The Outer Edges

More edgelands action in Essex in Kieran Evans's film The Outer Edges, a visual partner to Karl Hyde's forthcoming new album Edgeland (perhaps a sequel to Underworld's album Barking?). According to The Guardian story about it, it's a 'rather moving, artful documentary essay about the Essex borderlands, following the route of the river Roding down to the docks on the Thames estuary.

This is an edge I've got some personal history with having lived on boats in Barking Creek, the final crook of the Roding into the Thames. It was, and is, bandito country - with pirate capitalists, ex-junkies, ketamine zombies, DIY supremos, artists, suicides, thieves, prostitutes, greasemonkeys, rafts of global flotsam. When the weather was warm, and a hog was roasting riverside and a fairy light strand of bulbs hung across the sky casting magic illumination on a gathering of friends - then you valued the marginal. But in winter, when you heated snow from the roof in a pan on a gas ring to get warm water to wash with, when the wood in the shitty stove just heated the air above your barely insulated roof, when you woke in the morning and stared up at the ice rings on the nail heads in the ceiling wood above - it was a different kind of edginess. Still magickal, often, mind - but without the seasons, the place was also cursed. Shady deals, bad debts, boats stolen under contract - one man dead by drowning, one woman dead by hanging, the paedophile confessed under acid, children at risk from all sorts (lots of loco, little parentis - even from the parents), there was a hex on the place. I had the feeling, that the longer I was there, the worse the things I would see.

There was potential there - these are the types of 'no-road' places Stewart Brand speaks of in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built places where nobody cares what your doing, creative incubators, little bits of freedom. At a stretch, you could also go all Hakim Bey - at times it was a temporary autonomous zone. Too temporary though, and there were ruthless landlords (riverlords?) 'running' the place through their creepy Coco the clown agent - a curly haired scare face you could imagine waking to see stood above you with a knife to your neck. The Sausalito houseboat community of San Francisco it was not. 

Before too long we tried to make an escape, hired a licenced skipper to guide us round the coast to Maldon. We caught the cats, threw off the ropes and slid down the creek to Reiner's boat, paying cash for diesel tapped from its abundant tanks. [He would hang himself later too, down some other creek.]. The water was with us, the barrage was open - out past Creekmouth, under the tidal barrier and we were in the Thames proper heading east.