2013 part 1.

2013.

The pathways of the heath were carved from stone, little labyrinths in the dry stonewall, mosses and lichens, brooks carving out pathways on the woodland floor. Fungi livid in oranges and reds burst through the muted carpet of grey and burnt umber.
At last I was with Ishmael. He took my hand, he held me, we’ll get through this, I promise. We wandered, for miles, in circles, lost in this magical world of hidden pathways and mist.
We made plans to get out, I knew how it could be, Scotland, Yorkshire, the coast in Northumbria, I knew people up there, the living was alright, they still had a water supply and good services generally. There were food shortages and some restrictions on movement but it wasn’t anything like here. Up there was austerity but really people were free.

From here you could see the cuts and wounds, the scorched swathes of London. Plumes of smoke rose somewhere in the south east of the city, I guessed Lewisham, maybe the big shopping centre there, and elsewhere flashes of fire. I was stunned by the extent of the damage. The old central areas of the West End and City were under heavy armed guard to stop looting and occupation. You could see from this distance that stretches miles long, particularly near the Thames had just vanished into black, smouldering heaps. As quickly as the skyline had altered with glassy futuristic towers so it reverted as one by one they fell into jagged smoking ruins.
The smell was acrid, like a burning chemical factory. There was a toxic pall over the city, but as it shimmered and gleamed in the pink light I was struck by its beauty.

We set out walking through the newly carved territories, London was smarting and smouldering but still there.
The underground had closed six months before, it was dangerous structurally and the money had run out for rebuilding. The Piccadilly line had been ripped to shreds most of the way between the old Strand station and Turnpike lane leaving its’ tunnels blocked and shattered. The main railway stations were lying in ruins and it was under there that the most dense subterranean populations lived. People said there were hundreds of families down there, but it was hard to know. I hadn’t been down since 2010 when the first campaign started in earnest. Before that there’d been sporadic flare-ups, little indicators of the onslaught to come, but then when it really started it was everyday, carnage everyday. And that’s when all the big businesses and banks started to leave London, all the offices in Canary wharf, the City and in Paddington basin, all those places just shipped out into this circle on the periphery, round the M25. They got people working from home or in micro offices in unmarked buildings.

Since the strife it was like the old wars, people had started squatting out of necessity. Some just stayed in their own flats, no one cared about paying some landlord when the crisis was at it peak. Housing had become another issue, one of survival not speculation, repossession orders were torn up and bailiffs barred from estates. There were waves of people coming all the time from other parts of London like Elephant and Castle after it got really badly hit and all that area round Waterloo and Oval, loads of them started turning up. They’d had the dirty stuff down there, radiation I mean. There were other areas devastated with bomb damage and fire but you could fix that up and people did. There were big estates where the brutalist lines were suddenly broken and you had all this stitching and patching going on with plastic sheets, rugs, tarpaulin and bin liners. But when they used the dirty bombs, everyone was getting out dragging their kids and only the most desperate were left. And where could they go?

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