Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The Stone Crossing station is deserted: no ticket office, broken machines. Marc, having sat on a bench, isn’t sure that he’ll be able to stand up — even if a train does arrive, which seems unlikely. The railway is an icy ladder disappearing into the all-enveloping night.

Renchi, back in his Hampshire cottage, cruising websites, re-interrogating ground we had already covered, made contact with Dr J.C. Burne. Burne was the honorary archivist of Joyce Green Hospital, the memory man of the Dartford Marshes. His hospital was doomed; it was about to be rationalised (put to the bulldozer), asset-stripped, reconfigured. The usual land-management scam, in which silence (ignorance) assumes consensus. Local rumour favoured another M25 satellite estate, convenient for Dartford Tunnel and Bluewater. Better-informed whispers revised the plan: a refuge (holding pen) for asylum seekers. Bus ’em in, bang ’em up. The prison hulks, romanced by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations , were moored here; beyond the knowledge of the metropolis, a landscape fit for Gothic projection. Casualties of war had always been held on the marshes, wounded Germans, displaced Poles; their names and dates cut into the red brick of the hospital walls. The French, too, from the Second War: PAILLARD, YVES, 1940. OLIVIER, EMILE. 5.6.1940, FRANCE. DEP. 6.1O.1940. The scratch of a bent nail recording a memory-prompt lost to everyone except Dr Burne. And soon to be lost entirely.

Burne will give us the tour (27 March 2000). We must sneak through the gates just ahead of the wrecking crew; ahead of Burne’s retirement. The hospital library is due to close, the archive will disappear into other archives — except for files which have been destroyed (contagious, pox carrying).

West Hill Hospital closed in 1997. The Accident and Emergency Department transferred to Joyce Green. Many of the West Hill beds had already been removed to Gravesend; and so, as a pamphlet put out by the library points out, ‘for the first time since 1840 when the Workhouse authorities built the hospital the site was devoid of all hospital beds’. Now Joyce Green, just short of its centenary, will vanish and a new hospital, ‘built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme’, will be magicked from the grounds of the former Darenth Asylum.

The ‘flagship’ Darent Valley Hospital won’t be in the Darent Valley and it won’t be much of a hospital. It’s taken a hundred years to shift from prison hulk to plague ship (for smallpox victims) to New Labour ark. But, from its launch, the Darent Valley Hospital generated reams of publicity, all of it bad.

PATIENT THREATENS LEGAL ACTION AFTER 20-HOUR TROLLEY WAIT IN A ‘FLAGSHIP’ HOSPITAL CORRIDOR ( Evening Standard , 10 October 2001). Kerrie Williams, ‘mother-of-two’, is quoted as saying: ‘I’m amazed I actually got through it and lived to tell the tale.’ While lying on a trolley in a corridor, she was ‘intimately examined’, but given no food or water for two days. Williams now understood perfectly what the private/public partnership meant: go ‘private’ and receive swift treatment, while Joe Public expires on an unattended gurney.

‘The place,’ Kerrie Williams reports, ‘was in chaos.’ The new hospital cost £ 177 million and was built under the scheme whereby the private sector (the same contractors we have met, time and again, on our circuit) throws up something fast and glitzy — and rents it to the NHS. A sweetheart deal. Plenty of glass, generous parking bays and very few beds. Consultants (unconsulted) warned that the Darent Valley Hospital would be too small and that there would be long delays in the A & E Department. In other words, inner city conditions would apply to the perimeter, to Kent. You won’t find the drug war casualties of Hackney, mercenaries hosed from the forecourts of night petrol stations. You’ll have to make do with road rage, the boredom-stompings of Thamesmead, pub brawls. Feuding inbreeds. The BNP Calibans of economic decline. Middle-class families walking across fields attacked by hammer-wielding maniacs.

The Department of Health may not be much use at delivering hospitals that work, but they are very good at charts, projections, tick-the-box quizzes. The flagship Darent Valley Hospital was judged (in September 2001) to be ‘one of the worst in the country’. Its rating by the Department’s new classification system was: zero. Zilch. The pits of the pits.

We step out of Dartford station into a non-negotiable nexus of underpasses and flyovers. The retail fly-trap with its herringbone-brick roads and freakishly thin clock tower is known as ‘The Orchard’. It is of course barren and treeless. It acts as a reservation of New Commerce, an escape from the declining Spital Street, the deceased High Street. ‘Spital’, as a signifier, belongs to the era when Watling Street was still an active concern, when positive discrimination invaders (Romans, Vikings) were marching through — bringing leprosy and the ‘sekness that men called ye pokkes’. Dartford was an important staging post on the road to Canterbury, a hill to climb. Workhouse became hospital, became asylum. Isolation was the pitch. The desolation of the marshes (liable to flooding) made Dartford a prime site for pox hospitals, tents for contagious diseases.

The Wat Tyler pub offers: PEASANTS REVOLT BITTER. £ 1-49 PNT. 3.8 PC. WAT TYLER AND SEVERAL OF THE COMMONS CALLED AT THIS ANCIENT TAVERN (SO IT IS SAID) TO QUENCH THEIR THIRST WITH FLAGONS OF ALE.

Negotiating a route to Joyce Green Hospital, we find ourselves on Temple Hill; commercial imperatives overrule travel information. B & Q. CLEARWATER OPEN FOR BUSINESS AS USUAL. A Mercedes dealership with a forest of flags. A walk of ‘about twenty minutes’ (pitched by the woman in the breakfast caff) stretches into an hour of uncrossable bypass, marsh mud, site-specific rain. My plate of ham and eggs has been sprayed with a silver film. I can’t decide whether to eat it or to have it framed.

Dr Burne is waiting in an office in the Postgraduate Building, sucking at a mug of tea, tapping on a tin of biscuits. The hospital estate with its winged design, its outbuildings, open-air corridors, flower beds and shrubberies, is posthumous. We’re used to that, we’ve come to expect it: good-humoured resignation, folk hanging about in warm rooms nibbling through the remaining stock of chocolate digestives. Waiting for the rumble of JCBs, the skips and Portakabins.

‘What’s your interest?’ Burne challenges. He’s seen off plenty of time-wasters, professionally bored media casuals, work experience docu-directors asked to knock up three minutes on TB or cholera. The doctor is alert, gold-spectacled, silver-bearded and forward-leaning. ‘Trams, plants or smallpox?’

‘All,’ Renchi says, playing safe.

‘And you?’ Burne prods his stick at me.

‘Poking about anywhere that wants to keep us out.’

That satisfies the archivist. He’s on his feet and heading for the door. ‘Come on. What are you waiting for? There’s plenty of ground to cover.’

Long retired from his work as consultant pathologist at Joyce Green, the doctor devotes himself to its history. He could be Renchi, twenty years down the line: wind-scoured, wrinkled, bald on top. He wears a bright red sweater, dark blue, weatherproof jacket and a Russian hat. He moves rapidly and in bursts, a silent movie: Trotsky on the trot. Renchi, in his flapping headgear (yak herdsman), struggles to keep up.

‘Swollen toe, not gout,’ says Burne, excusing the stick. The glass-roofed, open-sided walkways are suntraps: one long avenue pivoting into another, a true arcade project. With views on a miraculous garden. Here, diseased Londoners could be aired, cobwebs blown off by river breezes. Blended zephyrs: exotic plants, sewage farm and byre.