London Orbital Read online

  Anna made the mistake. She used the word ‘Brighton’. The house didn’t care for it. The bedroom window, when she moved close to it, cracked into a lacework of tributaries. A map of the River Lea and its quarrelsome sibling, the Lee Navigation. With the New River breaking away, heading off in the general direction of Islington.

  This was one of those London days when the light was no light, a grey hood. Trapped inside a gigantic light-bulb. You re-breathe, you use something that is already used up, exhausted. Cold cars coughed smoke. Walking was forbidden. North of the M25, on the far side of Waltham Abbey, footpaths had been closed off. Locally, the gates of Haggerston Park were padlocked; no access to the football pitches, no sylvan shortcut to Hackney Road. The authorities, in a frenzy of political correctness, removed the baa-lambs of the city farm from their paddock.

  Driving along what had once been called the Ml6, that early section of the orbital motorway, from Waltham Abbey through the fringes of Epping Forest, south towards Purfleet and the bridge, you could see black smoke. A heavy pall over the mass graves of pigs, foot-and-mouth victims petrol-roasted in secret barbecue pits. The original outbreak had been noticed in a slaughterhouse near Brentwood. Little Warley and Great Warley, highlighted on TV’s maps of shame, were conveniently off-road, with easy access to the M25 for the meat lorries, the animal transports.

  Essex was plague country. Invisible airborne contagion closed the city’s markets: the aisles of Smithfield were deserted. Hungry rhinoviruses fulfilled their destiny, causing blistered eruptions in the mouths and about the hoofs and teats of cattle, hogs and sheep. Sinister factory-farm sheds we had crept around on our M25 walk, protected by barking dogs, the hum of generators, were accused of malpractice.

  The whole deal with the orbital motorway was called into question. The original Thatcherite pitch (civil engineering plus photogenic road-building programme being part of the Great Leader package) was anti-metropolitan; it was about protecting the suburbs. Nasty, dirty trade goods, all that was left of the north’s industrial heritage, could be detoured around the city – without invading, say, Finchley; or being contaminated by the alien hordes of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The road replaced the working river. Seen from a distance, across a rough pasture golf course in Essex, tarmac glistened like black ice. As soon as the M25 was opened, swans lifting from the Thames at Staines mistook the bright silver surface for water; there were several nasty accidents. A report in the Evening Standard (February 2001) described the trauma suffered by a man, on his way to visit a retired rock star in the Surrey stockbroker belt, when a large white bird crashed on to the bonnet of his car.

  The M25 shifts cargo, transports workers from Middlesex into Surrey. It carries contraband, dodgers of excise duty, grotesquely stacked humans, prepared to pay a premium for a ticket out of some Balkan hellhole. The road has become the business, while the river, emptied of everything except landfill barges and cheerless pleasure craft, is a backdrop to computer-enhanced heritage and development scams. The Thames is a false memory, constantly referred to in terms of its back story: the Globe Theatre (faked), madeover power stations, blacking factories and tanneries reinvented as luxury apartments, self-governing islands with top dollar security. You see the river but it isn’t there. You hear the road but the noise is explained away as part of the general acoustic interference that assaults our ears.

  The M25, from being the pet and the pride of an autocratic government, has been rapidly downgraded to a rage-inducing asteroid belt, debris bumping and farting and belching around a sealed-off city. The orbital motorway is a security collar fixed to the neck of a convicted criminal. It enforces a nocturnal quarantine.

  Launched, mysteriously, as a highway to the wide world, it was soon revealed as the inspiration for tabloid headlines, YES, I AM THE M25 KILLER: Daily Mail (31 March 2000). M25 KILLER NOYE GUILTY OF MURDER: Evening Standard (14 April 2000). HOW TO SURVIVE THE M25 (We explain how to use your cut-and-keep maps): Daily Mail (24 January 1988).

