It takes a person of rare sensitivity to nominate Purfleet as a convenient-for-Fenchurch-Street-and-the-City estate. Carfax Abbey, Stoker called the place. The etymology, as Leonard Wolf (editor of The Annotated Dracula) points out, plays back to the ‘fourteenth century Anglo-Norman carfucks’. Carfucks. An immaculate crossover with J.G. Ballard and Crash. Carfucks. The appropriately suggestive subtitle for the A13 and its tributaries (running off into Rainham Marshes). Lay-bys. Portakabin castles. Breakers’ yards. Leashed curs howling like the wolves of the Carpathian Mountains.
Stoker, in the trance of composition, becomes Dracula in his study, the connoisseur of maps. I don’t imagine that he ever spent time walking the river path from Grays, he didn’t need to; he was in the drift. He had his researchers out on the road, doing the legwork. Harker reports:
At Purfleet, on a by-road, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It was surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates were of heavy oak and iron, all eaten with rust.
The ebbing of the tide of time drags London, its heat, to the cold east: Soho becomes Clerkenwell, becomes Hoxton, becomes Shoreditch. Dracula’s Purfleet, just inside the present M25, is our West Thurrock. The smoking mass of the Procter & Gamble factory is Carfax Abbey — constructed from giant silver bullets: to suppress memory. The neighbouring lunatic asylum, kept by Dr John Seward, is reconvened as a colony of Barratt homes. The church remains. Bram Stoker’s description is better than Pevsner, lively as Ian Nairn.
The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say to medieval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my kodak views of it from various points… There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum.
There is no medieval chapel in Purfleet. This is it, under the bridge and on to Thurrock; the church of St Clement’s, hidden among soap factories and storage facilities, a wild garden of mallow and storkbill and sorrel. A refuge for estuarine junkies.
Like Harker, I kept busy with my Kodak. I strung together numerous ‘views’, knowing that the alignments would shift; by the time I returned the teasel thicket would be cleared for a car park. My casual topographic record mutates into an epic canvas (painted by Jock McFadyen), or a lovely sequence of small panels, crafted from video-pulls, by the artist Emma Matthews. West Thurrock is in danger of becoming another Barbizon, the stalking ground for a school of weekend casuals. With stools and smocks and binoculars.
We moved on towards the bridge. Heavy clouds hugged the shoreline, black at base, blooded as the sun climbed above the Littlebrook Power Station. Backlit dredgers. Two skeletal towers, one on each shore, carrying power lines. They never faiclass="underline" river, marshland, the pier that looks like a concrete boat. All the sensory buttons are pushed. Space. Flow. Dereliction. New estates springing up. The thick tongue of oil on the shoreline, its ridges and patterns.
At Stoneness Point, we can see the Dartford Crossing; skinny bridge, cloud road. We look across the Thames at what was once Ingress Abbey (and the Nautical School), at Greenhithe. The subtlety of Stoker’s geographical revisions becomes suddenly clear: he works through triangulation. Three distinct locations. Three addresses for the coffins of Transylvanian earth, Dracula’s bolt-holes: Chicksand Street (off Brick Lane in Whitechapel), Jamaica Lane (Bermondsey) and Piccadilly (with a view of Green Park). A thin isosceles triangle. Like that Portland stone dagger, the steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields.
How Stoker laid out his plan without standing here, I can’t imagine. He must have had Ackroyd’s preternatural skill at processing field reports, gutting and filleting obscure publications and coming up with the juice.
Ingress: ‘the act of going in or entering; immersion’. Ingress Abbey was the model for Carfax. St Clement’s (on the north shore) was the old church. Joyce Green Hospital would do for the asylum. Fiction compresses the picture. Walking gives it room to breathe; topographical elements separate — but are always visible. Paste those Kodak prints to the wall. Work it out for yourself.
Like Stoker’s troop of bungling adventurers, vampire hunters, we’re always too late; Dracula has escaped. The V of Joyce Green Hospital is destroyed, the site prepared for economic immigrants. The church is taken into the protection of Procter & Gamble. Ingress Abbey is lost (along with its Capability Brown park). We hit the oracular keys and get the inevitable response: Ingress Denied.
After a river trip, at the beginning of the last century, the Shah of Persia said: ‘The only thing worth mentioning was at Greenhithe, where there was a mansion standing amidst trees on a green carpet extending to the water’s edge.’ Ingress Abbey is now being refurbished, at a cost of £4 million, for a software company. The park will be developed by Crest — who have promised 850 homes, plus ‘amenities and garden features’. The Carfax walls of ‘heavy stone’ have been replaced by ubiquitous chainlink fences. Another potent landscape has been exposed to daylight, stripped of its shadows. Another reservoir of memory is drained.
‘CALMER WATERS. A riverside lifestyle to enjoy at your leisure. Imagine living just 45 minutes from the city, yet a million miles away. In the grounds of an ancient Abbey, framed between the River Thames and acres of mature woodland. Ingress Park is the reality, CREST NICHOLSON. The Hallmark of a Classic Home.’
This is how good fiction works: by transposition, a code any half-bright idiot can break. Purfleet is not (in absolute terms) where Carfax is — but where you see it from. The switch: subject and object. You learn to empty yourself into the view. At privileged viewing points, the observer vanishes: the fictional residue remains, coheres. It’s there even when you don’t see it.
The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, curved and minimalist, is highly strung. Hawsers fade into the sky. A long black line splits the cloud, flashes of movement. White tuning forks anchor a structure that can’t support the weight. The bridge is free-floating. This is the only place where the orbital motorway lives up to its metaphoric responsibilities: grandeur, lift — surprise.
Vampires, according to Stoker’s mythology, have problems crossing water. Count Dracula, open-eyed in his coffin, is trapped on board his vessel — until the ship runs aground, or the tide turns. ‘He went south from Carfax,’ says the vampire hunter Van Helsing, ‘that means he went to cross the river, and he could only do so at slack of tide.’ The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, scarlet lights at dawn and dusk, is a ladder for vampires. A ladder on which blood is turned into oil. And back again. A motorcycle outrider with BLOOD on his vest.
We’re advancing through a cyclorama of storage tanks, rattling chutes, private jetties, CCTV, razor wire, TANK TERMINAL. POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE/EXCEPT ON BUSINESS/SMOKING AND NAKED/LIGHTS FORBIDDEN/WEST THURROCK OIL TERMINAL. Thurrock on the east side of the bridge, Purfleet on the west: oil everywhere. The fiefdom of the Bush boys: Exxon, Esso. (Enron, Energy: an E-scape loud with entropy.) This is where the fuel protesters, farmers and long-distance hauliers staged their protest. Stop the distribution. Barricade the gates.