even doing it all at once – my reason for being here is connected with the quirks of the National Health Service, namely the fact that for seven years I have commuted from flats in Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich to Darent Valley Hospital on the edges of Dartford – a building that I found it appropriate to write about in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. So when I’ve explored the surrounding area, it’s usually been after treatment for Crohn’s disease and its many side-effects and knock-on irritants; which also means that I’ve occasionally hit North Kent under the effects of codeine or morphine, something which certainly assists in finding sites of interest. However, far too often I just make the same journey, first on one of the worst of the privatized train networks, Southeastern, then on North Kent’s Fastrack Buses or on TfL London buses (both make the same journey, the latter for nearly half the price). On the occasion I went to Gravesend, I took the Bus B from Darent Valley, which took me through Ebbsfleet and Northfleet on a proper round-all-the-houses trip which cost me a princely six pounds. The two Fleets are a study in place all of their own.
Ebbsfleet will be known to Eurostar passengers as Ebbsfleet International. It was supposed to become a practical New Town under the Thames Gateway, but although a lot of houses got built, it didn’t entirely pan out that way. The station itself, from which you can get to St Pancras, Paris, Lille and Brussels, is a Foster-like glass box that was pre-emptively strangled by road engineering, so that it was impossible for a real town to ever grow up around it; a series of spurs from the M25 surround and encase it, and the housing emerges on the edges of that. Ebbsfleet has no centre, though it has many, many units of neo-Victorian or Pseudomodern living that somehow slipped through the CABE net. The nearest thing to a centre is Bluewater, more of which presently. Northfleet, though, is a town of some sort. Like the Medway, it goes along and under high chalk cliffs, atop which you find very surprising things – patterned, Festival of Britain-style tower blocks, tiny terraces of the sort usually built for dockers, millworkers or miners, and the earliest major building by one of the architects of twentieth-century Britain, Giles Gilbert Scott: in the small Edwardian Catholic church here you can see more than hints of the blocky, heavily masonry-clad, modernized Gothic that would bring him to Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station. That’s a lot, for a town this small.
The town of Gravesend, like Chatham Dockyard, is a minor revelation, a memorable small town both distant from and a cousin to London, able to breathe some of its metropolitan air without completely swallowing its bullshit. There’s not much to Gravesend, but what there is is fairly fascinating. Firstly, there’s the most hated building in Gravesend – I have this on good authority – the Thamesgate Car Park. Arndale Brutalism, massive and monumental, it adjoins a completely uninteresting shopping centre, but is actually a very smart and dramatic building; in rich red brick around sculpted, ribbed concrete, its overhanging volumes have a hint of the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright. From a distance, it’s a ruthless cruiser of a building, fitting just perfectly with the container ships which dock nearby. In fact, you can imagine a Zaha Hadid giving it the nod of approval for its fearless, attention-seeking tectonic melodrama. I can understand the disdain, however, because from the train it gives the impression that you’re about to enter a shabby, disjointed place much like Chatham. You’re not – Gravesend is tight, cohesive and built very much around the river. In its ‘historic quarter’ (there’s no escaping the nomenclature), a dense high street of weatherboarded maritime buildings throws itself right towards the Thames. At the end of it there’s a pier with a restaurant on the end, a characterful pub, and a view of Tilbury Power Station on the other side of the Thames. When it gets dark here, this is a compellingly alien space, the bright lights inside the Power Station speaking of the heat and electricity generated therein. Next to the pub is the local headquarters of the Port of London Authority, housed in an undemonstrative box, a long way from the baroque palace it built for itself near the Tower of London a century ago.
On that same high street there’s a Town Hall that is really worthy of the Industrial South, a sandstone Doric Temple which for all its architectural rectitude and austerity really ambushes you, tells you that this was once a place which thought very highly of itself indeed; a fragment of the Enlightenment cast down to North Kent. Better still, you can walk through it to the seedily seasideish Borough Market, and then through that to Saint Andrew’s Court, a decent, strong, well-made 1962 council estate. Walk back into the town centre, and you find shopping malls much as you do everywhere else. They’re a little strange, slightly crepuscular, at the point between concrete Brutalism and brick vernacular described by Douglas Murphy as ‘Brutalomo’; an attempt to create the dense and enclosed spaces of a real street to replace, well, a real street. The mall’s multiple layers are enjoyable, although it’s all strangely underlit, as if to make it feel deliberately gloomy, even sinister. Out from there, there’s a fine eighteenth-century church, a statue of improbable one-time Gravesend resident Pocahontas, and a view of some developer excrescence. There’s a very active local Civic Society group in Gravesend, and they are justifiably proud of the fact that they recently blocked a tall tower of luxury flats, through a forthright campaign of sit-ins and civil disobedience, a little Kentish Occupy. It’s a precious and rare victory against developers in the Gateway’s free-for-all; but the guff you can see clinging to the riverbanks in Gravesend is not tall, not modern, and is immaculately in keeping; though it tears up the Thames Path, it dresses up its violence with pediments and neo-baroque details. It’s a bit harder to campaign against something that sweet-talks an area like this.
The reason why Gravesend’s urban grain felt so refreshing was because my point of comparison here is always Dartford, a desperately sad town. You can get a hint of that when you leave the train at the station. Look up at the Town Hall, a ’60s complex of no distinction, and you can always see two protruding things – a Union Jack and a CCTV camera, like a slightly laboured Banksy mural brought to life: community, nationality, security. It’s hard to tell which building-boom decade did more violence to Dartford. You can tick off the suspects. The ’60s, with its roadbuilding and loveless offices? Maybe. The ’80s, with its car-centred shopping malls, and more pointedly, the construction of the M25, which chopped the town in half? Quite possibly. The 2000s, with its faceless brick and aluminium blocks of flats cleaving to the edges of dual carriageways? Perhaps, but they’re all missing the point, really – it’s hard to find much of a heart in Dartford at all. There’s a decent enough high street, ending at a pretty medieval church, but not much else. The poky Victorian terraces in the centre make clear why – this too is an industrial town, but one too close to London to be able to carve out an identity of its own. You now get little comic juxtapositions here, from the attempt to Make It Nice. The pediments of an ’80s improvement scheme act as a gateway to a derelict co-op and a couple of greasy spoons. A big metal drum houses a few chains, and the railway gets you back into London either to work, or if you were born here, to live when you grow up. All that said, Dartford is of some importance for the very large shopping centre on its periphery.
Appeasing the Gods of Craft
I often find myself visiting Bluewater, mainly because it’s the closest ‘amenity’ to the hospital. The first time I went there, I was a little underwhelmed – having spent much of my childhood and youth in malls (like 90 per cent or so of those born since the 1970s), it felt like a familiar but expanded version of something I already knew very well indeed. The only novelty seemed to be the extraordinary setting, a gigantic Firing Squad-friendly bowl carved out of a chalk pit. Over time I ended up exploring it in a bit more depth, and its complexities and contradictions became more apparent, without necessarily making it a more pleasant place.
I hadn’t initially realized, given the hospital’s hilltop encampment-like position, that I was so close to Bluewater at least twice a month. I was within walking distance, in fact, or rather I would be if there were any means of walking there. What infuriates anyone used to enjoying the city through walking its short-cuts, walkways, underpasses, parks and general non-routes is that the place is so obsessively channelled, to an extent that makes you realize how much modernist housing projects, with their obliteration of gates and enclosures, were driven by a now-extreme libertarianism.
