An Afternoon in the Industrial Zone

Met Joe in an internet cafe in Western Road. He had left his jumper there on the previous day. It was only about 1:00pm, which was quite early for a Sunday walk. I had only had two pints the previous night, and Joe had been too hungover to even think about drinking. A common ritual with us is the 'walk' or 'stomp'. Highly ritualised and refined over the years. It usually begins with meeting up in the early afternoon, with a pre-set destination (or to be more accurate) journey in mind. After meeting up, food and drink needs to be bought, often from a newsagent or other kind of corner shop; samosas, crisps, chocolate bar, diet coke. On this occasion Joe needed to purchase some kind of hat, as he had lost his last one in an internet cafe in Amsterdam. This necessitated a trip to a charity shop, where Joe duly bought his hat, and I bought the 1990 remake of 'Night of the Living Dead' for £2:99, which I was quite pleased with, despite the fact I would then have to carry this for the rest of the trip.
We had decided on our journey the day before. Our last stomp had been to Falmer, back in October, as had the 'Other Side of The Marina' walk. In September, we had investigated the scrubby Sussex Downs environs of 'Benfield Valley park', but had failed to locate the observatory which had been promised on the map. We had settled this time for 'Industrial Zone Shoreham', with the possible destination of Shoreham itself in mind, (though we were as liable to turn back from this if we got bored, tired or distracted. As it happens we did make it to Shoreham). We had only 'done' this walk once before, the end of July 2007, the day before I started working at the call centre. That had been a rididulously hot day and the industrial zone was strange; a mysterious and illicit nudist section past the private beach where bodies keep being washed up. Naked bodies of indeterminate sex, rising from the sea like zombies, whilst, seemingly oblivious, families walked their children and dogs on the paths just above.
Hmm.
Stomps are punctuated by incidents, splitting the walk into chapters. The prologue to this walk, consisted of the discovery of a small cafe, just past the King Aldred swimming pool, called something like 'Mr Bumbles'. I've walked past here numerous times, but never noticed this before. A small hut, the interior bedecked with Christmas decorations and tasty looking pies. We sat on the plastic chairs outside, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, debating whether to go back to the garage to get some rizlas as we had already used our last two.
We decided not to and pressed on.
What do they call this place? Celebrity Beach? Something like that. Millionaires row maybe. A private beach anyway. There was something bleak and desolate about it though, the houses looking all empty and haunted in their seemingly abandoned air. I am always glad when we have left the private beach behind. As I said above, bodies seem to keep being washed up here. I wonder if the celebrities feel haunted by it all. If they live here ever. We saw no-one. I couldn't stand to live here.
After clambering over a rocky bluff, we enter into the industrial zone proper. The beach is a mixture of sand and pebbles. Scraggy grass grows up the slope that leads to the factories, dockland machinery, warehouses and locks behind us. The beach is littered with empty drinking bottles and bits of industrial waste; rope covered with rust, rusty cans of factory effluvium, rusty tracks, rusty wood. Anything here becomes infected with rust.
The beach was empty (we only saw one other person, a dog walker with two admiringly friendly dogs). The sense of isolation was heightened by the factory walls that lined the beach, giving it a claustrophobic air. I don't know if the factories are ever used, but they have that same abandoned air as the celebrity houses we had just passed.
Two great iron columns (rust covered of course) rose from the beach, relics from some forgotten industrial revolution. Bits of seaweed and barnacles. Against a pleasingly glowering sky they looked like gallows, or lost temples dedicated to some savage, polluted god.
The landscape of the industrial zone behind us was as strange. Great machines like magnified crows hunched over unseen prey, odd little huts, a thousand pipes and chimneys. It was all a hypnotising jumble of mess; piles of bricks left here, a clutch of pipes abandoned here, a repository of feral, broken objects.
All this led to the beach accunulating an almost M.R.James-esque ghost story atmosphere; the lonely walkers on the beach (and we felt far, far from Brighton here), the too-still sea, and the too-busy sky, and yes, you could imagine something following you from groyne to groyne... Not a white sheet as in 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You', but a ghost born of factories and power stations; a sheet of corrugated iron, walking jaggedly toward us across pebble and oil drum littered sands. There were no seagulls, only an infinity of crows.
