11:54 a.m. 06 August 2002
I found the roof in the building where I work yesterday. Found is sort of a lofty word for it, really – the steps are right there by the side of the building, but I hadn’t gone up and explored before. Besides which, they don’t exactly seem like they would lead up to the roof. They look more like fire escape stairs.
But roofs here seem more accessible than I’m used to, and this one follows the pattern. It looks out over the back of the area where our building is: a section of Chelsea, I have discovered on the map, that is actually called Sands End.
We’re right next to World’s End, which I know because if I walk up the street I hit the World’s End bakery and World’s End florist, but neither area is usually called an End. Instead, the place where my building sits is now up-and-coming, and titled Chelsea Harbour, and the World’s End section of things tries to attach itself to the greater fame of Chelsea Kings Road and its nearness to Sloane Street -- where the fashion is -- and Kensington -- where the money is.
But traces of the Ends remain. It’s a strange-feeling area. Our building is several minutes walk from the tube station, so it’s not quite so built up with pubs and shops. Instead, there are a lot of small businesses tucked away in only newly reclaimed buildings: Sands End was, until very recently, almost entirely industrial. These days there are several large furniture auction-houses, as well as other small businesses like mine, but there’s a weird, ghostly feeling of one world being overlayed on top of another, and the old warehouses and industrial outbuildings are still here, but now with small video production companies and construction headquarters and even some kind of strange school on the top floor of a tiny, old factory.
From the roof yesterday, I could see the whole juxtaposition. Just to the south of us is an enormous, new complex called Chelsea Harbour Estates. It’s very fancy-looking, with two enormous glass geodesic domes on top of fancy hotels and high-priced shopping, and it includes several really swanky apartment buildings overlooking the river. It’s one of these complexes that makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into some futuristic moon-colony; it’s as if you should be conveyed by moving walkways and encounter strangely-dressed, fashionable, rich moon-colonists. Really, they might as well be: the inhabitants and visitors of Chelsea Harbour Estates use doormen and private cars and shop as much in Paris and Milan as they do in London, while the workers just outside their doors tuck themselves away in former storage closets and hike to Tesco for lunch.
I think, though, that the tall, fancy sandstone of Chelsea Harbour Estates remembers the industrial ground beneath it – and maybe something even older than the turn of the century factories that stood here. The river beside it is not the bustling, millennial waterway it is down at Embankment, three or four miles west of here. It is sluggish and quiet, and strange, mud-colored birds flit on and off of its tiny gravel shores. And on some days, the apartment buildings of those new moon colonists moan in the wind, a low, keening sound that waves just above the river and fades into the dark humming of the old power station behind it.
Because the traces of the old Sands End are still here, just to the west and east of the new.
Over to the east of Chelsea Harbour, just back enough to seem minimized, are the weird, enormous tanks of an industrial gasworks. They contribute to the moon-landscape feeling, as they look like some race of alien giants might have left them there as reminders of their prowess. These things are really huge, as large as two buildings and four or five stories tall. To add to the effect, one of them isn’t completed, only a crop-circle-like frame standing in empty, desolate scrubland.
And right behind Chelsea Harbour Estates on the other side stands an enormous, frightening red-brick building that is the Lots Road Power Station. It’s a gothic monster dating from the 1930s or so, and its bricked-up archways, huge foggy windows, and towering, crematorium-like smokestacks seem to dominate even the larger complex near it. The power station, despite all attempts by the growing area to make it appear normal, still shadows the river and the neighborhood. It’s a ghastly, frightening building, simply enormous and long enough to take up an entire block. I have a great desire to see inside it, maybe even at night, because it’s the most scary building I think I’ve ever encountered. The turbines whirling in there still create a hum that shakes the ground around it faintly, and the sludge that comes gently into the channel beneath it, flowing out to pollute the river, is like the blood of a terrible, enormous animal that’s sitting, waiting for its time to come again.
All together, it makes for a distinctly eerie effect. And it makes me wonder if there’s more to Sands End even than the normal dynamics of commercial reclamation of old industrial turf. Warehouses, while normally eerie, aren’t usually so strange as they seem here. I wonder what went on in Sands End before the industry even came here.
Was it one of the many places where smugglers and criminals came into London, a marsh like the one in which Pip finds his convict? Was it a lonely stronghold of the poorest refuse of society, dotted with tiny, tarpaper shacks and trash? I imagine it as the kind of yellow marshland that still appears in places on the Thames, even in the business of modern London. They’re incredibly lonely places, these marshes, and the wind over them sounds like the crying of the past.
I even wonder sometimes if there’s a plague cemetery somewhere deep down here – they’re all over the city, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find that someone had had the forethought, some time in the dark medieval past, to cart bodies downriver and downwind, away from the haven of Westminster and into the wilderness at Sands End. Maybe someday I’ll find out. In the meantime, I think I’m going to try to make the roof my place to sit, as long as the weather allows me to. I like the lonely wind up there.
