A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley

reassembled by a surrealistically inclined topographical demiurge. The extreme dips and peaks of the land throw up all manner of chaos, usually of a fairly unpleasant sort, such as the road system that holds the place in a tourniquet; for the pedestrian, the result is that thoroughfares that should be straight lines entail squeezing along weird half-pavements and crossing a baffling series of traffic islands, with entry points in the most counter-intuitive places possible. Across the Brutalist shopping centre and Ahrends Burton and Koralek’s law courts, a concrete flyover sweeps as if at random. An art deco war memorial looks over the general absurdity from up on ‘the lines’, the stark cliffs that run all the way through the Medway, giving it a strangeness and melodrama that is exceptionally unusual for the south of England. Where on earth, you would be within your rights to ask, am I?

      It’s an impressively weird place, this quintessential down-at-heel naval town. It is often claimed to be the origin of the class-hate epithet ‘chav’ (‘Chatham Average’ is the suggested, and unlikely, etymology). If you’re coming (as, I’ll own up, I am) from the railway station, after you negotiate the ham-fisted road engineering you step down concrete stairs into a dense High Street of 99p shops and such, with a large Arndale-style block at the end of it; also at the end is a civic clock tower of such grandeur and munificence that you could be in the Industrial North rather than the Medway; similarly, too, with the wonky-roofed, wood-clad Urban Renaissance tower that creeps up behind it. Next to you on the other side is a bus station that has escaped from Tellytubbies, big, jolly and bulbous. Yet at the heart of Chatham is a development which raises some curious questions about the re-use of industrial sites. It’s a pregnant subject in this recession, with the scattered remnants of manufacturing in serious trouble, for all the noises about a return to ‘making things’. At first sight, Chatham Dockyard, disused since the mid-1980s, conforms to the standard post-industrial Urban Regen type, being turned over alternately to the creative industries (an art college), the heritage industry (several museums, ornamental ships) and the property speculation industry (newbuild flats that are ‘in keeping’, loft conversions). Yet there’s something unusual here.

      The place to compare it with is the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, the huge Thames-side engineering works unexpectedly hailed by Tristram Hunt MP as a post-industrial counter-model to the Barratt Homes boredom that was mainly created by the developers’ scrum in the Thames Gateway. In Woolwich, the Wen and all its values pervades the factories entirely, with the majority of them turned into very expensive new flats, with a tame museum, some Gormleyish sculpture and some units serving as estate agents, organic grocery stores and a gastropub. It’s London at its worst, a self-segregating upper-crust enclave, a series of Canary Wharf yuppiedromes that just happens to be cast in severe Vanburghian forms, as if accidentally. Chatham Dockyard isn’t like that – its industrial past feels much closer, it still feels in some odd way itself. Partly that’s because of the way that many of the factories have become exhibits of themselves – one enormous shed houses various big lumps of metal as permanent, open ornaments, though it’s the thuggishly powerful steel frame that catches the eye. Industrial wreckage – cranes, presses, guns, scattered about at random – is more a feature of the space than sententious public art, which is right and good. The architecture is more complete, more vivid, than at Woolwich. But what makes it interesting, almost exciting even, is that there are things actually being built here as well. Pleasure boats and yachts, obviously, but ships nonetheless. Thrown together with the art school and the museums, the result is rich with potential. This is only really possible with the relative distance from London, where the pressure of property is higher; but for once, the idea of ‘mixed use’ seems convincing – strange, incongruous things thrown together that shouldn’t work, but do.

      The distance from London has saved Chatham Dockyard from becoming boring, but along the Medway you can still see acre upon acre of developer’s dross – typically cul-de-sacs, of flats as often as houses, clinging to the river’s edges like stock-brick barnacles. From Chatham Dockyard you can see something just slightly more ambitious. In the foreground is an Odeon, using the same industrial Big Shed method as the old factories, then for producing, now for consuming; behind them you can see two skyscrapers. Well, almost skyscrapers, of a sleekness and finish that you don’t generally expect in an area more marked by concrete-framed blocks with oast-house cowls on top. Both have curved, glazed façades, and are a fragment of the ‘aspirational’ side of the Thames Gateway’s property frenzy, the part that involves the perusal of Wallpaper* magazine and viewings of Grand Designs as much as of Location, Location, Location. It’s unusual in North Kent, relatively exceptional for its high-end smoothness.

      The Condition is Grave

      Now I’ve rooted you somewhere and established the possibility that you may be doing this journey on a boat, I can stop pretending I’m doing the same. I’m not even doing it all at once – my reason for being here is connected with the quirks of the National Health Service, namely the fact that for seven years I have commuted from flats in Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich to Darent Valley Hospital on the edges of Dartford – a building that I found it appropriate to write about in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. So when I’ve explored the surrounding area, it’s usually been after treatment for Crohn’s disease and its many side-effects and knock-on irritants; which also means that I’ve occasionally hit North Kent under the effects of codeine or morphine, something which certainly assists in finding sites of interest. However, far too often I just make the same journey, first on one of the worst of the privatized train networks, Southeastern, then on North Kent’s Fastrack Buses or on TfL London buses (both make the same journey, the latter for nearly half the price). On the occasion I went to Gravesend, I took the Bus B from Darent Valley, which took me through Ebbsfleet and Northfleet on a proper round-all-the-houses trip which cost me a princely six pounds. The two Fleets are a study in place all of their own.

      Ebbsfleet will be known to Eurostar passengers as Ebbsfleet International. It was supposed to become a practical New Town under the Thames Gateway, but although a lot of houses got built, it didn’t entirely pan out that way. The station itself, from which you can get to St Pancras, Paris, Lille and Brussels, is a Foster-like glass box that was pre-emptively strangled by road engineering, so that it was impossible for a real town to ever grow up around it; a series of spurs from the M25 surround and encase it, and the housing emerges on the edges of that. Ebbsfleet has no centre, though it has many, many units of neo-Victorian or Pseudomodern living that somehow slipped through the CABE net. The nearest thing to a centre is Bluewater, more of which presently. Northfleet, though, is a town of some sort. Like the Medway, it goes along and under high chalk cliffs, atop which you find very surprising things – patterned, Festival of Britain-style tower blocks, tiny terraces of the sort usually built for dockers, millworkers or miners, and the earliest major building by one of the architects of twentieth-century Britain, Giles Gilbert Scott: in the small Edwardian Catholic church here you can see more than hints of the blocky, heavily masonry-clad, modernized Gothic that would bring him to Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station. That’s a lot, for a town this small.

      The town of Gravesend, like Chatham Dockyard, is a minor revelation, a memorable small town both distant from and a cousin to London, able to breathe some of its metropolitan air without completely swallowing its bullshit. There’s not much to Gravesend, but what there is is fairly fascinating. Firstly, there’s the most hated building in Gravesend – I have this on good authority – the Thamesgate Car Park. Arndale Brutalism, massive and monumental, it adjoins a completely uninteresting shopping centre, but is actually a very smart and dramatic building; in rich red brick around sculpted, ribbed concrete, its overhanging volumes have a hint of the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright. From a distance, it’s a ruthless cruiser of a building, fitting just perfectly with the container ships which dock nearby. In fact, you can imagine a Zaha Hadid giving it the nod of approval for its fearless, attention-seeking tectonic melodrama. I can understand the disdain, however, because from the train it gives the impression that you’re about to enter a shabby, disjointed place much like Chatham. You’re not – Gravesend is tight, cohesive and built very much around the river. In its ‘historic quarter’ (there’s no escaping the nomenclature), a dense high street of weatherboarded maritime buildings throws itself right towards the Thames.