Chapter One
The Thames Gateway:
One of the Dark Places of the Earth
One of the Dark Places of the Earth
You Can Do What You Like, but You Must Do What
You Like Here
You Like Here
Though their innovations should not be discounted, many of New Labour’s experiments with managed neoliberalism were anticipated by the caring, sharing Thatcherism of the John Major government. The return to some form of planning and urbanism was the distant consequence of Major’s curbs on out-of-town shopping centres, brought in partly to assuage the shires, but extended under Labour into a more positive focus on the cities. The Private Finance Initiative and the Millennium Dome were both late Tory policies that Blair executed with great enthusiasm, to the point where both are now indelibly associated with his reign. Likewise, the most extensive experiment in urban planning undertaken by New Labour was the Thames Gateway, which was begun in the early 1990s during the Tories’ twilight years. It’s here that you can really detect the way that there was a subtle shift in the market dominance of the ’90s and ’00s, a shift which is now being repudiated. The ‘Thames Gateway’ was a gigantic dollop of land between London and the North Sea; an area which should really be described as the Industrial South. It begins with the disused wharves of the London Borough of Greenwich6 and the Isle of Dogs, extends up the River Lea to the industrial estates of Stratford, then along the Thames past Silvertown, Barking, Erith, Dartford, Gravesend, Tilbury, Sheerness, Basildon and Canvey Island, finally departing up the Medway to Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham. It passes London’s internal organs, the places that keep the capital going but which property development and conservation have long since expelled from the metropolis itself: container ports, factories both closed and thriving, petroleum refineries, sugar refineries, several power stations, marshes and nature reserves. It is the estuarine path described by Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the riverside journey taken by the Romans to the blasted, uncivilized, inhospitable edges of the known world. It can still feel just a little like that.
Since the 1980s London has not expanded east so much as westwards, past Heathrow and out towards Swindon and Oxford, bringing in its train lucrative property development and business parks – the Thames as a Silicon Valley, the motorcade from Notting Hill to Chipping Norton. Pure, unadulterated laissez-faire would have meant the further incursion of volume housebuilding, microchip factories and tech parks out across the Home Counties into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire; and that expansion is what the reforms to the planning laws are designed to create now. This westward movement meant the continued decline and dereliction of Conrad’s easterly riverside stretch, and that is what the Thames Gateway ‘plan’ was intended to reverse. There are reasons for this, not insignificant among them the fact that these places are marginal constituencies, populated by the people who decide elections. Working-class and fucked-over enough to be inclined to vote Labour, patriotic, atomized and flag-waving enough to vote Tory, they make the area a political battleground, which is weird for somewhere so seemingly uncommitted. In order to rescue the estuary, laissez-faire was tampered with in an interesting way. Development would continue its expansion of London westwards only under fairly strict control, within the planning system’s strictures; but developers were given complete free rein over the industrial and post-industrial wastes of the East End and South Essex, South East London and North Kent. There would be very little in the way of public infrastructural improvements, at least until the forever deferred completion of the ambitious Crossrail scheme, and there would be little planning or co-ordination, with competing Regional Development Agencies and local councils bidding for their piece of the pie. There would be housebuilding on an enormous scale, without the state, local populations or local government able to stand in the way. It was, in short, an Enterprise Zone larger even than London itself, a New Metropolis that resembled the incremental, speculation-led and car-based development of Los Angeles more than it did any of the Bilbaos, Barcelonas or Berlins bandied about by planners and politicians.
