Canada Water to Surrey Quays

‘Have you ever been Westfield’s, David?’ asked the shopping obsessed and arguably slightly dim girl.

‘No,’ I replied, barely even looking up. ‘No, I haven’t.’

‘You should go. You’d really enjoy it.’

‘I doubt it,’ I muttered.

‘You would.’ Surprisingly she’d heard me and I wondered how many other people heard the things I said under my breath. ‘It’s got all the stores you could want in one place and then it’s got this luxury goods area. You know? Really nice shirts and good quality jewellery and stuff.’

‘Yeah, you see I know that and I still don’t think I’d have fun there.’

‘And when you’ve shopped yourself out you can go and get some food,’ she continued undeterred. ‘They’ve got everything all together in this international area. It’s really quick, good food. You know, Nandos and Wagamama’s and Strada and Giraffe and everyone you’ve heard of.’

‘You’re still not really selling it to me.’

‘You should go.’

‘I’d rather stab my eyes out with a rusty nail,’ I smiled. And seeing as this was a couple of months ago, I added: ‘Besides, it’s in West London. I get a rash if I spend too much time in West London.’

‘Where do you live again, David?’

Now, I knew she was a Hammersmith girl who rarely ventured further south or east than Trafalgar Square and only the most dedicated London explorers ever seem to know where the hell Brockley is hidden, so I went for the it’s marginally better known neighbour: ‘New Cross way.’ She cocked her head and looked baffled. I followed up with the slightly geographically inaccurate, but at least familiar sounding: ‘Between Peckham and Lewisham. Sort of.’

‘Oooh, Neeew Cross,’ she said as though it were somewhere entirely different. ‘There’s a big shopping centre just like Westfield’s there, isn’t there?’

‘Er, nope.’

‘Yes there is.’

‘No there isn’t.’

‘There is.’ She looked confused. ‘I’m sure there is.’

‘I’ve there nearly ten years. I think I’d have noticed.’

Except she was right and I was wrong. Well, sort of.

I stood at the crossing by the exit to Southwark Park and looked across the road at Surrey Quays. Surrey bloody Quays shopping centre. A Tescos, a knock-off camping and sports warehouse, a Frankie and Johnnie’s pizza bar, and some a eighties matchbox disaster of a shopping centre with faded vomit coloured floors and low level high street chains squeezed into surprisingly small retail units. Westfield’s, Europe’s biggest and most pretentious cathedral to the capitalism of crappy tat, it ain’t.

Not that it should aspire to be, either.

I think I’ve only ever been there once (aside from the camping gear warehouse which I go to frequently and am always disappointed by the shoddy nature of the kit) and that was when I forget to pack any t-shirts to visit Michael in Liverpool, years ago, and couldn’t stomach the fight back through the traffic. Buying something new was just easier.

But that’s the slightly odd thing. Like Westfield’s, Surrey Quays is perfectly easy to reach by tube and yet the majority of people come by car.

‘God,’ the strawberry blonde has said to me on more than one occasion, ‘why on earth do you drive in London?’

Well, obviously I’m a diesel guzzling selfish environmental terrorist, but also the reason no-one ever knows where Brockley sits is because it’s not particularly well served by public transport unless you’re happy on the bus or want to go everywhere via London Bridge. Which, if I’m honest, I usually am fine with. My nightbus treks in recent years have been extensive to say the least.

‘Aha,’ she has never said, but I’m borrowing her for the sake of convenience (sorry), ‘but now the East London line’s reopened surely that all changes?’

Hmm, but it’s still only going in one direction, although slightly more integrated it may be. The thing about driving is that it helps you understand how the whole city clips together, not just the routes dictated by the TFL’s central office. The only other way to truly discover the hidden London is to do exactly what I’ve being doing throughout the course of this blog: walk. And we don’t always have the time to walk. Besides, the traffic’s not always that bad. It took google-Steve, Steph and I less than an hour to chunter across from the M4 home. Although that was at almost midnight on a Sunday.

Keen tube map observers will have noticed that I appeared to skipped right past Canada Water. That’s because Canada Water is a bit of a non-place; somewhere that falls in-between other places. Stand on the southbound platform for the East London line and look right. You will be able to see Rotherhithe station less than a hundred metres further up the track; look left and the daylight that heralds Surrey Quays is snubbing against the tunnel’s black. It appears to only exist because the diggers for the Jubilee extension missed intersecting with either of the existing stations.

