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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LONDON ORBITAL

  ‘A book of great passion and energy about the M25 from one of the masters of the English sentence’ John Lanchester, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

  ‘Sinclair’s prose is exquisite, his approach is a distinctively English take on the whole strange business of psychogeography. The walk around the M25 which is the basis for the book is no mere trope, but a way of penetrating to the very jam of the London doughnut, by excavating the dough within which it is encased’ Will Self, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

  ‘A fascinating account of his heroic walk around the M25, a journey through a new Britain of retail parks and industrial estates’ JG Ballard, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

  ‘An instant classic: part social history of the unsung lands that lie beside the M25, and part cultural analysis of this endless terrain of science parks, golf courses, hypermarkets and speculative housing that makes up the New Britain of 2002. A feast for admirers of Sinclair’s rich and quirky style’ JG Ballard, Guardian, Books of the Year

  ‘Rambling, self-indulgent, brilliant. Partly a diary, partly a ferociously learned, literate and curious exploration of the plight of the nation’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘An absolute joy. Sinclair’s England is horribly recognizable, a land of retail parks and jerry-built housing… he uncovers a rich history’ The Times

  ‘Sharp, astute, at the top of his singular game… Sinclair is a London visionary and a crackling prose writer, he sees and maps esoteric connections’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Very readable. It’s a hoot’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

  ‘His writing is so good it’s invisible. Nothing escapes Sinclair’s eye, and the mass of piled-up detail accumulates to convey the atmosphere of London’s outskirts, sometimes pine-scented, sometimes considerably gamier’ Time

  ‘Dazzling word-wizardry, unsettling and illuminating… a pleasure to read. He proves that he is so accomplished a stylist that he can (and indeed frequently does) write his way out of a lay-by. Classic Sinclair territory’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘The truest, most knowledgeable living writer on London. London Orbital is a late, retrospective addition to the genre of millennial literature, but also the most enlightening and observant’ Evening Standard

  ‘Wonderful, remarkable, ambitious. A great, strange book giddy with information, by turns gritty and lyrical. London Orbital is a glory; keep a copy in the glove compartment’ Sunday Times

  ‘Full of satire, intelligence and a contrariness that will come back and taunt you from the verge next time you’re stuck in a tailback’ Big Issue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor’s Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; and London Orbital. He lives in Hackney, East London.

  London Orbital

  A Walk around the M25

  IAIN SINCLAIR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Granta Books 2002

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  13

  Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2002

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193601-7

  For Renchi, and for Kevin Jackson,

  shadows on the road

  … for tho’ eclipses of thought are to me a living inhumement and equal to the dread throes of suffocation, turning the valley of vision into a fen of scorpions and stripes and agonies, yet I protest, and glory in it for the sake of its evidence, of the strength of spirit that when inspir’d for art I am quite insensible to cold, hunger and bodily fatigue…

  Samuel Palmer (letter to George Richmond)

  K. Hodges (London, W8): What was your worst moment on TV?

  Jeremy Paxman: Interviewing a man under the impression that he was a schizophrenic in care in the community when in fact he was an engineer who’d come on to talk about the M25.

  Independent (29 September 1999)

  Contents

  Prejudices Declared

  Soothing the Seething: Up the Lea Valley with Bill Drummond (and the Unabomber)

  Paradise Gardens: Waltham Abbey to Shenley

  Colne & Green Way: Abbots Langley to Staines

  Diggers & Despots: Cutting the Corner, Staines to Epsom

  Salt to Source: Epsom to Westerham. Through the Valley of Vision, to Dartford & the River

  Blood & Oil: Carfax to Waltham Abbey

  Millennium Eve

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Prejudices Declared

  1

  It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.

  I have to admit: I was developing an unhealthy obsession with the M25, London’s orbital motorway. The dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape. Was this grim necklace, opened by Margaret Thatcher on 29 October 1986, the true perimeter fence? Did this conceptual ha-ha mark the boundary of whatever could be called London? Or was it a tourniquet, sponsored by the Department of Transport and the Highways Agency, to choke the living breath from the metropolis?

  Thatcher, who never grasped the concept of ‘dressing down’, her range going from airfixed-in-pressurised-dimethyl-ether (with solvent abuse warning on can) to carved-out-of-funerary-basalt, decided that day, or had it put to her by style consultants, that she should treat this gig as an outside broadcast, a chat from the paddock at Cheltenham, not the full Ascot furbelow. A suit, semi-formal (like Westminster Cathedral), in a sort of Aquascutum beige.

  Autumn. No hat. A war footing: mufti-awkward. Argie bashing, ranting. Cromwell-fierce, hormonally stoked, she wields her small scythe, dismissing the unseen enemy, stalkers in the bushes, eco-bandits, twitchers, pennypinchers, lilylivered Liberal fifth-columnists, bedwetters, nay-sayers.

