London Overground Read Online Free
Author: Iain Sinclair
Taking this casual Hackney drop-in pedestrian out of his comfort zone. Into the challenge of how to respond to a high-concept space which is not quite an art installation, not quite a start-up Silicon Roundabout operation. Not quite a Chinese supermarket in Silvertown in which you are invited to choose your lunch from a bubbling tank. I think of the way fish have become a code for money. As well as slang for a prostitute, a vagina, a gambling chip, a pound note, the new inmate of a prison. Heron Tower, a recent cloud-scrape development in Broadgate, sells itself in a skirt of soothing fish motifs – without appreciating the special relationship between sharp-beaked herons and their watery breakfast.
Sunday-afternoon attendees at CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS are subdued, museum-disciplined. Hushed kids straining at the leash. Adults in discriminations of black. Techno-geeks in sloganed T-shirts, tapping at keyboards, tweaking lights, invite you
not
to make an approach. The background thrump and drip of computer muzak is just loud enough to phase out overhead train rattle: serial heartbeats setting a mood, which would otherwise be too melancholy to solicit credit-card action.
Plinths
dressed with flat screens. A sympathetic design concept bleeding into mute fish action. Slow-mo promotional trailers for meditation packages that come with the sound switched off. ‘Made from acrylic, not glass … Acrylic has a transparency rate of 93%, making it the clearest material known.’ Zero green tint. The whitecoats at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hamburg ran tests on oxygen concentrations, to prove that you don’t need a large surface area of water to produce an optimum oxygenation exchange. In other words, those antique Chinese-restaurant tanks, and the goldfish bowls favoured by expelled council-flat-dwellers relocated to Loughton, are now as redundant as primitive personal computers, the size and weight of the safes of Bethnal Green moneylenders. So redundant, in fact, that they’ll soon be back in the retro boutiques of Broadway Market, and the pits of neo-junk dealers returning to the arches under the railway alongside London Fields, in anticipation of dross-sentimentality on the part of incomers with slender bicycles on the narrow balconies of their dropped-in flats. Schoolroom maps with an excess of red. Dysfunctional portable typewriters. Rusty scythes of a discontinued peasantry. All the beachcomber detritus of vanished worlds. Everything CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS disavows.
The London Overground arches between Haggerston and Shoreditch have been colonized by German and Japanese enterprises primed to exploit the frontier aspect of the undefined post-Olympic legacy moment. Flagrantly localized car-repair businesses have gone. Or transferred to the street as all-weather, roofless improvisations, shuttles around wardens, neighbourhood watchers and civic improvers. The former railway caves were heroically polluted, corpse-clammy, and shuddered with perpetual radio noise to set the nerves on edge. Room would be found for a warm glass cabinet in which sat an impressive
woman with scarlet talons and a smoker’s cough, leafing through brochures for the next winter cruise to the Caribbean, and relishing a good gossip before handing over the bill (no credit cards, please). The hollow-chested mechanic would present you with some apparently damaged part, in a pool of oil, as evidence of work undertaken. I miss all this theatre, the people. The new economy of the arches is not covert, subterranean. No longer a chain of survivalist troglodytes in dingy pits, but a brick mall, a linked street of
calculated
economic and subcultural decisions.
Shadow the Overground in the direction of the canal, once an attractively illegitimate gulch, a slice of oily-handed marginalists and crumpled drug wraps (outside the range of surveillance cameras), and New Hackney stands revealed. Before the winter sun rises, freshly installed flat-dwellers are
Sunday-afternoon attendees at CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS are subdued, museum-disciplined. Hushed kids straining at the leash. Adults in discriminations of black. Techno-geeks in sloganed T-shirts, tapping at keyboards, tweaking lights, invite you
not
to make an approach. The background thrump and drip of computer muzak is just loud enough to phase out overhead train rattle: serial heartbeats setting a mood, which would otherwise be too melancholy to solicit credit-card action.
Plinths
dressed with flat screens. A sympathetic design concept bleeding into mute fish action. Slow-mo promotional trailers for meditation packages that come with the sound switched off. ‘Made from acrylic, not glass … Acrylic has a transparency rate of 93%, making it the clearest material known.’ Zero green tint. The whitecoats at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hamburg ran tests on oxygen concentrations, to prove that you don’t need a large surface area of water to produce an optimum oxygenation exchange. In other words, those antique Chinese-restaurant tanks, and the goldfish bowls favoured by expelled council-flat-dwellers relocated to Loughton, are now as redundant as primitive personal computers, the size and weight of the safes of Bethnal Green moneylenders. So redundant, in fact, that they’ll soon be back in the retro boutiques of Broadway Market, and the pits of neo-junk dealers returning to the arches under the railway alongside London Fields, in anticipation of dross-sentimentality on the part of incomers with slender bicycles on the narrow balconies of their dropped-in flats. Schoolroom maps with an excess of red. Dysfunctional portable typewriters. Rusty scythes of a discontinued peasantry. All the beachcomber detritus of vanished worlds. Everything CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS disavows.
The London Overground arches between Haggerston and Shoreditch have been colonized by German and Japanese enterprises primed to exploit the frontier aspect of the undefined post-Olympic legacy moment. Flagrantly localized car-repair businesses have gone. Or transferred to the street as all-weather, roofless improvisations, shuttles around wardens, neighbourhood watchers and civic improvers. The former railway caves were heroically polluted, corpse-clammy, and shuddered with perpetual radio noise to set the nerves on edge. Room would be found for a warm glass cabinet in which sat an impressive
woman with scarlet talons and a smoker’s cough, leafing through brochures for the next winter cruise to the Caribbean, and relishing a good gossip before handing over the bill (no credit cards, please). The hollow-chested mechanic would present you with some apparently damaged part, in a pool of oil, as evidence of work undertaken. I miss all this theatre, the people. The new economy of the arches is not covert, subterranean. No longer a chain of survivalist troglodytes in dingy pits, but a brick mall, a linked street of
calculated
economic and subcultural decisions.
Shadow the Overground in the direction of the canal, once an attractively illegitimate gulch, a slice of oily-handed marginalists and crumpled drug wraps (outside the range of surveillance cameras), and New Hackney stands revealed. Before the winter sun rises, freshly installed flat-dwellers are
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