7/27/2019 Rupert Griffiths: Footwork

1/1

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