While Pierce looked at timetables, I pecked out a quick email response to the press contact at Wolfe / De Chauncey. Earlier interview overrunning, unexpected circumstances, sincere apologies, possible to reschedule? And then another train east: not a Tube, a mainline train, albeit an unhurried local one. We only went one stop, but the change was startling. Beyond Barking, the city really fell apart. The railway line itself spread out as if no longer pent up by urban pressure, splitting into a wide braid of sidings and halts. Disused goods cars brilliant with graffiti fed rust to beds of weeds. Other trains passed us, rushing out of the city on separate, better, tracks. We were in the distribution steppes, the pylon orchards. Expansive wastes of tarmac patrolled by lorries and cranes, and filled with shipping containers.

Dagenham Docks Station – I liked the unregenerated name – lay under a swerve of elevated motorway, a speck of Edwardian brick caught between the concrete teeth of a later era. No one disembarked with us. Leaving the station, we were confronted by what I knew from the map to be the south-western corner of the Ford factory. This turned out to be underwhelming: no obvious forest of belching smokestacks or cathedral of automation, just unmarked, unremarkable low-rise buildings in fleshy brick. If they made any noise, it was drowned out by the motorway.

Behind us, behind the motorway and the station, the plume. To be seen across London, the plume had to climb high in the air, and so it did, an impossible tower of churning ink. But here, almost at its base, the surprise it offered was its width. It appeared to fill a whole quadrant of the sky, blacking out the south-east. A vast field must be alight to fill that footprint; more than ‘alight’ – that was a word for foil-tray barbecues and dinky wood stoves – this was ablaze, consumed, engulfed, erupted. Yet there must still be fuel down there to burn, to ecstatically release and send its residual filth up into that roiling pillar. My curiosity was already almost sated, we were closer than near, we were inside it. The air was foul with it. That filling-station tang I had noticed this morning had become a burning tyre under the nose, a nauseating blast against the back of the throat.

Perhaps we had already done enough: I had dodged De Chauncey for now, gone on a trip that would make for scenic colour, and now we could turn around and go to the pub. I could wash away some of this hydrocarbon stench. But no, it was too soon. We had come all this way, we had to make something of it – and Pierce was just getting warmed up. I could see his enthusiasm rising.