london belongs to me

Unfortunately the Victorian time-tunnel elevated corridors linking the buildings together above these lanes (one corridor inside, one plein air; walkway above), have been securely decommissioned. Still the complex exemplifies the piranesian traits of space desimplified by the slow contingencies of history. Before the day staff arrive, you can clamber up the fire-escapes and down the stairwells with impunity. Vertiginous half-corroded iron platforms from whose apex you look down on endless gormenghastly towers and courtyards, and peek in through grime-frosted windows at comatose rooms awaiting demolition.

The visit is made in search of Joseph Merrick. Across Whitechapel Road from the hospital's main entrance stands the building, now home to a sari shop below and a taxi firm above, where Dr Frederick Treves first paid to visit a freakshow featuring a sensational new 'exhibit' called The Elephant Man. In a small garden square behind the main entrance a statue of Victoria has on its reverse a relief featuring Treves lurking in the background. A tiny museum houses a perfectly-sewn replica of Merrick's hood, immediately bringing to mind Lynch's slow, deliberate zoom into the single square eyehole, into the nightmares of the Elephant Man, filled with puffing steam-monsters, dark smoggy streets, the curse of monstrosity and the lash of human cruelty.

But as it turns out Merrick is only a monstrous sign, avatar and genius loci; of a psychogeographic papilloma. Walking the perplexing labyrinthine passages, crawlways, roofs and courtyards, the in-between spaces that form a negative architectural image of the Royal London, brings on the confusion and want of architectonic calm proper to a structure haphazardly extended many times to house crazy medical technologies that always stay one step ahead.

Everywhere are relics of paradigms overthrown. Getting rid of the past is a never-ending grind. We find discarded piles of 50s minicomputer hardware tangled with bits of iron bedstead. The arteries of long-obsolesced fuel supplies, studded with taps and switches and stubby outlets, still cling to the walls like dead vines. In many places the powers-that-be have given up in exasperation and simply locked the ghosts in, doors never to be opened again save by wrecking-ball.

In salvageable sections, the past is chased systematically from the inside outwards. Where the building has been updated, it is mostly by way of a currettage that leaves the outer crust oily and crumbling but installs a layer of shiny new material on the inner chambers. The interior is the usual decontaminated functional utopia immediately shabbified by contact with the NHS. You could be anywhere.

We make a visit to the small, immaculate museum which devotes a good proportion of its limited space to the history of Joseph Merrick. The curator tells me he is petitioning the more exclusive medics-only Pathology Museum for the return of Merrick's boiled and bleached skeleton, the plastercast of his body, and the model church he built while housed in the Royal London (a german cardboard-cutout kit hyperbolically elevated by Lynch to a Merrick original, a towering monument of innocent imagination). He also confirms (disappointingly) that our earlier attempt had indeed successfully located Bedstead Square, where Merrick was moved after receiving enough public donations to keep him for his remaining days, and in which he spent those days.

In Lynch's film this is where Michael Elphick, in his imposing role as utter personification of brutal human cruelty, brings his cockney guests (including a young Pauline Quirke) to ogle and molest the resident freak. It's all left to the imagination now - all that remains are a couple of bricked-up rectangles which used to open on a corridor leading to the rooms in which Merrick stayed (the actual rooms were destroyed by bomb damage during the war). Modern-day Bedstead Square is made all the less salubrious by the phalanxes of shocking-yellow wheeliebins full of human blood and body fat, sawed-up bones and syringes, and all the other waste mountains that NHS private contractors like to pour into vans to be parked-up in laybys until the cloacal stench disturbs the locals. (Blood-miles, a parallel measure to the green's bugbear 'food-miles'; in the heyday of the Royal London they would have incinerated all the waste on-site, no doubt adding deliciously to the atmosphere).

Years of underfunding have saved it thus far but, obviously too tough for the heritage treatment, the Royal London (according to the curator) is scheduled to be flattened. web-based Elephant Man devotee (site worth a look if only for the Brasseyesque computer reconstruction of what Merrick would have looked like 'if he had been normal' LOL) has been harassing the museum to blue-plaque Merrick in Bedstead Square, unlikely to happen since this old-world Royal London is soon to be erased. There are already signs that the underfunded steampunk fortress is in inevitable transition from just-managing to just Management. Whilst many doors open onto dead rooms, unworthy even of redeployment, others declare that they nurture within unwholesome assemblies such as 'Risk Management Training Schools', fragments of the future arrived too early, flipcharts and handouts awaiting their human counterparts under bare lightbulbs and flaking lead paint.

In the glow of the red light, I serve up via obsolete, messy, chemical process a few monochrome prints, hoping to catch and intensify the feeling I had that morning. The photographs must be printed coal-black, high contrast, pushing the captured light into dark hyberbole, to catch the fleeting half-miraculated vague essence. The sights, smells and sounds of solid-state capitalism not-yet liquidated. Red brick under the grime of centuries. The low slow-motion screech of langurously-swaying iron chains, the faraway tick-tock of a deep-earth occulted pendulum. Despondent resonances faintly echo Dickens' Coketown, distilled essence of the industrial city, "where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness".