BROWSE Columns
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Let’s start with the facts, because every drifting ship needs an anchor. At 2.37am that night, July the 14th 2005, I was transported from the city in the blink of an eye. The whole of me: every brick and concrete lintel, each of my four floors, my twenty-eight flats and the stairwells and corridors linking them, the tenants who inhabited me. One second I stood where I had for thirty-seven years, in the E2 postcode of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The next, I materialised with no more than a shudder on a sodden patch of land by the sea.
Is that the right word, ‘materialised’? It’s not something Tower Hamlets Council has an official term for.
When they woke that morning, my residents sensed it in different ways. The sound of seagulls. The smell of salt water, earthiness on lips and the tips of tongues, sea air moving against waking skin. The city had increasingly got louder over the years, but even in my earliest days it had never been this quiet. The static purr of the sea that morning was our tinnitus.
There was also the fact of flatmates not returning from nightshifts and nights out. The absent touch, sound, sight, smell, kiss-taste of loved ones. It had been a week since the 7th of July and the bombings, the first of which shuddered my foundations, so these absences were felt keenly.
Some of the tenants jostled their way up the twin stairwells to the roof, throwing shoulders into the locked access doors to confirm what their peeling back of the curtains had revealed: an expanse of marshland and a steep beach sloping down to a stretch of mudflats so vast it pushed the sea almost out to the horizon.
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Call me sodden? A patch of land? I am landMASS.
earth,
clay,
sand,
silt,
gravel.
I am the weight that is layered
underneath everything.
I am used to arrivals, just as I am used to departures and everything that happens in between. I have existed through them forever—I have seen them all. Timbers used by Saxon fishermen nestle in the mud offshore, punctuating my surface. The Roman chapel is back in use, adopted by the Christian community that keeps itself to itself along the shoreline. And the old RAF base, old by your standards, like all of these things—the low-slung, glass-fronted cube of the control tower was, for a while, a house. Now it is boarded up and smothered by trees and undergrowth, separated from the runway, which itself has been parcelled up and repurposed or consumed by the weeds that force their way through cracks in the slabs.
Think about the tides that constantly redefine my edges, giving me shape in space and in time. The clay that lines my shoreline is steadily separated from the sea by three miles of mud for half of the day. And for the other half, that sprawling, alluvial band of saturated earth is gradually lost to the estuary.
Whether it happens overnight or over a year, another man-made weight settling onto my surface—more bricks, more concrete, more people—is mere skin pressure,
epidermis
barely imposing
on dermis.
To always wonder how or why, the patience that would require. The needlessness of it.
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Those who had mobile phones prodded at them, trying to send messages or make calls. Though they couldn’t get through, they kept at it. For many, this was a re-hash of the morning of the bombing, when calls went unanswered—for normal reasons then, it turned out: work, school, flat batteries, not-nows. Some of them had been caught up elsewhere in the chaos of the city that day, stranded and scared, feelings that hadn’t had time to dissipate. This now was another not-now, another not-knowing-what-to-do.
For those first few hours, most of the tenants remained inside. Up in Flat 17, which for as long as anyone could remember had been lined with bunk beds far beyond official capacity, four of the men talked about what they thought had happened. Two fiddled with the fuse box, hoping this would solve the problem of communication. The couple in Flat 13 took to their bed in a tight, unmoving embrace, as if their solidity and unity would help—and in some way it did. The lone tenants in Flats 2, 11 and 14 also retreated behind closed doors but gave little away. I did my best to absorb the rays of the sun, to provide them with some comfort at least.
Alexei, a boxer who worked in a steam baths in the basement of an old warehouse near Canning Town, sat on the second-floor fire escape, dwarfing a cigarette between thick fingers and staring at the mudflats and the ribbon of sea on the horizon. Go inside, solntse, he said, ruffling the hair of his young son, Andrei, who had emerged into the corridor behind him.
After a while, Alexei and some of the others made their way downstairs and stepped outside onto a hard clay ridge that sloped down to the shoreline. Initially they all stared
across the mudflats in the same way Alexei had. Mrs Pressburger, an elderly Hungarian widow who had escaped the German invasion during the war, talked about making a plan, expeditionary parties and so on, to find out where they were and what they could do about it. They speculated about what could have happened: time travel, or some sort of collective hallucination. Maybe they’d died, someone said, all of them, in some sort of major event – maybe this was heaven, or hell, or purgatory. Further inland, they saw a dog-walker staring in their direction, a bounding, oblivious Labrador nearby.
Salt began to collect on my windows like frost and a steady onshore breeze blew in through the rear entranceway, winding its way upstairs, my stairwells the lungs that help the residents take in the atmosphere of their surroundings.
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I remember their first morning, tide low, their flimsy shoes sinking lightly into the clay, and the little ones counting
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
concrete barges lined up in a row in the mud offshore.
one, two, three
gulls drifting against the onshore gusts.
