Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (30 page)

‘The northwest passage is fucked,’ Petit says.

The searchlight-bathed bowl of the stadium is protected by yellow-jacket security, crowd-control barriers. An unused stadium is a sad place, overwhelmed by the politics of absence. The potential for evil. Trains run into darkness. End of the road. End of everything. A car park filling up for a nocturnal event to which we have not been invited.

We stand on the Olympic Way as clinically white punters emerge from the Wembley Park Station and shuffle towards the arena. Like some form of reverse evolution. We try to guess who is tonight’s big attraction. Elderly folk. No funny costumes. The arena holds 12,000 people. O2 expects to seat 20,000. A Moonie wedding? A celebrity spook-speaker? A convention of northwest-passage initiates? The following day’s paper provides the answer: Dolly Parton. ‘The sheer wonderful weirdness of it all,’ said the
Evening Standard.

There is no way back from this terminal edgeland. Our paths divide. Petit wants to investigate an off-road hotel made from container units, before he picks up the hire car and drives to the Baltic. To flesh out his film-without-film, his Museum of Loneliness. I don’t have that option. I have to walk, that’s part of the unspoken contract. I can’t return to a place that is no longer there, my Olympic Park banishment is absolute. I think I’ll aim at Morecambe. Where the former Arsenal and England defender Sol Campbell cried ‘No mas, no mas’ on his comeback career.

It was the Chinese hour. Before joggers, cyclists. Coming from a distance, along the river path, an intermittent plosive puffing; breath under pressure, arms pumping across chest.
Powww, pwah. Poww.
A low-slung concentrated woman, in Mao cap, sees us, sees through us, with no recognition or acknowledgement. None required. My groans, involuntary, are memory-provoked; painful scenes from the past replayed and re-edited as we walk. Every step highlighting an episode best forgotten.

‘Don’t do
that
.’

I wince, but say nothing, as Anna mutters loudly against dog people who do not scoop, litter bandits shedding packets as they gargle on morning phones. Dogs stimulate conversation. Dogs are sociable; while they sniff rears, lick bollocks, frisk and bound, leash-holders exchange canine gossip. We slalom through twisted cones of unbagged shit.

Chinese walkers pick their circuits with care, paths around stadiums, approved stretches of the river. They never pause. They do not rush: fit for purpose. Exercise undertaken before these unresolved strips of waterside London are
visibly
empty, witnessed only by cameras and security guards in kiosks.

We are headed for Oxford. The source of the Thames, beyond that, was a sort of coda, to be investigated, but of no great consequence. Oxford is the alternative capital; when London falls, royalty retreats upstream. Charles I and his louche court made free of the medieval colleges. Hitler left Oxford well alone, not a bomb fell, even on the industrial car-making suburbs. He planned to take up residence in the area, slighting Churchill by establishing his headquarters within a few miles of the old bulldog’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace. Oxford is where the brown Thames meets the causeway of oolitic limestone, running from Bath to Stamford: honey-trail and honeytrap.

Within my own peculiar mythology, Oxford was the outer rim of London, the rind, the river-gate: as defined by Ford Madox Ford in his 1909 essay, ‘The Future in London’ – one sixty-mile sweep of the compass-pencil from a fixed point in Threadneedle Street. The arcane, the hermetic: they pushed against the flow, or went with the tide, to this other capital, the city of secret streams, privileged institutions, chained libraries. Capital of spooks and code-breakers. Established drunks and gluttons for preferment. The operators of television’s
Morse
franchise got it right, time unravels at a gentler pace among inward-facing architecture, enclosed gardens protected by narrow doors.

Elias Ashmole carries off, by cart, the books and artefacts of the Lambeth gardener John Tradescant. He founds a museum in Oxford. Giordano Bruno lectures on the new cosmology and is pronounced a heretic. Oxford, I suspect, will hold some clue, now as always, about the interpretation of England as an argument between poetry (spontaneity, intensity) and politics (the rest). I come back to Ed Dorn and his six-part poem from
The North Atlantic Turbine
; how aspiration flows west, by train or by water, in the temper of sexualized attention. Riding out of Paddington, watching the soft countryside of the Thames Valley, he sits among the long-haired love-children of a dying imperialism. The eros of water-light plays on golden girls and golden stone: ‘the beautiful Jurassic lias’.

