Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (8 page)

GATEWAY TO LONDON’S OLYMPIC PARK. OVER 300 DYNAMIC BRANDS. 1.9 MILLION SQ FT OF RETAIL AND LEISURE DESTINATION. WESTFIELD
.

Access to the virtual stadium is by way of an Australian supermarket. High screens feature a blurred sprint to athletic supremacy and a lifetime of endorsement. Pedestrian permeability, that’s the catchphrase: out of the station, holding your breath, and into the mall.

On Angel Lane, where tethered piebald ponies crop the verge, I try to identify the entrance to the obliterated Chobham Farm. A gigantic hoarding, layers peeling away, features a manic John Lydon (formerly Rotten) doing a number on behalf of Country Life butter. The western horizon is cancelled in a sandstorm of construction dust.

I remember coming out of the gates, on the morning after the platinum heist, and deciding that this would be my final week as a Stratford labourer. I stood on this spot, looking over the rail yards, across the mounds and hoists where rogue capital was busying itself to squeeze a living out of an undervalued strip of territory. There was a new graffito on the wall now hidden behind Lydon’s butter advertisement: CHARLES MANSON IS INNOCENT.

China is the myth, the money opera. On 21 February 1972, as I was contemplating my exit from Chobham Farm, Richard Milhous Nixon, bloodied in the proxy wars of Vietnam and Cambodia, stepped from the presidential plane, Air Force One, on to the Chinese mainland for the photo-opportunity of a lifetime. Two posters met. The American political bagman, liar, serial opportunist, and the doped, moon-faced enigma of Mao, long marcher, swimmer among maidens. Kissinger and Chou En-lai hovered in the wings. Pat Nixon was presented with a glass elephant and invited to check out pig farms (as if auditioning viruses for export). She was greeted by marshalled children. And spoke of a time when consumer luxuries must give way to simple Quaker virtues. The 1987 John Adams opera confirmed what we now know: China was fit ground for the greatest show on earth, the Olympic Games of 2008. Rehearsals began at least two thousand years ago.

The neurotic swirl of activity around this grandest of projects – building, destroying, promoting – brought regiments of freelancers to Beijing. Commentators, essayists without tenure, loose poets: they ballasted aircraft in the rush to get ahead of the story. The dollar fountains, the packed forecourts of slick used cars in place of market gardens along epic highways. Neon rain. Face masks for cyclists. Glazed food to be eaten on the run. Jellyfish macerated in China-Cola.

Dazzling proposals were unveiled by peripatetic Dutch architects. Swiss designers in mean spectacles astonished audiences at conferences celebrating ‘City of Culture’ status in Norwegian fishing towns, prudent with their North Sea oil revenues. Laptop magicians screened CGI visions of impossible towers, interlinked orbital motorways stretching the ancient capital hundreds of miles, so it appeared, into the Mongolian wilderness.

The pulse of the world was out there and I wanted to be a part of it. The siren song of the six orbital motorways was irresistible. What could be more challenging than to set the afterlife of the Beijing Games against our own emerging Olympic Park? Many of the containers now snaking along railway embankments through Hackney Wick towards Stratford, alongside the ghosts of Chobham Farm, are stencilled with the logo
CHINA SHIPPING
. White lettering on green metal boxes. Loud signage in a landscape of burning-eye graffiti, breakfast cafés, junkyards, closed roads and plasterboarded pubs.

I watched driving footage, shot on a mobile phone, sent back from Beijing as an appetizer: soft enough, generic enough, to be anywhere. Dallas. Milton Keynes. Or a spin on the virgin Chiswick flyover, shortly after it was declared open by Jayne Mansfield in 1959. And a few years before J. G. Ballard blew a tyre, rolled over the central reservation and demolished street furniture (for which he was charged £100). When asked by an interviewer if he knew any Chinese, Ballard replied: ‘I wish I could say I did. I was born in China and lived there till the age of sixteen. I didn’t learn a word.’

Beijing taught us that the interval between posting a development promo on the screen and walking through it is undetectable. If you can’t smell the kitchen, or scrape shit off your shoes, you are not there. This morning, there is a clinging, overripe perfume that people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped acres used, so recently, to be. Aromatic mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. A heron dance of cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists, clustering for safety, dip and swerve like swallows. Hard-hats and yellow tabards monkey over the jungle scaffolding of shrouded towers, the exposed steel ribs of emerging stadia. Grass has the irradiated sheen of an ancient toothbrush. Early risers, in the privilege of first-use recreation, a smudge of sun burning off the fug of pollution that hangs over a pre-Olympic city, fall into quiet conversation.

Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom. A bridal abundance of cherry: pink-and-white froth. Yellow pompoms of japonica. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as an energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets.

I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle, for more than an hour, around the perimeter fence of the newly laid carpet of a sports complex achieved in advance of the Great Event. They are there when I set out and still there, moving at the same brisk unhurried pace, when I return. The pavilion and the new pitches are a compensatory gesture towards those who must endure years of drilling, dust, demolished schools and theatres, banishment from functioning but inappropriate housing developments. The block-building, assembled overnight, has no vernacular element, it could have been designed anywhere for any purpose; blinding whiteness complemented by the deep blue of the interior, an aspirational colour we must learn to associate with the culturally unifying message of the Games.

The Chinese woman walks, right shoulder to the fence, in a clockwise direction, while her husband short-strides the other way. When they meet they do not acknowledge one another, not so much as a nod or a wink. My impression is that he is less enthusiastic about the regime. He wears a hooded monkish top and looks like a sixty-a-day man who has given up his addiction, reluctantly, after receiving bad news. A drag of burnt air, one final smoke-chase, is his reward for completing the hour’s penance. The woman, in flat cap, arms pumping, is remorseless, gaining ground with every circuit.

‘The opportunity has come for them to lift up their heads,’ said Chairman Mao. ‘The authority of the husband is getting shakier every day.’

The comrade walker pistons forward on her self-imposed generator: by force of will, she drives the engine of the city. At her side march unseen battalions.

And this is East London, four years short of that seventeen-day corporate extravaganza, the ‘primary strategic objective’ to which we are so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston Park, E2, a modest enclosure factored out of war-damaged terraces, the vanished Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, has long been an oasis. It was launched as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, wooden obstacles for training circuits, laminated heritage notices. Spanking new carpets are woven for clapped-out football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of
EastEnders
fame.

Back in the 1820s, Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials, stock accounts falsified. In more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed on a daily basis, hidden parks win prizes for visionary planting schemes. Unnoticed, rough sleepers in thin bags utilize the stone terrace of a café that has been shut for years. Late risers, having nothing much to rise for, burrow deep into dismal kapok-stuffed cocoons, while dog-accompanists use ballistic devices to hurl soggy yellow-green tennis balls for their hunt-and-retrieve pets. Designated wilderness zones quote wild nature.

Artificial grass is better than the real thing, tougher. False chlorophyll glistens like perpetual dew, the permafrost of conspicuous investment. The rough sleepers are not victims of property mania or traumatized war veterans, they are construction workers, often Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is: the tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole-digging. The throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along murky waterways. A much-lauded development calling itself Adelaide Wharf (an aircraft carrier ploughed into a wood yard) replaced a long-standing cold-store operation. ‘With its 147 units (prices up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ said Stephen Oaks, area director for English Partnerships.

Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to spare, are rumoured to be buying up entire buildings as investment portfolios; many of these gaudy shells, low-ceilinged, tight-balconied, are doomed to remain half-empty, occupied by employees of the developer. Ikea storage boxes gimmicked out of swipe cards and toothpicks. The urban landscape of boroughs anywhere within the dust cloud of the Olympic Park has been devastated with a beat-the-clock impatience unrivalled in London since the beginnings of the railway age. Every civic decency, every sentimental attachment, is swept aside for that primary strategic objective, the big bang of the starter’s pistol.

When did it begin, this intimate liaison between developers and government, to reconstruct the body of London, to their mutual advantage? Dr Frankenstein with a Google Earth programme and a laser scalpel. In the early 1970s, when the deepwater docks were already ruined by containerization, restrictive practices and fearful-angry ‘Enoch is right’ marches, Maxwell Joseph acquired Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards, acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as buffer-reefs against the encroachment of the City. A paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the Gainsborough portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman, the brewmaster, asset-stripped the operation, and bought up surrounding acres in canny anticipation of future development packages, the coming world of retro frocks, Moroccan internet cafés and ‘plastinated’ freak-show corpse art by Gunther von Hagens. The eastward shift, towards off-catalogue territory, was launched. Spitalfields Market, with its parasitical life forms (allotment gardeners, twilight prostitutes, vagrant drinkers around wastelot fires), was expelled to Hackney Marshes. Where it would function quite successfully up to the point where the football pitches, alongside the new site, would be required as parking space for the 2012 green Olympics.

Johnnie Walker, chairman of the Hackney and Leyton Football League, was enraged. Despite assurances from a multitude of faceless authorities, that work would not begin for four years, the diggers arrived before the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the ODA (Olympic Development Authority) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. Challenged, a spokesperson for the ODA admitted that two trenches had indeed been dug, for ‘archaeological’ research. Animal bones and beer cans were photographed and preserved; along with the rubble of blitzed Second World War terraces over which the football pitches had been laid out. ‘The heritage must be protected.’

Much of this tricky element, heritage, can be recovered from vintage films as they are reissued on DVD. The tall chimney of the Brick Lane brewery, a significant territorial marker, appears like an accusing finger in stills taken from Carol Reed’s
Odd Man Out
, which was released in 1947. War-damaged Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels: to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s
The London Nobody Knows.
Umbrella rolled, vowels clipped, he sleepwalks through a gone-in-the-mouth city, struggling to make conversation with marooned mariners and fire-eyed witnesses. When he performed his dying fall in
Odd Man Out
, clutching at the gate, before staggering across the snow towards the lights of the police cars, he is in Haggerston Park, E2.

Another film, so sharp in its exposure of aspects of the coming land piracy that it seemed prophetic, arrived in 1979.
The Long Good Friday
was efficiently directed by John Mackenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as Mackenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by local government corruption (‘the new casino’s gone through’), kickbacks to Irish Republicans in the burgeoning construction industry, bent coppers and heritaged Kray hoodlums making overtures to the New York Mafia with their ‘property lawyers, lawyers specializing in gambling tax’. Much of this had happened and continues to happen. It is the Thatcherite legacy we are now experiencing. London topography is reconfigured according to the movie finances of the moment, first as proper cinema, then as budget television.