ISBN: 978-0-9564105-2-8 Published 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. Pure Land Press 42 Theobalds Road London WC1X 8NW www.purelandpress.net
SILVERTOWN
‌it is impossible to reconstruct the factual past. Memory is finite as well as fallible. Few scenes are vividly recorded‌ What is more, my recent mental state overwhelms my vision of the past. My present mental state is like a prism, which alters the shape and colours of my past life. J. Starobinski(1)
SILVERTOWN
On the flood plain of the river, a ruined industrial city once stood. At the time of our visit the site had already been abandoned for many years and the buildings all but destroyed. We sat looking out at the desolation, listening to the engine ticking as it cooled. As we got out of the car, an Alsatian threw itself in a fury against the chain link fence at the bumper of the car. But it seemed not to be able to reach us. Our nerves sharpened, we set off towards the buildings over a ground of fine black dust in which our boots left delicate and precise impressions, like the backs of spoons pressed into flour; or Neil Armstrong’s photograph of his footprint on the moon.
Although the ruins were concentrated in the middle of the site, their orphans stretched away to a grey horizon on a treeless, grassless plain. The area was rumoured to be highly toxic, and perhaps this was one of the reasons why it was so infrequently visited. More than five-hundred acres in extent, it wasn’t possible to see the perimeter of the ground from anywhere near the middle. There was nothing in any direction which offered the promise of a world less destroyed, or any reassurance of the presence of civilisation, however distant. We stopped for a while by a wall to watch a lone figure with an assault rifle walking a dog, some three hundred yards distant.
As we approached the buildings we began to see that they looked built for a race of giants—wide stone steps led up to darkened doorways, many of them twice the height of an adult. All the structures were partially demolished, many bearing the trauma of multiple strikes from wrecking balls.
This last round of destructions was to prove the beginning of the final erasure of a site that had suffered wartime conflagration, as well as the country’s largest peacetime explosion.
The combination of the lawlessness of the area and its remote location, had kept the interiors of the ruins in a suspended state of decay—partially burned books, paperwork and records lay with fragments of obsolete machinery amongst the rubble. These remains did not look recent, but seemed contemporaneous with the occupation of the buildings.
From 1870, coal and gas by-products, as well as the technologies that produced them, were dispersed throughout the empire where their smoky descendants took root. In the opposite direction, goods and treasures traded and pillaged from all corners of the world were funnelled up the river to the capital. Cleopatra’s Needle, the Parthenon Marbles, the colossal winged lions from the royal palace of King Ashurnasirpal all passed through Gallions Reach, the bend in the river on which Silvertown stood. Bystanders on the foreshore over the last four hundred years would have witnessed a continuous succession of tall ships, barges, clippers, cutters and steamships delivering a steady stream of goods and treasure, as well as travellers, together with their stories, from around the globe.
The electricity people came two months ago and since that time we have had no lights This is a good thing as malevolent beings have followed us across the water and now they are sleeping in the ceiling The lights might wake them and then they could descend upon us I place these bowls of water and grated bone on the floor and sprinkle salt across the doorways to protect us who would have thought they could have followed us all the way to West London? walking across the water travelling across the sea?
There are things I cannot eat If I were to taste them there is a girl in Georgetown who would make my life a misery I cannot understand how she could do this from all that way away In the museum I saw a model of a village like my own — at that moment I knew I would not see my home again even though it was my hearts desire I cannot walk across the water I cannot travel across the sea
After only one or two visits, the place settled in the mind perhaps as securely as it could ever expect to remain in its landscape, like a vast library from which all the books had been borrowed or lost. Even now, in its absence it retains its connections to all parts of the world, both in fantasy and in fact, recalling the aggregates of personal history, the web of associations which connect individuals to historic locations and events—supplying a blueprint for the mix of myth and history, which memory must eventually become.
As with much Victorian and Edwardian architecture, it’s creators had plagiarised architectural styles from across the globe and the industrial installations were ornamented with Palladian, Italianate and Gothic Revival details; there were cherubs on buildings where toluene and naphtha had once been refined from coal. In the administrative buildings, layers of peeling wallpaper gave clues to the identities of generations of workers and administrators; floral devices and decorative tropes, indicating personal tastes and reflections in a recurring present.
