London Overground by Iain Sinclair

eight-foot-tall cartoon creature is not collecting for charity. They are chatting. It’s hard for the soft cow, a star emblazoned on its throat, to bend down far enough to catch what’s being said. I don’t know where else in the world you could witness a sniff-and-shrug domestic between a pink girl with short dark hair and a talking cow with no mouth and huge unblinking eyes. As wide and white as death. With nobody on the public street paying them the slightest mind.
    Andrew stalls for a moment, taking a surreptitious blow by looking back down Old Kent Road. He is frozen rigid, in contemplation of an unravelling mystery. As if some earlier self, in the first days of his intoxicated courtship of Leila, and the youthful freedoms of the city, should be revealed. He jumped back from the kerb, pushed by the slipstream of the ghost of his own motorbike. This was the route he always took, so he explained, on his return to St Leonards, after London tasks and adventures.
    The Overground station at Queens Road Peckham is rewarded with another Kötting portrait. He has the energy to point: stout Cortez with his eagle eyes, none too silent on a peak in Peckham. But still managing to alarm a non-travelling vagrant, as he tried to make off with a pile of free newspapers. It says something about this station that they were still there, mid-morning.

    Peckham improper, the definitive street of small shops, rank meat, trade, movement, goods, deals, arrives so suddenly and is so charged with bounce and collision, leftover civic structures signifying some dissipated claim to being a centre, that we miss it entirely; moving through in hot debate of our own,
without pausing to record Peckham Rye Station.
Thereby undoing the immaculate procession of our circular walk and disqualifying the premise of the image vine. (I charged back, a day or two later, to commit a selfie. By then Kötting was an absence, a loud ghost sprayed somewhere on the nether reaches of Old Kent Road.)
    The station on Rye Lane was the grandest one so far encountered on our circuit; it required an etching press, not a digital camera. The nudge of recognition came from its association with the Lower Lea Valley and midwinter walks down the Northern Sewage Outfall. The architect was Charles Henry Driver, who was also responsible for Abbey Mills Pumping Station, that yellow-brick Moorish fantasy intruding on the Greenway path, breaking clouds, diverting storms, to disguise its legitimate function: housing engines to refine and reduce shit. Pumping stations and railway stations are in the same business: evacuation.
    Peckham Rye Station, I subsequently discovered, was the epicentre of a major row about development. The promoters were in the grip of what they described as a ‘Vision’. They started calling the commuter station a ‘hub’. Suspect viruses advanced down the line. The journalist Alex Proud said that Peckham was now suffering from ‘Shoreditchification’; entrepreneurial ‘hipsters’ and carpetbaggers in dark glasses were descending from Orange Line carriages to curate the buzz that leads to increased rents and spurious retail projects. These activities were forcing out the original (if not aboriginal) settlers. Network Rail owns the station, the land beneath the
forecourt and all the arches leading to Bellenden Road. Following the Shoreditch/Hoxton example, they mean to make the best of it. So Peckham’s railway zone was rebranded: The Gateway. It now sounded like a New Age religion.
    We strain eagerly uphill, enthused by the way the short passage between the lowlands of railway Peckham, as tribal, immersive, loud, watchful as the former Kingsland Waste Market, and the nursery slopes of established Peckham Rye, demonstrates such a leap in real-estate values. Even a minor physical elevation comes with entitlement to upward social mobility. You don’t need oxygen, but the modest ascent uses the Overground as a cultural funicular.
    Muriel Spark might have