Post on 14-Apr-2018
7/27/2019 Rupert Griffiths: Footwork
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one of London's poorest Boroughs. This as yet
unrealised landscape is not merely bucolic, it is also
the home of Barking Power Staon, capable of
producing 2% of the UK's peak demand electricity.
Further along the north bank of the Thames are the
concrete barges of Rainham marshes, apparently used
in the D-Day Landings and scuppered aer the war.From here the windmills of the Ford Dagenham plant
can be seen and a vast sweep of the Thames, which
brings home the scale of London's riverside industry
and infrastructure.
We walked the south bank but I am talking about the
north bank. But as I menoned earlier, this is how I
experienced the walk, a constant tacking back and
forth between the banks, visually and temporally, in
memory and me. From the footpath along the southbank, the north bank becomes a connuous ribbon, a
panorama of visual connuity. This is at odds with the
visceral, fragmentary experience of trying to traverse
the north bank. There is no connuous footpath on
the north, but rather there are points at which you can
emerge onto the river aer having spent hours
landbound, trying to find a way out of the labyrinth.
Viewing these momentary gaps and glimpses as part
of a connuous ribbon gives an apparent coherence
and connuity to a landscape which is in reality
physically fragmentary and largely inaccessible to thefootbound.
Here the problemacs of the gaze as a trope for
interogtaing landscape come into view. Just as the
developers of Barking Riverside presents us with the
language of an architectural picturesque, so too does
the landscape itself, seen as a connuous ribbbon of
green, emerge as something defined by an aesthec
coherence that veils the processes and histories from
which it has emerged. This belies the reality of this
complex and fragmented landscape, veiling the
mulple flows and disrupons, the land law and polity
that affords movements of capital, real and
speculave, the mass displacements and migraons,
and the complex ecologies that margins between
water and land illuminate. The inadequacy of terms
like nature, culture and technology come clearly into
view here in our understandings and represenons of
processes of landscape producon and consumpon.
'Footwork' was a leisurely walk of roughly 17 miles,
taken with a group of arsts, performers and
academics. We started out from the UEL campus in
East London and came to a staggered halt with an
overnight stay in Darord Travelodge, followed by a
group discussion and workshop the following day.
The walk departed from the new UEL campus on a
Wednesday morning in June, following the edge of the
Royal Victoria and Albert docks, where water, land and
air are very audibly shared with City Airport. We made
our way across the campus adjacent to the grey
expanse of dock water, crossing the bridge that divides
Victoria from Albert before finally disappearing down
a concrete slabbed alley, knee high in grasses and
snging neles. This is where the journey seemed to
noonally begin and it is also where my descripon ofthe walk ends a descripve text will merely misguide
and misinform when a great deal more is to be gained
by taking a bike and a spare hour or two on a sunny
aernoon. In way of a (very) brief summary of the
route, we connued on to Woolwich, where we
crossed the river and then walked (almost) unfeered
and uninterupted from Woolwich to Darord, along a
connuous angular concrete path that runs alongside
of the river for almost (but not quite) the enre
journey, soening into a sinuous dirt track with views
of fields, ponies, World War II pil boxes, visually andaudibly punctuated by the occasional scrap merchant.
Previously, the closest I'd come to this route was the
Woolwich Ferry terminal on the north bank of the
Thames. The free ferry service is one of only three
crossings over the stretch of river between Woolwich
and the majesc Queen Elizabeth Bridge at Darord,
prosaically shiing cars and footpassengers across the
river every five minutes or so. The walk was one that
I'd had in mind for some me (at least a stretch of it
anyway), having explored the opposing bank.
The tacking back and forth of the ferry from bank to
bank very much describes the way in which I
experienced the whole walk. Over the previous couple
of years I've made numerous excursions out to urban
peripheries of the opposing north bank of the Thames,
tracing a route through the knots of roads, sewers,
rails, rivers and pylons of the lower lea valley, Canning
Town, Silvertown, Beckton and Beckon Alp, a
hesitantly bioremediang spoil heap. Further along,the sparse desolaon of Barking Creek and the vast
and empty expanse of land soon to be transformed
into Barking Riverside. This is a Thames Gateway
housing project which over the next twenty years will
create homes for 26,000 Londoners, forty percent of
which will be deemed 'affordable housing'. The
developers confidently incorporate the ubiquious
pylon into the picturesque CGI imaginaries which help
us imaginavely inhabit this future riverside idyl for
FOOTWORK
Barking Creek
Barking Poweer Station
Dagenham Sunday Market
Barking Riverside
Rainham Marshes