London Overground (7 page)

Andrew stalls for a moment, taking a surreptitious blow by looking back down Old Kent Road. He is frozen rigid, in contemplation of an unravelling mystery. As if some earlier self, in the first days of his intoxicated courtship of Leila, and the youthful freedoms of the city, should be revealed. He jumped back from the kerb, pushed by the slipstream of the ghost of his own motorbike. This was the route he always took, so he explained, on his return to St Leonards, after London tasks and adventures.

The Overground station at Queens Road Peckham is rewarded with another Kötting portrait. He has the energy to point: stout Cortez with his eagle eyes, none too silent on a peak in Peckham. But still managing to alarm a non-travelling vagrant, as he tried to make off with a pile of free newspapers. It says something about this station that they were still there, mid-morning.

Peckham improper, the definitive street of small shops, rank meat, trade, movement, goods, deals, arrives so suddenly and is so charged with bounce and collision, leftover civic structures signifying some dissipated claim to being a centre, that we miss it entirely; moving through in hot debate of our own,
without pausing to record Peckham Rye Station.
Thereby undoing the immaculate procession of our circular walk and disqualifying the premise of the image vine. (I charged back, a day or two later, to commit a selfie. By then Kötting was an absence, a loud ghost sprayed somewhere on the nether reaches of Old Kent Road.)

The station on Rye Lane was the grandest one so far encountered on our circuit; it required an etching press, not a digital camera. The nudge of recognition came from its association with the Lower Lea Valley and midwinter walks down the Northern Sewage Outfall. The architect was Charles Henry Driver, who was also responsible for Abbey Mills Pumping Station, that yellow-brick Moorish fantasy intruding on the Greenway path, breaking clouds, diverting storms, to disguise its legitimate function: housing engines to refine and reduce shit. Pumping stations and railway stations are in the same business: evacuation.

Peckham Rye Station, I subsequently discovered, was the epicentre of a major row about development. The promoters were in the grip of what they described as a ‘Vision'. They started calling the commuter station a ‘hub'. Suspect viruses advanced down the line. The journalist Alex Proud said that Peckham was now suffering from ‘Shoreditchification'; entrepreneurial ‘hipsters' and carpetbaggers in dark glasses were descending from Orange Line carriages to curate the buzz that leads to increased rents and spurious retail projects. These activities were forcing out the original (if not aboriginal) settlers. Network Rail owns the station, the land beneath the
forecourt and all the arches leading to Bellenden Road. Following the Shoreditch/Hoxton example, they mean to make the best of it. So Peckham's railway zone was rebranded: The Gateway. It now sounded like a New Age religion.

We strain eagerly uphill, enthused by the way the short passage between the lowlands of railway Peckham, as tribal, immersive, loud, watchful as the former Kingsland Waste Market, and the nursery slopes of established Peckham Rye, demonstrates such a leap in real-estate values. Even a minor physical elevation comes with entitlement to upward social mobility. You don't need oxygen, but the modest ascent uses the Overground as a cultural funicular.

Muriel Spark might have composed
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
, but she'd be cut adrift in the contemporary action around the station, the railway lowlands. She treated the working district, in her slender, sharp-witted 1960 novel, as suitable turf for satire.

‘Dougal turned sideways in his chair and gazed out of the window at the railway bridge; he was now a man of vision with a deformed shoulder. “The world of Industry,” said Dougal, “throbs with human life. It will be my job to take the pulse of the people and plumb the industrial depths of Peckham.”'

This horned Dougal, a genial Lucifer, presents himself as a teaser-out of local particulars, a scout in dim municipal libraries. He makes copies of unreliable facts, he raids friable newsprint. He has Mendelssohn composing his ‘Spring Song' in Ruskin Park. And Boadicea committing suicide on Peckham Rye, ‘probably where the bowling green is now'. He validates a dull present by inventing a ripe past.

