Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Under the canal bridge, where something aspirational has been attempted with cobbles, we find a pair of abandoned ankleboots. Marc rearranges them, darting about to find the best angle; as if, by the ritual of photography, he could conjure up the presence of the woman who kicked them off. Before vanishing for ever.

The blighted townscape, where North Circular passes over Lee, is unrevised. Carrier bags trapped in thorny thickets. Rubbish infiltrating chainlink fences. Yellow and black barriers. Humps in the road. A retail park. Flooded fields. Marc, on the central reservation, surfs wheel-spray, as he records volatile waves of traffic.

London rushes at us, tightens the cord. Kersh depicts a city swollen with bad gas, a straining belly eager to disgorge itself on unprotected ground: ‘Expanding city population, plus your expanding heavy industry, plus, of course, rising land values in your outlying suburbs. Well, that’s what I’m out here for.’ Predatory industrialists, compliant politicians. They live to work the margins, unloved land. As do writers and photographers, the thrill of the spurned. New narratives of dereliction.

The grey concrete walls of the sewage beds at Markfield Recreation Ground, South Tottenham, have been blitzed with aerosol colour, image and text. Robots. Androids. Beast-men with zap weaponry. Spike-breasted women in (blood splashed) bikini briefs. Tags. Spurts. Slogans. SHIT VEGAN. A communal album. Any artist is free to revise, improve, distort. Urban pictographs we don’t have time to decode.

The Lee is manufacturing War of the Worlds fungus; it’s kraken-clogged, choked with green scum. A woman is chucking sliced bread from the window of her new flat, straight into the water. Gulls and ducks squabble. Rats dart from canalside undergrowth to carry off spilt crumbs.

The camp under the Eastway bridge has been abandoned, the council have got the travellers out. Wick Wood: another war zone. Padded car seats. Precarious stacks of tyres. Sections of carpet. Washing machines. Gutted cars. Caravans. Bundles of sodden newspapers: POLITICA.

WHERE ARE YOU? A cancelled map. Filth flung from speeding vehicles spreads over the embankment. Marc poses at the roadside in his once-white shoes.

We’re on home turf, Hackney to Thames. No surprises. I can’t believe how quickly we’ve come back. Everything is in suspension, post-Christmas, pre-Millennium. A red-on-red poster, Soviet pastiche, promotes George Michael: SONGS FROM THE LAST CENTURY. The canal is silted, lifeless. Without colour. A sepia negation, it defies the idea of colour, the folk memory.

The Lee Valley Media Zone has abdicated, retired to its second home. The picket fence around the Big Breakfast cottage is black with names, the fishing pixie leers like a child molester. A poster for Peter Greenaway’s 81/2 Women is peeling from one of the piers of the Bow Flyover. The wine bar in the Three Mills complex is shut.

Rain rattles on the roof of a blue and black tent. What we have, on this muddy canalside paddock, is a replica of the Dome. A circus tent in which acrobats have been rehearsing for the Big Night. NEW YORK!! NEW YORK!! screams red-bulb lettering. We can investigate the virtual Dome for nothing. They’ve been flooded out, they’ve gone. Condensation dripping from sodden canvas. The desertion of the circus animals. Rehearsals are over. This tent can be broken, shifted. The misery is finite. Nobody is watching, nobody cares. Nobody will hold them to account.

It’s one o’clock and we’ve made it to the Isle of Dogs. Marc’s limping; he’s not too bad, a slight thigh strain. Liquid City. We slither, steaming, into the pub: an old favourite, the Gun in Blackwall Way. Traditional riverside hospitality always on offer: no hot food, stale crisps, nobody at the bar, locked balcony. A place so fiction-friendly that I can never remember what happened the last time I dropped in and what happened in my novel Downriver.

Such light as this day ever pretended to has abdicated. We carry our drinks to a table. We look out, directly, on the other Dome, the money pit to which all the celebrities in town have been invited. A royal knees-up due to kick off in twenty-four hours. The Gun’s spiked, a couple of pickled regulars sniffling into their half-pints, tomorrow it will be heaving. Anything with a view of the river has been booked solid. We’ll start the party now. Order the Jamesons, the beers. Drink to the Dome’s damnation.

When we arrived at the spot where they’d filmed the EastEnders wedding, near the Ibis Hotel, the Dome was an alien form; a spoiler. It ruined the low level riverscape, the dingy mystique of Bugsby’s Marshes. It looked like a collapsed birthday cake from the now-disappeared bakers on Kingsland Road, a special order. Yellow candles in a mound of icing sugar. It sagged. It should never have been left out in the rain. Miss Havisham, back from the Kentish marshes, in all her decayed and inappropriate finery.

Two hours later, our table, dressed with a red Christmas cloth, was filled with glasses. Six of them in front of Marc — and one in his hand. The Nikon is also on the table, along with a box of matches and the mobile phone.

We’ve dried off, warmed up. I trot through to the bar for another round, ask for doubles. This is it. The moment has finally arrived. At the cusp of a new millennium, I’ll do it: make my first cellphone call. Dome-watch is turning into a session. It feels historic. I want to invite Anna to join us (I don’t fancy walking home along the Grand Union in the rain).

The professional drinkers are staying with the big screen, the river looks better when it’s electronically processed. We’re all pals by this time. We get fresh glasses with every round. I study framed river maps while I wait; remember old trips, with Paul Burwell and Brian Catling, to Tilbury, Sheppey, Southend.

When Anna, in coat, sits down ‘for a moment’ and is still in the chair an hour later, we realise that time is draining faster than we can record it. The vortex is about to reverse, spin counterclockwise down the plughole. The bride feast on the far bank, fairy lights, beams from helicopters, will turn into a wake.

My binoculars pass hand-to-hand. ‘You taking pictures for the papers? We’ve had ’em coming in all week,’ says an old soak, wobbling towards the Gents. Marc grips a cigar between his teeth, as he designs his shot. When he has licked the last granule of dust from his crisp packet, the Limehouse photographer flattens the eviscerated envelope. He smoothes the lining with the back of his hand, alchemises the tablecloth, red to silver.

Security personnel are rehearsing the arrival of the nobs, the royals. Bulbs wink on tent poles, for the benefit of flights into the City Airport at Silvertown. A final run-through for the Millennium show, the loud hurrah. Jeeps, red carpet. Stand-ins for Blair and Mandelson (the former ‘single shareholder’), Lord Falconer. The deputed Blair clone hasn’t got the walk right. ‘A man whose shoes are too small.’ (As poet Geoffrey Hill has it.) A yea-saying preacher, arms thrown wide, who pays other people to steer him away from the shit.

This is better than tomorrow. A grandstand view for the price of a few drinks. No crush. No fighting your way on to the Jubilee Line. No hanging about for hours on Stratford station. No arm-wrestling with sour royalty, during a joyless deconstruction of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

The coloured streamers above the bar are reflected in the window. The Dome is an invader crashed into the swamp on Planet Britain. Wrecked on our floating island, the aircraft carrier that Piety Blair has made us. Cod ritual always favours the Thames: the knighting of Francis Chichester at Greenwich, CIA product-placement dramas filmed (back-to-back with Jane Austen) in the Royal Naval College. Churchill’s funeral barge. The Millennium Wheel (the London Eye) which wasn’t ready on the night. The bridge that wobbled. The promised ‘river of fire’. Ceremonies invented to paper over civic discontent.