It gets me every time. That hallucinatory instant. Da da da da da, da da. The Pearly Queen drill of the EastEnders signature tune, as the map spins and the known world is stood on its head; what you thought was the blunt lingam of the Isle of Dogs is revealed as the East Greenwich peninsula. That vertiginous, and slightly desperate, readjustment of consciousness is what you face as you emerge, high on diesel fumes, road rage and subterranean paranoia, from the tiled bore of the Blackwall Tunnel. Nobody crosses water without paying a price, the ferryman's wages. The peninsula, marshlands giving way to the toxic debris of the South Metropolitan Gas Works, is represented on maps from the Seventies (which now appear positively antiquarian) as a radiant blank. Polar nothingness bordered by custard-yellow feeder roads steering over-ambitious voyagers back to the tunnel and the distant prospect of a return to civilisation.

LRB 2 October 1997 | PDF Download