‘Dangerous radiation levels within the receiver,’ Lewis explains, ‘had to be carefully and expensively screened.’ This too, radiation, carcinogenic leakage, the sour aftermath of entrepreneurship, was to be a defining element in the Lea Valley. History recovered through stinks and scummy water, smoke you can taste.
On 9 December 1997, a group of former Thorn employees met, on the site that had once been the engineering laboratories of the Euro-conglomerate Thorn EMI Ferguson to witness the dedication of a plaque paying homage to the late Sir Jules. The plaque is now positioned in the foyer of the Enfield Safeway superstore.
Best Value. We, East Londoners, support the Lea, as it supports us, marking our border, shadowing the meridian line. It is enjoyed and endured by fishermen, walkers, cyclists who learn to put up with the barriers, the awkward setts beneath bridges. We pay our tithe. Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan was a visionary document: ‘every piece of land welded into a great regional reservation’. The Lee Valley Recreational Park. A perimeter fence around a Sioux reservation. Compulsory leisure. The Lea would lose its subversive, grubby culture of contraband, villainy, iffy businesses carried out beyond the fold in the map.
Way back in 1961 Lou Sherman, Lord Mayor of Hackney, got together with representatives of seventeen other local authorities, and with the support of the Duke of Edinburgh, to realise Abercrombie’s vision. A levy was introduced for councils in Essex, Hertfordshire and London. Grander plans, with the passage of time, required more complex financial structures, ‘partnerships’. Local authorities, UK government, Europe: more executive producers than a Dino de Laurentiis epic. The Lea Valley was a future spectacle. Water was the new oil. Housing developments required computer-enhanced riverscapes as a subliminal backdrop.
There would be funds for decontamination, a ‘precept on council tax’, unnoticed, except by readers of the small print. Representatives of thirty boroughs had their places on the council of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. Regeneration was the theme, the green lung. A ten-year strategic business plan: ‘It firmly embraces the principles of Best Value in pursuit of enhancements of service delivery.’ Management-speak for the open air supermarket. Best Value. Never knowingly undersold. Eco-bondage. ‘A unique mosaic of farmland, nature reserves, green open spaces and waterways.’ The ideal brochure: god’s eye maps, photographs with jagged, painterly edges, bullet points, heavy print. Best Value.
Ultimately, all walks contradict the he of the land; they will be circular. An ‘Outer Orbital Route’ designed to ‘follow the outer edge of London, a country walk with London always nearby’. The Lea, given time and investment, would stand physics on its head. It would become a sylvan alternative to the M25. With the motor car as its handmaiden. ‘Consideration must be given to the needs of the motorist.’ A green halo. An aureole around smoking tarmac. ‘Leave the M25 at Junction 25. Follow the signs for City. At first set of traffic lights turn left signposted to Freezywater.’ This is the Lee Valley Leisure Complex.
‘We will make our commitment to our duty of Best Value; ensuring clarity of objectives and customer and performance focus at the heart of our cultural and organisational change… Major Capital Development will seek to achieve Best Value.’
Did we qualify — as customers? Drummond, Atkins and Sinclair? Unlikely. Elective leisure was the condition of our lives, endured through a puritanical work ethic. Drummond scribbling away, anonymously, in the cafeteria of a provincial department store. Atkins hunched in his dark room. Sinclair zigzagging around the fringes in a frantic attempt to avoid all versions of the circuit, the smooth walk that carries you back to the point of departure. We were spurners of Best Value. Drummond burnt money and gave away self-published booklets. Atkins printed more photographs than he could sell in ten lifetimes. I wrote the same book, the same life, over and over again. We wanted Worst Value. We refused cashback. We solicited bad deals, ripoffs, tat. If you explained something to us, we wouldn’t touch it. We knew what Best Value meant: soap bubbles, scented bullshit. That’s why our walk began at the most tainted spot on the map of London. Exorcism, the only game worth the candle.
4
Breakfast is a priority on these walks. Which is something of a problem in the desert between the neck of the Isle of Dogs at East India Dock Road and our access point to the Lee Navigation towpath at Bow Lock. The landscape is provisional. Strategic planning runs up against sulking real estate, tacky old businesses that won’t fade away, inconvenience stores, revenants from Thomas Burke’s Chinatown. Marine provisioners have decayed into monosodium glutamate takeaways that leave you orange-tongued, raging with thirst. Merchant marine outfitters peddle cheap camping-gear, unisex jeans, diving suits for non-swimmers.
Bill Drummond is a good walker, long-striding, easy paced. He doesn’t go at it like a journalist, rushing the rush, overwhelmed by a bombardment of sense impressions. Atkins has his aches and pains, but he’ll plod on for as long as it takes. Not much, as yet, to photograph. A token view across the river, back to the Dome, from the spot that featured in EastEnders, the hotel where Ian Beale married Melanie.
East India Dock Road, with its evocative name, has a secondary identity as the A13, my favourite early-morning drive. The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; flyovers like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for their transporters. The A13 drains East London’s wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated. The wild nature graveyard in Newham. Inflatable, corn-yellow potato chips wobbling in their monster bucket outside McDonald’s in Dagenham. River fret over Rainham Marshes.
Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.
A high sierra of container units in rust colours and deep blues, chasms through which sunbeams splinter, wrecked double-decker buses with spider’s-web windows. Junk yards with leashed dogs. The Beam rivulet and the sorry Ingrebourne meander through spoilt fields, beneath the elevated highway (a road on stilts).
Where a road goes informs every inch of it; there is an irritability about the section we have to cross. Why are we heading north and not swinging east, following the hint spelt out by juggernauts? The ramps that lift you on to the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge are decorated with burnt-out motors — as if joy riders from Barking and Hornchurch knew they’d reached the end of the line. Fire the evidence. Leave the orbital motorway to major league crims.
The A13 shuffle through East London is like the credits sequence of the Mafia soap, The Sopranos; side-of-the-eye perspective, bridges, illegitimate businesses about to be overwhelmed by the big combos. Black smoke and blue smoke. Waste disposal. A well-chewed cigar. The motorway, when you reach it, has been infected by this shoddy progress; the drivers are up for it, hard men, warriors. Hear the screech of tyres as they carve across three lanes to hit the Sandy Lane ramp without losing momentum.