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APT WCs
In the corner of the back yard, right by the river, a small house in brown brick crouches beneath a straggling buddleia. Four small windows, each one different, peer out across the concrete flood barrier under heavy, pink granite lintels. A knife grinder stands idly by, feet in the weeds, waiting for work, next to a rusting metal skeleton that bears a passing resemblance to a horse. Above the door the letters W and C are separated by neat blue dots pressed into a lintel somewhat larger and more authoritative than those above the windows. And just above the lintel a new, white, power cable slips between the bricks and tethers the small house to the main building like the painter on a ship's jolly boat. But despite this intrusion it remains still, quiet, apparently unchanged since it was first built.
It is, like the Harold Wharf building itself, loaded with time. Like the bricks of the wall on which it sits above the creek, it is soaked in the history of the river. And like the wreck stogged firmly in the mud on the opposite bank it clings to the past like an old man's coat. It is built on the bones of the Slaughterhouse that provided meat for the table of Henry VII (who died whilst the Sistine Ceiling was still incomplete). It looks out down the yard to the pottery that supplied the crocks for the Bounty whose crew took them to Pitcairn in the South Pacific. And it was constructed just before the First World War by James and Absalom Dandridge, rag and bone men extraordinary, whose warehouse was to be used for 'picking and sorting' rags. It is as much a part of the creek as the mud is and as much a part of Deptford as the bridge.
Inside, the air is as soft as the mortar between the bricks and smells of the whitewash flaking slowly from the walls. Half the space is empty where once there would have been sinks perhaps, but 'empty' at APT is a euphemism for 'owners-unidentified'. The other half consists of four small enclosures, as if in a cattle byre, each separated from its neighbour by a huge slate panel painted white, each containing its own atmosphere:
One has a door that droops indifferently and damp-pitted walls like a hermit's cell. One has a plastic slatted window that blurs the outside world into corrugations of blue. In another the chain that pulls the flush ends in an elaborate spiral and hangs before a pane of polka-dotted glass. The one on the end contains a sink and a small square of mirror that reflects the ragged ceiling. Stand above one of the bowls and you see your face reflected in the water and you know that when flushed it will inevitably join the river. These are not cubicles so much as chapels of prayer or rest in which to go placid amid the noise and haste, as if they had been commissioned by unknown workers for the everlasting unremembrance of their names.
Like the studios next door they are places of contemplation, places of industry, places of functional necessity. But each space, inscribed with its own accidents, is a reflection of the whole and a whole world in itself.
