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all images Ruth Oldham
in this flat estuary landscape. There are some gentle hills in the north and south of London, but east to west it is floodplain topography. Green spaces, woods, are also few and far between. The naming of this polluted waste heap as an ‘Alp’ strikes me as a wry comment on the perceived local lack of wilderness, greenness, nature, hills. The first project to transform the mound (to try to make sense of it perhaps) was the creation of a dry ski slope in 1989. The Alp finally lived up to its name. One could catch a chair lift up to the top, enjoy the panoramic view, ski down it at great speed and then have a drink at the Swiss style bar at the bottom. But such a straightforward transformation was not to be and the ski-slope closed in 2001 due to persistent subsidence problems. We might imagine this mound as an Alp, but it reminded us quite firmly that it is something else entirely. And we are still trying to work out what that something else is.
Faced with a great mound of rubble we are reminded of the inherent weakness of the system in which we live – a system based upon seemingly unending consumption of raw materials, with little consideration for the waste and pollution generated along the way. We know that it cannot go on forever. We are familiar now with the comparison of our linear system with cyclical system of Nature – where the notion of waste barely exists as everything is reused and transformed. So we take nature’s example, and attempt to transform the mound into something we can use. In the case of the Beckton Alp, the name is very revealing. Various accounts seem to agree that the alpine nickname dates back to when the gasworks were fully functional, perhaps the 1940s. The real Alps would have been a mythical landscape, a far-off dream, for most of the people living and working in and around Beckton at that time. Even today they remain exotic in contrast to day-to-day life
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