Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The media zone of the Lee Navigation deals, as it has always dealt, with waste disposal. Junk. I wait for a time when there will be digital mudlarks rummaging through exhausted footage for images to extract, fool’s gold dropped down the toilet bowls of the culture.

Hackney Marshes are pretty familiar. I had a great job once, painting white lines on the football pitches. A Forth Bridge task: start on Monday morning, under those epic skies, trolleying thick gunge, fighting the impulse to indulge in spiral patterns. Every Saturday and Sunday coarse footballers would obliterate my handiwork. Begin again.

Fat, glossy crows, cat-sized, scavenge the sward. Seagulls swoop on golf balls. They perch on crossbars, spot a knobbly egg and dive. Dozens of balls are lost in the thick grass where the Marshes slope up to Homerton Road. The walker feels small tramping towards a pylon-punctured horizon. Exposed on this broad table of land. The Friends Bridge, designed by Whitby, Bird and Partners, a way of getting across the Lea as it loops towards the Navigation, is a welcome destination.

The tough and functional steel and wood structure exposes the pretensions of the wobbly millennial effort, the spidery span that was supposed to carry pedestrians from St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. This bridge works. Its scarlet paint will survive the spray-can bandits. A straight path across honest planks, pale as sand, is counterbalanced by a red steel carapace (like Dalí’s fat lip sofa). The bridge understands its mythical function: to give the pilgrim, who has laboured to find it, access to a nature reserve, a slice of protected wilderness.

Back on the canal path, at the point where Eastway crosses the Navigation, we encounter one of those oracular concrete caverns. Reflected light sports in the grooves, REGGIE KRAY FOR MAYOR OF LONDON. There’s a reversed swastika (with the number 23), a scarlet skull and a single bone crossed by an arrow. The panels of the wall have been finished in a sort of refined pebbledash: a beach framed for exhibition.

Under the bridge, weed-slippery skeletons of motorcycles, dredged from the filthy water, have been laid out. I’ve seen travellers, barechested, prudish in old trousers, diving for scrap. Ropes and hooks. Mounds of antique iron. Bicycles, prams. Immune to Weil’s disease, rat bites, they submerge, time after time, in the mucilage, the electric-green scum.

The triangle of the Marshgate Recreation Ground is in the process of a rethink. Its history, summarised on a board, has been action-painted into oblivion. The newly planted patch has been christened: ‘Wick Woodland’.

Along the avenue of peeling London planes, caravans have been parked. Cars. And bits of cars. An inhabited junkyard, a moveable suburb. Bureaucratic toleration pushed to its limits by the construction of waste towers, mounds of black tyres. The travellers, barred from upwardly mobile riverside pubs, anathematised by eco-planners, have found a use for this leftover arrowhead of ground. They’ve Balkanised it. Fouled it. Used it. They’ve helped to clean the Lee Navigation. And they’ve done it without grants or ten-year business plans. Obviously, they’re doomed. They’ll be moved on. Strategic planting will win the day. For now tidy citizens might wince as they pass through this corridor of filth, avert their eyes; missing the improvised beauty of the accidental — a collision between a band of traffic on its high curve, new plantings, woodchip walkways, benches on which to contemplate the scene.

The mystery of the Navigation, where the Marshes confront rows of neat canalside hutches, was best captured by Rachel Whiteread in her monochrome plates, taken on the day when the Sixties’ tower blocks were blown up. Whiteread’s photographs celebrate silence; small boats on the river, crowds on the banks. Tents. A revivalist mob watching vertical history crumple and disappear.

As we pass the Middlesex Filter beds (closed) and move towards the weir, close to Lea Bridge Road, by the Princess of Wales pub, I try out a Fortean Times myth on Bill Drummond: how two headless, skinned bears were found floating at this spot. Children reported a yeti-like sighting, in a snowstorm on the Marshes. Paw prints were discovered and photographed. There was talk of circuses, gypsies — but no animals were reported missing. The implication was that the beasts had scavenged in Epping Forest, for picnic scraps, discarded burger cartons, roots and berries. Then started to forage further afield.

The floating things looked human but on the wrong scale, evolutionary accidents. Grey-pink. Flesh like a body condom. The paws had been lopped off, leaving the sorry creatures without proper means of identification. Interspecies monsters. The heads were never recovered. They vanished into London’s cabinet of curiosities, along with the skulls of Emanuel Swedenborg and John Williams (the suicided suspect in the Ratcliffe Highway Murders), the phantom hat of gangland victim Jack McVitie.

Heads as trophies. The bears were redundant once the heads had been hacked off. Were they decorating some Leaside pub? Or were they nailed to the wall of a neo-baronial ranch in Chigwell? Did they fulfil some shamanistic requirement, bear spirits raised as guides? Heads had long been used, in London’s underworld, as occult sources of power, botched voodoo displays. Instead of Dahomean carpets of skulls around the throne of a high king, the boiled poll of a smalltime informer, a rival.

East London’s waterway system, dank canals, had canteens of blood-rusty cutlery in them, weapons that continued to sing about forgotten crimes. Knives that begged to confess, plea-bargain. Customised shotguns. Arsenals of suspect weaponry. The police diving team was an everyday sight on the Hackney Cut and the Lee Navigation; wet suits, air bubbles, ropes. Dark fishing after the latest bin bag floater had been hauled ashore. I’ve watched them, with thermoses of coffee, thick sandwiches, cranking a car from the river. Not like Taggart . No hardbitten dialogue, no cynical pathologist dragged from a Burns night dinner. A small team taking a blow in the sunshine.

It’s more disturbing when heads start reappearing . I’m never happy with empty alcoves on English baroque monuments. It’s too easy to picture the Jacobite heads on Temple Bar. The spikes on London Bridge. Nobody liked it when Billy Moseley’s head turned up in a bundle of newspapers, in a Gents’ lavatory in Islington, up on the ridge overlooking the valley of the Fleet. It was clear, from the frosted flesh, that Billy had spent time in a deepfreeze. Less clear as to why he aborted his ill-advised cryogenic experiment.

It wasn’t just rubble under the marshes. There were legions of the unregistered dead. Children, animals. Foetuses. All, as I pictured it, headless. As a qualification. To preserve anonymity. Meat without eyes. Without souls.

*

I’ve been promising Bill and Marc a notable breakfast in the café by Springfield Park and I’m praying that it will be open. Bill, a connoisseur of cafés, knows the place. It’s where he meets his early mentor, the actor (director, philosopher, madman) Ken Campbell. A Liverpool connection. Campbell lives near the park. I’ve passed the house, without realising that it was his, noticed the tribal masks and fetish figures in the window. Hackney Marshes is a good backdrop for this latterday pataphysician with his alarming caterpillar eyebrows. Sit down with Campbell at an outside table and you are in company with a Ben Jonson clown, a whirlwind of cataclysmic energy; you realise, caught by that stare, those white, bottletop eyes, that the man is stonecold sane. He talks tickertape but his argument is rehearsed and organised; years of improvised performances, multilayered monologues, have honed his pitch. Fast as morse — but intelligible if you give yourself up to him. He puffs a small cigar. Sucks noisily at his mug of tea. He takes his role as spirit of place very seriously.