The adults started to explore. Some followed the coastline, pulling at thick-stemmed wildflowers and samphire—which they did not yet realise they could eat—turning over small stones and shell fragments, contemplating the tide and the sea. Another group found a fence and followed it inland for as long as the conditions underfoot would allow—you would be fortunate to travel far without having trouble finding a direct route across my surface. There is a reason that the crow flies ^^
Anyway, they did well to get as far as they did before they were forced to turn back. By then, the tide was high and the mudflats
submerged.
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The first afternoon two dark green trucks approached along the causeway Alexei and some of the others had found, a straight route across the marshland. The drivers of both, dressed in uniforms that were the same khaki as the truck, remained seated. A man in a suit climbed out of one, holding a clipboard and pen. He spoke to them, explaining that he was a representative of the local authorities and that he would be their liaison moving forward. He had been alerted to their presence in recent hours and, he said, he had also received reports of a corresponding anomaly in London, a council block that had been replaced by a sunken patch of earth overnight. There was feared to have been a fourth bombing, until no reports of an explosion emerged. Solutions were being sought and they should remain in place until further notice. They were, he told them, in Essex, about 60 miles from London and
several miles from the nearest main road.
You’re free to come and go during the day, but we request that you remain residing here, he said. We’ll make arrangements in due course.
Then he took down all of their details on his clipboard and climbed back into the truck, which drove off. The other truck and driver remained.
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Six high tides, six low.
They explored further, in more detail, crisscrossing my surface in ways that none of the regular walkers do. They picked their way along the runway, up to the old control tower. Some of the older children climbed through a gap in the fence of the disused electricity substation. Further along the shore they spotted the two large, high-security monoliths of the nuclear power station that has stood on my shoreline for fifteen years or so..
A change seemed to rise among many of them once they got over the initial shock of their arrival. Everything everyone is worried about happening everywhere else feels like it happened here decades ago, one of the women said, and the others nodded.
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A water tank was towed along the access road and hooked up to a portacabin containing five toilets and three showers. A generator was placed outside and connected to my electrical circuits, humming from seven in the morning until ten each evening, except for when it became overloaded and chuntered to a halt. Large, plastic containers of drinking water were distributed to each household. Food arrived, pre-packaged and non-perishable. Spotlights were towed in, illuminating my external walls and the surrounding area in a way that felt brighter, more nocturnal, than the streetlights in the city.
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People would stand and stare from a distance.
Two boys on motorbikes churned my surface as they approached the building, to be met by the man in the truck, who pointed them in the other direction.
Someone spraypainted the word ALIENS on the side of the building.
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One day a crowd of people arrived, driven along the access road in several vehicles. They approached on foot and began to shout and chant, to demand the removal of the residents, for them to be sent them back, back to where they would willingly go if it was possible. Soon, the police arrived and moved the group of people back behind a cordon. From then the man in the green truck was joined by a rotation of policemen standing guard next to a riot van.
The next week, the crowd returned, larger, and resumed chanting, but this time another group came. They chanted slogans of support for the tenants and shouted back at the first group. Once or twice the police had to step in to keep the two groups apart.
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The sea came in and came out. I breathed steadily, as I always do.
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I became the site of a division. Even more spotlights were directed at my frontal elevation, illuminating protesters, whirring machinery, official activity. My seaward side
sheltered the residents from all of this, and this is where the adults gathered to exercise or smoke cigarettes or ponder their situation. The children played at the fringes of the beach as the tide began to recede, making the most of things until darkness set in.
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The fire started at night, seventeen tidal cycles after their arrival, more or less. Three figures came out of the shadows, their faces illuminated by a flaming bottle that smashed against the door of the building.
Flames against the door, against the brickwork, spreading inside the building, smoke emerging from the lowest windows.
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The fire burned my front door frame, turned the walls of the ground-floor corridor black, and the smell of soot and smoke lingered inside afterwards. Thankfully, they got it under control before anything awful happened. My experience of fires is that people tend to start them at night. This is true in the city and it appears to be true here, which makes me think it must be very human to be violent under the cover of darkness.
The following day, the man who had spoken on the first day returned, telling the tenants that the police presence had been increased, the cordon expanded, and that the culprits for the fire would be tracked down. That planning was in progress and would consider permanent arrangements for all of the tenants as possible. That constraints faced nationwide by local authorities meant the process was, unfortunately, slow, but would be complete as soon as possible. The building, he said, had been assessed as stable for the time being.
Copies of a letter arrived to be distributed to all households, an interested party, concerning the redevelopment of the now-vacant plot of land in the city. Offices topped by apartments, a new library, new shops. This is a travesty and we want to help, the letter said. Journalists arrived to ask the residents for their thoughts, but the police sent them away.
After the fire the protests stopped. For a while, people came to deliver gifts and supplies. They said they had read about the fire in the news and they wanted to help if they could. Someone gave them some gardening tools, someone else brought a fishing rod. One morning one of the men came outside to find a bicycle with a trailer attached and a ribbon tied around the frame.
Soon, though, the attention died down. People lost interest, or started to regard the new settlement in the same way they did the Christian community living in the old holiday park, the harmless, grey-suited men and head-scarved women who walk hands-clasped along the shoreline each Sunday to sing hymns in the Roman chapel. The cordon remained, but the security presence was reduced to three private guards working rotating shifts throughout the week.