Peckham Rye has chosen Bellenden Road as its engine of regeneration. A five-minute stroll from the Overground station. Tributaries with Hampstead aspirations: Elm Grove, Holly
Grove, Blenheim Grove. The estate agent's tactic of trifling with selected aspects of history that Spark exposes in her affectionate ridiculing of the pretensions of hilltop suburbia are extant in the rapid evolution of Bellenden Road into an elective Montmartre. Pavement cafés. Community bookshop. Authentic artisans stepping aside so that their warehouses and gated courtyards can be occupied by artists and printmakers. There is a well-kept sign pointing out that Bellenden Road was ‘formerly Victoria Terrace'. A Victorian advertisement, like a supersize trade card, has been restored on an endwall:
PRINTING OFFICE. FOR BUSINESS BUILDING. ESTD
1884. Here is an advertisement advertising heritage. And asserting the pedigree of the survivor.

In 1998, at the time of the conception of his
Angel of the North
, Antony Gormley had a studio here. Knighted now, a sculptor of international consequence, Gormley has followed the railway to the hub of hubs at King's Cross, the ultimate Eurozone of future development. Back then, I walked from Hackney to Peckham with a commission to produce an essay in response to the
Angel
. Blake was part of the attraction, his tree of celestial beings. Peckham angels were infusions of light, evanescent, but no more extraordinary than the colonies of parakeets in Wanstead. Less noisy perhaps. Alexander Gilchrist in
The Life of Blake
, first published in 1863, describes that famous episode: ‘On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it was, as he in after years related, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he had his first vision. Sauntering along, the boy looked up and saw a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars.'

Gormley's office-workshop, off Bellenden Road, shared a yard with the studio of the artist Tom Phillips. Phillips had been plundering the past, very fruitfully, by working over a
Victorian novel by William Hurrell Mallock called
A Human Document.
Pages of starchy narrative were defaced, isolated phrases emphasized, colour and pattern-making employed, to chart an adventure in concrete poetry. Phillips called the project
A Humument.
The original book was found in Peckham Rye, at Austin's, a furniture repository and accidental mausoleum of dead stuff that might now be dignified as ‘architectural salvage'. Austin's was a major South London resource, somewhere in character between the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill and Nunhead Cemetery. Graham Greene references the place. He was a premature Overground man, testing the adulterous liaisons of
The End of the Affair
on Clapham Common. He furnished rooms from Peckham warehouses. In the days when Greene was making a fetish of not being filmed, he agreed to be interviewed, so long as his face wasn't shown: on a train.

Phillips visited Austin's in the company of R. B. Kitaj: School of London investigates a reserve collection of unoccupied beds, cupboards, chairs. A mad, uncurated heap of periods and submerged stories.

‘Ron, I'll get the first book I find for thruppence and spend the rest of my life working on it.'

That book was
A Human Document.
A suitable case for the William Burroughs treatment: the masking, slicing, excavating of covert truths. Rivers of phrases. Pools and puddles of words. Enochian signs. Hypnagogic undertow. On page 111: ‘a broken bridge and / photograph, betrayed … certain S-shaped iron ties'. Peckham as a site of divination, Mallock's novel as a reconfigured
I Ching.
Mundane narrative redacted, by the wit of Phillips, into poetry.

Like all of us who are responsive to place, determined to acquire a chorus of spiritual forebears, Phillips positions Austin's ‘on Peckham Rye, where Blake saw his first angels and
along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham'. And where Muriel Spark located her own mischievous archivist burrowing into legends of freaks and mermaids. ‘It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-being, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.'

Phillips ripped through numerous copies of
A Human Document.
The first one cost almost nothing. The one I sold him in 1981 was £8 (postage included). He sent me a postcard of ‘Dante in his study'. The Peckham artist, the man on the far side of Gormley's courtyard, began by simply scoring out words to uncover the skeleton beneath the obfuscations of the dead author's controlling mind. Phillips used the found book as I was using London: a Tarot, a Book of Changes. He tapped it for confirmation: ‘wanted. a little white opening out of thought'.

Tom's companion on that first trawl through the furniture repository, Ron Kitaj, shared this attitude towards a form of art recoverable by way of books as mediums. He favoured prints made of poets, philosophers. Walter Benjamin. Ed Dorn. The one-eyed Robert Creeley. The wall-eyed Robert Duncan. Kitaj's painting
Cecil Court, London
WC
2 (The Refugees)
is an epitaph for a vanishing trade, bookdealing. A paved beach and a court of windows. A memory-culture escaped from Hitler's Germany. A strip of London real estate soon to be priced out of existence. The painting has the noise and smell of Yiddish Theatre.

