Invisible

I must have crossed the Dartford Crossing hundreds of times in my life. I live in Kent, the rest of my family live in Essex; any family gathering or meet up usually involves a northbound passage through one of the two old Dartford tunnels, and a return to Kent via the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge.

It’s on the way back to Kent that the M25 crossing affords a spectacular view west along the Thames. If you time your journey home just right, you can often see the sun setting behind the distant skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and the City of London.

As attractive as that view can be, it’s the rather less conventionally attractive industrial spread that you can see on both sides of the motorway as you climb the span of QEII Bridge that has always interested me. A mix of oil tanks, cement works, freight jetties, and other manufacturing, distribution and storage facilities spill out from under the looming shadow of the QEII bridge, predominantly, but not exclusively, on the north side of the river.

And so, on a recent warm and balmy Sunday evening, I took a drive from home to walk along the riverside with my camera, intrigued about how close I could get to what I’ve observed from the motorway.

But first, I inevitably faced the queue of traffic to get through the northbound crossing. Fortunately this time it was only a ten minute delay, but we’ve often been stuck here for considerably longer – the inevitable delay that we always have to factor into a journey north of the river, a hazard of being separated from the rest of my family by the Thames as it begins to significantly widen, free from the confines of the city it flows through.

I have a vague childhood memory of these two tunnels being the only way you could cross the river here, before the QEII Bridge was built. I wonder to myself how long I may have waited here in traffic if these two tunnels had remained the only passage from Kent to Essex and back.

I drove onwards into Essex and immediately turned off the motorway towards the small settlement of Purfleet. Purfleet sits upstream from the Dartford Crossing, a few miles from the consumption-driven agglomeration of Lakeside, with its shopping mall, Ikea store, and countless retail parks, and abutting the Thames and the industrial detritus that hugs the river in this part of Essex.

Purfleet feels like a place that is somehow untethered from everything around it. Just a single village convenience shop serves its population (the other shop in the village now boarded up), the trains entering its station on their way to Central London do so across a level crossing, the kind of thing you find in the countryside, not in an urban area like this. This feels like a forgotten place, a place left behind by the metropolitan mega-city it sits on the outskirts of.

Walking across the level crossing, I follow a path onto some scrubland that separates the village’s main road from the Thames. Concrete blocks intersperse the path, emblazoned with the tags and graffiti of those that have come here before. I come across a makeshift shelter, with a rudimentary sofa and table nestling beneath, an empty packet of Marlboros on the table – evidence of life and subversion in this wasteland.

Walking a bit further and I come across an area where rubbish has been dumped, including an old fridge. This place feels marginal. There’s a sense of the badlands about it that fills me with a degree of unease. Is this a safe place to be walking as the evening light fades with an expensive camera in hand?

I push on through my anxiety towards the bank of the Thames itself. Not that I can see the river at this point. The embankment has a large flood wall all along the river here. This area is, after all, downstream from the Thames Barrier. Should a storm surge threaten the City, then the Barrier walls would be raised and, with nowhere else to go, the deluge would spill out of the river’s channel downstream threatening the shoreline in places like this.

Reaching the riverside, a sense of claustrophobia adds to my unease. The narrow path here is bordered by the high river wall on one side and barbed wire fencing on the other. The barbed wire separates the path from more scrubland, though at this point I am able to photograph the concrete footprints of previous buildings and industry remain, gradually being obscured by the relentless reclamation of nature.

I eventually reach the oil storage tankers of the Esso oil terminal. In the late evening sun they take on a luminescent rust colour, their faded and flaking paintwork giving them a tiger stripe makeover through my viewfinder. Pipes stream in all directions from the refinery and across the path I am on and out to a jetty that sticks out on the Thames. I climb up the ladders that periodically intersperse the flood wall to get a better view. I’m rewarded with a beautiful vista westward into the city as the sun lowers in the evening sky.

Looking along the riverside a number of jetties poke out into the path of the Thames. Some are abandoned and long since fallen out of use, a few still look like they are in use, including the one with a stream of pipes that reach across from the shoreline to the refinery.

I eventually work up the bravery to step onto one of the old abandoned jetties, this one more of a concrete quay (the wooden deck boards on some of the others look like they might give way under my weight). Just a few old abandoned huts sits on the plinth, each making perfect photographic silhouettes against the setting sun in the west. Inside each hut sits some kind of wheel connected to something that lies below my feet. I realise these must be how the flow in and through the abandoned pipework below must have been controlled.

Sat on the plinth there’s a strange silence to the scene. The QEII bridge looms downriver, but I’m too far away to hear the noise of the constant traffic it carries. The City looms in the other direction with the sun sinking lower on the horizon. There’s the odd sound of a seagull somewhere above me or across the river. But other than that the evening is perfectly still.

Sat on the quay, I can’t be seen from the river path. The river is too wide here for me to be seen from the opposite bank. For a moment I am invisible to the rest of the world. That thought stays in my mind as I climb back onto the river path and walk back to Purfleet, the invisible place sat on the outskirts of the mega-city.