Marc fails to make the seven a.m. meeting at London Bridge station. He’s been here before, walks recorded in his book Liquid City (Isle of Grain to Teddington). The novelty has worn off, feet have healed; he discriminates, picks outings worthy of his talent. That’s very reasonable, the images have been logged. Greenhithe, Ingress Park (its Capability Brown plantings handed over to Crest Nicholson), Northfleet, Gravesend: they are part of an earlier narrative. I won’t peddle an exhausted tale. Better to pick up where the motorway surges into Essex.
The problem is that video-time and shoot-from-the-hip photo-time are not compatible. Renchi and I have learnt to register detail as we walk; a steady and unspectacular progress. Breakfast, pub lunch, chats with folk met at the wayside. Nothing to break the trance. Video is trance. Once Petit’s finger starts to stroke the touch-screen, he’s gone. He’s inside the image.
Temple Hill throws up seductive views of river, motorway, suspension bridge: Petit might take an hour to find the right spot from which to film. Renchi can’t rein himself in. Look, look: blue and white POLICE tape in a field, Costa del Sol bungalows with new silver motors too big for the driveway. The Italianate tower of another captured hospital, WELCOME TO THAMESLINK PARK, ARCHERY HOUSE. Temple Hill is an entire landscape of ‘Archery’, brash and dissimulating. Loud with inaccurate précis, revised biography. Petit loves it, he scowls and he shoots. Renchi, anguished, frantic to be on the move, smiles. Walking and filming won’t work. That’s why Petit spends so much time on the road. You can’t go wrong; one hand rests lightly on the wheel, the other on the button of the Sony DV. Radio On. Bruce Gilbert mixes on cassette, news flashes from the radio. Out in the weather, stuck on the marshes in a steady downpour, the film-essayist surfers. He wants a narrative that can be reduced to a list. A shooting script.
1. On a ridge above the Dartford Crossing: the Sakis Hotel. A venue favoured by migrant US evangelists, operated by slot-machines. SUNDAY BRUNCH £16.95. 3 COURSE CARVERY & JAZZ BAND. EAT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN!
2. CROSSWAYS. Giant letters in a retail park. A plantation of pylons.
3. Approved industrial architecture: a windowless box. On an epic scale. The coming, off-highway aesthetic: neutrality. Absence of signature, ASDA BACKS BRITISH BEEF.
4. AMBIENT GOODS INWARD. Dead roads where container-transporters park. Limbo zones of rubbish in short grass, improvised culinary and sexual transactions.
5. Ingress Abbey as devastated mud, a building site.
6. Graffito on riverside walclass="underline" THATCHER OUT!
7. The cranes and hoists of Northfleet under a heavy sky. Petit eating a banana. A snail hanging from a spear of wet grass. A snail on Renchi’s shoe.
8. One hoarding: PELICAN FABRICATIONS, SEACON TERMINALS LIMITED, BRITANNIA REFINED METALS LIMITED, LONDON COACHES, FLAT-OUT KARTING, THAMES TIMBER.
9. The locked stadium of Dartford and Northfleet FC.
10. A Northfleet café with an expressionist muraclass="underline" industry returned to life in a smoky (yellow/red) apocalypse. The mural as a window on an alternative world.
11. A wall of figs in a Gravesend industrial estate.
12. A chalk quarry (caged walk) not yet converted into another Bluewater. Renchi suffers from mild, Petit from severe, attacks of vertigo.
13. Riverside houses with Belgian roofs, Corinthian capitals (inverted foliations), arched windows, ogee mouldings. Fallen into disrepair.
14. A fibre-optic colony. Guarded by a lighthouse topped with concrete water tank.
15. Graffito on tile walclass="underline" EAT THE ESTABLISHMENT.
16. A microphone, on a tripod, set up on a traffic island.
17. A chaplet of sunflowers woven into a chainlink fence. WARNING GUARD DOGS ON PATROL. KEEP OUT.
18. Memorial tablet to Pocahontas (in bell-shaped hat).
19. The Gravesend-Tilbury Ferry: Princess Pocahontas.
We’re out, at last, on the grey Thames, at the mouth of the estuary. The voyage towards Essex feels like a mistake. The small craft has to push against the tide. Sky and river merge. Our walk through Surrey and Kent dissolves. We are returned to the familiar shabby narratives of Tilbury (dockside, fort, World’s End pub). To piebald horses roaming a Dutch landscape of irrigation ditches and rifle ranges.
As the light goes, Petit falls further and further behind; he is trying to make a video-record of salient dereliction (high dock walls, weed-strewn railway tracks, hangdog lamp-standards). We tramp towards Grays. There’s no river path, we have to stick with the Dock Approach Road. Tower blocks wink across rough heath. Steady traffic. Everything is visible and nothing is revealed. There must have been a reason once for Grays, but it’s been forgotten. Subdued, we wait for the Fenchurch Street train.
Blood & Oil Carfax to Waltham Abbey
1
Film-essayist Patrick Keiller, who knows about such things, says that Grays once had a wonderful cinema, on a par with the Kilburn State. Now the State of Kilburn can sneer at its riverside rivaclass="underline" Grays is beyond resuscitation. A body bag lined with asbestos.
19 October 1999: we stepped on to the platform to a (glove-in-mouth) tannoy babble that sounded like the three-minute warning. At Fenchurch Street the ticket machines were out of order, trains were running late and station security were shaking down a couple of estuarine chancers (trying to slip into town without the necessary paperwork). The woman behind the plexiglass screen couldn’t hear what Renchi said, couldn’t imagine why anyone, so early in the morning, would want to travel towards Grays. The point of Grays is that you leave before first light, return after sunset — avoid all eye-contact.
Don’t misunderstand me, I love the place: it’s pre-fictional, post-historic. It has slipped out of the guidebook and into the Gothic anthology. Laughable attempts at civic revival — pedestrianised walkways, covered markets upgraded to prolapsed malls — do nothing to diminish the galloping entropy. The Stalinist turret of Keiller’s favourite cinema — STATE — is visible from the station. Dirty brown bricks, deeply scored creases: the aspect of a power station, of Bankside before the makeover.
WHO IS THE DISTRICT CONTROLLER???? Graffito on the underpass. Grays is a breakaway republic, the Uzbekistan of the Estuary. Grays has Tattoo Studios (‘Over 18’s Only Please!’) and food so fast that it avoids the mediation of the microwave, travelling directly from slaughterhouse floor to fast-breeding salmonella culture. Retail facilities behave like uninhabited multi-storey car parks. Trade goods are rejects from car boot sales.
But Grays has something that gives it life and pedigree, Grays has the River Thames. The sky to the east, on this damp morning, could be illuminated by searchlights: a pissy-gold cloud base flushing to a raider’s dawn. Nautical pubs are imposing but clapped out. The signboard for The Rising Sun has weathered into a Monet Xerox, Tower Bridge drowning in thin syrup.
The essential qualities of this riparian settlement have not been lost. James Thome, writing in 1876, sketches Grays as: ‘old, irregular, and, like all those small Thames ports, lazy-looking and dirty’. Grays lived off chalk: when they’d finished digging it out for conversion into lime and cement, carting it on to the roads of Essex, they moved into retail landfill — Lakeside, Thurrock.
‘Of all the accursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism,’ wrote Arthur Young in 1757, ‘none ever equalled that from Billericay to the “King’s Head” at Tilbury… the ruts are of an incredible depth… and to add to all the infamous circumstances which occur to plague a traveller, I must not forget eternally meeting with chalk wagons, themselves frequently stuck fast until a collection of them are in the same situation, so that twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out, one by one.’