Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The drench from the sewage farm came in columns. You didn’t smell it, you wore it. It invaded your clothing. Marsh Lane, so Burne told us, derived its name from Marsh Gas Lane. Huge gulls feasted on the sewage outflow, rode the tide, pecking at submerged delicacies. ‘Do you know how old I am?’ Burne challenged. ‘Eighty.’ He chuckled.

How had we missed it? From the chalk mound of Beacon Hill, a stone cairn on the embankment, the old straight track arrowed into the water tower of Joyce Green Hospital. A thin grey line between hefty, untrimmed hedges. What felt, on the night of the storm, like a march through a completely unstructured landscape now made sense. The view arranged itself into discrete elements. Remove the hospital, garden and tower, and balance is lost; orchards grow wild, there is no estate to give focus and meaning to an exploited wilderness.

Entry to Joyce Green, coming from Long Reach and the isolation wards, was by way of a wicket gate; a fever bell had to be rung. The bell was preserved, as Dr Burne would show us, in the hospital library: polished, with the crest of St George. ‘You realise,’ he said, understanding our reluctance to leave the riverside, ‘that the estate — gardens, woods, farm, hospital — has its own microclimate.’

It was true: the rain, soft and steady, had stopped. The suspension bridge hung over the Thames like a solid rainbow. ‘Look: Spanish oak, laurel, white daffodils. Bees and butterflies you won’t find anywhere else on the marshes. This place is the uniquest of the unique.’ He jabbed with his stick at a fallen tree, brought down across our path. ‘That proves it. Ivy kills.’

For Burne, ‘filthy plumes of smoke’ was an endearment. The power station had as much right to its position on the river as the sewage farm and the hospital — even though pollution bleached the leaves. Fuel had been stockpiled here in advance of the miners’ strike: Burne saw Thatcher’s strategy before it came into play. Know your own small patch and the rest of the world becomes readable.

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The tour was over and we were about to head back into Dartford, but Dr Burne was reluctant to let us go. He wanted us to see everything. A humped bridge was the only way of crossing the busy bypass. ‘Tricky for cripples in wheelchairs,’ he said. The man who was too old for euphemisms.

He led us — the rain was back — into a new estate that had swallowed up the superintendent’s villa. Bland units. Statistics to satisfy government white papers. Quota-fillers stacked on the road’s edge. Visitors to Joyce Green can no longer walk out of town and ambulances are as rare as albatrosses; what we see from the bridge are the gleaming buses. They appear, so Burne tells us, every ten minutes or so. The destination windows spell out the story: HOSPITAL — DARTFORD — BLUEWATER.

The small wasteland also has its microclimate: hail. Rattling off the road, my unprotected head. This abandoned spot, hidden at the back of the estate, was once the hospital’s burial ground. It’s on the old maps — ‘Joyce Green Cemetery’ — but will soon be deleted; the designation would be meaningless. Burne slashes at brambles with his stick, looking for a single gravestone.

He came down here, so he told us, from Staffordshire. He remembered picnics, early in his marriage, on Cannock Chase. He was appointed Consultant Pathologist in 1955. His wife’s family were Welsh. Two sons dead. One from diphtheria and the other from being sent ‘as a precaution’ to the diphtheria hospital.

‘It’s the ultimate stupidity,’ he said. ‘What they’re proposing for Joyce Green and West Hill. The loss will be incalculable. The work done in the elimination of smallpox was one of the most important medical achievements of the century.’

We were drenched. He didn’t want to leave that place. It might be his final visit.

‘Do you know that smallpox cultures have been stored in Russia and America? Total insanity. If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you. One day they’ll get out. Sold off to any fanatic with spare change.’ When the paradise gardens of Harry Hopkins have returned to marshland, the Joyce Green viruses will be immortal.

With images of bio-terrorism as a parting gift, we thank Dr Burne and walk over Temple Hill to Dartford. The hail stops as soon as we quit the burial ground. There are notices plastered all over town about the Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Jagger has done an Alleyn. Like the Elizabethan actor and theatre promoter, Edward Alleyn, Jagger has manoeuvred himself from lowlife mountebank to man of property and status. Alleyn founded Dulwich College, Jagger got his name on a Millennium project school-hall.

We stopped for lunch in the Wat Tyler, as a way of reading the mood of the Dartforders. WAT BURGER, CHIPS & SALAD. £ 3.30. ‘And a pint of Peasants.’

A chainsmoking woman sat by the door, her nose in a Wilbur Smith. A pensioned skinhead, grey as anthracite, vast belly sagging out of T-shirt, stared at the floor; two inches of warm beer untouched. A Hamlet cigar salesman was practising a stand-up routine at the bar. Two lads, competitively slaughtered, asked if there were any new vodkas that week. On the wall, above our table, was an advert: a man wheeling a manacled mermaid in a lobster trap.

Coming off the bridge, in light rain, we’re carved up by a biker. He’s in a hurry. The message on his vest says: BLOOD. He’s probably lost the Darent Valley Hospital, somewhere among the chalk quarries. He’s detouring towards Bluewater. One of Dracula’s outriders, I reckon. Emergency supplies for retail vampires.

We can’t cross back into Essex without making the Blue-water pilgrimage, setting foot in the Wellsian pit. The Martians used laser technology, carpet-bombs, eco-terrorism. Their successors, the planners and promoters of the Bluewater space station (‘a non-smoking environment’), are more subtle. Blueness is the right subliminal message: heavenly ceiling, sparkling sea. Bluewater is aspirational. Profoundly conservative. Blue-water is the measure that separates those who belong, who know the rules and the language, from the sweaty, unshaven mob who rush the Channel Tunnel. Bluewater is the perfect name for ‘the most innovative and exciting shopping and leisure destination in Europe today’. Bluewater is where the Martians of the New Millennium have landed (the Dome business on Bugsby’s Marshes was just a rehearsal). They have learnt their lesson: they don’t move out from the crater to threaten London, they let London invade them. Excursionists arriving at the chalk quarry, to the east of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, find themselves in a sort of processing plant, or customs post for asylum seekers. A channel port (on go-slow). Bluewater skulks in the desert like the set for a Star Wars sequel. Humans, having negotiated the precipitous descent, are reluctant to get out of their vehicles.

Pausing, on the lip of the pit, I saw the weird beauty of this excavation. Virtual water, glass fountains and imported sand have replaced the tired Kentish shore as the favoured day trip for Cockneys. Bluewater is the new Margate. The sickly London child Samuel Palmer was sent to the Isle of Thanet to convalesce; sea bathing and sermons. T.S. Eliot nursed his soul-sickness at the Albermarle Hotel in Cliftonville. Such indulgences have been suspended: now perfectly healthy urbanites, primed by subtly placed road signs, descend on Junction 2 of the M25. BLUEWATER. No need for further explanation, the name is enough. Retail paradise. No visas required. City of glass in a kaolin bowl. But the effect of this Martian pod cluster, this ecumenical Disneyland of tinsel-Gaudí, is enervating. Arrive in rude health, buzzing with energy, and a few minutes trawling the overheated malls, losing all sense of direction, overwhelmed by excess of consumer opportunity (choice/no choice), will bring you to your knees. Or to one of the many off-mall pit stops. The headache kicks in: which coffee from a list of thirty? (They all taste the same.)