  The M25 wasn’t a way of avoiding London, or a way of protecting the shires from urban corruption (socialists, non-voters); it was a convenient back lane for housebreakers, a shuttle into the excavated chalk quarries (ghosts of wartime tunnels and bunkers) now imagineered into virtual unreality shopping cities. Planet Retail. Satellite Ikea. These off-highway zones, on either side of the Dartford Crossing – Lakeside, Thur-rock, and Bluewater – set up their own impenetrable micro-geographies; traffic islands, loops, dead ends that mimicked the motorway system. Bluewater looked like the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, a duty-free holding area. Water was the pitch, the selling device. A park, an idyll, a day out: a destination for those who have no good reason to travel. The old Cockney favourites, Margate, Ramsgate, Southend, Hastings, were superseded, given over to asylum seekers, banished inner-city dole bandits, workshy inadequates. Bluewater was a real outing to an unreal place. Once you’ve been there, in the silence, the aftershock of travel, when the skin of the car stops vibrating, you learn the awful secret: there is no there. The question remains: ‘How many compulsory purchases do I have to make to get out?’

  What else is the M25 good for? Auto-jousting: the classic road rage scenario. The Brinks-Mat alchemist (Kenneth Noye) in the Land Rover Discovery, travelling into town from his well-protected Kentish pile, arrives at the Swanley interchange at the same moment as red Rascal van-man (Stephen Cameron) and his girlfriend. A traffic light at a sliproad holding impatient motorists a beat too long. There are so many CCTV cameras on poles around the orbital motorway that this affray is pretty much an audition for Crimewatch, or another botched British gangland feature film.

  ‘He stabbed me, Dan.’ With a four-inch blade, which Noye happened to have about his person. Through the heart and liver. The witness, called at the trial, was piloting a white Roller.

  The crime seems to be a straightforward confrontation, a matter of hierarchy, aspirational lifestyles. Noye, the wealthy Mason, with plenty of good chums on the force, the chancer who has made it into Kent, colliding with a kid from the South London suburbs in a red van. The shocked Roller-owner, a solid businessman, is there to keep a disinterested eye on the vulgar affray.

  But it’s not quite as simple as that. Roller-man, Alan Decabral, has substance, it’s true: twenty-odd stone of it, in a red and black rugby jersey. His eyes, in press photographs, are wary, nested in pouches of angry skin. The beard is grey, hair long and unruly. Rings, bracelets, thin watch. Antiques, guns, Hell’s Angels, drugs: Decabral was a fairly typical new-money Kentish rate-dodger. Everything about him – shirt, beard, biography – solicited disaster.

  ‘The man who put road-rage killer Kenneth Noye behind bars,’ according to the Observer (15 October 2000), ‘was sitting in his son’s car outside Halford’s in Ashford, Kent, when a man appeared at his window and shot him once in the side of the head.’

  The participants in the Swanley interchange drama, two dead and one imprisoned, drift from newspaper shorthand to full-blown figures of myth. Driving on the M25, coming over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, fumbling for your coin to pay the road toll, nurdling into the right lane, brings out the stories. Every cab driver has a Kenny Noye yarn: bent coppers, Masonic conspiracies, buried bullion. It is always assumed, rumoured, that the three men – killer, victim and witness – had plenty of previous, criminal connections. Three cars, three lifestyle statements, converging in the wrong place: one of the gates that act as circuit breakers, disturbing the energy generator that hums continually around the undisciplined body-mass of London.

  The orbital motorway, opened in a spirit of jingoistic triumphalism, rapidly declined into a service road for toxic landfill, somewhere to shift an earlier era’s mess; the rubble of asylums and hospitals, munitions factories and firing ranges. The road gave access to new Legoland housing developments. The curvature of the M25 was a fraud, reality was a series of badly stapled straight lines, local sprints (Potters Bar to Waltham Abbey, Upminster to Purfleet, Shoreham to Godstone), or ramp
s leading directly into the major off-highway retail parks, Bluewater and Lakeside, Thurrock.

  Any attempt to drive the circuit, or to come to terms with that journey, enforced metaphors of madness. The motorist in his helmet-on-wheels, with its petrol-burning engine, dirty exhaust plumes, faulty electronic circuits, entered into a contract with sensory derangement, diesel-induced hallucinations. He (or she) underwent the sort of voyage towards insanity, breakdown and reintegration that R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatrists of the Sixties advocated. Solitary Italianate water towers, at points of vantage around the road, on hillocks at Shenley and Claybury and Dartford, become the markers, compass points in a map of madness. Because something has vanished, because it can no longer be seen, doesn’t mean that it’s not there.

  The M25, previously known (through brief trespass, short-hauls to Gatwick or Heathrow), was a thing to be tolerated, endured rather than experienced. The trick was to move back, step away, treat the road as a privileged entity, a metaphor of itself. Enlightenment came with distance, detachment.

