London Overground (17 page)

Clarke loved the garlicky Gothic, cemeteries as sets: relief from private spaces where fetishized young women, glossy as seals, were trussed in latex and perched on dangerous heels. He was troubled and of his time: beyond surface, surface. A presentational skill ambitious of critical respect (without the
hurt, the risk). Black mirrors of narcissism. Portraits of Keith Richards and Marco Pierre White as stoned refractions of himself. Most of the subjects are invited to glare back at the invasive camera.

Objects were auditioned from the foreshore of the Thames; bent cutlery swabbed down and removed, to be recorded under laboratory conditions. When mortality first rattled his bones, Carlos Clarke acquired a powerful BSA 650 motorbike. He said he would ride it off the roof one day.

On the morning of 25 March 2006, the photographer left the Priory Hospital in Roehampton. He had been there for a fortnight and was thought to be responding well to treatment. He walked north down Priory Lane and Vine Road towards the Thames; a route buffered by green acres: golf course, tennis courts, rugby ground. Woodland screening the tracks of the
commuter line. At the Barnes level crossing, Carlos Clarke ran out in front of a train.

Having recently sold his Battersea studio, he said that he made more money from property than from a lifetime's photography. The Clarke archive, postmortem, was relocated to a rented lock-up in World's End.

Driffield was initially drawn to Brompton Cemetery, not by radio wildlife, nor by death (another of his interests), but by
I. CLARKE MARINE STORES
, a superior junkshop offering boxes of loose porn, replenished daily. Kensington dustcarts disgorged every afternoon. Driffield was on hand to forage, while listening to the
Jimmy Young Show.
He once walked away with a silk top hat. The junkpit serviced the cemetery like an unlicensed version of the Tate Modern gift shop. The tombs were the exhibits: sculpture, architecture, bandit graffiti. The shop flogged grave goods, the rubbish of our lives, the stuff that survives. And is taken up by living hands, re-narrated. Thanks to I. Clarke, the ranks of the Brompton dead were given a special status, made into honorary mariners. Inland watermen of the Styx.

Now, as we discover, the shop is gone. The cemetery perimeter has a transitional feel, local estate agents trying to catch an uncertain wave are daunted by the mass of Earls Court Exhibition Centre, a once-popular venue for trade shows and circuses, fed by the railway. Ballard's middle-class Chelsea Marina terrorists from
Millennium People
came here to subvert a cat show at Olympia, the other railside behemoth shed. And the sex-death cultists of
Crash
, enervated by petrol-fume excesses – blood, semen, X-rays – visited the motor show at Earls Court, in order to parade their combat wounds – scars, scrapes, callipers – while hoping, against the dazzle of corporate
novelty, chromium and celluloid, that ‘something obscene might happen'.

Earls Court was Buffalo Bill Cody's marquee, a metropolitan space where his rough riders and reservation warriors could deliver a spectacle of the old west to the new west, to the emergent suburbs, the railhead. Cody – looking like a trial run for Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Chicken rancher, but without the sinister spectacles – mixed showbiz with dollar biz; he worked the brand, franchising pre-cinematic clichés of wagon-train battles before John Ford had the chance to invent them. Sitting Bull and his Sioux ghost dancers, with other landless shamen, drummed the gods of earth and sky, the diurnal cycle, into London sawdust. Earls Court Exhibition Centre opened in 1887, one year before the Ripper murders in Whitechapel – at which point, Cody was in town. Conspiracy theorists, taken with the way immigrants escaping Russian and Polish pogroms came ashore by Tower Bridge and settled in Whitechapel, believing they had made it to New York City and the New World, decided that there must be a link between First People re-enacting the slaughter at Little Big Horn and the brutal sacrifices of East End prostitutes.

