The View From the Train (14 page)

In December 1864, Charles Dickens received a Christmas present from the actor Charles Fechter – a prefabricated two-storey summer house in the form of a Swiss chalet. It was delivered from Switzerland in ninety-four pieces packed in fifty-eight boxes, and was erected in the shrubbery at Gad's Hill Place, Dickens's house near Rochester, in Kent, where he lived from 1856 until his death in 1870. The main coach road from London to Dover ran through Dickens's property and, to reach the shrubbery, he had a tunnel made beneath the road. The upper room in the chalet became Dickens's study, where he wrote parts of the unfinished
Mystery of Edwin Drood
, on which he was working in the chalet the day before he died. On the walls, in the spaces between the windows, Dickens placed five large mirrors, of which he said: ‘they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees.'

Knowing that Cedric Price had appeared in a film that I had made about houses and possessed a video copy of another, the publisher Nick Barley
*
suggested that we should go on a trip together. He told me that Cedric was keen on Dickens. I suggested the Thames estuary, which I had long associated with various themes – mobility, expendability, non-plan and so on – in the work of Price and some of his contemporaries (and which is featured in both the films already mentioned, partly for this reason). We decided to go to Rochester because of its role in Dickens's first novel
The Pickwick Papers
, and only then discovered that Dickens's chalet is preserved there. It was arranged that Cedric, Nick and I would travel to its present location in the garden of Eastgate House, in Rochester, which is now the Dickens Centre.
*
Nick was to drive; there was to be no stopping off en route. We would meet at Cedric's office at ten o'clock in the morning, and be back by half-past-four in the afternoon.

Dickens's chalet, Rochester, Kent, 2001

Cedric had been in the office since eight, but had been interrupted by telephone calls. We discussed the pros and cons of various methods of communication. I mentioned that I had recently located a copy of a useful but long out-of-print book in a bookshop only a few minutes' drive from my home with the aid of the Bookfinder website, which led Cedric to suggest
Serious Business
, a book of water-colours by J. H. Dowd, a popular artist of the 1930s, as a test of any such facility.
¹
The cover of this cloth-bound book which, he said, contained images of children and sandy beaches, was a particular shade of green favoured by interior decorators of the 1930s, but neither of us could think of the name of the colour.
²
He was about to fetch his watercolours to identify it when Nick arrived, and we set out, in a hired Kia.

I was already suggesting we might manage a detour to Chalk, the village between Gravesend and Rochester where the blacksmith's forge is traditionally the model for that in
Great Expectations
, when Cedric pointed out a truck, which crossed our path as we approached the square, with a single twenty-foot container on the end of its semi-trailer, as a Foden, and we discussed surviving UK and other truck manufacturers.

Back to Chalk, then
hulks
(the prison ships of
Great Expectations
), their location in the river, and the difficulty faced by escaping prisoners in getting off the marshes; Cedric suggested the spatial uses characteristic of the estuary were determined by its potential for
secrecy and security
. We passed the end of Doughty Street, where Dickens lived between 1837 and 1839 at No. 48, now the Dickens House. Seeing a Citroën DS coming the other way, I ventured it was a ‘nice car' (Alison Smithson's book
AS in DS
having been republished a few weeks earlier), but this led instead, via the colour of the driver's pullover, which was green, back to
Serious Business
, and whether (or not) it is becoming increasingly difficult to imply nuance in written language in the way this title did in the 1930s (it seems to have become something of a catchphrase).

On the west side of City Road, at its junction with this roundabout (one of the realised fragments of Abercrombie's 1943 plan for London) is a large building with terracotta facing, of mixed,
uncertain use, called Imperial Hall, which we all agreed looks as if it might have been misplaced from Manchester, or perhaps Blackpool, or even North America. I suggested that this might be because in these places buildings are allowed to age, whereas in London they are more likely to be subject to continual, often ineffectual refurbishment. In Commercial Street (which fails to confirm this idea), Cedric asked where we were, before recognising the huge redevelopment at Aldgate, circa 1980, as the last built work of the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd.

I had recently looked at a film,
Houses in the Town
, made by the Central Office of Information in 1951, in which Gibberd presents an argument for an urban (as opposed to suburban) quality in new housing development, and which ends with footage of the construction of the Lansbury Estate (the showcase housing project of the Festival of Britain, in Poplar). Gibberd was involved in this, and designed its market square at Chrisp Street, an early example of a pedestrian shopping centre, which we passed a few minutes later. Cedric mentioned Gibberd's book
The Architecture of England from Norman Times to the Present Day
, published by the Architectural Press in 1938. ‘I liked him,' he said, adding that Gibberd had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s (one might not imagine this from the film, in which he appears the epitome of an affable, pipe-smoking bourgeois) and that his contact with Attlee had helped him get the commission for Heathrow Airport.

Cedric's first visit to London, he said, was to spend a half-day at the Festival of Britain.
³
He had admired Basil Spence's Sea and Ships Pavilion (‘the best thing he ever did'), and recalled the Regatta Restaurant's door handles, in the shape of human hands.

