the fouled Ravensbourne River. Everything nudges you back towards the river and the notion of a voyage out. Behind a scrapyard is an eccentric memorial to Peter the Great, who came to London to learn the art of shipbuilding; the hard way, hands-on, in the naval dockyards. Beyond Peter’s monumental throne, and the court dwarf (featured to exaggerate royal size), is a pier for the ferry that services the Hilton Hotel. I take a snapshot of Petit alongside a sign that says:
GREENLAND PASSAGE
. Hoar-stubbled, eyes narrowed, he’s ready to climb the gangplank for a doomed Arctic Grail expedition.

Unfortunately, the ferry isn’t operating and the pier is padlocked. To get at our northwest passage we have to cross the river. Pedestrians can’t broach the Blackwell Tunnel. So it’s Rotherhithe, one of the grimmest experiences London can offer; a tiled bore beneath the Thames, a dirty-white drain shared with vans, motorbikes, company cars.

Fumes. Clattering blades in ventilation shafts. The backdraught from trucks pushing you against the curved wall. The descent seems to go on for ever. I thought I had died down there and that this unknown place was my eternal destiny. But O2 was the real fantasy: an involuntary flashback as we tramped alongside the submarine traffic.

A company man, Alistair Wood, had been deputed to conduct me on a site visit to the revamped Arena. Under commission from an architectural magazine, I was kitted out in buttermilk tabard, hard hat, boots. I remember the way the tent sucks the energy out of you. The Anschutz operation was more focused than the hysteria of New Labour’s Millennium Dome launch; that desperate casting about for significant content, when it was obvious that nobody had the faintest idea what to do with the paradox of a cavernous yet claustrophobic space. Now plans are hardnosed and practical: an arena for the Rolling Stones and an exhibition floor for an artefact of similar age, the mummified King Tut. The Anschutz spinners will do what they can to pump life into this dreary enclosure. Restaurants, TV sport, shopping: a combination of Bluewater and the defunct Docklands Arena. Rock shows in which the tribute bands are all originals: miming, drowning, and confronting monster blow-ups of their own ghosts. Around 1,500 workers are beavering away to make the best of what they’ve got, some fancy cladding and a cliff of breeze-blocks. Coloured lights are projected on to grubby canvas to disguise wounds made in construction.

A casino deal would have completed the Las Vegas makeover: before that was scuppered by mean-spirited publicity following Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s acceptance of Mr Anschutz’s hospitality, down on the ranch, in 2005. The white blob of O2, seen from across the river, is like Prescott’s complimentary cowboy hat. With the brim torn off. Philip Anschutz collects Western art, paintings by George Catlin and Frederic Remington. One of his fortunes came from oil drilling (selling a disastrous fire as the set for a John Wayne movie). Bugsby’s Marshes have always dripped with oil, whale blubber rendered in cauldrons to bathe the Victorian city in soft light.

Anschutz holds all the cards; if he doesn’t pick up the tab for this unholy mess, nobody will. So if he wants 2,000 spaces for cars, they’ll start painting the grid. Right now. (Thereby unpicking, at a stroke, the eco-boasts of New Labour’s Millennium Dome.) Alistair Wood tells me that his daily journey from Southfields to Docklands takes around an hour and a half, and involves the packed, nose-to-armpit hell of the Jubilee Line. It’s a rare day when he finds room to open his newspaper. Multiply this experience by a quantum factor and you see what’s coming, along with flash floods of global tourism, for the Olympic Park. Mr Wood also reveals that Anschutz was eyeing up Wembley Stadium. One nocturnal excursion, one glance through the tinted windscreen at the hinterlands, hooded predators in the shadows of the Olympic Way (old Olympics, forgotten dreams), dissuaded him. East Greenwich was the consolation prize. The offer that couldn’t be refused. By a government desperate to bury history. Or to save it for their self-serving, pension-fund memoirs.

There is an object I want to show Petit in King Edward Park, Shadwell. It’s a ventilation shaft that drops down into the Rotherhithe Tunnel. The shaft is screened, occupied by Irish workmen. The gaffer, on the mobile in his car, gives me permission to look behind the security fence. It’s still there, the stone block with its tablet in memory of Sir Martin Frobisher and the other navigators: ‘Who, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, set sail from this reach of the River Thames near Ratcliffe Cross to explore the Northern Seas.’

