Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Log official posters: FREE COMPUTER COURSES. LONDON SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES. FIRST RIGHT. Log fly-pitched posters in lurid red on yellow: PYJAMA CLAD PSYCHOPATHS. HARD KNOCKS ON YOUR XBOX! SEXY NINJA VIXEN. LYCRA CLAD WEBSLINGER.

Wing mirrors brushed our sleeves. We were the only pedestrians in a panning shot that took in discriminations of improbable and impossible human habitation, imposed-from-above housing schemes, cottages, demi-villas, low-level estates (neo-suburban or punishment colony), solitary tower blocks like periscopes surfacing to challenge the ruin.

There were Pupil Referment Units like battery farms with paranoid security. Galvanising outfits. Rusting gas holders. Stinking creeks. A yellow-blue Mercedes lorry, canvas-backed, stalled at the next section of roadworks, asked us for directions. The canvas billows suspiciously at the sound of English voices. The driver, heavy beard, dark glasses, is browner than anything achieveable on a Loughton sunbed.

We can’t, by my calculation, be more than two and a half miles from Beckton Alp. In a straightish line. But there is no sign of it. Nothing untoward breaks the horizon: pedestrian bridges, cranes, estate agents’ boards, communities severed by the great arterial road (five lanes ambitious for expansion). Little gardens with rudimentary planting (grass, privet) are used as parking lots (second, third car, another on the pavement).

A hundred-yard section, between aborted or incomplete engineering projects, threw us from our road-edge walk and into a brief transit along the boundary wall, red brick, of a Canning Town estate. The wall acted as a noticeboard for this abandoned settlement: trysts, declarations of love (or the mechanisms of love), threats, political and occult symbols.

ROBERT KEYS YOUR NEXT … FUCKEN TRAITOR. HAPPY XMAS LONDON. LOVE + BEST WISHES. SINN FEIN AND THE IRA.

Such niceties are soon behind us. We’re back in the virtual tunnel, of noise, remorseless traffic flow, cancelled pathways, detours, sand, yellow jackets and hardhats. It’s cold and we feel the first flakes of snow burning against our faces, melting and dripping from upturned collars.

The alp, when it appears, is as unimpressive as the Millennium Dome, which, under a powdering of fresh snow, it resembles. As we advance, the mound becomes more dramatic, conical not humpbacked. Beckton Alp is a considerable event that nobody notices. They, motorists, are preoccupied with traffic lights that seem to change on a weekly basis, holding reluctant tourists under a flyover, alongside a series of piers and supports (supporting nothing but foul air). Precast concrete columns and elegant structural solutions — for which, as yet, no questions have been found.

The approach to the alp is by way of a parodic suburb, a single line of misplaced Hendon semis, grafted together to form a mile-long terrace, with bow windows, porches, stained-glass sunrises, bushes and cropped evergreens at regular intervals. As if this vulgarity, the A13, wasn’t happening, wasn’t hurtling past the garden gate. (If those gates had not been removed to convert garden into garage.).

I’m struck by a pair of white horses’ heads (manes, veins, bulging eyes) that stand, like chess knights, on gateposts. The missing ears are encouraging. It means that somebody, at some time, must have walked this route.

CLUTCH CARE CENTRE. NEW & USED OFFICE FURNITURE. DIVERSION.

We take it, willingly. Coffee would be welcome. East Ham must have a café. The transient amnesia of the road, keep moving, see nothing, builds up a powerful undertow of disenfranchised weirdness: it puddles and spills from ancient villages, pilgrim route stopovers. Anything human and messy that has to happen, happens here.

S. KOREA/BEAT & EAT/DOGS.

White transit van with red script: ISRAELITE CHURCH OF CHRIST.

A team of Kosovans working the lights.

The women, long skirts, headscarfs, smear windscreens with dirty water, scrape and scratch with harsh sponges and squeegees. The cold, the ice: it doesn’t help. A young lad with a mobile phone keeps watch. I can’t lift my camera without being spotted, abused. The men, minders, smoke in a flash American car, discreetly parked in Roman Road.

This is a major crossing point for the energies of London. Danny is excited. He takes out a black box that reads the health of the landscape, electrical pulses, numbered keys. I don’t need the box to reach a verdict: sick, possibly terminal. Purple and black. Ameliorated by snowfall.

Tides of sewage rush under the road, down the Northern Outflow, to Beckton Creek. Traffic grinds on an east-west axis. Travellers heading for the retail parks, City Airport, Silvertown, Woolwich Ferry, wait for a break in the flow. The Kosovans have the whole thing covered. Head for the M25, Lakeside, QEII Bridge, Southend — or back towards the City — and you’ll be hit by windscreen polluters.

Head for the Thames, on the A117, the old north-south road, and a troop of war zone performance artists will attack you. Like a George Grosz tribute band. Strong meat, this. Men, on a bitter morning (bitter themselves), rapping on car roofs, shouting, gesticulating, butting at windows, holding out their hands. No attempt to charm or to go for pathos. Trouser leg rolled up to reveal a livid stump, a limb the size of a knotted rope’s end. Landmine deformities and mutilations pressed against the screens of Dagenham multiples, Mondeos, Capris, Escorts. Angry, handsome men with pieces missing. They move among the stalled cars like relic peddlers on the Mexican border. In T-shirts, they weave through lanes of captive motors, raging, pinched and shivering in the sudden arctic snow shower.

‘You know,’ Track said to me, across the Formica table in the neat East Ham café, ‘you chew like an old man. At the front of your mouth, slowly. Like your teeth might fall out at any moment.’

‘I am an old man,’ I shot back. With feeling. This place, with its wall mirrors, was a shrine to memento mori. ‘I’ll eat any way I want.’

Danny didn’t do food. He took his tea, sweet, by the pint. He sucked, wiped his beard, without comment from Track. Who was amused by my peevishness, my vestigial vanity. She hadn’t meant her comment that way, it was a technical observation. She liked to know precisely how things worked.

‘Do you live around here?’ I asked Danny — who seemed very much at home, getting tannin refills on a wink at the hostess (ink hair, full slap), spreading his books and charts across neighbouring tables with no challenge from the authorities.

‘No,’ he said.

I don’t know why I imagined that Danny lived anywhere. He was the sort of man you meet on the road, lose on the road, find again: in field or ditch or stone circle. Or church. We’d walked past a good one, St Mary Magdalene. It was closed. And Danny, his bag and his reputation to consider, wouldn’t go over the wall. Track had no such scruple. She reported that the church was built around 1130, Kentish rag, flints and chalk from Purley, Caen stone from Normandy, pudding-stone from local quarries. A Roman cemetery was close by: hence, Roman Road. A doctored wilderness, enlivened with overgrown memorials, ran down to the A13. At nine and a half acres this was, so the notice claimed, ‘the largest churchyard in England’.

‘I’ve got a place,’ Danny admitted, when the subject had been abandoned, ‘near Basildon. You’ve heard of the Plotlands?’

We hadn’t. So he produced the book: Basildon Plotlands (The Londoners’ Rural Retreat) by Deanna Walker. What a story. It brought tears to the eyes, the liberties that had been lost. Anarchist (Guild Socialist/Naturist/Up Yours, Squire) Essex men and women allowed to erect whatever form of shelter they chose, chalets and shacks, on land nobody could find another way to exploit (not then, late nineteenth century to utilitarian Fifties). A frontier cabin on the Langland Hills (they made the Beckton Alp look like the Matterhorn). Danny was the last open-range squatter. The rest had been swallowed in planning restrictions and the thrusting New Town — where so many pill-peddling gangsters and A13 pirates thrived.