Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

19 October 1999: we stepped on to the platform to a (glove-in-mouth) tannoy babble that sounded like the three-minute warning. At Fenchurch Street the ticket machines were out of order, trains were running late and station security were shaking down a couple of estuarine chancers (trying to slip into town without the necessary paperwork). The woman behind the plexiglass screen couldn’t hear what Renchi said, couldn’t imagine why anyone, so early in the morning, would want to travel towards Grays. The point of Grays is that you leave before first light, return after sunset — avoid all eye-contact.

Don’t misunderstand me, I love the place: it’s pre-fictional, post-historic. It has slipped out of the guidebook and into the Gothic anthology. Laughable attempts at civic revival — pedestrianised walkways, covered markets upgraded to prolapsed malls — do nothing to diminish the galloping entropy. The Stalinist turret of Keiller’s favourite cinema — STATE — is visible from the station. Dirty brown bricks, deeply scored creases: the aspect of a power station, of Bankside before the makeover.

WHO IS THE DISTRICT CONTROLLER???? Graffito on the underpass. Grays is a breakaway republic, the Uzbekistan of the Estuary. Grays has Tattoo Studios (‘Over 18’s Only Please!’) and food so fast that it avoids the mediation of the microwave, travelling directly from slaughterhouse floor to fast-breeding salmonella culture. Retail facilities behave like uninhabited multi-storey car parks. Trade goods are rejects from car boot sales.

But Grays has something that gives it life and pedigree, Grays has the River Thames. The sky to the east, on this damp morning, could be illuminated by searchlights: a pissy-gold cloud base flushing to a raider’s dawn. Nautical pubs are imposing but clapped out. The signboard for The Rising Sun has weathered into a Monet Xerox, Tower Bridge drowning in thin syrup.

The essential qualities of this riparian settlement have not been lost. James Thome, writing in 1876, sketches Grays as: ‘old, irregular, and, like all those small Thames ports, lazy-looking and dirty’. Grays lived off chalk: when they’d finished digging it out for conversion into lime and cement, carting it on to the roads of Essex, they moved into retail landfill — Lakeside, Thurrock.

‘Of all the accursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism,’ wrote Arthur Young in 1757, ‘none ever equalled that from Billericay to the “King’s Head” at Tilbury… the ruts are of an incredible depth… and to add to all the infamous circumstances which occur to plague a traveller, I must not forget eternally meeting with chalk wagons, themselves frequently stuck fast until a collection of them are in the same situation, so that twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out, one by one.’

The days of the cement factories and the futile attempts to promote Grays as a sailing resort, a marina, are over: river gives way to road. We’ve taken our hit of nostalgia, hanging about the dock gates, photographing steam stacks, cranes, jetties. It’s time to follow the Thames path, west, towards the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, the motorway.

The path, which begins with a paved promenade, soon declines into a Barratt estate, dressed as an open-air exhibition of ‘computer generated impressions’. This is a strikingly schizophrenic effect: you get the Thames as it is, cloacal, rusty, tired — and, at the same time, you are confronted with computer-generated projections (Grays as it ought to be). A blue-river fantasy feeds directly into khaki drift; a young couple, first-time buyers, stride hand in hand down the riverfront parade towards a line of virgin Barratt villas. Future grass for present mud. The magic mirror of the Barratt hoarding works like Prozac, taking the edge from blight. Pink stone, a cloudless sky; toy boats gussying up a dead river.

Barratt World is hallucinogenic: mushroom villages, Noddy in Essex. No hurt. Cohabiting couples in gainful employment. Regency stripe wallpaper. Red sofa — on which a woman in a green dress sprawls, teasing a coffee cup. Her partner, in immaculate blue shirt (two buttons undone), leans forward. He has another (empty) coffee cup. They are fresh, fragrant. Unblemished. If it wasn’t for the coffee cups, they’d be rutting like stags. If everything goes well, and they upgrade from the one-bedroom apartment in Block H of Lightermans Quay (at £ 86,995) to the two-bedroom apartment at £ 104,995, they’ll acquire the two sinister kids who invade their love nest with a breakfast tray (single red rose, refill of imaginary coffee).

Lightermans Quay has its own map, roads like veins flowing into the A13. Only three destinations are admitted: Southend, Lakeside and the M25. The furthest points of reference are Tilbury and Chadwell St Mary (where Daniel Defoe invested in a tile works — and lost £ 3,000). ‘A calm and tranquil setting with appealing riverside walks,’ the promoters claim. ‘This whole part of the riverfront is steeped in history.’ Which the builders are doing their best to disguise. What counts is ease of access to Junction 30/31 of the M25 and the ten-minute drive to ‘the huge shopping complex of Lakeside’.

Ten minutes’ walk, on the other hand, carries the excursionist into a wilderness of tall chimneys, chainlink fences, partly demolished block buildings, dank ponds, thorn bushes, coarse grass. The latest units of the housing development, frightened Dutch cottages, shelter on the very edge of a soon-to-be-demolished brownfield site. O’Rourke and Associates are swinging their hammers at the garden gate, bulldozing mounds of rubble, coating the ‘double-glazed external windows’ in fine dust.

We meet a game old boy, sniffing the tide. A weatherbeaten unident in a flat cap who deeply regrets the destruction of the wild orchards that once marked the river path. ‘Better than Vicky Park, it was.’ He’s been in Grays since he came back from the war. His house in Canning Town had been bombed. It wasn’t there, nor was his wife. She’d been relocated. But he couldn’t reconcile himself to the exile. ‘Sod all life. They do what they want with the river. Criminal.’

As for the Barratt hutches…‘Kennels,’ he spat. ‘Hear everything they say next door. Stretch and you put your elbow through the wall.’ They don’t build these estates, they grow them overnight.

A younger man with a large dog joined us. A reluctant citizen of Chafford Hundred, a former Canvey Island fisherman. ‘Lego homes,’ he reckoned. ‘They come in kits.’ He sounded less enthusiastic than Buckminster Fuller for the flatpack lifestyle. Euro regulations had done for his trade. He pointed to the fast-flowing water. ‘I can remember when this was a river of soles.’ River of Souls! Golden scintillae riding the wavecrests. We saw it: a floodtide of immortals surging to the west. Before we realised what he meant: soles, fish he could no longer net. The river’s bounty, his living.

Chafford Hundred — ‘The most coveted address in Britain’ ( Evening Standard , 12 September 2001) — was a plague on the landscape. So the sole-fisher reckoned. The future he would have to endure. A bright new ‘commuter-belt village’ whacked down on a hillock overlooking a defunct port, a highroad whose vitality had been leeched by Lakeside, Thurrock. Patrick Keiller, conducting a personal survey into housing, found much to admire in Chafford Hundred.

‘Who lives there?’

Hammered by government statistics, I needed to know. Who were these putative householders, where did they come from? I rang Keiller.

‘Divorce,’ Patrick said. ‘And extended life expectancy. Single parents. Split families.’

A colony of the disenchanted in a panorama of disenchantment. Amnesiaville. It would take more than divorce or death to get me to Chafford Hundred. But one of the Barratt apartments at Grays? Riverview, ‘audio entryphone system’, elective isolation, ‘thirty-five minutes by train to Fenchurch Street’ — what could be better? As a studio, a writing space. If I could lift myself into the right socio-economic bracket. Grays was aspirational, a spoof balcony on which to contemplate the river of souls.