Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair Page B
Authors: Iain Sinclair
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which time, the original wall has been obliterated under fresh tags and aerosol doodles.
The pressure of regeneration, force-fed by the Olympics, is such that zones once tolerant of impoverished artists have to turn every wastelot, every previously unnoticed ruin, to profit. To provide more theoretical housing, it is necessary to unhouse those who have already fended for themselves. Walking down the Regent’s Canal from Victoria Park, on the morning of 8 May 2008, I witnessed another eviction. Around thirty police, with attendant vans, bailiffs, hired muscle. Council officials in dark suits clutching protective clipboards. Loud bangs, crunched hinges: the door is battered down.
A towpath cyclist is enraged. ‘How long was that building empty? Twenty years? The squatters cleaned the whole place up, it was going to be a community centre.’
A barrel-fronted property, dressed in weeds and tendrils, between the Empress coach garage and the gas-holders. I noticed, a few years ago, a sticker on the cobwebbed window: BACK THE BID . Squatters reclaimed this ghostly shell, using Tibetan gods and prayer scrolls for blinds.
Plodding home from Stratford, after discovering that much of the Olympic Park was fated to become a termite shopping centre, I picked my way down what was left of Ruckholt Road and Eastway. They were taking down the blue fence. Panels were hacked out and dumped on a carpet of wood chips, around the stump of an inconvenient ash tree. The blue tourniquet had served its purpose. Plywood was being replaced by more of those virtual-reality panels: archers, swimmers, cheering crowds. High-definition digital photography and ethically challenged fakery.
Signs are unreadable, arrows point towards mesh fences and motorways. I try to cross the Quarter Mile Lane Bridge, but I’m soon engulfed in security checkpoints. They don’t understand the concept of walking, wandering without a fixed agenda.
‘You want a job?’
I’m about to become an example of positive discrimination, those slots reserved for decrepit locals.
‘See that caravan? Go down there and they’ll take you on. Start straight away.’
I’m tempted. Why not return to the era when I cycled out here, to paint white lines on 200 football pitches? And, before that, to Chobham Farm. After all these years, I was being offered regular employment: I could help to dismantle the blue fence of the Olympic Park.
Arriving at Victoria Park, in the golden hour, I am stopped by a troubled and short-sighted Chinese man. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He is flanked by five women of various ages and the same height, daughter to grandmother. They have lost something, somebody, and recognize me as a park regular, foot-dragging, respectably distressed.
‘A little man. No teeth. Not normal, simple. Very, very small.’
He was spotted, twice, last Thursday, by a dog-walker. Nothing since. This tiny simple man has disappeared. He carried an umbrella.
I don’t want to ask if he is Chinese.
‘Does he speak English?’
‘Not at all.’
A man seduced by crowds, a grand public event, noise: the ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’ free concert. He meandered into all that fuss and was never seen again.
Disappointed in my response, the bereaved family move east, in the direction of Hackney Wick, where everything vanishes or is revised. And nothing returns, in the same condition, to the territory it left behind.
Raids
The incident I’d witnessed by the canal, the collaboration of police and council bailiffs, was a commonplace of our early-morning walks. Raids happen at first light, youths congregate at dusk. ‘Pond life are out,’ say the watchers at their surveillance screens, stirring coffee mugs, leaning forward on their elbows. Life on the street is budget television and the police are the major producers. Digital technology at every demonstration. Hours of CCTV footage of suspect corners. Targets (drug actors) audition for remote viewers as the lack of action goes down: the
The pressure of regeneration, force-fed by the Olympics, is such that zones once tolerant of impoverished artists have to turn every wastelot, every previously unnoticed ruin, to profit. To provide more theoretical housing, it is necessary to unhouse those who have already fended for themselves. Walking down the Regent’s Canal from Victoria Park, on the morning of 8 May 2008, I witnessed another eviction. Around thirty police, with attendant vans, bailiffs, hired muscle. Council officials in dark suits clutching protective clipboards. Loud bangs, crunched hinges: the door is battered down.
A towpath cyclist is enraged. ‘How long was that building empty? Twenty years? The squatters cleaned the whole place up, it was going to be a community centre.’
A barrel-fronted property, dressed in weeds and tendrils, between the Empress coach garage and the gas-holders. I noticed, a few years ago, a sticker on the cobwebbed window: BACK THE BID . Squatters reclaimed this ghostly shell, using Tibetan gods and prayer scrolls for blinds.
Plodding home from Stratford, after discovering that much of the Olympic Park was fated to become a termite shopping centre, I picked my way down what was left of Ruckholt Road and Eastway. They were taking down the blue fence. Panels were hacked out and dumped on a carpet of wood chips, around the stump of an inconvenient ash tree. The blue tourniquet had served its purpose. Plywood was being replaced by more of those virtual-reality panels: archers, swimmers, cheering crowds. High-definition digital photography and ethically challenged fakery.
Signs are unreadable, arrows point towards mesh fences and motorways. I try to cross the Quarter Mile Lane Bridge, but I’m soon engulfed in security checkpoints. They don’t understand the concept of walking, wandering without a fixed agenda.
‘You want a job?’
I’m about to become an example of positive discrimination, those slots reserved for decrepit locals.
‘See that caravan? Go down there and they’ll take you on. Start straight away.’
I’m tempted. Why not return to the era when I cycled out here, to paint white lines on 200 football pitches? And, before that, to Chobham Farm. After all these years, I was being offered regular employment: I could help to dismantle the blue fence of the Olympic Park.
Arriving at Victoria Park, in the golden hour, I am stopped by a troubled and short-sighted Chinese man. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He is flanked by five women of various ages and the same height, daughter to grandmother. They have lost something, somebody, and recognize me as a park regular, foot-dragging, respectably distressed.
‘A little man. No teeth. Not normal, simple. Very, very small.’
He was spotted, twice, last Thursday, by a dog-walker. Nothing since. This tiny simple man has disappeared. He carried an umbrella.
I don’t want to ask if he is Chinese.
‘Does he speak English?’
‘Not at all.’
A man seduced by crowds, a grand public event, noise: the ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’ free concert. He meandered into all that fuss and was never seen again.
Disappointed in my response, the bereaved family move east, in the direction of Hackney Wick, where everything vanishes or is revised. And nothing returns, in the same condition, to the territory it left behind.
Raids
The incident I’d witnessed by the canal, the collaboration of police and council bailiffs, was a commonplace of our early-morning walks. Raids happen at first light, youths congregate at dusk. ‘Pond life are out,’ say the watchers at their surveillance screens, stirring coffee mugs, leaning forward on their elbows. Life on the street is budget television and the police are the major producers. Digital technology at every demonstration. Hours of CCTV footage of suspect corners. Targets (drug actors) audition for remote viewers as the lack of action goes down: the
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