A nothing area that bears a real name, one derived from the old dockyards where the boats to and from Canada moored up, adjacent to a place that holds a fake identity. Surrey Quays didn’t exist until Thatcher’s docklands’ regeneration commission helped the shopping centre open. Before then it was always Surrey Docks, confusedly so-called not because of the region its ships came from but because it sat on the old county border with Kent. Surrey Quays, a region of London that’s Thatcher’s child. Bet the cockneys who lines the streets with their barbecues and cans of Fosters as the marathon pelts on by in April turning the area into a wholesome street party wouldn’t appreciate being reminded.

Above ground, at Canada Water, there is little to be seen except, in April, the throngs pushing their way down to catch up with the Marathon in either the City or Docklands and the Daily Mail printworks. Whilst arson is always tempting at the sight of the country’s least well and most enthusiastically bigoted daily paper, it’s also noticeable that they still haven’t taken down the sign on the exterior of the building that namechecks the LondonLite. This was one of two free evening papers launched simultaneously to prevent the other getting a market strangehold that told you absolutely nothing about people you’d rather had been chemically put to sleep several years ago. One’s usp was that the ink didn’t come off on your hands. Seriously. That’s how crappy these publications were.

They were distributed by almost violently aggressively men and women on street corners thrusting unwanted scrap paper into your hands, refusing to take ‘no thanks,’ the fact that your hands were either in your pockets or laden with goods as good reason to not want a copy of their publication. The genius that is Smoke once suggested taking copies, folding them up and setting up stall adjacent offering ‘free paper hats,’ to confused commuters.

Still, they were a feature of London street corners near stations and major bus stops for a few years, often be glowered at by Evening Standard hawkers trying to flog a barely superior publication for sixty-five times the cost. For a while, after the disappeared, I missed them. They were a convenient enemy. Like the Charity Muggers who still line the popular pavements they were an easy irritant to moan about. Although the best defence has to be the gentleman I followed along Holborn recently who when greeted with the enthusiastic ‘how are you feeling today, sir?’ responded with a curt ‘hostile.’ But now the free paper floggers are no longer there and, unsurprisingly, it’s only when I consciously try to remember them that they appear in my memory.

So. Canada Water. Don’t believe the map. Except for the occasional conserved duck nest in an artificially tarted up and maintained subsidiary of the Thames, it doesn’t exist.

Still, Surrey Quays (despite the enforced name change) does and it isn’t New Cross. There’s a whole industrial estate in the way complete with Milwall’s the New Den where the riot between Birmingham and London football fans kicked off shortly after I’d moved down. The streets burned for an evening after a Championship playoff match, cars were tipped over, bottles and bricks twisted through the summer evening’s sky and the odd fire burned inside the husk of a Nissan Micra. The evening afterwards I wandered into the pub and leant at the bar next to the battered and bloodied man with ‘hate’ and ‘love’ cut into his knuckles. ‘If a fucking Brummie walked in here now,’ he snarled ‘I’d tear his cock off.’ I ordered my drink in my poshest, most forced accent.

Then there’s the refuse plant visible from the trains and out where in the new year I saw an inflatable Father Christmas being bounced between two mini-jcbs like a complex game of season volleyball. My train was trapped at a signal as the wheeled silently and serenely past broken up fridges and through troughs of pulped household waste, the nine-foot Santa balloon bouncing ahead of them at every twist and turn. In my head some epic piece of swirled strings music played for their soundtrack.

‘Oh, come on. You’re making this up now.’

Well, not really no, but perhaps just a little bit. I mean it happened. Or at least I’m pretty certain it did, but did it really happen like that. Did I think those thoughts at that moment? It becomes difficult not to tilt the language. I get confused, sometimes, as to where the line between the fiction of my internal monologue and reality lies and which side of it I should be standing. Or writing.

In the Observer recently Robert McCrum reviewed a memoir about the Vietnam War and discussed the difference between history and fiction. The function of history, he argued, is to tell the truth whilst the moral drive of fiction is to get it right through the contrivance of invention. In other words, to borrow a phrase from Francis Spufford, to make shit up.

In that case, what is my other discipline? How does the language of sales work? Isn’t that just making up shit that you think people want to hear?

‘How do you go about writing something?’ she asked over the glass topped kitchen table and because I wanted to impress – and because I didn’t really know the answer -I told her a story she wanted to hear about structure and strife. But here’s a recipe that might be closer to the truth (for me anyway): I start with a blank white computer screen and an idea of an emotion and a sliver of a movement and I take a dollop of what’s gone before and I start to make shit up that I hope someone will want to hear. Maybe there’s no-one listening, but that’s my problem and no-one else’s.