Walking Interval 2: Cutty Sark to Canada Water

A right turn out of Cutty Sark DLR station is a turn away from the desirable part of Greenwich. The road is gritty with traffic, and the south side is lined with yet more building sites, interspersed with dead or moribund-looking nightclub venues.

As soon as I could after crossing the bridge over Deptford Creek, just before it joins the main river, I took the path to the bank of the Thames. The sound of the traffic faded, but the booming clangs from the construction works resounded through the increased space. The mouth of the Creek, empty of boats with a cormorant splashing around and the colours of the clouds strung across, was calm and shaded imperceptibly into the spread of the Thames.

Noise followed me past the strange statue of Peter the Great just where the two rivers met, but it was winnowed out – only the most penetrating sounds made it through the line of new flats. A wooden wharf rotted into the river, while a mother tried to keep two small children off the cycle track. A man staring at his phone almost walked straight into me.

The flats on the left seemed lifeless – the only sounds inside would be the hum of fridges and freezers, the scuff of cat feet on floorboards, the message tone on smartphones forgotten at the side of beds. The river on the right was bare of birds now, and though the sun still shone across the Isle of Dogs, I could see a right snarl of clouds further along the water.

Soon the path was firmly pointed away from the Thames by a high, jagged-headed fence. Around the endearingly named Twinkle Park, more flats. But along the narrow road beyond ran a high dock wall. A gate made of chipboard and barbed wire interrupted its bricks, which had been darkened by the patina – or smear – of pollution, and shoulders brushing past.

Round the next corner, and the sharp-topped fence was back, revealing a huge plain of concrete hard standing, smudged with lines of green where buddleia had broken through. Two huge rusting Nissen huts occupied one corner, but most of the rest of the area was a void giving play to late April sun. The difference between this space and that I had passed on the Greenwich Peninsula was the way that housing pressed against it. Council flats from the 1960s sat between grass patches and parked cars, as though halted by that fence.

This was the week of the Shakespeare celebrations, and there was an odd frisson in being in Deptford, close to where Christopher Marlowe was killed, and is buried. Meanwhile, noise was back – people were about, cars reversing, shouts going up and down the glassy fronts of the flats.

Round another corner, I found myself in a small park – Saye Court Park, after a grand house that once stood here, an incongruous ghost manifested in the vast trunks of plane trees standing here and there in the grass. Their leaves were barely sprung, almost seemed to have no colour to them. Their bark was mottled, all the way from the great thighs of the roots high up into the branches. They let slip a chill wind across the low, bent trunk of what seemed to be an even older tree.

This mulberry tree, its trunk horizontal, its bark lumpy like a hundred knuckles in a bag, was fenced off. The stump of an information board represented a sort of silencing – this was clearly something important, but why it was, who could tell?

If you believe in “place memory”, I should have been able to hear an echo of another Early Modern writer here. Later, I found out that the mulberry may have been planted by John Evelyn, diarist and author of Sylva, a great book on trees, in the outer reaches of his garden at Saye Court. The house’s grounds were once thought to be the essence of a beautiful garden. In the nineteenth century, major steps towards the creation of the National Trust were taken in, and for, the house and its land.

The park exists, with its few persistent trees. Between them and where the house stood runs the dock wall, and then the pale face of concrete that covers the wharf. This sheared ground is apparently earmarked for more top-end flats and retail “space”. Never mind the loss of Saye Court, I was struck by a pertinent graffito on the wall between the wharf and the council flats: “1 million homeless children – 1.5 million empty homes”.

I was soon back among housing again, people hurrying from doorways. The slam of a door reverberates a long time when there are many windows to reflect the sound.

On the far side of these flats was a scrubby bit of green with a broad, level tarmac track across its middle. I turned onto a side path through the grass, drawn by the thicket of bushes and the chirping of blue tits. This was Pepys Park – the diarist spent much time working in the navy Victualling Yards, whose site is now buried under the surrounding estates. He also visited Evelyn at Saye Court. Would he have paused to read the signs about the local wildlife? Most of it was absent, out of the cold.

Silence reigns along Deptford Strand on a Monday afternoon, or as close to silence as London gets. There’s the wash of the Thames, a few boat engines churn. But no cars, no voices. I’ve written before about the odd way the river seems to absorb sound, but I’d forgotten the effect on the walker. The knock of foot to concrete vibrates up the body and into breath. Although my ears were washed in the calm, I still felt the press of busyness.

The Strand, with its rows of flats all waiting for keys to turn at the end of the gritty commute, finally gives onto South Dock (now a marina). The great space over the river showed that the icy sunlight I’d so far walked in was soon to be erased. Huge banks of cloud growled – not audibly, but in colour. Oddly, the rushing wind that precedes rain seemed warmer than the surrounding air. When I got to Canada Water, I might be soaked, but not shivering.

The discrepancy between sound and quiet takes on a new dimension around South and Greenland Docks. So much was once here, now gone. Ships creaking and smelling on the river, the saws and shouts of cutting up whale meat. The stench of whale gas and sweaty men. The fires under the tanks that prepared the blubber, the children outside the dock walls playing lost games in the road.

In later years, timber in forestfuls, some to be the masts of ships, lifted, dropped, rolled and knocked together. The combined whistle and pop of fires in dockers’ homes, in the bellies of steam ships. The bang-bang-bang of the docks’ machinery – gates and pumps and signals, perhaps something like the boom of construction further downstream.

Coots were sitting on nests a few metres from the bows of white sailboats. A female sat on a huge mound of brownish twigs, while the male flashed up his blue feet in search of more waterweed below the surface. The sound of a coot is a brief, sharp whistle, and often an aggressive rush through the water to drive off a rival. A cormorant made a more snake-like dive, after fish in the open water.

Pressed for time, I had to rush the last part up to Canada Water Tube, through crushes of people, humming cars and that indefinable noise at the back of the ears that says “this is London”. The sky-mirror of Surrey Quays’ remaining basin, the buddleia, its one determinedly singing robin, all fell into the same last-gabble of the walk.

I subsided into the Underground, to go, as John Lanchester writes in his book on the District Line, “down and in”.