  ‘I can’t stand those who carp and criticise when they ought to be congratulating Britain on a magnificent achievement and beating the drum for Britain all over the world.’ Rejoice. The
military/industrial two-step. That old standard. Mrs Thatcher went on to rave over ‘the Sainsbury’s effect’, the introduction of US mall-viruses, landscape consumerism, retail landfill.

  YES was the word. Thatcher filtered in a perpetual green glow, like a Hammer Films spook. Bride of Dracula. Green meant GO. This business with ring roads had been floating around the ministries since the Thirties, since they’d noticed that cars were taking over the planet. At first, the idea had been: car as servant, parkways, elevated heaven ramps (Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death). Road-ribbons between lakes and golf courses. Orbital grooves that interconnected, working their way out from a loop around the royal bits (palaces, parliaments) to the inner suburbs, Hampstead and Holland Park. To the outer suburbs, unknowable Stanmore, Totteridge, Ponders End. To green belt nothingness, the great nowhere at the edge of Epping Forest; a territory defined by the red Italianate water towers of Victorian and Edwardian madhouses. And why stop there? Why not opt for abandoning airports and retaining huge runways that roared past Oxford, Cambridge, Winchester and Canterbury?

  The snipping of the ribbon in October 1986 prefigured other ribbons, blue and white bunting that would turn the inner cities into a necrophile carnival: the spite-karma of terrorist outrages, turf wars. Irishmen, on their way home from the pub, shot, colandered, by rapid response units, for the crime of carrying unlicensed table-legs.

  Newsreel paranoia is such that in the back files, even at this distance, nothing more than a face is revealed. We may know who is cutting the ribbon, but not where. Time has been suspended. There were, from the start, M25 myths: the woman who thought it was an oversized roundabout, the family who decided to keep going until they saw the sign for Newcastle. Archive footage doesn’t let on: the location where Margaret Scissorhands, amputator of naughty thumbs, did the deed is still a secret. It wasn’t at the official starting point, Junction 1, south of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, near Dartford. Nor was it within range of the Esso storage tanks at Purfleet, the soapy perfume of Procter and Gamble’s West Thurrock factory. Nor out in the deadlands, where the blue highway loses its nerve and turns yellow for the elevated Thames crossing. A hawk-eyed swoop at the cameras on the remote north-west frontier, not too far from South Mimms service station. So it was rumoured.

  A television researcher with superhuman determination, a man called John Sergeant, spent weeks on the road, living in a rented scarlet Mondeo, checking co-ordinates, chasing whispers. He narrowed the area down to a section of straight road, somewhere between Potters Bar and Junction 21 (the Ml interchange). He would interrogate newsreel clips, freeze frame, photograph the monitor; return to the motorway. Compare and contrast. He worked the hard shoulder. He scanned soft estates. He came close, but he couldn’t pin it down with absolute precision.

  That was left to Tony Sangwine of the Highways Agency. The film-essayist Chris Petit and I spent a morning on the road with Sangwine. The man was a visionary, a landscaper and motorway horticulturalist. He realised that taking on the orbital loop was the contemporary equivalent of getting a Capability Brown commission. Motorways were the last great public parks. Sangwine knew every weed, every salt-resistant clump of grass. He spoke lovingly of roe deer and short-tailed voles. The Highways Agency had planted more broadleaf woodland around the M25 than anywhere else in England. ‘We have introduced the woodland flora you associate with ancient, semi-natural woodlands,’ Sangwine boasted. ‘Bluebells, dog mercury.’

  Sangwine was there for the opening party, the marquee on an old airfield, the lunch that Thatcher didn’t attend. She arrived in a bullet-proof car with security outriders. She snipped the ribbon and vanished. Sangwine pointed out the exact spot, an emergency phone kiosk on the northside hard shoulder, close to where the River Colne flows under the motorway, close to the padlocked shell of Napsbury Hospital.

  The opening of the road was a moment of tremendous occult significance; within minutes the first circumnavigators were on the move. Simon Calder, one of nature’s folding-bike men, travel editor of the Independent, had his thumb out. No fear of the snipper, the scissor-madame. He found the experience ‘dull’. No Kerouacian epiphany, no download of spiritual gain.

  No members of the general public, the great unwashed, were allowed to witness the ceremony. Corporate freebies. Big time blacktop sprayers and their guests. Plus vetted journalists, Murdoch’s tame jackals. A guest list like the Dome bonanza. The first car breaks down at 11.16 a.m., precisely one minute after opening time. Within hours, it is perfectly clear that this unmagical orbit is the absolute contrary of the future Millennium Dome: the M25 instantly exceeds its expected quota of visitors, day trippers, casuals – where the flow to the Dome shrivels, week by week, until the promoters are forced to drag in school kids, the disadvantaged, confused tourists bribed with a ticket to ride the London Eye. Those who thought the downriver coda was compulsory, the price they had to pay for their ascent into the clouds.

