SILVERTOWN
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 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
SILVERTOWN
On
the flood plain of the river a ruined city once stood. At the time of our first visit the site had already been abandoned for many years and the buildings destroyed. We sat listening to engine ticking as it cooled, looking out at the desolation. As we began to get out of the car, an Alsatian threw itself against the chain link fence at the bumper of the car in a fury. 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 back of a spoon in flour. Like Buzz Aldrins footprints on the moon. Although concentrated in the middle, the ruins stretched away to a grey horizon on a treeless, grassless plain. The site was more than five hundred acres and it wasn’t possible to see the perimeter from anywhere near the middle. There was no sign in any direction which offered the promise of a world less destroyed, or any reassurance of the presence
of civilisation, however distant. The buildings we were approaching 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 multiple wounds caused by wrecking balls. We stopped for a while in a doorway to watch a lone figure walking a dog about half a mile away, he was carrying what looked like an assault rifle. The combination of lawlessness and the remote location seemed to have kept the interior of the ruins in a strangely pristine state - there was little evidence of recent visits. Partially burned books and records lay with fragments of obsolete machinery amongst the rubble, but they seemed contemporaneous with the buildings. This was the only visit we made to the site and it settled in the mind as a ruin settles into a landscape. On reflection, I thought about the historical moment we were there and then my mind drifted over the architectural details. Like much Victorian architecture, utilitarian vernacular buildings plundered architectural styles from almost any time and place: Palladian, Gothic Revival, Italianate – there were cherubs on buildings where toluene and naphtha had once been refined from coal. Once the site fell out of industrial use it became a site of
fantasy. In the 1960s comedy films and TV programmes were shot here, the mounds of chemical waste, the highest artificial hills in London, were used to portray low budget mountaineering scenes. The 1984 version of the George Orwell novel makes use of the buildings as part of a dystopian London, and a year later the same structures sheltered Vietcong snipers in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket - a film during the later stages of which many of the buildings were blown up for real. In the final scenes of the film the soldiers retreat through the industrial quarters of Hue city singing the Mickey Mouse March, while the chimneys of the gasworks burn behind them. It seemed a place to which almost any cultural memory would attach.
At one time the city existed as a ruin - and although we made images of it on several occasions they have all merged together with the buildings as they once existed - the memories and the associations all flatted into one plane of the past. No-one can remembers exactly where it stood it as it has been so utterly erased by subsequent developments - not just the buildings but also the landscape in which it stood - where the topography itself has been altered. The city was built on a huge scale - it looked as if it had been designed for a race of giants – It became a place linked in our imaginations with other lost cities places that existed in the past and which once held the remains of the histories and technologies of the times.