The Ginger line: Iain Sinclair on the London Overground

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/12/the-ginger-line-iain-sinclair-on-the-london-overground

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My day’s tramp around the circuit of the London Overground railway, commonly known as the Ginger line, began in Cheltenham. In company with the artist Laura Oldfield Ford, I’d been invited to take part in a post-Olympic debate, pitching our meagre frontline witness against the golden nimbus of an entitled oarsman, still deciding which conspicuous charity he would elect to front, and a celebrated sports journalist with columns of unbiased investment in the grand project. Ford had worked, walked and self-published reports from east London’s lower Lea Valley, home of the Olympics. Her presentation was constructed from specific details, the losses that might be weighed against promised future gains. The Cotswold audience, well-intentioned lit-festival casuals, morphed into a lynch mob, wolves out of Terry Gilliam, at the perceived affront to the mood of national rejoicing at a sack of medals. It was when I heard how Laura had been jostled as she tried to collect a plate of food after the event that I realised it was time to strike out in a new direction. The disputed zone on the eastern margin of the district where I had lived for 45 years was no longer part of a shabby post-industrial reality: it was a CGI fiction so seductive that it became the only acceptable description of a place many thought they knew, but few, after the circus moved on, chose to experience.

Walkers navigate by sound. Drifting towards the Thames with no purpose beyond getting away from the construction dust and promotional screech to the east, I found myself eavesdropping on the climactic moan of the Overground. If the traffic ditch of Kingsland Road played like a gurgle of peristaltic juices recovering from a monster kebab, the Overground was a 14-hour sigh of mounting, but never-quite-satisfied sexual bliss. The heartbeat of the new London might be revealed, I felt, by tracking the acoustic footprints of the railway for a single day: Haggerston to Wapping, Clapham Junction, Imperial Wharf, Willesden Junction, Hampstead Heath and home again. The 33 stations of this perverse pilgrimage, stitched together in ways that had never been possible before, had their own microclimate. The arches beneath the elevated tracks, oil pits dealing in MOT certificates, mysterious lock-ups and rehearsal spaces for bands without names, were being rapidly upgraded to fish farms offering meditational aids to keep money-market buccaneers on an even keel, Japanese restaurants and artisan bakeries operated by downsizing hedge-fund managers. The word “artisan” signalled the change in demographic. A humble medieval craftsperson is upgraded to a purveyor of ethical coffee in a space that tries to look like a newly excavated ruin.

The intriguing aspect of London Overground, beyond parasitical clusters of new-build flats with their bicycle-rack balconies, beyond early-morning gyms and proliferating coffee outlets, was the fact that the system worked. Trains arrived every few minutes, carriages were nicely appointed in colours reminiscent of Penguin books in their pomp. Freshly carved neural pathways made it possible to ride from Dalston to Denmark Hill; to visit Goldsmiths college by way of New Cross Gate; to see where William Blake was married or where Freud died. Any commute, for the honeymoon period before the line caught on, was a rare London pleasure.

Related: Iain Sinclair: 'I take a walk every morning. It's opening up your system to the world, charging circuits to be able to write'

The new line, with its new bridges, was opened by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, on 27 April 2010. The first train left Dalston Junction at five minutes after midday. The confident thrust of the orange line trespassed on ghost tracks stripped out in 1986 by Margaret Thatcher, in the belief that there was no demand for a link to the City of London. Any person over the age of 20 exploiting public transport, as the Great Leader pointed out, was a self-confessed loser.

Back in 1853, in that remote boom-industrial age, the East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway changed its name to the North London Railway. The original line ventured from Camden Town to Poplar, linking arbitrary destinations in a way that offered fresh ways of reading the territory. In 1865, with the City requiring a rapid infusion of clerks and functionaries, it was decided to pleach a branch line from Dalston Junction to Broad Street, a satellite of the Liverpool Street terminus. The new City station thrived, expanding to nine platforms, while Dalston Junction serviced a busy neighbourhood around a Victorian circus building that evolved, generation by generation, into fresh forms of entertainment and social intercourse.

The new railway, which was not new at all, felt like the right expedition for our confused times

All this decaying authenticity hit the buffers when the Olympic imperative demanded a major transport hub. Demolition crews moved in, fences went up, random fires nudged squatters out from doomed Georgian terraces. The old Dalston Junction station was reduced to rubble. Almost as soon as access to the line was forbidden, invasion began. There were school kids looking for adventure and street-feeding opportunists assessing potential donors from a perch above Middleton Road. Drug providers and their twitchy clients, itinerant labourers and rough sleepers marked out their bivouacs.

The non-space that is no part of any official development package becomes the only space: covert, returned to nature, forbidden. Saplings grew into scrub woods, railside screens. Wildlife and lowlife multiplied. Contraband was dumped overnight. Here, unsponsored and unheralded, was London’s true Green Bridge. It would have been a great thing if the elevated track had been allowed to complete its circuit of London, without trains, and with the sort of edgeland fecundity that Richard Mabey celebrates: a walk in parallel, and above, the traffic of the working city.

After close to a quarter of a century of fruitful neglect, development caught up: investment silos, light-stealing towers. The “final link” of the Ginger line was completed on 9 December 2012. If the M25 was the significant doughnut for the Thatcher era, a landscape of decommissioned hospitals converted into upmarket compounds with no history, then the new railway, which was not new at all, felt like the right expedition for our confused times.

A walk around this accidental remapping of London in a single day; that’s what it had to be. If it could be managed. And if Andrew Kötting, the filmmaker and performer, could be persuaded to join me. As foil, informant, partner in absurdity. The journey would be potentially endless, linking prisons, football stadiums, waste-disposal plants, cemeteries and reservoirs of memory. Andrew’s anecdotes of Deptford would sustain us until we arrived at Angela Carter’s Clapham and the location for JG Ballard’s Millennium People in Chelsea Harbour. We must plod on, day into night, waiting to see if a shapely story would emerge.

• Iain Sinclair’s London Overground is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.