Walking Interval 3: Canada Water to London Bridge

Some walks have their moods determined before I start. When I looked at the map for my route between Canada Water and London Bridge, the road name that caught my eye was Jamaica Road in Bermondsey.

A friend once lived in one of the beautiful eighteenth-century houses on the north side, just by the Tube station. I stayed there a couple of times. During this period, I also happened to re-read Dracula: it mentions in passing that the vampire had sent some coffins filled with Transylvanian earth to an address in Jamaica Lane, Bermondsey, where they were lodged in a cellar. In the novel, the heroes dispose of all Dracula’s refuges after he himself has been staked.

So when I see Jamaica Road on the map, I always think of my friend, but also of those coffins, their malign potential. This walk inevitably has something of the double exposure to it: images that contradict each other, but coexist.

The first contradiction I encountered as I emerged from Canada Water Tube and headed west on Surrey Quays Road was a flash of Stoke-on-Trent, near where I grew up. The old dock office still stands at the roadside – despite being engulfed by fire during the Second World War – but to one side is the shopping centre, and to the other is a leisure centre. Neither of the newer buildings has worn well. The dock offices still have a touch of Victorian solidity and grandeur, but also looked a bit kicked, cobwebbed and half forgotten. This combination of decaying modern buildings and stoically enduring older ones seemed very familiar to me. For all of Stoke’s gradual revitalisation in recent years, this could still have been a Potteries scene.

In my family – and elsewhere – Stoke and London are imagined as polar opposites, so their combination in my perception had all the portentousness of Thomas Hardy’s “The Meeting of the Twain”, about the Titanic and the iceberg. Of course, I know that neither place’s image of the other is more than half true, but this was an interesting start.

King Stairs Park, leading to the river, returned me rapidly to London proper. It was the first really summery day of the year, and families were spreading out on the grass, among dedicated sunbathers in shades and big headphones. Smart-looking flats rose on either side as I climbed the park’s slope, which gave a view of the shining Thames, the sunlit buildings on the far bank and, further off, the steel faces of Canary Wharf’s office blocks.

The path dodges round various old buildings that stand right up to the bank, while on the left are ranks of flats. Some retain the external look of the warehouses that must have occupied this whole part of London. Down Mill Dock, whose mouth is crossed by a footway built on the tops of the gates that block it up, the view is all close-set bricks and ironwork balconies that echo the forms of the cranes that would have unloaded the ships moored there.

Even so, there’s a strange sterility to the area. These homes seem antiseptic, cleansed of their inhabitants, cleansed of everyday lives: work is everything; everybody has to get a presentation ready for a meeting in the morning. All windows are closed, each footway is lined with square cobbles, each street is so narrow (echoing the footprint of the warehouses) that the sun has only a few degrees of access before shadow cools everything again.

But there’s no doubt that these new buildings are an improvement on the polluted, crowded, dangerous original Docklands. I say this even in the face of the evidence that many who lived and worked there had fond memories of the family and friendship groups formed there.

That smoke-knotted past hovers faintly in the background. Maybe its endless representation in monochrome – the children’s faces, the hulls of ships, the crates of goods, the dock-workers’ clothes pushes it further than it ought to be into history. Imagine it intermittently visible in reflection in all those closed windows.

The Thames was very lightly whipped by a summery breeze, and boats clipped along it, white and blue gleaming. Gulls drifted, but all seemed to have lost their voices.

Other birds may have inhabited one of the stranger sites on this walk, the fourteenth-century royal manor house now set in a museum-like space and surrounded by new housing. The rectangle of the foundations is grassed over, but walls emerge round its edges, lumpy and knuckled. Even on this bright day there was a look of moisture about the stones. According to the signs, Edward III had the place built, perhaps as a falconry lodge.

Until it was embanked in the nineteenth century the Thames sprawled generously under London’s belly, and across the top of the villages that lined the south bank. Channels and backwaters broke up the land, and much of what became the docks was marsh. I think of the water lying in viscous pools, visible through the dew-marks drawn by damp-loving grasses, and bitter against the tongue and throat.

The king’s falconry journeys must often have been sheeted in mist. The birds in their tresses and hoods – the peregrines almost as monochrome as Docklands photographs – dusted with fine droplets, the horses snorting, sharp smells from them, their riders and the river. The foundations of the house remain, but the scene itself can only be conjecture, the faintest image on the triple exposure of the path.

On the approach to Tower Bridge, everything is drenched in the present. The sun bleaches the buildings. It’s busy all the way to London Bridge. Office workers – perhaps inhabitants of those deserted flats – crease their suits as they try to bend their urgency round snowdrifts of visitors, sunbathers outside City Hall, dawdlers looking down at the river.

Much official history is crammed into the bridges, the Tower on the north bank, HMS Belfast, the names on the sheer-faced buildings. The area around London Bridge could be seen as the city’s navel, the locus of its myths: the original Roman bridge, the one fought over in Viking assaults, the one crossed by the rebel forces led by Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. Nearby is a plaque marking King Alfred’s re-founding of the city in 986 – London sprouting and resprouting from this tap root.

I am thinking of an unleashed bird whipping through mist to strike its prey. There are peregrines living wild now in London – their real paths might cross the one I imagine in the traffic-heavy air.