Free London Overground by Iain Sinclair Page B

London (Overground) have acknowledged their part in the curation of this Bermondsey esplanade with a wall map of the recently completed railway circuit and some propaganda about the ever-expanding city they are shaping. A guerrilla muralist – perhaps the person responsible for HUNG OUT TO DRY – has collaborated so deftly that the work now qualifies for exhibition in a show of art iconoclasm at the Tate. Even though it’s hard to say who is the iconoclast, the original TfL designer or the spray-can bandit who added a neat
trompe l’oeil
chain to support the map and thereby turn it into a painting rather than a flat computer printout. Two stencilled yellow-tabard hardhats adjust the imaginary piece. One
brandishes a clipboard: WE OWN THIS CITY . As soon as the map is drawn, territory is copyright to the map’s commissioner. The ‘Completed London Overground’, like a trail of ginger gunpowder, reduces the complexity of the city to a whiteboard presentation.
    We are heading south towards Peckham. The twin branches of the Overground split into a great V, exposing new mounds of exploitable turf, inter-rail estates, recreational dunes on which solitary males pose with their dogs. Passers-through scuttle in a miasma of unease, hunched into themselves against too much sky: the leaking chimney of the waste-disposal plant, the speedy thrust of the trains. A catalogue of opportunism unable to tolerate for long the notion of a railside path. A stencil artist with a signature that looks something like LOREITO has found a suitable piece for the grey concrete wall: an infant dressed
like a cosmonaut pushing a buggy containing a baby with a green alien skull.

    We are expelled into a nowhere of cars with smashed windows, green glass in jagged patterns on soft grey seats. And messianic religions camped in garages and defunct factories: THE REDEEMED CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF GOD, WINNERS TEMPLE . A god of unrequired margins. Website faiths drawing an enthusiastic congregation in the way that, in earlier times, nonconformist artisans found their chapels in working zones outside the walls of the city. Where John Wesley launched his crusades, and William Blake, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan were laid to earth, between Finsbury Circus and Old Street, the seething hub of Silicon Roundabout has emerged: digital traders, masters of robotics, radio freelancers worshipping that Cloud where all the miscellaneous information of the multiverse floats somewhere over India.
    After the detours, the dips under railway bridges, now one side, now another, the windowless cars, the vernacular weirdness of places without a dominant narrative, we pick up the true path with another set of murals. The local artist, recorded at various points along the track from Surrey Quays, is ahead of us, making the Overground embankment into an elongated gallery. It’s liberating, you can collect him through the simple act of walking. He has a satiric edge, after the fashion of Banksy, but he is choosing to show on ground where he is unlikely to be picked up by stray gallerists. Shoreditch lecture groups will not find their way down here just yet, but it will come. The Overground will bring them, chasing the ginger trail. This art is not designed to be read from trains. You have to walk the broken path to find it. A combat soldier on his belly, the penis barrel of his gun with terminal droop: THE WAR IT’S NOT A MAN’S THING .
    Distance
between stations induces desert hallucinations, the native oddity of a brief span without overt surveillance. Two black men stride down the centre of the road with large chairs, the exaggerated thrones of Bond villains, supported on their backs. The white arrow on the tarmac points right. They turn left. Or, again, around the point where that pilgrims’ track, Old Kent Road, becomes New Cross Road, we wave at a ginger cow, the sacred beast of the Overground, as she teeters on her rear legs down the uneven pavement. The girl walking with this