parks – the Thames as a Silicon Valley, the motorcade from Notting Hill to Chipping Norton. Pure, unadulterated laissez-faire would have meant the further incursion of volume housebuilding, microchip factories and tech parks out across the Home Counties into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire; and that expansion is what the reforms to the planning laws are designed to create now. This westward movement meant the continued decline and dereliction of Conrad’s easterly riverside stretch, and that is what the Thames Gateway ‘plan’ was intended to reverse. There are reasons for this, not insignificant among them the fact that these places are marginal constituencies, populated by the people who decide elections. Working-class and fucked-over enough to be inclined to vote Labour, patriotic, atomized and flag-waving enough to vote Tory, they make the area a political battleground, which is weird for somewhere so seemingly uncommitted. In order to rescue the estuary, laissez-faire was tampered with in an interesting way. Development would continue its expansion of London westwards only under fairly strict control, within the planning system’s strictures; but developers were given complete free rein over the industrial and post-industrial wastes of the East End and South Essex, South East London and North Kent. There would be very little in the way of public infrastructural improvements, at least until the forever deferred completion of the ambitious Crossrail scheme, and there would be little planning or co-ordination, with competing Regional Development Agencies and local councils bidding for their piece of the pie. There would be housebuilding on an enormous scale, without the state, local populations or local government able to stand in the way. It was, in short, an Enterprise Zone larger even than London itself, a New Metropolis that resembled the incremental, speculation-led and car-based development of Los Angeles more than it did any of the Bilbaos, Barcelonas or Berlins bandied about by planners and politicians.
The Thames Gateway has recently often been a locus for M25 flânerie or exurban poetics, but it is seldom written about as a coherent entity. This makes sense, because there are few places less cohesive. It is a slippery zone, its very name implying that it is merely the way into the real event, the Metropolis itself. The name seems to have been chosen by a sadist, determined to ensure that the development always sounds pinched, substandard and suburban; but the area covered by it is absolutely enormous. This chapter is far from definitive, and will try instead to detail a journey that you can take, if you want, over a couple of days, rather than visiting every single part of the vast exurb. We will start on the Thames’s south side, or rather from the Medway, then go through North Kent, crossing the river via an imaginary bridge to Barking, where we will gradually make our way to the Metropolitan Enterprise Zone of Canary Wharf, and, eventually and reluctantly, end at the posthumous Blairite utopia of Olympian Stratford. In this route, you can find a place that is absolutely fascinating, with unforgettable landscapes, freakish buildings and marvellously pugnacious people, but it always defeats you in the end. The Industrial South can be contrasted, unfairly but unavoidably, with the Industrial North, in a way which does not credit the Wen and its outgrowths. There are few places in Britain where man has fouled his nest so comprehensively, with the sad concomitant that he is absolutely obsessed with that fouled nest. In fact, he thinks it’s an investment.
Under the Lines in Chatham
So, imagine that a boat has dropped you, as it may once have done, in the Medway Towns, specifically Chatham. Chatham looks at first like a normal town that has been smashed up and reassembled by a surrealistically inclined topographical demiurge. The extreme dips and peaks of the land throw up all manner of chaos, usually of a fairly unpleasant sort, such as the road system that holds the place in a tourniquet; for the pedestrian, the result is that thoroughfares that should be straight lines entail squeezing along weird half-pavements and crossing a baffling series of traffic islands, with entry points in the most counter-intuitive places possible. Across the Brutalist shopping centre and Ahrends Burton and Koralek’s law courts, a concrete flyover sweeps as if at random. An art deco war memorial looks over the general absurdity from up on ‘the lines’, the stark cliffs that run all the way through the Medway, giving it a strangeness and melodrama that is exceptionally unusual for the south of England. Where on earth, you would be within your rights to ask, am I?
It’s an impressively weird place, this quintessential down-at-heel naval town. It is often claimed to be the origin of the class-hate epithet ‘chav’ (‘Chatham Average’ is the suggested, and unlikely, etymology). If you’re coming (as, I’ll own up, I am) from the railway station, after you negotiate the ham-fisted road engineering you step down concrete stairs into a dense High Street of 99p shops and such, with a large Arndale-style block at the end of it; also at the end is a civic clock tower of such grandeur and munificence that you could be in the Industrial North rather than the Medway; similarly, too, with the wonky-roofed, wood-clad Urban Renaissance tower that creeps up behind it. Next to you on the other side is a bus station that has escaped from Tellytubbies, big, jolly and bulbous. Yet at the heart of Chatham is a development which raises some curious questions about the re-use of industrial sites. It’s a pregnant subject in this recession, with the scattered remnants of manufacturing in serious trouble, for all the noises about a return to ‘making things’. At first sight, Chatham Dockyard, disused since the mid-1980s, conforms to the standard post-industrial Urban Regen type, being turned over alternately to the creative industries (an art college), the heritage industry (several museums, ornamental ships) and the property speculation industry (newbuild flats that are ‘in keeping’, loft conversions). Yet there’s something unusual here.
The place to compare it with is the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, the huge Thames-side engineering works unexpectedly hailed by Tristram Hunt MP as a post-industrial counter-model to the Barratt Homes boredom that was mainly created by the developers’ scrum in the Thames Gateway. In Woolwich, the Wen and all its values pervades the factories entirely, with the majority of them turned into very expensive new flats, with a tame museum, some Gormleyish sculpture and some units serving as estate agents, organic grocery stores and a gastropub. It’s London at its worst, a self-segregating upper-crust enclave, a series of Canary Wharf yuppiedromes that just happens to be cast in severe Vanburghian forms, as if accidentally. Chatham Dockyard isn’t like that – its industrial past feels much closer, it still feels in some odd way itself. Partly that’s because of the way that many of the factories have become exhibits of themselves – one enormous shed houses various big lumps of metal as permanent, open ornaments, though it’s the thuggishly powerful steel frame that catches the eye. Industrial wreckage – cranes, presses, guns, scattered about at random – is more a feature of the space than sententious public art, which is right and good. The architecture is more complete, more vivid, than at Woolwich. But what makes it interesting, almost exciting even, is that there are things actually being built here as well. Pleasure boats and yachts, obviously, but ships nonetheless. Thrown together with the art school and the museums, the result is rich with potential. This is only really possible with the relative distance from London, where the pressure of property is higher; but for once, the idea of ‘mixed use’ seems convincing – strange, incongruous things thrown together that shouldn’t work, but do.
The distance from London has saved Chatham Dockyard from becoming boring, but along the Medway you can still see acre upon acre of developer’s dross – typically cul-de-sacs, of flats as often as houses, clinging to the river’s edges like stock-brick barnacles. From Chatham Dockyard you can see something just slightly more ambitious. In the foreground is an Odeon, using the same industrial Big Shed method as the old factories, then for producing, now for consuming; behind them you can see two skyscrapers. Well, almost skyscrapers, of a sleekness and finish that you don’t generally expect in an area more marked by concrete-framed blocks with oast-house cowls on top. Both have curved, glazed façades, and are a fragment of the ‘aspirational’ side of the Thames Gateway’s property frenzy, the part that involves the perusal of Wallpaper* magazine and viewings of Grand Designs as much as of Location, Location, Location. It’s unusual in North Kent, relatively exceptional for its high-end smoothness.
The Condition is Grave
Now I’ve rooted you somewhere and established the possibility