On familiar ground – mine, then Petit’s – we make shift across London: north-by-northwest. The walk walks us as we check off the memory-prompts: Royal London Hospital, the old Kray brother pub, the Carpenters Arms, steel-shuttered and under offer. The white Hawksmoor obelisk of St Luke’s, Old Street. And Chairman Mao’s peeling effigy on a wall at King’s Cross, near the old
Time Out
offices where Chris worked as film editor. The development pitch, around the mainline station, with its Channel Tunnel champagne bar, is of a different order; serious money with expectation of a serious return. East Greenwich is frontier territory: circuses, pirates, unquiet spectres of labourers in dirty industries.

‘In 1978,’ Petit said, ‘I realized that I was about to become unemployed. I wasn’t going back to
Time Out.
We bought a flat in Primrose Hill because Camden was the only council who would lend money to unmarried couples. Gloucester Avenue: £12,500. I was never any good at the inner-city thing. I was a child of the suburbs. I was stuck in that northwest passage of London for about twenty years.’

After a brush with a blind pavement-cyclist and his snarling cross-breed, we know we’re in Camden: torched massage parlours, drug touts, cul-de-sac estates on the edge of the railway. And that old engine-turning shed, the Roundhouse. Which has been revived, rebranded, and patronized by a list of the great and the good. Petit commends the toilets. Forty years ago I was here filming Allen Ginsberg at the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation, that epic conference of the counterculture. A moment like the Putney Debates, with the common soldiers, anarchists and fundamentalists, after the English Civil War. Such freedoms signal the end of a cycle: a cleansing of the atmosphere before an era of oppressive legislation: Cromwell or Thatcher. The coming of the lawyers. Trimmers. Politicians. Apologists.

Confirmation that we’re walking the true line, Greenwich to Wembley, comes when I notice the lobster-red figure of a naked Gormley multiple, perched on a Roundhouse ledge: a potential jumper. From this point on, we are cataloguing former Petit properties. He reckoned to get a film and a couple of books out of each new address. He was tracking his old master, Céline, to the Willesden of that supercharged 1964 novel,
London Bridge.
Céline is the genius of public transport, using bus journeys as the best method for a total derangement of the senses.

‘I wanted to go somewhere nobody in their right mind would pick,’ Petit said. ‘Kilburn came pretty high on the list. We bought a house at an address we never learnt to pronounce properly: Streatley Road. £27,500. Five bedrooms. You arrive as an immigrant, in the way the Irish did. Kilburn was my boundary. Twenty minutes down the line from Stanmore. I’d grown up on an army estate, civilian housing for military personnel.’

‘How did it work out?’

‘The thing I liked about Kilburn was that it was three turnings from Marble Arch. It was that combination of the Bronx and the Irish. If you went into Irish pubs with an English accent, they told you to fuck off. I got a lot out of Kilburn in terms of production.’

Snow is falling, wet and secret, like gossip: on sullen dormitory streets, railway suburbs. There are few shops, no pubs, little to break the conformity of boredom. A zone for reforgotten BBC producers. We pass the room where Chris looked out of the window as he wrote his script for
The Hard Shoulder
and realized that the missing ingredient was Kilburn. The termite life of the main road: submerged avenues, narcoleptic tributaries.

Willesden Lane is another kind of northwest, a true frontier. Welsh chapels converted into Buddhist temples. Coloured domes. A culture-shift leading to a high street of defiantly urban energies, mostly black, with a trace of Polish melancholy.
Polskie Delikatesy
: RED PIG. Swine skulls on hooks, tongues out for inspection. Micro enterprises, worshippers at strange shrines. Kabul before the invasion. An active market. With illegitimate trade goods: fruit, cloth, opium, Stinger missiles. Grumbling rumours of the North Circular Road on our event horizon.

‘I remember going to a legendary Chinese restaurant on Willesden Lane,’ Petit reminisced. ‘I drove up there thinking: “This is the arse-end of nowhere.” I was reminded of Ballard driving past a wretched, lime-green Ford Granada. He said, “What a horrible car.” Six months later, he found himself owning one. That was exactly my experience of trying to live in Willesden Green.’

The halo of the new Wembley Stadium appears, out of the twilight, over the end of a dim street with about as much conviction as a painted backdrop from Hitchcock’s
Marnie.
The architect’s signature flourish mimics the missing brim of John Prescott’s white Stetson. We are closing on an arthritic symbol of Empire; exhibition sites accessed through a buffer-zone of storage units, Ikea and Tesco superstores.