Earls Court and Olympia were born of the railway. ‘Waste ground', which politicians and promoters love to carve up and rewrite, was available. And would soon become a tangle of metal tracks. An interim performance zone before the imperial trade fairs and the construction of the great white sheds. In 1895 an observation wheel was installed for the Empire of India Exhibition, a precursor to the South Bank's London Eye. The recent Eye, that symbol of surveillance, being a Ferris-wheel device for allowing tourists to experience aspects of air travel (queuing, security, a circuit of the Thames) without stomping carbon footprints all over the heavens. Virtual travel is the
smarter future. Earls Court Exhibition Centre grasped that from the start. The 1935 rethink, the swaggering Egyptian-cinema modernism of C. Howard Crane, had its traditional elements: it ran well over budget and it came in late.

The old gods were expelled from Olympia. And the lords of enterprise culture ejected from Earls Court with the erection of Richard Rogers's New Labour tent on Bugsby's Marshes, East Greenwich. Smart money moved east: more waste ground, fewer regulations. Kensington was covertly decanting into the kind of ghost town left behind by gold-rush fever or a dry oil well. The stucco was as frosty as ever, villas and mansion blocks intact and unravished, but the former inhabitants had been priced out, or replaced by remote investors. The Royal Borough was a manifestation of Monopoly mania, a property-speculating, money-laundering board game: the right to buy and not occupy.

The commentator Simon Jenkins, who lives in the area, described the recent changes: ‘Luxury cars untaxed in basements. Gated “communities” are like eerie sets for
The
Stepford Wives.
Streets are empty at night … This part of London is like Hamelin after the piper left.'

The Earls Court Exhibition Centre, overtaken by the O2 Arena (and the novelty of the Jubilee Line station forced through for the millennium-night fiasco), is deader than Brompton Cemetery. It enjoyed a final flourish by taking on the volleyball originally advertised for the Olympic Park in Stratford. The Earls Court pool, an indoor sea comprising more than two million gallons of water, once home of the Boat Show, has been transferred to the ExCel Centre, alongside Royal Victoria Dock, in the eastern development zone. A bigger shed serviced by a newer, brighter railway. Tighter security and more space for arms fairs, displays of weaponry, manacles, cattle prods.

Earls
Court faces demolition. And potential development into the standard blend of residential flats, retail outlets and a convention centre. On 3 July 2013 Boris Johnson approved the plans and waved through a proposal for four new ‘villages' and a virtual ‘high street'.

We couldn't find a corner shop for ice cream and candy bars and energy drinks to keep Andrew ticking over. Forced to pull away from the comforting tracks of the Overground, we followed the curve of Eardley Crescent, another dusty passage of abandoned and now skeletal Christmas trees and communal houses that gave nothing away. I suggested a minor detour to the former Brompton Road Underground Station, but the swollen-footed film-maker was having none of it. He was eager to tramp on towards the oasis of the Westfield supermall in Shepherd's Bush, where he had heard that fast food of every nation was readily available. And that our disreputable appearance would not disqualify us from vacant stools in the street of snacks. He might also break his habit of pissing the mortar from the bricks of shady corners and avail himself of a stall in one of Westfield's admirable toilet facilities.

Our disorientation, afternoon slump, was due in part to the way that the Overground walk was becoming confused by the layers of a labyrinthine underground system pulling us in the wrong direction, away to the east. I'd never been able to work out the best method for navigating a route through Earls Court, where all the coloured spaghetti strands of Tube lines knot and unravel. The abandoned Brompton Road Station seemed to hold a clue, if not a TfL minotaur. Its status was unconfirmed. Development pitches were in the air; a sale for £53 million was mentioned. It was also said, as part of the myth, that Rudolf Hess, Hitler's cracked deputy, had been brought here for interrogation. The disused station was
commandeered by the Ministry of Defence, who initially favoured an interval as a heritage attraction: before the site passed to property speculators for re-visioning as executive flats. The Qatar royal family, who never tire of rescuing spare slabs of London, and an unnamed Ukrainian billionaire, are among the rumoured purchasers. The MoD spokesperson, Andrew Morrison, is at pains to stress that the authorities take their role as ‘custodian of the nation's history' very seriously. Monies raised from the sale will be returned to the defence budget.