  At the cold turn of the year, on 1 January 1998, it began. I drove out to Enfield Chase. The area around Bull’s Cross, parks behind red brick walls, garden centres, stables, eerily quiet roads, was very seductive to me. The ‘story’, if there was a story, had moved away from my old Whitechapel midden, from the river: developers and visible artists, explainers, exploiters, had taken care of all that. Whenever a heritage is recognised and celebrated – a moment such as the staging of an exhibition in acknowledgement of the legacy of the Whitechapel Library, Isaac Rosenberg and the circle of Yiddish poets (just as the Library is closed) – is the time to move on, move out.

  Enfield was a dream; themes read about but not known, half-recalled mentions of the gardener John Tradescant, Capel Manor, E.A. Bowles at Myddelton House. Through the bare trees, you could hear the faint siren song of the road, the M25. Everything was frost-slick, glistening. Streams and rivulets caught the light. The parks and gardens were, of course, all shut; I made a note of the opening times, for another occasion.

  Coming into Whitewebbs Lane, with the notion of finding a bridge over the M25, I heard a sound, a howling, that was to be one of the defining characteristics of my motorway walk: the chorus of the boarding kennels. Domestic animals are dumped, out on the fringes, where their din will cause least offence. On a working day, the yelps and snarls, the prolonged baying, would be muffled in traffic, minute-shavers hustling towards the motorway.

  On Bull’s Cross bridge (one of the current 264 that span the M25), you could hear it, acoustic layering; the way tyre-hum modulates as speeding vehicles move from grey to blacktop. Then the dogs and cats in their cages, riders coming out of the woods around Theobalds Park. A fragment of chat from two dog walkers who passed me on the bridge: ‘In exchange for a pension, they gave him a gravel pit.’

  A fox, emerging from the Western Jewish Cemetery, shot me a baleful glance and stalked into a roadside copse. White Webbs Park, on the south side of the M25, had been pleasant enough – as long as you kept to the designated walkways: PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT, ARCHERY IN PROGRESS. This was a day for family groups, adults talking, children impatient, new mittens, new bicycles. Theobalds Park: a royal residence, landscaped by Tradescant, then the estate of a brewing family who could afford to reassemble Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar at the bottom of the garden as an overambitious folly. And now? The Abbey National Centre of Excellence. A surveillance checkpoint and voice box to interrogate unlicensed visitors. I loved it. This was the true territory for the fiction that is England.

  You could slither down a slope, on the north side of the road, and sit under the motorway bridge (the New River insinuates itself beside you). There’s an Ice Warning box (ready to flag the next glaciation). A mosaic ramp with hexagonal panels, regular as crystal. Tough grass breaks the tiles. Feral picnickers have been here before me, leaving punctured tins and cans of strong lager; soggy handbags and soggier documents.

  I sit, comfortably, with my back to one of the piers, munching my sandwiches and deciding that, yes, I want to walk around the orbital motorway: in the belief that this nowhere, this edge, is the place that will offer fresh narratives. I don’t want to be on the road any more than I want to walk on water; the soft estates, the acoustic footprints, will do nicely. Dull fields that travellers never notice. Noise and the rush of traffic, twenty-four hours a day, has pushed ‘content’ back. An elaborate scheme of planting (two million trees and shrubs, mostly in Surrey and Kent) would hide the nasty ditch with its Eddie Stobart lorries, its smoke belchers. The M25 walk was the next project. The form it would take and the other people who might be persuaded to come along, to liven up the tale, was still to be decided.

  3

  Those boards outside newsagents’ shops, with their broken haikus, fascinate me. DIANA’S RESTING PLACE CHANGED. ROYALS URGED TO SELL BRITAIN. SPICE GIRLS ‘SPLIT’ FEAR. FOOT AND MOUTH ARMY MOVE IN. Anonymous poetry, urgent and anxious. Banishment of definite and indefinite articles. Present tense. Absence of lower-case lettering. It was a style to which I aspired. The city composing its own disposable legend. Royalty, crime, transport, weather. On a daily basis. Unselfconscious surrealism. Even the one-eyed got the message. Burdening yourself with a newspaper was a waste of time. Terse black-on-white newscasts told you everything you needed to know. More effective than contradictory traffic updates and fog warnings flashed from gantries above motorways.