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With
to go and
to move them on, they set themselves free.
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They dug up a square of earth and grew vegetables that took on a saltiness from the marshy ground. They learned how to catch a type of fish, mottled and flat, that someone said was plaice but someone else said was called flounder. They used the bicycle and trailer to take vegetables to sell by the roadside and bring supplies back from the town. They fixed and painted over the fire damage. They played games in the patch of bare earth above the beach. Each day they waited for the tide to overtake the mud so they could swim in the water. They organised a celebration for the eightieth birthday of Mr Stephens, the retired bus driver from Flat 3, bringing out dining tables and chairs from flats on the first two floors so everyone could eat together. They came up with the idea of paying the three security guards a small amount of money to leave, to come only when they needed to reassure their bosses that all was well and to ensure they would continue to receive their wages.
They had lived with displacement and uncertain horizons before, but it had never been like this. They loved, they made love, they made friends, they made things, plans. The sun shone every day, and the warmth lingered within my walls.
The city felt like a memory, a story from before, old and ecstatic. Sometimes, sitting around a bonfire late at night, they would talk about it—but they didn’t leave.
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On the shoreline the seaweed dried to a crisp each day and I was lapped by a warming sea. My inhalations and exhalations stretched over the days.
I gave rise to prodigious crops of the plants that grow across my marshland. They had learned some of the names of these, as they had the fish and the birds, and they said them out loud as they walked across my surface in the evening sun.
Thrift, scurvygrass, sea lavender, dittander.
They lived amongst my flora.
One morning, a vehicle approached along the access road. A man in a brightly coloured jacket climbed out and entered the building. He was clutching a stack of papers.
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It happened so quickly. Each envelope contained a letter with an official stamp and a heading in capital letters: NOTICE OF REMOVAL. Another letter followed with news of ALTERNATIVE ARRANGEMENTS. Towns that Mr Stephens said he knew only for their football teams. Northampton, Macclesfield, Shrewsbury, Kidderminster, Grantham. Or temporary lodgings, TBC, until immigration status could be ascertained. The adults had resigned discussions. The children played on the beach, pulling at the clay with their hands, peeling chunks away from the ground.
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The first time, they refused. They locked doors, hung banners made from curtains from the second-floor windows. They chanted furious syllables:
THIS. IS. OUR. HOME.
But men in uniforms broke the doors open, trampled the gardens they had planted outside, dragged those who resisted loudest away and kept them locked in vehicles for several hours before letting them return to the building.
You have twenty-four hours to get your things in order, the bright-jacketed man told them. This is not your home.
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For the best part of four decades I stood in the East End of London, one of six blocks brought into being in 1968, arriving late to fill a bombed-out void more than twenty years after the war had finished. Although my role was official—the council was my creator, owner and custodian—I was my own custodian and the custodian of people, each resident that came and went. I was where official and unofficial meet.
I know the difference between an ABC and an ALMO, and I know the particulars of the local Community Safety Strategy and the Egan Principles. I knew that officially each dwelling within my walls slept a maximum of five.
Yet I also knew bunk beds were packed within the two bedrooms and sitting room of Flat 17, providing beds for fourteen men, mostly undocumented and previously unknown to each other. I knew they would come and go at different times of the day and the night, that they had few belongings, that some treasured photographs, locks of hair and small toys. I knew that, unofficially, two families occupied Flat 25—three adults and five children, brought together out of necessity and a surreptitious note pinned to noticeboards in the Residents’ Association office and some of the local newsagents. I knew they weren’t the first. I’ve never existed to pass judgement.
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The second time, they emerged before the trucks and buses arrived, stacking bags and boxes in front of the building. They helped load the trucks with their belongings and then they formed queues and filed onto the buses. Many of them turned back to the building as they boarded, as if to acknowledge it or wish it farewell.
Another truck arrived after they left. The men who came with it slowly unloaded lengths of wood and metal and built a structure around the building, as if they wanted to dismantle it
(mantle, like cloak, like landmass)
as if they wanted to dis-cover it.
But rather than pull the building apart, the men climbed onto the platforms they had created and secured thick, perforated metal panels over each door and window. After three full tides they had sealed the building and removed their platform. Another truck full of men and equipment arrived and the men built a panelled metal fence around the building, its top reaching as high as the second-storey windows.
Now, its foundations sink imperceptibly into the rising tide. The wind at its strongest blows through the cracks that have begun to appear in the walls of the highest floor.
It shrieks.
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As much as my official role permitted, I provided shelter, warmth, privacy, an opportunity for rest, recuperation, solitude, unity, love, all according to an ideal that led to my creation in the first place.
I am the wreckage of an idea.
Paul Tucker is from South East London. His fiction has been published in Brixton Review of Books and The London Magazine, and he is an alumnus of the Stinging Fly Summer School. He is currently studying on the Prose Fiction MA at UEA. He has written about arts and culture for The Economist and The Quietus, among others.