  Driving around the road was useless, as I discovered when I endured 250 miles in a day, with Chris Petit, clockwise and anticlockwise, coming in off my old favourite, the A13. And detouring into Lakeside, Thurrock. Into Theobalds Park and Heathrow. More was less, further was nowhere. In the morning, after we paid our pound and crossed the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, we dragged, lurched, crawled on a three-lane conveyor belt, side-on to single-occupant, lightweight jacket-on-hook, cellphone voyagers. Soon these unfortunates would be penalised for their brief period of meditative calm: soothing tapes, landscape-format viewing screens.

  This, according to one commuter interviewed for a television documentary, was the best of it, the highpoint of the day. The only contact with the changing seasons, the Surrey hills, canny roadside plantings. With England. This was the only respite from work stress, the on-line office, domestic responsibility. A car trip, Southend to Reigate, pushed up the heart rate but smoothed the soul; easily accessed reverie, a sensuous interplay of light and movement. Novelty that is only novelty because the route is so familiar.

  On summer evenings, listening to a concert or radio play, one man admitted that he would go the long way home: West Byfleet, Staines, Uxbridge, Abbots Langley, Potters Bar. But regulations, imported from the States, will tax solitary motorists, those who refuse to share their pod, those who need this quiet time; they’ll be shunted into the slow lane. Ostracised for the only reason that makes it worth running a gas-guzzling, money-burning machine.

  Nobody can decide how long the road is, somewhere between 117 and 122 miles. By the time you’ve driven it, you don’t care. You should be way out in another eco-system, another culture: Newport (Mon.), or Nottingham, or Yeovil. The journey must mean something. Not a wearied return, hobbled, to the point of origin.

  It was obvious, therefore, that the best way to come to terms with this beast was to walk it. To set out, counterclockwise, from Waltham Abbey, and to complete the circuit before the (official) eve of the New Millennium.

  2

  Frosted bedroom windows, one of them cracked. Cars quilted with powdered snow. We had been talking too loudly about leaving Hackney. A fantasy, obviously, after all these years, brought on by zeros, overweening house prices. The terraced cottages of city bank clerks had declined to outside-lavatory-and-tin-bath (with scrupulously tidy garden) of honest working folk; grandparents, parents, four or five kids shoehorned into a plasterboard-improved box. By the 1960s, the Haggerston/Shoreditch fringe had been infiltrated by the abdicated middle classes (layabout communards, demi-artists); then by administrators, potential curators, first-rung medicals, single parents who spoke two languages. A few years after parturition most moved on. The school opposite was now a teachers’ centre: there were more cars to catch the snowfall.

  Our house didn’t like quitters. It had given us shelter for more than thirty years, witnessed childbirth, seen books written and published. Casual chatter about a shift to the seaside was a compensatory gesture, a delayed midlife crisis. It didn’t mean a thing. An excuse to sample oysters i
n Whitstable (Notting Hill prices), to swim at Walberswick (Southwold: the new Hampstead), to admire Charles Hawtrey’s blue plaque in Deal (retired bookdealers, everybody I used to know).

  The Bethnal Green painter Jock McFadyen who was quietly building up a bleak topography of absence, doomed snooker halls, drinking clubs on the cusp of oblivion, told me that he always felt the presence of the sea, tons of dark water, lurking behind Hackney’s railway embankments and stuccoed pleasure palaces. It was only a matter of time, in his opinion, before all this trash, dirt and dust was swept away. We were amphibians in remission. On good mornings, looking out on the wet street, I was sure that he was right.

  The early months of the true millennial year, 2001, had no good mornings. The house was delivering, more in sorrow than anger, its response to our treachery: the ridge from the top of my spine to my left arm was painful. The local massage man (warm office, psychology paperbacks) called the condition ‘frozen shoulder’. Two years, he reckoned, if I was lucky. I’d have to train myself to write standing up, at a lectern, one-handed like Ernest Hemingway. Pre-Hailey, Idaho. Pre-shotgun. Luckily, my former bone-tweaker, a man built like a wrestler, who operated out of Purley, wrenched the shoulder back into life. ‘Bag of frozen peas every half-hour,’ he said. ‘Work through the agony. Grab a doorknob, try a dozen kneebends.’ Within a week, I was able to manage the gears on the old BMW. I could drive around that south-east quadrant of the M25; an hour to Junction 6. The ‘shoulder’ of the motorway, Bluewater to Brands Hatch, became my shoulder; frozen by traumatised muscles and tendons, clogged by weight of traffic.

  Rain was still falling. It started around September and it hadn’t stopped. Now it was turning into sleet.