After we had passed the base of the power station chimney, we came to some kind of wharf leading out over the water. It was covered with black barnacles and seaweed, and at the end of this strangely purposeless wharf, another great rusting pillar, or column, rose up into the sky.
This was very pleasing, more so as I discovered a few rizlas in my pockets so were able to smoke as we sat at the end of this narrow wharf, looking out to sea. We both wrote a poem. It wasn't a very good poem I wrote but the line 'the bleak Sunday shores offer a consolation' parallelled Joe's line about 'the sea soothes my troubled soul'. We had a discussion about his line afterwards. His criticism was that it was a cliche, which it was, but it was also true. Neither of us are particularly happy with out lives at the moment, but being out here, watching the lapping brown water under portentious skies...
We moved on, passing by a small cafe, situated deep in the industrial heartland of the zone. What was it doing here? Why was it still open on a cold Sunday afternoon in December? Come to that, why was this section of the Industrial Zone so busy with families and dog walkers? Actually, I could see why. Industrial architecture is always interesting, and the maze of walkways and corridors, docks and bridges so tightly packed together became a veritable outsider artist drawing, all chaos, precision and neurosis. A faulty cartography for unmappable climes.
We worked our way through the interior of the Industrial Zone and onto the road to Shoreham, scene of the infamous January 2006 walk, where Joe, Andy and myself entered a state of existential boredom walking along here.
Nothing to see here, just MFI warehouses, scraggy strips of grass, trundling, deafening traffic, advert hoardings. And it goes on so long. Even yesterday, when we joined the road about halfway down, the walk to Shoreham just seemed to take... forever.
Nearly dark by the time we arrived.
Shoreham is an interesting place in its bleakness, probably because I usually only come here in Winter, which only adds to it's 'end-of-the-world' air. The shops were closing by the time we arrived, but Joe was able to buy a 'meat square' in the co-op, because he hadn't adequately bought enough provisions for the journey. We crossed the covered walkway over the river. The tide was out (the is always out here, the river only a rumour, and this only adds to the sense of dreamy desolation). Small boats lay stranded, rotting on islands of scraggy grass, sinking into the dangerous looking mud. A horror comic landscape.
We soon arrived at the houseboats. A strange tourist attraction these. Great hulks of old ships, precarious gangways leading from walkway to decks. Welded messes, repositories for junk; planks of wood, washing machines, a streetlamp fused onto one ship, an actual bus, or coach, part of the hull of another. Many of them are painted by, seemingly, old hippies, proclaiming peace, love and cannabis. Such statements are out of place here. The boats have a far more brooding quality, a feeling of ancient-ness. Who lives here? How much do they cost? Do the floors slope inside? I preferred the more nameless hulks, vast military-ghosts, portholes allowing no insight, no access, no information. They seemed to suggest places of nocturnal and occult conspiracy.
The walkway was interesting too, a raised platform between the boats on one side and an undergrowth filled ditch on the other. Tall houses beyond the ditch cut you off from the rest of Shoreham. Trees, well, small bushes really, sloped over the path, giving the impression of a tunnel, and the regularly placed lamps cast pools of orange light. It all gave the quality of a strange dream, only half remembered in the morning. The quality of a background in a surrealist painting. Something hyper-real, too lucid, and ultimately, without reason, haunting.
At the end of the walkway, we stopped, looking across the road and into the fields beyond.
'The walks over' Joe said.
he was right.
We headed back into Shoreham proper, had a pint at the Duke of Wellington before catching the bus back to Brighton. Not that we went back to our respective homes straight away, but to Brighton Pier, on deserted days, a place with a not dissimilar atmosphere to some of the places we had been that day. The closing ritual to the stomp. We played 'House of the Dead IV' and did disgracefully, not even getting to the end of level one, before having a cup of tea, and finally heading back to the less than pleasant buildings where we live.