I’m resigned to it, but Anna fumes with each forced exit from a route that is so busy bigging itself up:
STRICTLY NO ACCESS TO RIVERSIDE WALKWAY
. I see now where the O2 rebranding comes from; deliberate confusion with Oz: Philip Anschutz as the Wizard. In a few minutes, I’ll be whistling ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. The post-architectural shells and green-glass helmets of the Thames Path are friends of Dorothy: glitzy, camp, hollow. Scarecrows in full slap dancing in a dustbowl. My experience, of taking a tour around City Hall, that blob of Xeroxed New York, was pure Oz. The more I saw, the less there was: a knot of angry teachers with placards, outside the entrance, provided the only reality. Airport security: card-swipes, identity checks, shuffling lines. The process took longer than the climb to the viewing platform, which was the main purpose of the building, a perch for television interviews. The Tower of London and Tower Bridge as a backdrop for weather reports. Sound behaved in strange ways. From the public gallery you could hear the whispered asides of mayoral advisers, while keynote speeches were mushy and inaudible.

At London Bridge, Anna gets a call. If you carry a phone, you are electronically tagged. A family crisis: she will have to go home. I will push on, step out. I hope we can reconnect after a few days. I read an interview with Rory Stewart: diplomat, royal tutor, kilted hiker through dangerous places. Travel-writer in the tradition of Eric Newby, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Bruce Chatwin. Stewart is sitting somewhere in Shepherd’s Bush, averting his eyes from the Westfield hangar. Dusk is falling. He decides, on a whim, to stroll down to Oxford, to one of the colleges with which he has a special relationship. He probably composes a lecture as he goes. He will arrive in time for breakfast. My god, how fast does the man walk? Following the meandering river path is going to keep me busy for four or five days; Stewart yawns, stretches, knocks off the miles to sharpen his appetite.

A member of the audience challenged me after a talk I’d given at some seminar room in Oxford. ‘You’re not
really
a walker, are you?’ He was right. Day tripper, excursionist. No Richard Long straight-line epics for a few pithy words, hundreds of miles to produce a single image. I did it the other way, modest distances for torrents of justifying verbiage.

William Shakespeare, high-domed, full-cheeked, is advertising tours on the side of the Globe Theatre. There are never-ending improvements to the image of construction. Fences around fences. It’s that moment of the day, shortly after dawn, when hot yellows and reds are reflected in the glass panels of culture bunkers. Leaves uncurl on needle-thin paper-bark trees. TEMPORARY EYESORE is stencilled in black on an orange barrier. A scribbled message on a scrap of paper beneath Southwark Bridge: A CITY ON THE BRINK.

Heritage London. Funfair London of Ferris wheels and Japanese fish tanks. Secret State London: a memorial to resistance fighter Violette Szabo and the wartime SOE.
Carve Her Name with Pride
, Virginia McKenna as the martyred heroine. The period of British films restaging the Second War went on twice as long as the real thing.

Why did the Festival of Britain, in 1951, feel so much better than the launch of the Millennium Dome and the construction of the Olympic Park? I was eight years old. It was one of my first trips to London. Then there was the river, which I loved straight away, the boat carrying us between the exhibition site on the South Bank, with its
Eagle-
comic Skylon needle, and Battersea Park with its pleasure grounds and dodgem cars. The show, coming out of war, austerity, rationing, was at the heart of London, not banished miles downstream. Ealing Studios made a film about a family barricading themselves into their doomed terrace, to repel bulldozers clearing the ground for the grand project. Bureaucrats relent, allowing the house to remain as a festival exhibit: the typical English home. When the allotment holders in Waterden Road proposed the same ruse to the Olympic Development Authority, they were expelled within weeks. By 2009 the will of the alphabet-soup quangos is absolute: more consultation, swifter destruction. Direction of travel.

The Central Office of Information documentary,
Brief City
(1952), brought the Festival of Britain right back to me. The voice-over speaks of ‘fierce little boys filled with their secret purposes’. School caps, ties, white shirts, grey shorts. It was summer, the men were in gabardine coats, puffing on pipes, and the women carried large white bags as they hobbled in difficult shoes. The architect Hugh Casson wanders the site with Patrick O’Donovan, who represents the sponsors, the
Observer
newspaper. They smoke, they stroll, ordinary figures in the crowd. There were 8.5 million visitors, but the project was not universally popular. Telephone operators at the box office were reported to answer with a brisk: ‘Festering Britain here.’