The Thames Gateway has recently often been a locus for M25 flânerie or exurban poetics, but it is seldom written about as a coherent entity. This makes sense, because there are few places less cohesive. It is a slippery zone, its very name implying that it is merely the way into the real event, the Metropolis itself. The name seems to have been chosen by a sadist, determined to ensure that the development always sounds pinched, substandard and suburban; but the area covered by it is absolutely enormous. This chapter is far from definitive, and will try instead to detail a journey that you can take, if you want, over a couple of days, rather than visiting every single part of the vast exurb. We will start on the Thames’s south side, or rather from the Medway, then go through North Kent, crossing the river via an imaginary bridge to Barking, where we will gradually make our way to the Metropolitan Enterprise Zone of Canary Wharf, and, eventually and reluctantly, end at the posthumous Blairite utopia of Olympian Stratford. In this route, you can find a place that is absolutely fascinating, with unforgettable landscapes, freakish buildings and marvellously pugnacious people, but it always defeats you in the end. The Industrial South can be contrasted, unfairly but unavoidably, with the Industrial North, in a way which does not credit the Wen and its outgrowths. There are few places in Britain where man has fouled his nest so comprehensively, with the sad concomitant that he is absolutely obsessed with that fouled nest. In fact, he thinks it’s an investment.
Under the Lines in Chatham
So, imagine that a boat has dropped you, as it may once have done, in the Medway Towns, specifically Chatham. Chatham looks at first like a normal town that has been smashed up and reassembled by a surrealistically inclined topographical demiurge. The extreme dips and peaks of the land throw up all manner of chaos, usually of a fairly unpleasant sort, such as the road system that holds the place in a tourniquet; for the pedestrian, the result is that thoroughfares that should be straight lines entail squeezing along weird half-pavements and crossing a baffling series of traffic islands, with entry points in the most counter-intuitive places possible. Across the Brutalist shopping centre and Ahrends Burton and Koralek’s law courts, a concrete flyover sweeps as if at random. An art deco war memorial looks over the general absurdity from up on ‘the lines’, the stark cliffs that run all the way through the Medway, giving it a strangeness and melodrama that is exceptionally unusual for the south of England. Where on earth, you would be within your rights to ask, am I?
It’s an impressively weird place, this quintessential down-at-heel naval town. It is often claimed to be the origin of the class-hate epithet ‘chav’ (‘Chatham Average’ is the suggested, and unlikely, etymology). If you’re coming (as, I’ll own up, I am) from the railway station, after you negotiate the ham-fisted road engineering you step down concrete stairs into a dense High Street of 99p shops and such, with a large Arndale-style block at the end of it; also at the end is a civic clock tower of such grandeur and munificence that you could be in the Industrial North rather than the Medway; similarly, too, with the wonky-roofed, wood-clad Urban Renaissance tower that creeps up behind it. Next to you on the other side is a bus station that has escaped from Tellytubbies, big, jolly and bulbous. Yet at the heart of Chatham is a development which raises some curious questions about the re-use of industrial sites. It’s a pregnant subject in this recession, with the scattered remnants of manufacturing in serious trouble, for all the noises about a return to ‘making things’. At first sight, Chatham Dockyard, disused since the mid-1980s, conforms to the standard post-industrial Urban Regen type, being turned over alternately to the creative industries (an art college), the heritage industry (several museums, ornamental ships) and the property speculation industry (newbuild flats that are ‘in keeping’, loft conversions). Yet there’s something unusual here.
The place to compare it with is the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, the huge Thames-side engineering works unexpectedly hailed by Tristram Hunt MP as a post-industrial counter-model to the Barratt Homes boredom that was mainly created by the developers’ scrum in the Thames Gateway. In Woolwich, the Wen and all its values pervades the factories entirely, with the majority of them turned into very expensive new flats, with a tame museum, some Gormleyish sculpture and some units serving as estate agents, organic grocery stores and a gastropub. It’s London at its worst, a self-segregating upper-crust enclave, a series of Canary Wharf yuppiedromes that just happens to be cast in severe Vanburghian forms, as if accidentally. Chatham Dockyard isn’t like that – its industrial past feels much closer, it still feels in some odd way itself. Partly that’s because of the way that many of the factories have become exhibits of themselves – one enormous shed houses various big lumps of metal as permanent, open ornaments, though it’s the thuggishly powerful steel frame that catches the eye. Industrial wreckage – cranes, presses, guns, scattered about at random – is more a feature of the space than sententious public art, which is right and good. The architecture is more complete, more vivid, than at Woolwich. But what makes it interesting, almost exciting even, is that there are things actually being built here as well. Pleasure boats and yachts, obviously, but ships nonetheless. Thrown together with the art school and the museums, the result is rich with potential. This is only really possible with the relative distance from London, where the pressure of property is higher; but for once, the idea of ‘mixed use’ seems convincing – strange, incongruous things thrown together that shouldn’t work, but do.