I've not written much about this area of London, because there are no memories to exploit. There are no memories because I haven't walked these streets enough to initiate a dialogue with the buildings, the spaces between buildings, the stations, platforms, bus stops, cafés and pubs. But now, in a winter twilight of orange lamp-blisters on the yellow wall of Kensington (Olympia), and the candle-flame glow of the interior at West Brompton Station, and the notices ordering customers to
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK
, and Kötting posing with his lopsided ursine grin beside a poster advising him to
SWAP COMFORT FOOD FOR COMFORT FITNESS
, and even though it's inconvenient to stop and fumble with gloved hands for my notebook, I have to record how the neutered husks of Olympia and the barrel-roofed mead halls of Earls Court do provoke memory. They summon disconnected incidents and flash-frames from some sealed archive at the sump of consciousness. Walking does that. Walking inhibits reflex systems of censorship. Andrew talks or clowns or forages for books and bricks to carry home, to confirm memory, to make a record. When he has processed this material in his warm hut, within his chilly sailmaker's loft studio in Hastings, it will begin to make sense.

In an odd and rather submerged period of my life, between
my last years in school and my temporary migration to Greyhound Lane in Streatham, after leaving Dublin, this was the area of London where I found a bed or couch or portion of floor. As we pound towards Shepherd's Bush, listening for the sounds of the railway, involuntary memories flood back. A hitchhiker couple I picked up in Glasgow – what was I doing there? – and brought all the way to a basement flat not far from here, to which I had somehow acquired a key. A single narrow bed. And their voices in contrapuntal disagreement, all night, before I turned them out with invented phone numbers.

Or, again, returning with a London friend, late, unexpectedly, after an abortive trip to Belgium, and falling asleep behind a high sofa while he went out to search for his partner. And being woken by whispers of confession, tears, solicitous words, soothing actions:
no no no, yes, no, yes,
oh yes, oh oh oh.
Brief and vigorous: bed, floor, sofa lovemaking. More tears, more petting. And away. It was my fellow traveller's girlfriend, the one he had left behind, and another man. The one entrusted with looking after her. Gone, both of them, before the frustrated searcher returned.

I used to see clusters of agitated young girls hanging around outside the property in Emperor's Gate, off Cromwell Road, where John Lennon, who was supposed to be a bachelor boy, lived, up six flights of stairs, in a three-bedroom flat, with his new wife, Cynthia. And young baby.

Earls Court: I was brought to trade shows, Ideal Homes Exhibitions, with my parents. The warm smell of the Underground. The crowds. I remember some
Eagle
comic space pod for which I had to dress in a silver bin bag for a simulated voyage to the stars. I remember getting a certificate for doing a jump from a parachute tower.

The emptied vaults of these buildings, visited by so many people, trigger unreliable recollections without structure or
chronology. I came to Olympia on the whim of a girl who had been told about a fortune-teller who saw it as it was. The decision to dress up, go out, make this expedition, turned into a performance. There was a subtext that I barely understood: how the relationship she was in was not working: her life, the basement flat, London. She was soliciting permission to behave badly. She'd been brought up as a Catholic, a good system for wiping the slate and carrying on regardless.

She came out buzzing. The old woman in the tailored charcoal suit – probably twenty years younger than I am now – had no theatrical props, beyond a fistful of rings. She looked as if she might double up with a stall of antique jewellery in Camden Passage. The cubicle, with its creaking plastic chairs and smell of embrocation, might well have been shared with an alternative chiropractor. She sussed me right away and played back all the things my actions and attitude were telling her. (I would never again undergo such a fraudulent experience – until, fifty years later, Alejandro Jodorowsky pulled out his set of well-used Tarot cards.)