The Other South Bank
Tired of the tube, the bus, the train, I took a walk along the Thames bank through the forgotten history of the docklands to try and rediscover the city.
Walking often gets overlooked in a place where you can move about by bus, tube, train, or taxi. But taking the time to move through London or any city under your own power can be very rewarding. It lets you recapture the sense of geography we often lose in the numbing web of the mass transit system. Day to day, we don’t need to know, really, where anything is. We need only know that boarding the tube at Finsbury Park will eventually lead us to Brixton, or that the 188 takes us from Waterloo to Hampstead Heath. How one gets anywhere ceases to matter. These days, in our cars and trains, we hold the city together in our heads with metaphors rather than footsteps, and so going back to the streets lets us remake it, new, once more. Walking in London is a profound thing. To move by yourself through some of the oldest streets in the world. To put a hand on that wall; to open that door. To see. To look.
To discover a part of the city I didn’t know, I followed a walking tour podcast narrated by novelist and London historian Iain Sinclair. The walk took me from the O2 arena on the North Greenwich peninsula, down the South bank of the river to the Thames barrier. It’s hardly the most picturesque walk in the country, but, as Sinclair explains, it’s a landscape rich with debates between the past and future, and one of the most varied stretches of land in the city. I found all kinds of things. The corporate Vegas of the O2; an ecology park; disused factories; the newest neighbourhood in London; a beach; a yacht club; the prime meridian. But coming out of the safe zone of the O2’s pleasure park, the proper journey started, rather unexpectedly, with art.
London is flooded with art, cropping up in the most unexpected of places. The docklands, near-deserted as they often seem, proved to be no exception. Dominating the riverside path on the Eastern side of the Greenwich peninsula is an immense structure of tangled steel . Rising out of the water to about fifty feet high, Anthony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud stands proud in the skyline. Walking towards it for the first time, it seems like a pile of wire coat-hangers, all angles and static. But as you approach, the perspective alters, and in the middle of the cloud of metal, a human figure comes into focus. It’s a powerful moment that crystallises the human story at the heart of the industrial geography of the docks. It’s a sculpture that invites a passer-by to consider the landscape in a new way. It’s one of hundreds of places on the riverbank that prompts a second look.
Keen to do just that, I kept walking south, through the area known as Bugsby’s Marshes. Like most names in London, it tells a story, and though Bugsby’s identity is long lost, the name still reminds us that all the surrounding land used to be marsh. “That’s why for so long there was nothing here”, explains Sinclair. “It was impossible.” Multicoloured apartment blocks now make a high-rise maze. London: it’s makes the impossible possible. But it’s important to remember that everything that now props up the dome, a crown-shaped monument to music and corporate sponsorship, and the surrounding restaurants, shops and tower blocks of the Millennium Village: all of that land reclaimed from a boggy, waterlogged marsh. North Greenwich tube station, in fact, was designed to float in the marsh, the land unable to support conventional foundations. It’s a telling sign about this part of the town – everything is shifting, and woven together. Things collect, times and places and people gathering like driftwood on a shore, but somehow everything is outside London’s familiar world – beyond it, or forgotten by it. Tied up so much in its own history, it’s hard to put roots down here.
Thinking of driftwood, I reached a sliver of shingle on the curve of the river, a spot Sinclair describes as being ripe for beach combing. Cutting its path right through the city, the river casts up all kinds of odds and ends on its hidden shores. Constructed on the bank, I found a monument to them: another sculpture. A brash, wonky thing made of recovered bits of drift: it’s a mighty throne, made from sun-bleached tree branches, old brooms and mops, steel poles, and great faded chunks of coloured rope. Like something out of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, you can imagine the king of the beachcombers sitting here, surveying his kingdom across the low tide, blinking out in the sunlight at the low cranes and warehouses, and the rumbling red cars of the DLR trains. You can see them all the way along the walk, sliding back and forth across the North bank between stations with curious and exotic names. Galleons Reach; King George V; West Silvertown; Cyprus.
Looking this way too, you can see the strange turquoise cubes of the Tate and Lyle factory. Its chimneys, vents and valves whistle in the daytime as it churns out bag after bag of fine white sugar. Supplying a nation fuelled by mugs of tea and plates of sweet treats, it’s the last place you’d associate with high culture, but as Sinclair gleefully points out, its founders were responsible for establishing the Tate gallery, a few miles upstream in Pimlico. “It’s a reminder,” he says, “that the dirtiest things pay for the finest things, the whitest things, and the granite and the marble come out of belching smoke and tin.” In the grumbling sun-stroked cumulonimbus of the sky above, you can suddenly recognise a sight worthy of Turner, or Monet.
Moving South around the curve of the river bank, you can see the impact of industry on the waterway. The iron skeletons of goods yards, mounds of sand, and the sharp smell of the tarmac plant. On the same street you can see the shining steel of modern industrial plants, and the old tattered brickwork of hundred year-old factories. The old and the new are smudged together here, and the same soil has housed London’s engines of industry since the docks first expanded this far in 19th Century. Coal, spices, cars, cement: everything imaginable has been docked, unloaded and passed through the waters here. Even on a quiet day you can almost hear the buzz of machinery, the clank of the cranes, and the rumble of the tugs tumbling down on the tide from hundreds of years before.
After a pub garden, corroded piers, hobby fisherman, and the graveyard of Sainsbury’s delivery vans, the walk thins out, and the sparkling outline of the Thames barrier emerges triumphant, and pronounces the end of the route. Looking back from the barrier, the water curves away in a silvery ribbon back towards the glass and concrete clusters of Canary Wharf. From here you can see the shadows of London’s centuries of architecture, collecting, like driftwood, on the skyline. And piercing that tangle of history, cracking open the city and laying it all out in front of you is the one constant in all this: the river. Though the chrome teeth of the Thames barrier clutch the secret power to stem the ebb and flow of the tide, the natural heartbeat of the water has guided London since the very beginning. From the first spark of settlement, providing a water source, a port and a defendable position, the river has given birth to the city, and allowed her to grow. Looking back from here on a landscape cluttered with human history and architecture, the Thames provides the one common thread between them. A path marked by time and still upheld today, the river, more than anything, deserves that second look. It shaped us, made us, and will outlast everything we have.
You needn’t take a guided tour to make the most out of a city walk: there are things to discover wherever you look. As Sinclair’s journey through the docks pointed out, it’s the small pieces of history as much as the big ones that hide the richest and most compelling truths. Artists and writers are making more and more work about spaces and places: in cities and out of them. Perhaps it’s because new technology, like the trains and buses, has stripped back the importance of understanding our surroundings. Google Maps and Wikipedia bring information to our fingertips, and the need to explore, and learn, has withered. Maybe we’ve forgotten the thrill of the space: the realisation that we exist within something: a physical cast of a greater story. As the world becomes more abstract, contemporary art seems to be trying to return us to physical contact with our surroundings. So try it. Put your shoes on, and walk down the road you’ve never gone to. Read the road names. Look through the windows. Find the graffiti, the launderette, the park. Walking, anywhere, is a profound thing. Magnificent. Essential.
‘Iain Sinclair’s Thames’ and other walking tours can be downloaded from www.guardian.co.uk/audio
Sam Sedgman is a playwright and spoken word artist living in London. His next show, ‘A Time and Place’, a spoken word piece inspired by psychogeography and the city of London, will be performed at the Albany Theatre in Deptford on November 10th. Find out more about Sam and his work at his blog, ...and a writer.