The distance from London has saved Chatham Dockyard from becoming boring, but along the Medway you can still see acre upon acre of developer’s dross – typically cul-de-sacs, of flats as often as houses, clinging to the river’s edges like stock-brick barnacles. From Chatham Dockyard you can see something just slightly more ambitious. In the foreground is an Odeon, using the same industrial Big Shed method as the old factories, then for producing, now for consuming; behind them you can see two skyscrapers. Well, almost skyscrapers, of a sleekness and finish that you don’t generally expect in an area more marked by concrete-framed blocks with oast-house cowls on top. Both have curved, glazed façades, and are a fragment of the ‘aspirational’ side of the Thames Gateway’s property frenzy, the part that involves the perusal of Wallpaper* magazine and viewings of Grand Designs as much as of Location, Location, Location. It’s unusual in North Kent, relatively exceptional for its high-end smoothness.
The Condition is Grave
Now I’ve rooted you somewhere and established the possibility that you may be doing this journey on a boat, I can stop pretending I’m doing the same. I’m not even doing it all at once – my reason for being here is connected with the quirks of the National Health Service, namely the fact that for seven years I have commuted from flats in Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich to Darent Valley Hospital on the edges of Dartford – a building that I found it appropriate to write about in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. So when I’ve explored the surrounding area, it’s usually been after treatment for Crohn’s disease and its many side-effects and knock-on irritants; which also means that I’ve occasionally hit North Kent under the effects of codeine or morphine, something which certainly assists in finding sites of interest. However, far too often I just make the same journey, first on one of the worst of the privatized train networks, Southeastern, then on North Kent’s Fastrack Buses or on TfL London buses (both make the same journey, the latter for nearly half the price). On the occasion I went to Gravesend, I took the Bus B from Darent Valley, which took me through Ebbsfleet and Northfleet on a proper round-all-the-houses trip which cost me a princely six pounds. The two Fleets are a study in place all of their own.
Ebbsfleet will be known to Eurostar passengers as Ebbsfleet International. It was supposed to become a practical New Town under the Thames Gateway, but although a lot of houses got built, it didn’t entirely pan out that way. The station itself, from which you can get to St Pancras, Paris, Lille and Brussels, is a Foster-like glass box that was pre-emptively strangled by road engineering, so that it was impossible for a real town to ever grow up around it; a series of spurs from the M25 surround and encase it, and the housing emerges on the edges of that. Ebbsfleet has no centre, though it has many, many units of neo-Victorian or Pseudomodern living that somehow slipped through the CABE net. The nearest thing to a centre is Bluewater, more of which presently. Northfleet, though, is a town of some sort. Like the Medway, it goes along and under high chalk cliffs, atop which you find very surprising things – patterned, Festival of Britain-style tower blocks, tiny terraces of the sort usually built for dockers, millworkers or miners, and the earliest major building by one of the architects of twentieth-century Britain, Giles Gilbert Scott: in the small Edwardian Catholic church here you can see more than hints of the blocky, heavily masonry-clad, modernized Gothic that would bring him to Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station. That’s a lot, for a town this small.
