Rotherhithe

I found myself on the south bank at last. I had expected to feel more comfortable, more at ease, but instead I felt slight odd, as though I’d been away too long. As though the journey had taken as long as the reportage of it would do. I paused briefly and attempted to realign myself. It helped if I thought hateful thoughts of Boris who almost certainly wasn’t in the silver testicle that Saturday morning. The weather was too good. He’d be off doing something rich, wench skinning or something. The London Assembly building, that bollock shaped mess of glass and steel, cast a shadow over one of the last naturally open spaces in central London, almost obscuring its new ‘sold for development’ placards firmly implanted into the dusty ground.

I dropped down into the narrow confines of the enthusiastically cobbled streets that ran between the river and the paved road. Once these had been like everywhere else, a mix of warehouses and mills and shipping ports and then they were abandoned and then gentrified into Starbucks and boutiques and pinned up chain restaurants that feed the inevitable drudge of office worker overflow, the Thames path hikers and the tourists waylaid between Tower Bridge and the Design Museum.

I nipped down an alley to the water, reasoning that the river front would be quieter. Instead, in an indication of how long it had been since I’d last been down that way, the towpath seemed to have been widened out and someone was pretending that it was the banks of the Seine by laying out metal tables and horrifically priced inane food from any number of dulling faceless places.

In the heat I beginning to feel quite sweaty and the sudden onset of musked eating and chunky cutlery and bustling warmth made the air constrain around me. I edged away and tried to escape the corporateness.

When, I wondered, had all that boring same-old stuff appeared? The last time I remembered walking along that stretch of river the boards had been drawn across the buildings and a desolate sense had lurked. The night previously, I’d wandered into the Brockley Jack, the place I would later tend pump, for a Friday pint. Whilst waiting to be served, the bassist from the Queens of the Stone Age, bald head, weird twisted goatee and all, waved at me with a slightly confused grin on his face.

‘What’s the bassist from the Queens of the Stone Age doing here?’ I asked the person at my side.

It was only when he came over to speak that I discovered not a Californian bawl, but a Midlands drawl and I realised it was my friend Simon from university, whom I hadn’t seen for years. It was all the more odd given that he should have been at home in Thurso on the north Scottish coast. By coincidence his partner’s father lived in Brockley and was a keen patron of the Jack. The next day we’d hooked up near London Bridge and after a beer or three, had taken their new baby for a stroll along the embankment.

And then, back in 2010, the path abruptly narrowed and stopped. An inlet ran off the Thames and the only crossing was a strap of iron help up by chiselled railings.
On the far side the world was the sort of space I’d been expecting; a run of forgotten buildings that contorted into a tight maze of muddled streets.

At home, I have a book called Derelict London that catalogues the empty shells of the city’s buildings. One such is Chambers Wharf which was once the last remaining run down warehouse on the Thames, proudly used by TV execs from the Professionals to the Sweeney. Yet now even that is being reinvented as luxury flats. People will move back in and haunt what was once there. But that’s the thing with London – it just keeps on having history, on telling stories.

Two cyclists in helmets and day-glo coats wheeled idly past me, their motion hardly justifying their excessive gear.

‘Oh, look at that,’ grinned one of them as they tootled by a corner shop with racks of vegetables and distressed fruit outside. ‘It’s trying so hard to be a proper
deli.’

‘Well,’ cooed the other, ‘someone’s got to try and improve the area.’

‘Twats,’ I muttered to myself hoping that they’d hear but not respond in kind.

The path cut down behind and through some more residential streets. Rows of sixties and seventies low rise council houses that had replaced the waterfront village façade and gained picturesque river views since all the bodies had been removed.
More or less.

‘We don’t all live in your blog,’ I’m worried someone will one day say, even someone badly disguised. ‘You don’t own the world.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I’ll reply, flustered. ‘I’ve got the receipt somewhere.’

‘Gah!’ They’ll explode. ‘Can’t you ever be serious?’

Well, yes and no.

‘I think,’ she ummed in the late afternoon dipping sun of Hyde Park one Saturday, ‘if there was no reference to me at all, then I might get a little offended.’

No pressure, then. Telling things the right way – that’s the trick, in the end, isn’t it? Making the stories and the ghosts work for me and not the other way around?

Eventually, my route popped out at a wide open spot. There was nothing but the breaker concrete wall at the waterside and on the city rim a wide, raised patch of green with the hint of a moat running around it. There was a public information sign surprisingly free from graffiti, but not as surprising as learning it was the one time site of a manor house built for Edward I. A holiday home for the twelfth century self-styled hammer of the Scots to jolly his way down the river to, aboard a
galley tugged along by Welsh prisoners of war.