  On the final afternoon of the old millennium, the boards predicted DOME FIASCO, hours before it happened; hours before the salaried opinion-makers and big cheeses were abandoned on a cold station platform in Stratford East. Up to that point, they’d bought the New Labour spin, the shameless bullshit. The Dome, an obscene fungus on Bugsby’s Marshes, empty of content, serviced by a flamboyant Underground link, had received a good or neutral press. The Jubilee Line had been shoved through (magnificent stations, no customers) while Hackney was kept in purdah, outside the system. Just because the brand name of this expensive interloper sounded regal and upbeat.

  East London stayed indoors. The Acorn pub on Queens-bridge Road promised: CONTINUOUS SKY. Motor traffic was forbidden to pull over, take a look at the river or the preparations for the big night. MILLENNIUM CLEARWAY. SPECIAL. CONTROLS APPLY. NO STOPPING.

  Helicopters droned overhead like a gangland funeral. Some of the Wapping riverside balconies made a halfhearted attempt at getting into the spirit of things by hanging year 2000 banners and a few coloured balloons. A melancholy airship drifted over the News International fortress. Knots of well-wrapped folk gathered in front of the Tower Hotel, gazing hopefully upstream at the gothic spires of H. Jones’s nineteenth-century bridge. Whose party was it? Had they been invited? Where was the action?

  I wanted to stay with the story – Dome, Millennium, meridian line – but I couldn’t face the orchestrated riverside jollity. The Thames resisted such vulgar and ill-considered nonsense, an evening of stage-managed spontaneity: ‘rivers of fire’, red, green and gold starbursts, the spinning of the new Ferris wheel, the London Eye. The Eye wasn’t working, it had failed its safety check. The heavens were shrouded, rain beads hung in the heavy air.

  My first notion was to try the Beckton Alp. Far enough out, down the A13, to avoid the crush; high enough to see the fire-stream as it raced, barge to barge, along the river. This manmade conical wonder, a ski slope overlooking the City Airport at Silvertown (retail park, golf driving range, Northern Sewage Outfall, arterial roads), seemed to be the ideal platform. It had everything I looked for, a privileged overview as grand as anything produced by the early London mapmakers, Anthony van den Wyngaerde or Wenceslaus Hollar. The Alp had been perfect for the solar eclipse, attracting locals and periscope-wielding enthusiasts, but it might prove bleak and damp, and difficult to reach, on the last night of the millennium.

  The other obvious choice, honouring the Greenwich meridian, was Waltham Abbey. My circumnavigation of the M25 had begun and ended there; I would align
myself with the fuss at the Dome, but drift to the perimeter, staying alert for distant noises, flares in the sky. I booked a table at the Shuhag Balti house (WE ONLY SERVE CHICKEN BREAST); I’d noticed the Millennium Special menu as I’d plodded through town on the last leg of my walk.

  Anna, by now, was used to my unorthodox notions of a good night out. Waltham Abbey had the edge on Beckton Alp. In light rain, we ambled out of a deserted car park.

  Early evening, around seven o’clock, it didn’t seem as if much was happening. We tried to get into the Welsh Harp, a quiet enough pub at the end of a day’s tramp. It’s a special feeling to pull off that double, abbey and pub. The great church doors of Holy Cross and St Lawrence were always locked when we made our starts, just after first light. And locked again when we returned in the dark. The presence of this sealed building, its surrounding orchards and fishponds, travelled with us. The astrological ceiling, with its zodiac symbols, deep blues, golds and whites, was a conceptual umbrella carried into the Essex countryside. The ceiling had been designed by the eccentric William Burges and put in place in the 1860s. Its theme, according to the brochures, was Time.

  The guy on the door of the Welsh Harp, no bulge-eyed bouncer, let us know that the pub was off-limits, a private party. Through soft rain, we tramped the wet flags of the market square, the spokes of medieval street pattern, pedestrianised (but lacking pedestrians): the usual small-town English mix of charity shops, minicabs (Abbey Cars), insurance, junk food. As the locus for a millennial celebration, Waltham Abbey was looking pretty good. Picture-book pubs closed to strangers. Motorway fringe motels booked solid with revellers. Slithery streets. Church bells. The Lea in spate, and soon to flood the ground-floor rooms of outwardly mobile retirees. Cue: local news interview as the three-piece suite floats out of the window.