The factory has been assembled from Vorticist limbs, cylinders, chimneys bolted together. It’s all about circulation: hiss, rattle, whistle, crunch. Then storage. Windowless units with steel-grey walls. The industrial icebergs of Thurrock drift towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. Thousands of tons of soap powder waiting to be shipped out. The most austere warehouse/tank has been sited so that the rising sun casts the shadow of the Procter & Gamble smokestacks across a colour-graded screen: a cinema of morning. This great downriver art work has been painted in four bands: dark blue (for the river), lighter blue, metallic grey, to the pearly haze of the sky. Meteorological minimalism. Constable’s cloud studies revisioned as a child’s building block.
It was easy to miss, but the Canning Town veteran, sucking on his single tooth, put us right. Follow the roughcast wall with the product placement graffito — PERSIL WHITE POWER — to the chalked Maltese cross (with inset swastikas); then turn north, pick up the path through the thicket of thorns. The block building is your target, two bands of colour poking above the trees. Ash, elder, bramble. Chickweed, mallow, sorrel. Nettles, wild carrot, ivy. A deep-green abundance through which we hack: towards the restored (by largesse of Procter & Gamble) twelfth-century church of St Clement’s, West Thurrock.
The freakish conjunction of church, block warehouse, factory has us spinning. That a building used by Canterbury pilgrims, a river crossing, should have survived. A major portion of the money required for restoration came from an unlikely source: the makers of Four Weddings and a Funeral. West Thurrock is not a backdrop I would have associated with Hugh Grant and Simon Callow. I checked the video. There it was. Dead Callow, resurrected Auden. Establishing shots from the high ground, a glimpse of the bridge. A melancholy walk, after the ceremony, to the riverside. Most of the magic of the place, mercifully, was elided. Actorly business, in English films, pulls rank on location. The facility fee was earned without evidence of the director (or the crew) seeing what was here, a strange geometry of unconnected elements. The knowledge that Thurrock had any meaningful existence before the arrival of the catering vans.
We met a Procter & Gamble gardener in the church grounds, a man in overalls who was prepared to let us in. The graveyard was a sanctuary for wildlife (and lowlife). We did the tour: saw the outsize headstones of the Essex giants and the memorial to the boys from the training ship Cornwall — who were buried in a mass grave in 1915, after going down, in a rowing boat disaster, off Purfleet. We admired the Roman brick courses, the evidence of a circular building, discovered on the south side of the present tower.
Renchi pounced: our old friends the Knights Templar. Only four round churches remained in England, so our guide informed us: the Temple Church (off Fleet Street), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, a church in Northampton and another at Little Maplestead, Essex. We listened to his pitch, nodding over the tiles (Roman sesquipedalia). Hospitallers and Templars guarded pilgrim routes. Without question, they had been active in this area.
The lid of a large tomb was cracked, the gardener lifted one section: junkies kept their gear inside. Kids from Thurrock and Purfleet haunted the burial ground, smacked out of their heads, sleeping against the church walls. Or, if the rain came in from the river, in a convenient sepulchre. Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham reworked by Wes Craven.
The headstone of Robert Lee commemorated a man ‘who died in the accident of a pistol in the twinkling of an eye’. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, respectful of vampire lore, took shelter in a suicide’s grave.
Alabaster effigies, inside St Clement’s, were chilled: chipped profiles, sliced skulls. The pilgrim route was good business. Crossing water called for risk premiums, offerings, prayer. Fear is the surest source of patronage: fragments of medieval glass, illuminated by a press-switch, featured a voyage through Hell’s Teeth — from the cult which followed the 1348 outbreak of bubonic plague. The Black Death. A crowned bear rattling a money bag.
St Clement’s, West Thurrock, was one of the river’s great secrets. Without the old man in Grays, we would have missed it. I had missed it on previous walks; climbing the river wall to photograph stacks of Portakabins, then carrying on towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. But gaining access to the church, touching alabaster flesh, experiencing forgotten plagues as brilliantly coloured shards of glass, confirmed my instinct. A residue of Count Dracula was still earthed in Purfleet.
Vampire scholars, such as Kim Newman, have always recognised that yesterday’s Undead are today’s asylum seekers, the Undispersed. The slow-detonating impact of Stoker’s 1897 fiction came, not from its novelty, but from the sense of the book as an original rewrite, the recapitulation of a recurring fable. Beneath the breastbeating Shakespearean echoes (cod-Irving), and the tent-show religiosity, is a considered and accurate geography. Westwards: Transylvania to Whitby. The Gothic imagination invading — and undoing — imperial certainties of trade, law, class. Dracula announces the coming age of the estate agent. Nothing in the book works without the Count’s ability to purchase, rent, secure property. Like the Moscow Mafia buying into St George’s Hill (proximity to Heathrow), Dracula chose Purfleet, alongside the Thames, so that he could ship out for Varna at a moment’s notice. Being an immortal, the Count knew that he only had to hang on for a few years and he would have a bridge across the river, a motorway circuit around London: new grazing grounds. The future M25 was a magic circle, a circle in salt. The Vampire couldn’t be excluded, he was already inside! Purneet rather than Thurrock. The motorway was the perfect metaphor for the circulation of blood: Carfax Abbey to Harefield — with attendant asylums. Stoker predicted the M25, made its physical construction tautologous. The Count’s fetid breath warmed Thatcher’s neck as she cut the ribbon.
Back home, in his coldwater Transylvanian pile — no shaving mirrors, no central heating — Dracula/Ceauşescu plots his exile, his escape to the fleshpots of the west. He fondles maps and guidebooks: ‘These… have been good friends to me… Through them I have come to know your great England… I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London.’
London gazetteers are a kind of pornography, a lubricious portfolio of future potentialities. The Lakeside Ikea catalogue would have turned him on to the A13 and the chalk quarries. Ikea were sensitive to ‘that well-loved essential bit of storage’, the patinised pine cupboard like a vertical coffin. Furniture that needn’t cost ‘an arm and a leg’.
‘Come,’ says the Count to Jonathan Harker, ‘tell me of London and of the house which you have procured for me.’
Dracula is the original psychogeographer, map fetishist, timetable freak.
The lamps were also lit in the study or library, and I found the Count lying on the sofa, reading of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide… He was interested in everything, and asked me a myriad questions about the place and its surroundings. He clearly had studied beforehand all he could get on the subject of the neighbourhood, for he evidently at the end knew very much more than I did.
The Count, doing his own research, located the heritage set needed for his experiment in English country house living. Sunk in reverie, on the couch in that dim library, he resembles Peter Ackroyd, conjuring up mists and miasmas, busy streets and quiet courtyards, passages where time flows as sluggishly as the Exxon oil-seepage on the Thurrock foreshore. Dracula’s special subject is: doctored memory, describing the past in the excited prose of a contemporary observer. The body of London solicits his bite. He knows just where skin is tender, where the stitches will part: the alleys and waste lots and riverside chasms where ancient crimes are unappeased.