Beside the A13 flyover, on the north side of the road east of the river Lea, this was a music venue of the punk era. Either it's been demolished, or we missed it. I thought, wrongly, that Charlie Kray had once been its landlord. Kray's twin brothers owned Cedric's first office, above corset-makers Sylphide, at 86 George Street, W1. One day they visited, in a big black car with a couple of minders to block the stairs, to suggest he might like to have a look at other premises in Great Portland Street (all this seemingly something to do with Joan Littlewood). Charlie Kray later showed him round this office, which was (much) later occupied by Peter Murray's company Wordsearch, the original publisher of the magazine
Blueprint
.

More talk of
secrecy and security
: the military, prisons, danger, explosives, criminals; Purfleet – the Admiralty's powder store in the eighteenth century, where Benjamin Franklin's experimental lightning rods were installed during the controversy between Franklin and Benjamin Wilson over the correct design of lightning conductors. Franklin believed that lightning rods should be tall with pointed ends, Wilson (a successful portraitist of the period) that they should be short with ball ends. There was a theatrical demonstration at the Pantheon, then recently built, in Oxford Street (now the site of Marks and Spencer), gutted by a fire in January 1792, the aftermath of which was a watercolour subject for the sixteen-year-old J. M. W. Turner.

There was a very large stack of containers to the north of the road. As a product of the architectural culture of the late 1960s,
I still consider these a photo-opportunity, but Cedric seems to have moved on, or was, perhaps, never that interested in their
appearance
.
⁴

In the 1970s, a Mr English, the Essex environmental officer, commissioned Cedric Price Architects to suggest planning proposals for the chalk quarry at Thurrock, later the site of the Lakeside Shopping Centre.

Joining the M25, we crossed the bridge, remarking how oddly unremarked on it is, for such a large and geographically significant structure. As we approached the centre of the span, a Chinook twin-rotor military helicopter passed above from east to west.

Travellers descending the bridge are faced by a view of a strange, cliff-like brick building suggestive of a nineteenth-century workhouse, or a prison, which turns out to be the Dartford Bridge Hilton (rooms from £99.00 per night, midweek). Wishing to consult the map, we followed a brown sign for a picnic location, took a wrong road, turned in the entrance to the Davanden Boarding Kennels (tel. 01322 222192), and a minute or so later reached a viewpoint looking north across the river, near the village of Stone, Kent (Cedric was born in Stone, Staffordshire). On the top of a wooden pole was a steel basket, which I took to be one of the nationwide chain of beacons erected in 1988 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Both Cedric and Nick seemed incredulous, as it was not even at the highest point of the surrounding landscape, but we were not far from the fort at Tilbury, where Queen Elizabeth I reviewed the army raised to resist the Armada, and where there would probably be
another beacon. Cedric, still unconvinced, pointed out that the fleet was then kept at Two Tree Island, between Canvey and Leigh-on-Sea, some distance downriver. Two Tree Island, formerly an Essex County Council landfill site with a large population of Brent Geese, now a nature reserve, had been the site of another Cedric Price Architects project, for a marina in 1972, successfully opposed, at a public enquiry, by the defenders of the geese – hence the nature reserve. I took some photographs, and we left at about 11.30. There was a man in a red Ford Escort van who may have been dead, or merely asleep, and strands of police tape fluttered at the entrance to this touristic location.

At the end of the road we had rejoined we found the A226, the old coach road from London to Dover. At the junction is Stone House, a Victorian asylum still in use as a psychiatric hospital, unlike many others visible from the M25 as it circles London. We turned left, and entered the landscape of the former chalk quarries of north Kent, passing a landfill gas burner in a field to the south of the road. At Stone, Cedric pointed out the McDonald's (job vacancies) as a former coaching inn. We continued east, up a hill to the south of which is the huge hole in which is Bluewater, the last out-of-town shopping mall of its era in the UK, built by the Australian developer Lend Lease. We passed flowers placed by the roadside (it is undoubtedly a dangerous road), long walls made of flints, and developers' signs for new housing.
⁵
At the top of the hill was another coaching inn, a view of a characteristically square-topped north Kent church and, further on, the gigantic cement works at Northfleet, with which Cedric's friend, the late David Allford, who became a partner at the architects Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, had been involved.

We pulled off the road into a street called Khartoum Place, and I read out a passage from Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, including the following:

Returning to the road, we passed soldiers in a backstreet, then drove on past Chalk, Dickens's house at Gad's Hill, a bridge over the dual carriageway that leads to the Isle of Grain (the location of, among other things, the fully automated container port Thamesport), and descended to Strood, Rochester Bridge, and the former city. According to Cedric, the appearance of Rochester Castle, which faced us across the river as we came down the hill (‘glorious pile – frowning walls – tottering arches – dark nooks – crumbling staircases'
⁷
) is partly a result of a twelfth-century bishop's melting the lead on the roof, to pour on surrounding attackers.