Plague ships used to bubble down the Thames to Rotherhithe. They bought the dying to isolation hospitals until their bodies could be dragged out to Blackheath or Nunhead, to be dumped down the pits.

The Mayflower launched from Rotherhithe. It pulled out of London, her crew stumbling out the Shippe pub and up her gang plank, before snaking around the Kent nub down to Southampton to collect the Pilgrim Fathers. Her Captain, Christopher Jones, didn’t stay in America. He came to London to die and was buried in the church yard opposite the pub that some sentimental bugger decided to rename after the famous vessel that went off to help forge a nation.

Opposite, Ed’s summer residence, inside what looked like a concrete bunker, was a pub. My resistance finally faltered. The hot weather and my exertions had won. I wanted a pint.

Inside the Angel, I found classic styled wood panels complete with glass arches dividing snugs and saloons. I stood at the bar between the tattooed, jaded eyed labourers and the tweed jacketed, moustached retired gents. I was mildly shocked to discover it was a Sam Smith’s pub - one that was a far cry from their usual locale of Fitzrovia and the surrounding area. Although, of course, the whole Sam Smith’s set up refuses to make sense. Small brewer from darkest Yorkshire buys up dilapidated central London pubs restoring them to their Victoriania beauty and then by selling only their own brand booze undercuts the rest of the city. The most famous of their beers was always Man in the Box. An alpine style lager recognisable by the elaborate pump top of a old man puppet dressed in traditional German clothes inside a transparent plastic case. Despite the removal of the models years ago, ‘A pint of Man in the Box, please,’ will still get you the same beer on the counter.

If only the bitter tasted better, they’d be perfect.

Never-the-less, I took my cold pint and wandered out onto the veranda overlooking the river.

On the southern side the river felt quieter, less imposing than it had appeared from the north. It was as though that wide exposure view somehow calmed the aggressive swirl that peeked out between snipped of buildings earlier. The water was free from traffic. The pleasure cruisers only came that far east if they were heading for Greenwich and even the floating junkyards, usually a pit of rusty contagion, seemed to have gone on their summer holidays.

At the other end of the veranda a man in cycling lycra squatted on the floor and his head between his knees, a tabloid paper laid out in front of him, a half drunk lager leaving a translucent patch to the top corner of the newsprint.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

Slowly he raised his head to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot as though from tears, or a syringe into the corner. He appeared to pleading, but for what I couldn’t say. He stayed like that for a moment, trying to work each other out, trying to figure what was what, until he looked back down to his paper.

My phone bipped to itself, deep inside my pocket. I took it out and read the message. I smiled inwardly, suppressing the pleasure at her response and found myself being surprisingly pleased at being surprisingly pleased. I nodded to my distraught drinking companion, but he was having none of it, so I finished my beer and felt a little bit cool. Until I reminded myself how I was spending my day.

Once outside I cut across the bottom end of Southwark Park and past yet more people baking themselves in the pleasant glow of summer’s weekends. On the far side of the park, the Rotherhithe Tunnel sank down under the river taking a flood of cars into its bending and twisting depths. It’s not a place for the claustrophobic. Unlike its bigger cousin, the Blackwall Tunnel, the Rotherhithe is two way and refuses to follow a direct route, manoeuvring itself under some unknown river bed obstacle.
The oncoming traffic always feels as though it is about to chink the corner of the bumper at each and every tight corner. But worse, is the congestion of cyclists wearing oxygen masks to prevent asphyxiation; flimsy pieces of cloth to block out the cloying exhausts. I can’t bear to keep the windows down and I’m underneath for a shorter period of time and not exerting myself. How do they survive?

At the entrance maw, Stu and I once whooped Michael on through the early stages of his marathon whilst further down the road a dj stood on the roof of uber-cockney pub shouting out individual names for encouragement to the tune of Keep on Runnin’ and Eye of the Tiger. Michael came round the corner, waved to the bellows of his name and disappeared onwards towards docklands, back the way I’d come.

I appeared to have left Iain Sinclair and George Orwell and Joseph Conrad and all the others on the north bank. There were no writers ghosts lurking around that corner of south London. Which was odd, because it’s packed with as much history and imagination as everywhere else. From being the birthplace of Michael Caine to the home of the Norwegian government in exile during the Second World War, there’re plenty of memories to be found. Perhaps, they just had to be mine and I hadn’t formed them yet.