‘I began to collect scarce books and pictures about this shadow world, the trail of which has not quite grown cold in my past life,' Kitaj said. He prowled book alleys. And the furniture repositories of Peckham. Street markets. Junk pits. But the submerged libraries of dealers who store everything and curate nothing have gone. Swept away in the slipstream of the
Ginger Line. Oxfam shelves, and all those other charity displays on dying high streets, will never supply the singular items with which Phillips and Kitaj worked, tracking wormholes through time. Some know-nothing dealer will be around to advise on what is to be kept: the bright, the current, the glossy pretenders. The rest is landfill. Austin's of Peckham has become Austin's Court, a nest of railway-connected flats. A desirable address. Old Alf Austin, the last of his line, had a catchphrase for first-time visitors to his warehouse. ‘Gentlemen, everything is for sale.'

We sat in Gormley's office above the Peckham yard where a regiment of sculpted avatars, forked and naked, endure the season's showers, acquiring a weathered patina:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
aliens bursting from the pod. Antony Gormley is monkish, long-limbed, an abbot of intent at the heart of a multinational enterprise; a global brand whose product is the marketing of copies, reworkings, extensions of his own body, cast by his partner, Vicken Parsons, and her assistants, who are sterile-suited in white like a forensic team newly arrived at the scene of the crime. Photographs of these procedures have a fetishistic allure: yogic discipline, the whiteness of the bandages, clingfilm body wrappings emphasizing every bump and gnarl. Private rituals servicing public art, with each stage of the process documented like
The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The
Angel of the North
, Gormley told me, was the realization of a dream. The sculptor's responses to my questions were considered, lengthy, and delivered after long pauses as he waits for the right word, the only word, to emerge from religious silence. I find my attention drifting to the window and the walk I made, up the hill to a small park, a stamp of green I associate with Blake's vision. I sank into the infinite emptiness Gormley locates within the human shell. His thin spectacles. That
ink-black hair. The interrogator's quizzical tilt of head. The becoming stoop of a benevolent hierophant explaining years of rigorous discipline and practice to a layman with a hungry notebook.

Gormley saw his
Angel
as ‘a concentrator of landscape', privileged above motorway and Sir John Hall's consumer hub, the Metro Centre. Why not in Peckham? Why not above the Ginger Line? The
Angel
, beginning as a peeling of self, travels out into the world to occupy a northern hilltop. Gormley's need to present his giant as the final flare of the age of iron, with heavy engineering complemented by digital technologies, is understandable, but marginal to the presence of the thing itself. The
Angel
is a Blakean archetype, a rusted automaton whose roots drop down into native rock. The steel sculpture is the focus for ‘a field of energy': the tired eyes and wandering minds of 90,000 motorists, sealed in their metal bubbles, driving past every day of the year. They look at the blind looker. Who cannot return their gaze. The
Angel of the North
is the symbol of a symbol, logo for regeneration. Rooted and imprisoned where Blake's birds of light shimmer and vanish.

On the window ledge of Gormley's office is a small plaster figure, an angelic form of modest wingspan. The simple maquette exists somewhere beyond, and not before, the public clatter, committees and convoys of the Gateshead giant. It was made, Gormley explains, for the child of a friend. Seeing what he had achieved, the sculptor decided that the figurine belonged with him. It was the germ of the grand project. The
Angel of the North
should stand for at least 150 years. This warm-to-the-touch plaster thing could vanish tomorrow; its vulnerability is its release from the prison of time.

The benign emanation on the windowsill, looking out over Bellenden Road, was private. The inflated version, locked down in Gateshead, was an issue, political, cultural, economic, right
from the start. If Gormley were to leave a memento, to pay his respects to a period on the south side of the river, it would be the commission from Thames Water to produce a series of manhole covers for Peckham. The project was stillborn, with the exception of a unique prototype installed at the junction of Maxted Road and Sandison Street, a short distance from the studio. The design is based on the sculptor's naked footprints, whorls and hard ridges of skin from miles tramped in London and elsewhere. A rectangle filled with a unique signature of self: the beating of the bounds. An iron mirror has been cast, as Gormley suggested, to look like ripples in a pond. ‘You are invited to stand on it and feel yourself suspended, as it were, between the great infinity of the blue dome of the sky and this river of human ordure that it flowing beneath your feet.'