London Overground by Iain Sinclair Page A

composed
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
, but she’d be cut adrift in the contemporary action around the station, the railway lowlands. She treated the working district, in her slender, sharp-witted 1960 novel, as suitable turf for satire.
    ‘Dougal turned sideways in his chair and gazed out of the window at the railway bridge; he was now a man of vision with a deformed shoulder. “The world of Industry,” said Dougal, “throbs with human life. It will be my job to take the pulse of the people and plumb the industrial depths of Peckham.”’
    This horned Dougal, a genial Lucifer, presents himself as a teaser-out of local particulars, a scout in dim municipal libraries. He makes copies of unreliable facts, he raids friable newsprint. He has Mendelssohn composing his ‘Spring Song’ in Ruskin Park. And Boadicea committing suicide on Peckham Rye, ‘probably where the bowling green is now’. He validates a dull present by inventing a ripe past.
    Peckham Rye has chosen Bellenden Road as its engine of regeneration. A five-minute stroll from the Overground station. Tributaries with Hampstead aspirations: Elm Grove, Holly
Grove, Blenheim Grove. The estate agent’s tactic of trifling with selected aspects of history that Spark exposes in her affectionate ridiculing of the pretensions of hilltop suburbia are extant in the rapid evolution of Bellenden Road into an elective Montmartre. Pavement cafés. Community bookshop. Authentic artisans stepping aside so that their warehouses and gated courtyards can be occupied by artists and printmakers. There is a well-kept sign pointing out that Bellenden Road was ‘formerly Victoria Terrace’. A Victorian advertisement, like a supersize trade card, has been restored on an endwall: PRINTING OFFICE. FOR BUSINESS BUILDING. ESTD 1884. Here is an advertisement advertising heritage. And asserting the pedigree of the survivor.
    In 1998, at the time of the conception of his
Angel of the North
, Antony Gormley had a studio here. Knighted now, a sculptor of international consequence, Gormley has followed the railway to the hub of hubs at King’s Cross, the ultimate Eurozone of future development. Back then, I walked from Hackney to Peckham with a commission to produce an essay in response to the
Angel
. Blake was part of the attraction, his tree of celestial beings. Peckham angels were infusions of light, evanescent, but no more extraordinary than the colonies of parakeets in Wanstead. Less noisy perhaps. Alexander Gilchrist in
The Life of Blake
, first published in 1863, describes that famous episode: ‘On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it was, as he in after years related, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he had his first vision. Sauntering along, the boy looked up and saw a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars.’
    Gormley’s office-workshop, off Bellenden Road, shared a yard with the studio of the artist Tom Phillips. Phillips had been plundering the past, very fruitfully, by working over a
Victorian novel by William Hurrell Mallock called
A Human Document.
Pages of starchy narrative were defaced, isolated phrases emphasized, colour and pattern-making employed, to chart an adventure in concrete poetry. Phillips called the project
A Humument.
The original book was found in Peckham Rye, at Austin’s, a furniture repository and accidental mausoleum of dead stuff that might now be dignified as ‘architectural salvage’. Austin’s was a major South London resource, somewhere in character between the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill and Nunhead Cemetery. Graham Greene references the place. He was a premature Overground man, testing the adulterous liaisons of
The End of the Affair
on Clapham Common. He furnished rooms from Peckham warehouses. In the days when Greene was making a fetish of not being filmed, he agreed to be interviewed, so long as his face wasn’t shown: on a train.
    Phillips visited Austin’s in the company of R. B.