The town of Gravesend, like Chatham Dockyard, is a minor revelation, a memorable small town both distant from and a cousin to London, able to breathe some of its metropolitan air without completely swallowing its bullshit. There’s not much to Gravesend, but what there is is fairly fascinating. Firstly, there’s the most hated building in Gravesend – I have this on good authority – the Thamesgate Car Park. Arndale Brutalism, massive and monumental, it adjoins a completely uninteresting shopping centre, but is actually a very smart and dramatic building; in rich red brick around sculpted, ribbed concrete, its overhanging volumes have a hint of the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright. From a distance, it’s a ruthless cruiser of a building, fitting just perfectly with the container ships which dock nearby. In fact, you can imagine a Zaha Hadid giving it the nod of approval for its fearless, attention-seeking tectonic melodrama. I can understand the disdain, however, because from the train it gives the impression that you’re about to enter a shabby, disjointed place much like Chatham. You’re not – Gravesend is tight, cohesive and built very much around the river. In its ‘historic quarter’ (there’s no escaping the nomenclature), a dense high street of weatherboarded maritime buildings throws itself right towards the Thames. At the end of it there’s a pier with a restaurant on the end, a characterful pub, and a view of Tilbury Power Station on the other side of the Thames. When it gets dark here, this is a compellingly alien space, the bright lights inside the Power Station speaking of the heat and electricity generated therein. Next to the pub is the local headquarters of the Port of London Authority, housed in an undemonstrative box, a long way from the baroque palace it built for itself near the Tower of London a century ago.
On that same high street there’s a Town Hall that is really worthy of the Industrial South, a sandstone Doric Temple which for all its architectural rectitude and austerity really ambushes you, tells you that this was once a place which thought very highly of itself indeed; a fragment of the Enlightenment cast down to North Kent. Better still, you can walk through it to the seedily seasideish Borough Market, and then through that to Saint Andrew’s Court, a decent, strong, well-made 1962 council estate. Walk back into the town centre, and you find shopping malls much as you do everywhere else. They’re a little strange, slightly crepuscular, at the point between concrete Brutalism and brick vernacular described by Douglas Murphy as ‘Brutalomo’; an attempt to create the dense and enclosed spaces of a real street to replace, well, a real street. The mall’s multiple layers are enjoyable, although it’s all strangely underlit, as if to make it feel deliberately gloomy, even sinister. Out from there, there’s a fine eighteenth-century church, a statue of improbable one-time Gravesend resident Pocahontas, and a view of some developer excrescence. There’s a very active local Civic Society group in Gravesend, and they are justifiably proud of the fact that they recently blocked a tall tower of luxury flats, through a forthright campaign of sit-ins and civil disobedience, a little Kentish Occupy. It’s a precious and rare victory against developers in the Gateway’s free-for-all; but the guff you can see clinging to the riverbanks in Gravesend is not tall, not modern, and is immaculately in keeping; though it tears up the Thames Path, it dresses up its violence with pediments and neo-baroque details. It’s a bit harder to campaign against something that sweet-talks an area like this.
The reason why Gravesend’s urban grain felt so refreshing was because my point of comparison here is always Dartford, a desperately sad town. You can get a hint of that when you leave the train at the station. Look up at the Town Hall, a ’60s complex of no distinction, and you can always see two protruding things – a Union Jack and a CCTV camera, like a slightly laboured Banksy mural brought to life: community, nationality, security. It’s hard to tell which building-boom decade did more violence to Dartford. You can tick off the suspects. The ’60s, with its roadbuilding and loveless offices? Maybe. The ’80s, with its car-centred shopping malls, and more pointedly, the construction of the M25, which chopped the town in half? Quite possibly. The 2000s, with its faceless brick and aluminium blocks of flats cleaving to the edges of dual carriageways? Perhaps, but they’re all missing the point, really – it’s hard to find much of a heart in Dartford at all. There’s a decent enough high street, ending at a pretty medieval church, but not much else. The poky Victorian terraces in the centre make clear why – this too is an industrial town, but one too close to London to be able to carve out an identity of its own. You now get little comic juxtapositions here, from the attempt to Make It Nice. The pediments of an ’80s improvement scheme act as a gateway to a derelict co-op and a couple of greasy spoons. A big metal drum houses a few chains, and the railway gets you back into London either to work, or if you were born here, to live when you grow up. All that said, Dartford is of some importance for the very large shopping centre on its periphery.
Appeasing the Gods of Craft
I often find myself visiting Bluewater, mainly because it’s the closest ...