The days of the cement factories and the futile attempts to promote Grays as a sailing resort, a marina, are over: river gives way to road. We’ve taken our hit of nostalgia, hanging about the dock gates, photographing steam stacks, cranes, jetties. It’s time to follow the Thames path, west, towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, the motorway.
The path, which begins with a paved promenade, soon declines into a Barratt estate, dressed as an open-air exhibition of ‘computer generated impressions’. This is a strikingly schizophrenic effect: you get the Thames as it is, cloacal, rusty, tired — and, at the same time, you are confronted with computer-generated projections (Grays as it ought to be). A blue-river fantasy feeds directly into khaki drift; a young couple, first-time buyers, stride hand in hand down the riverfront parade towards a line of virgin Barratt villas. Future grass for present mud. The magic mirror of the Barratt hoarding works like Prozac, taking the edge from blight. Pink stone, a cloudless sky; toy boats gussying up a dead river.
Barratt World is hallucinogenic: mushroom villages, Noddy in Essex. No hurt. Cohabiting couples in gainful employment. Regency stripe wallpaper. Red sofa — on which a woman in a green dress sprawls, teasing a coffee cup. Her partner, in immaculate blue shirt (two buttons undone), leans forward. He has another (empty) coffee cup. They are fresh, fragrant. Unblemished. If it wasn’t for the coffee cups, they’d be rutting like stags. If everything goes well, and they upgrade from the one-bedroom apartment in Block H of Lightermans Quay (at £86,995) to the two-bedroom apartment at £104,995, they’ll acquire the two sinister kids who invade their love nest with a breakfast tray (single red rose, refill of imaginary coffee).
Lightermans Quay has its own map, roads like veins flowing into the A13. Only three destinations are admitted: Southend, Lakeside and the M25. The furthest points of reference are Tilbury and Chadwell St Mary (where Daniel Defoe invested in a tile works — and lost £3,000). ‘A calm and tranquil setting with appealing riverside walks,’ the promoters claim. ‘This whole part of the riverfront is steeped in history.’ Which the builders are doing their best to disguise. What counts is ease of access to Junction 30/31 of the M25 and the ten-minute drive to ‘the huge shopping complex of Lakeside’.
Ten minutes’ walk, on the other hand, carries the excursionist into a wilderness of tall chimneys, chainlink fences, partly demolished block buildings, dank ponds, thorn bushes, coarse grass. The latest units of the housing development, frightened Dutch cottages, shelter on the very edge of a soon-to-be-demolished brownfield site. O’Rourke and Associates are swinging their hammers at the garden gate, bulldozing mounds of rubble, coating the ‘double-glazed external windows’ in fine dust.
We meet a game old boy, sniffing the tide. A weatherbeaten unident in a flat cap who deeply regrets the destruction of the wild orchards that once marked the river path. ‘Better than Vicky Park, it was.’ He’s been in Grays since he came back from the war. His house in Canning Town had been bombed. It wasn’t there, nor was his wife. She’d been relocated. But he couldn’t reconcile himself to the exile. ‘Sod all life. They do what they want with the river. Criminal.’
As for the Barratt hutches…‘Kennels,’ he spat. ‘Hear everything they say next door. Stretch and you put your elbow through the wall.’ They don’t build these estates, they grow them overnight.
A younger man with a large dog joined us. A reluctant citizen of Chafford Hundred, a former Canvey Island fisherman. ‘Lego homes,’ he reckoned. ‘They come in kits.’ He sounded less enthusiastic than Buckminster Fuller for the flatpack lifestyle. Euro regulations had done for his trade. He pointed to the fast-flowing water. ‘I can remember when this was a river of soles.’ River of Souls! Golden scintillae riding the wavecrests. We saw it: a floodtide of immortals surging to the west. Before we realised what he meant: soles, fish he could no longer net. The river’s bounty, his living.
Chafford Hundred — ‘The most coveted address in Britain’ (Evening Standard, 12 September 2001) — was a plague on the landscape. So the sole-fisher reckoned. The future he would have to endure. A bright new ‘commuter-belt village’ whacked down on a hillock overlooking a defunct port, a highroad whose vitality had been leeched by Lakeside, Thurrock. Patrick Keiller, conducting a personal survey into housing, found much to admire in Chafford Hundred.
‘Who lives there?’
Hammered by government statistics, I needed to know. Who were these putative householders, where did they come from? I rang Keiller.
‘Divorce,’ Patrick said. ‘And extended life expectancy. Single parents. Split families.’
A colony of the disenchanted in a panorama of disenchantment. Amnesiaville. It would take more than divorce or death to get me to Chafford Hundred. But one of the Barratt apartments at Grays? Riverview, ‘audio entryphone system’, elective isolation, ‘thirty-five minutes by train to Fenchurch Street’ — what could be better? As a studio, a writing space. If I could lift myself into the right socio-economic bracket. Grays was aspirational, a spoof balcony on which to contemplate the river of souls.
Chafford Hundred thrives because it is not really there. It’s displaced, not placed: 2,000 (and rising) pristine, anti-vernacular units. Scimitar-shaped Draylon-grass carpets. Second cars. An empty-by-day enclave with no centre and no purpose. Chafford Hundred, as English as one of Prince Charles’s model villages, is actually bad-weather California: compulsory democracy, the flag (of the developer), total absence of that inner-city ethnic stew. As we walk away, we are overtaken by a white stretch-limo packed with kids on a birthday outing — to Bluewater?
The satellite estates around Grays are as much about repossession as possession. In the early Nineties’ property slump, late-Thatcherite speculators caught a cold. Ready-cash sharpies (from Deep Essex and London) picked up houses for around £80,000. Now, five and six bedroom properties start at £310,000. Journalist Nick Curtis, reporting for the Standard, claimed that there was nothing to do in Chafford — except have babies, rent videos, and watch more houses being built.
As we follow the sweep of the broad Thames, the riverbank evolves into what I calclass="underline" Dracula’s Garden. Plants have had the juice sucked out of them, they’ve swallowed the filth brought in on the tide. They’ve stood up to wind, acid rain, the noxious perfume of the soap factory! And they’ve thrived. Mutated. Treated toxic infusions as growth hormones. Teasels look like spiky hand grenades. Lurid mosses lurk between the stone blocks of the embankment. Tyres, left in the mud, become rock pools. A lovely, lapping tidemark of oil, thick as elephant skin. Abandoned shopping trolleys act as trellises for weeds and rubbery marine growths. Couch grass breaks through a tarpaulin topsoil. Oil is the blood of the place. Oil and its antidote, soap.
Dominating the path to the headland, to Stoneness Lightbeacon, is Dracula’s Castle (aka Procter & Gamble’s bone-boiling detergent factory). You breathe soap, blow bubbles as you walk. Small pale flowers, meadow saxifrages, have been bleached blue. They’ve taken the additives and bloomed. A vibrant ecology of compromise has developed along the shore, in the shelter of the hot castle walls, under the pall of perfumed steam.