Free London Overground by Iain Sinclair Page A

and south, past and future. Slipping into dioxin-clubbed reverie, arranging what is before us in terms of dystopian cinema, I am reminded of the way that film-maker Patrick Keiller associates trains with surrealism and privileged witness. In his essay ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’ Keiller writes: ‘The present day
flâneur
carries a camera and travels not so much on foot as in a car or on a train. There are several reasons for this, mostly connected with the decline of public life and urbanism.’ South London is where Keiller’s solitary and poetically inclined commuter gazes at an eternity of suburb without urb and thinks of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and Apollinaire. Apollinaire, when he lodged in this territory, spoke of ‘wounds bleeding into the fog’. ‘I began to think,’ Keiller continues, ‘it might be possible to predict the future by looking out of the window.’
    The
past is always ahead of us. Films like Keiller’s seem to be documentaries about a future that is used up. ‘The future,’ William Burroughs said, ‘is already photographed and pre-recorded.’ All we can do is follow the image vine, the necessary chain of snapshots. Expose one frame, one image made without premeditation, and the rest follows. You pull in the string. Hoxton bleeds into Clapham Junction, into Willesden, into Kensal Rise, into Highbury & Islington.
    I remembered what I felt, at the time of writing
Downriver
, about the way that accounts of the first railway age, Victorian boom-time confidence, overlaid the area we were now infiltrating. And how our present passage between trackside fence and high wall meshed with intimations of that earlier period. ‘The viaduct blitzkriegs the market gardens of Deptford,’ I wrote, ‘recouping some of the capital investment by graciously allowing the punters to use the edge of the track as a rustic esplanade, catching glimpses of the meandering river, beyond the hedgerows and the mounds of rubble.’
    As we crossed the tracks by way of a new bridge with neat ginger handrails and a roof of strengthened chicken wire (to deter jumpers), Kötting started to beat his chest and chant: ‘Mill-wall! Mill-wall! Mill-wall!’ Was this the right pub, the one where he met his mates before they marched on the Den? The shock for me when I first navigated the railway esplanade, on a recce undertaken before the Kötting walk, was the abrupt, out-of-nowhere confrontation with the notorious football stadium. I should have been better prepared. Living cities thrive on a proven equation: market, hospital, church. Limbic terrain fed by railway or motorway acquires different markers: prisons, megamalls, stadia. The Den, home of the Millwall FC wolf pack, is the obvious but unexpected destination of our railway path.
    ‘Terry
Hurlock,’ Kötting intones. ‘Teddy Sheringham. Tony Cascarino.’ Fist thumped on heart for every hero. ‘Football League, ’88–’89 … Division One! Hurlock, Sheringham, Cascarino. Razor Ruddock, Les Briley. October, top of the table. Horne, Darren Tracy, Jimmy Carter.’
    A stadium in repose is a bowl of latent noise, suspended emotion: unheard chanting, the ineradicable cheers of phantom crowds. Like that scummy afterglow left in a drained coffee cup. Here, right beside our path, is a Meccano cathedral with the roof sliced off. An emphatic structure under a dome of sky blue enough for a fatal space launch in Florida. And supported on complimentary blue pillars. A finished work-in-progress.
    The embankment leading down to the turnstiles supplies an abundant source of almost-collectible junk: sodden jackets lacking one sleeve, microwaved vinyl by suspect bands, the usual divorced white goods. The sharpened tines of the protective fence have been embellished with nooses of barbed wire and a set of upturned yellow chairs cast in hard plastic. The chairs are potentially worthy of display in a Broadway Market window within three years.
    Transport for