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13 31 17
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Once the site fell out of industrial use it became a place of fantasy. Films and TV programmes were made here. Mounds of chemical waste, the highest artificial hills in the city, were used to portray low-budget mountaineering scenes. The buildings became the film set for a dystopian London. Later, the same structures sheltered Viet Cong snipers, and with the addition of some advertising slogans and a few rather unconvincing palm trees, G.I.s retreated through the ruins of Hue City singing the Mickey Mouse March, while the chimneys of the gasworks burned behind them. In their wake, the spectre of real events; a dream of war and genocide settling on waste ground in East London.
Like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the site seemed possessed of a magical power to recreate the past of its visitors. As there are few records of the place, or even accounts of it, it lingers in the imagination of those who witnessed it, a private atlas miraculously populated from memory. Images, artefacts and narratives with links to other histories took up residence within the image of its crumbling façades. Every fragment from the site provided a link, like the imagined volumes in Borges’ Library, to all possible stories—originating from a geographical place that had lost its moorings and slipped into another realm, pursuing an afterlife at once easily recalled, but in any practical sense, unreachable.
Lasswitz urges mankind to construct that inhuman library, which chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence. Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14. 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat’s theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn’t publish, Urizen’s books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalogue of the Library,—the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalogue. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—before it would ever reward them with a tolerable page. The Library of Babel - Jorge Louis Borges(2)
During the re-development of the site, the original buildings disappeared and the topogaphy changed out of all recognition; few original features remain, making it difficult to locate on contemporary maps. Overwritten with new pre-occupations, the landscape now tells different stories. As documents and artefacts work on our imaginations the place can seem as real to us as if it was still there— like scenes from photographs and films that overwrite our own memories. But if we had never witnessed the territory at first hand, how could we know if the city had ever really existed?
It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino (3)
CODA When Silvertown was being built in the nineteenth century, photographic film was in the process of development. The final destruction of the site in the 1990s, coincided approximately with the demise of silver as a key ingredient in the recording and preservation of the past. Layers, oxidation, accretion, and decay are the vocabulary of the analogue world. It is the language of geology, of libraries, of the periodic table, chemical transformation and carbon dating. The accumulations of time recorded in the substrates of the substantial world. On the retina screen there is no layering. Here images are refreshed under glass, as if immersed in water, like pebbles on a beach. Their colours are rendered more lustrous and their textures more immediate, until such time as they are eventually discharged in a flash of static. The negatives from which the portraits and landscape images in this book were made, like the site itself, are long gone. The locations and the occupants of Silvertown have lost their footing in the material world, dissolved like salt in a sea of images. What remains is an aggregation of recordings and themes, which confound attempts to separate fact from fiction, assembled as much as an allegorical memory as an historical one.
Image references
Publicity still from ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Dir Stanley Kubrick (1987)
Image from Tuol Sleng ( S-21) Internment Camp, Phnom Pen, Cambodia
German Bombers over Silvertown (1940)
TEXT references The area described in this book as‘Silvertown’ includes the site of Becton Gasworks, immediately adjacent to Silvertown, from which many of the images originate. Jean Starobinski, Jean Jacques Rousseau – Transparency and Obstruction (1988)
(1)
Tr Authur Goldhammer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Jean Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
(2)
First published in The Garden of Forking Paths, (1941). Tr Esther Allen, London: Penguin Books (3)
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
Tr William Weaver, London: Vintage
Jean Paul Satre, Les Mots (1964)
(4)
Tr Irene Clephane, London: Penguin Books
All other Images and texts: © Allan F. Parker With thanks to: MCC, Judith Goddard, Keir Fraser, Simon Josebury, Ingrid Chen, Juan Loyola and Anita Dawood (Editor)
I would put out the light and leave the study: invisible in the darkness, the book kept sparking for itself alone, I would give my works the violence of those corrosive flashes, and later, in ruined libraries, they would outlive man Les Mots, Jean-Paul Satre(4)