I found the roof in the building where I work yesterday. Found is sort of a lofty word for it, really – the steps are right there by the side of the building, but I hadn’t gone up and explored before. Besides which, they don’t exactly seem like they would lead up to the roof. They look more like fire escape stairs.
But roofs here seem more accessible than I’m used to, and this one follows the pattern. It looks out over the back of the area where our building is: a section of Chelsea, I have discovered on the map, that is actually called Sands End.
We’re right next to World’s End, which I know because if I walk up the street I hit the World’s End bakery and World’s End florist, but neither area is usually called an End. Instead, the place where my building sits is now up-and-coming, and titled Chelsea Harbour, and the World’s End section of things tries to attach itself to the greater fame of Chelsea Kings Road and its nearness to Sloane Street -- where the fashion is -- and Kensington -- where the money is.
But traces of the Ends remain. It’s a strange-feeling area. Our building is several minutes walk from the tube station, so it’s not quite so built up with pubs and shops. Instead, there are a lot of small businesses tucked away in only newly reclaimed buildings: Sands End was, until very recently, almost entirely industrial. These days there are several large furniture auction-houses, as well as other small businesses like mine, but there’s a weird, ghostly feeling of one world being overlayed on top of another, and the old warehouses and industrial outbuildings are still here, but now with small video production companies and construction headquarters and even some kind of strange school on the top floor of a tiny, old factory.
From the roof yesterday, I could see the whole juxtaposition. Just to the south of us is an enormous, new complex called Chelsea Harbour Estates. It’s very fancy-looking, with two enormous glass geodesic domes on top of fancy hotels and high-priced shopping, and it includes several really swanky apartment buildings overlooking the river. It’s one of these complexes that makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into some futuristic moon-colony; it’s as if you should be conveyed by moving walkways and encounter strangely-dressed, fashionable, rich moon-colonists. Really, they might as well be: the inhabitants and visitors of Chelsea Harbour Estates use doormen and private cars and shop as much in Paris and Milan as they do in London, while the workers just outside their doors tuck themselves away in former storage closets and hike to Tesco for lunch.
I think, though, that the tall, fancy sandstone of Chelsea Harbour Estates remembers the industrial ground beneath it – and maybe something even older than the turn of the century factories that stood here. The river beside it is not the bustling, millennial waterway it is down at Embankment, three or four miles west of here. It is sluggish and quiet, and strange, mud-colored birds flit on and off of its tiny gravel shores. And on some days, the apartment buildings of those new moon colonists moan in the wind, a low, keening sound that waves just above the river and fades into the dark humming of the old power station behind it.
Because the traces of the old Sands End are still here, just to the west and east of the new.
Over to the east of Chelsea Harbour, just back enough to seem minimized, are the weird, enormous tanks of an industrial gasworks. They contribute to the moon-landscape feeling, as they look like some race of alien giants might have left them there as reminders of their prowess. These things are really huge, as large as two buildings and four or five stories tall. To add to the effect, one of them isn’t completed, only a crop-circle-like frame standing in empty, desolate scrubland.
And right behind Chelsea Harbour Estates on the other side stands an enormous, frightening red-brick building that is the Lots Road Power Station. It’s a gothic monster dating from the 1930s or so, and its bricked-up archways, huge foggy windows, and towering, crematorium-like smokestacks seem to dominate even the larger complex near it. The power station, despite all attempts by the growing area to make it appear normal, still shadows the river and the neighborhood. It’s a ghastly, frightening building, simply enormous and long enough to take up an entire block. I have a great desire to see inside it, maybe even at night, because it’s the most scary building I think I’ve ever encountered. The turbines whirling in there still create a hum that shakes the ground around it faintly, and the sludge that comes gently into the channel beneath it, flowing out to pollute the river, is like the blood of a terrible, enormous animal that’s sitting, waiting for its time to come again.
All together, it makes for a distinctly eerie effect. And it makes me wonder if there’s more to Sands End even than the normal dynamics of commercial reclamation of old industrial turf. Warehouses, while normally eerie, aren’t usually so strange as they seem here. I wonder what went on in Sands End before the industry even came here.
Was it one of the many places where smugglers and criminals came into London, a marsh like the one in which Pip finds his convict? Was it a lonely stronghold of the poorest refuse of society, dotted with tiny, tarpaper shacks and trash? I imagine it as the kind of yellow marshland that still appears in places on the Thames, even in the business of modern London. They’re incredibly lonely places, these marshes, and the wind over them sounds like the crying of the past.
I even wonder sometimes if there’s a plague cemetery somewhere deep down here – they’re all over the city, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find that someone had had the forethought, some time in the dark medieval past, to cart bodies downriver and downwind, away from the haven of Westminster and into the wilderness at Sands End. Maybe someday I’ll find out. In the meantime, I think I’m going to try to make the roof my place to sit, as long as the weather allows me to. I like the lonely wind up there.
Labels: England, ghosts, liminality, lonliness, space
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