Casson knew what he was about and his concept was not strangled at birth by spinners, politicians, land pirates. He spoke of ‘leisured gaiety’: kiss-me-quick hats and fairground novelties alongside solemn Henry Moore figures. Popular-science gizmos and models for New Towns tested on a compliant audience. There would be no vaunting processional ways, no grand vistas, no cardboard rhetoric. The South Bank site was plotted like a series of rooms, opening out, one from another. ‘London,’ Casson told us, ‘is a city of secret places.’ He wanted to conjure that sensation of coming across a country lane nestling among uniform suburbs, the hidden garden overshadowed by grim warehouses. Wren churches flanked by Italian coffee bars: the Fairway Café, the Dairy Bar, the ‘51’.

The Thames would remain an ‘off-stage presence’, unstressed, vital to the city’s sense of itself. The view across the river to the north bank was acknowledged: as a backdrop. ‘We didn’t want any resounding pronouncements,’ Casson insisted. He designed hanging walkways, stairs, passages, so that visitors would get unexpected glimpses of light on the river. Where fences were necessary, they maintained the integrity of the site, with its bright ‘nursery colours’, against the overwhelming weight of London soot and dirt outside. When darkness fell, searchlight beams swept over dancing crowds, in serious holiday mood, jitterbugging, foxtrotting, in hats and long coats, to the sounds of a full orchestra in evening dress. Premature Europeans taking pleasure as a duty. End of an era. Captured on film, lost in the archives.

Battersea Park holds a vestige of the festival period in its gracious riverside walk. From the steps of the gilded Peace Pagoda you can look across the Thames to the Chelsea Physic Garden. Taking my breakfast on Battersea Bridge Road, among soft-shirt architects and resting actors perusing the broadsheets, I contemplate the good life of this stretch of the river. I have already crossed, by Vauxhall Bridge, to the north bank, to avoid developments around Nine Elms. I return to the south side by Chelsea Bridge. Beyond the park, spindly Albert Bridge has its own prohibition:
ALL TROOPS MUST BREAK STEP WHEN MARCHING OVER THIS BRIDGE
.

Broad avenues, dappled light. My Thames walk is a gentle marathon, the miles drift effortlessly; the balance between riverside development and awkward ghosts like St Mary’s Church, Battersea, where William Blake married Catherine Boucher, is manageable. I echo Céline: ‘On foot, at a sprint, my private Olympics.’ I get through it, get it done, these new clusters of superior towers, shrouded wharfs, flamingo-pink extrusions reflected in potential marinas. The smooth folk, under blue umbrellas, taking coffee at round tables, are computer-generated, but content among neat beds of yellow and red flowers. The fabulous harbour, the promised future, is pink-on-blue: no green spaces, no embankment. Electrified towers advancing to the river’s edge.

Near Wandsworth Park, I encounter the first walkers of the day, a map-around-neck group of sheepy seniors hitting the Wandle Trail. ‘Tony Trude,’ we are informed by a notice on the bridge, ‘moored his houseboat and watched river life.’ The boat sunk in 2001. What happened to Tony is not revealed.

Six young women are being trained in the use of invisible skis. They reactivate the northwest-passage metaphor with a clumping synchronized dance across imaginary snowfields. A man in a tight grey suit is shouting into his phone. ‘I talked with the chairman this morning. I told him what was happening with Nigel. We’re screwed.’

I stop to pay my respects to another riverside St Mary, the little church of the Putney Debates of 1647. At that time, 40 per cent of locals were watermen. A ferry carried travellers across the Thames to Fulham. Many notables, officers and common soldiers from the English Civil War, were present: Ireton, Thomas Rainsborough, Edward Saxby, John Wildman, William Goffe. That story is now a matter of recordings and pamphlets. Hard chairs, nothing elaborate in the way of pews, have been arranged on three sides around a plain altar table. Children take non-denominational instruction. ‘These toilets are permanently closed.’

After Putney, the river is about exercise and pleasure. Boathouses, tracks for cyclists keeping up with rowing eights, bellowing at single scullers. Richmond is an English Arcadia; the grand villas, the follies and grottoes begin. Private roads for rifle and pistol clubs. Seven miles out from London, Catholics and other heretics were permitted to take up residence. That sense of exile can still be felt. At Ham House, I can’t hear my own breath for the din of leaf-hoovering devices. The river is screened. The official path, much employed by joggers and dog-walkers, becomes a tunnel through tightly planted scrub. A stone needle at Teddington marks the end of the authority of the Thames Conservancy: ‘Landward Limit 1909’. And the final stretch also of whatever cultural ballast I have carried from the Isle of Grain; we dream now of tame English villages instead of the open sea.