Free London Overground by Iain Sinclair

and cabinets of the games room. ‘Insured for two million.’
    When
Joe took the fat roll from his pocket to settle up, he said, ‘Don’t count it, son. Any shortfall come down the yard.’ That’s etiquette. That’s the social distance between Dulwich and New Cross. New Cross is on the Overground, Dulwich isn’t.
    The stretch between Surrey Quays and Queens Road Peckham is terra incognita, a miracle of high mesh fences, narrow paths, waste-processing plants. The railway is a dominant presence, but the substantial gap between Overground stations means that it’s hard to read its effect on property development. If there are arches or caves beneath bridges they are motor-trade traditional: big doors, big dogs. Divorced from the street, the windows of working clothes and heavy boots that hover between function and fashion, the railway path has the exhilaration of the Regent’s Canal, the muddy towpath, in the days when it was forbidden to civilians, those who did not have business with coal boats and lumber yards. Our parting from Lower Road is emphasized by a wall painting: a white male of the clerical type, bureaucrat policeman, suspended from a giant clothes peg. HUNG OUT TO DRY .
    Railways cross railways. A felt underlay of scabby grass. The tall chimney of the processing plant. A single black tree stripped of its meat tilted over the permitted path, asset-stripped by the yellow spew of burning waste, gritty particulates you are free to absorb at no extra charge. SELCHIP , the South East London Combined Heat and Power Plant, squats the railway as the Enfield version, source of carcinogenic rumour, lurks beside the River Lea Navigation. The combined heat-and-power system was conceived, at no small cost, for a scheme that has never been implemented. Electricity – and bad will – are generated here. In 2002 Greenpeace activists, troubled by the threat of dioxins produced during the incineration process, took direct action by invading the main tipping hall and climbing the
stalk of the chimney. After this episode, and the attendant publicity, Liberal Democrats on Lewisham Council, and Peter Ainsworth, Shadow Environment Secretary, pledged their support. The looming presence of the plant, with the scatter of new-build estates, the dying tree, the silver tracks slipping under a double-arch bridge, evoked earlier journeys, our walk up the Lea to join the circuit of the M25 at Waltham Abbey. The same elements, the same mounting excitement.

    London’s smaller rivers, the tributary streams, visible, buried, or choked by refuse, flow by inclination towards the Thames, while the Overground, on this part of its circuit, drifts alongside the river, in parallel, a short distance inland. A rival. This unknown and previously unexplored Bermondsey landscape is made comfortable by its resemblance to the parts of the Lea complicated by never-resolved arguments between discontinued industries, converted gunpowder mills, expanding retail
and storage zones, waste disposal, Ikea riots and the first stab at regeneration by means of showcase athletics.
    PICKETTS LOCK FIASCO HEAPS SHAME ON BRITAIN bellowed the
Telegraph
in 2001. The author of this critique, scorning the political failure to erect a workable stadium while balancing the books, called the whole sorry affair ‘an Ealing comedy’. ‘Manifesto pledges have been broken, secretaries of state and sports ministers have come and gone and press officers have been plundering the thesaurus to construct obtuse and misleading language … Our ambitions are being butchered by incompetent ministers and lightweight, self-serving quangos.’ Here was a prime example of the nay-saying negativism from certain elements of the media so furiously denounced by Lord Coe in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic triumph. The author of this scurrilous
Telegraph
diatribe was a certain Sebastian Coe.
    Three or four hours of quiet, steady walking will do that, rub away barriers, borders, distinctions of north