London Orbital Read online

There’s always a warm glow in not belonging, in being the only abstainer at a fleadh in Ballycastle, the only non-Iberian bull-runner in Pamplona who hasn’t read Hemingway; it means that you’re not responsible. You don’t have to enjoy yourself. It’s not part of the contract to become one with the spirit of place. You are not obliged to spew, fight, sing, dance, wreck your car or in any other way amuse yourself. And this is very liberating.

  I felt so. I’m not sure that Anna agreed. Waltham Abbey wasn’t Hackney. It was, to a significant degree, populated by ex-Hackney escapers who had tunnelled under the wire years ago, at the first sign of the place going to the dogs: when they started selling croissants, jerk chicken and putting up notices advising you that you were walking down a cycle track. Old-timers were nervous of nail extension parlours and hair straightening booths that stayed open all night, doing a steady trade with hooded youths and brothers who’d traded in black, 6-series BMWs for less conspicuous Audis. As the only way to drive through the City of London without being pulled.

  Waltham Abbey and the inhabitable pockets of Epping Forest were white Cockney on the drift, the tectonic plate theory. Hackney becomes Chingford. Notting Hill relocates to Hoxton. Rafts of like-minded citizens (holding fast to their prejudices) nudged, ever closer, to the rim of the map. It took the M25 to stop them disappearing into Fenland mists.

  Cabbies, always awkward sods, had uprooted years ago: try finding one who didn’t grow up in Bethnal Green and who doesn’t now live in Hertfordshire or Essex. Strange choice. To commute towards the jams, to spend your days snorting diesel, for the privilege of a Saturday shop at an out-of-town mall, nine holes on a Sunday morning. More space – before the latest animal husbandry disaster – to run the dog.

  You wouldn’t have known, from the bunting and the flashing lights through the windows of Waltham Abbey pubs, that there was anything special about this night. The driving on the road out, Lea Bridge Road, Hoe Street (Asian mini-marts fully operative), Walthamstow dog track, Chingford Mount, was unexceptional. Bumper car rules: red means go. One headlamp (full-beam) as standard. White vans, windows open, drum ‘n’ bass, take precedence over every other form of transport.

  The police were busy elsewhere, organising their lock-ins or earning overtime at Blair’s Riverside Follies. Policing this turf, at the best of times, is retrospective: sirens, three car chases, weaving in and out of sluggish traffic. The state mercenaries were funded, so it seemed, to put up blue and white decorations around murder sites. The ground was guilty, it had to be made an example of, framed off. Landscape art. East London, as I walked it, was becoming a lake of crisp cellophane, fields of wrapped flowers. Concrete bollards that sprouted nosegays. Lipstick-pink peonies, goldenrod and primrose, held in place with brown parcel tape. Commemorative cards: JUSTICE FOR HARRY.

  Eventually, a lesser pub, a hangdog funeral parlour, desperate for custom, let us in. The barmaid slipped us a couple of tickets. The atmosphere was like a wake for an elderly bachelor nobody really knew or liked. They were going through the motions. It was the least they could do, but they hadn’t hated him enough to start on the celebratory sweetmeats, the booze. He wasn’t worth a song or a dance. Maybe the wake was for King Harold, the last Saxon king, senior stiff in the burial ground behind the abbey. They had his portrait up on the wall and they’d draped it in coloured streamers. The men hadn’t arrived yet. A suspicion of women, dressed to the nines (and well beyond), perched at the bar. Kids skittered around, seeing how far they could go without getting a slap. We were the relatives who belonged to somebody else, the wrong side of the family. We smiled and nodded, paid for our drinks, slipped away before the fun started.

  It isn’t easy to stretch a curry pit-stop over three hours, but the Shuhag was happy to watch us try. Under ordinary circumstances, Anna keeps me out of restaurants that don’t have customers. She wants the reassurance that the experience is survivable, other reckless souls are prepared to give it a bash. Tonight, for this once-in-a-thousand-years moment, rules are relaxed. The only options are going back to the pub for a bag of pork scratchings, or home to bed.

  Wine is wasted on mussel beran, chicken tikka, lamb korma, king prawn dansak, and the rest. The usual eccentric mix westerners cobble together when they order by numbers. The equivalent, I guess, of Yorkshire pudding with winkles, gravy, Spanish omelette and boiled sprouts. But, wasted or not, we kept it coming. It was turning into a great night. The waiters were friendly. The ceilings were low. A ‘fully air-conditioned, Balti & Tandoori restaurant’ doesn’t fit easily into one of those step-down-from-the-pavement premises that are usually turned into lace-curtain tea rooms, or tourist brochure and pictorial ashtray information centres. The Shuhag and its chilled Chablis kept us in a state of non-specific wellbeing; dim red light, comfortably upholstered banquettes, unobtrusive service. A table filled with small hot dishes, replenished as soon as they disappeared.

  Other diners manifested. A foursome who told us they wanted an early meal, something to line the stomach, before taking the train into town, to catch the excitement. They were astonished to hear that we’d travelled in the opposite direction, by choice. But whichever direction, in or out, we were all on the same beam, the meridian line: Waltham Abbey is one of the few places where they take notice of zero longitude, mark it with decorated pillars and a straight walk. Enough to let you feel that you’re getting somewhere, before it all comes to an abrupt end: perimeter fence, strategic planting and ‘Government Research Establishment’ on the map.

  By eleven o’clock we were moving, unsteadily, towards the church. Again, we didn’t really belong, wrong clothes, and again the locals were welcoming. There was a certain powdery greyness about the anoraks and the rigorously disciplined hair, a certain sheen. Steradent and talcum powder. The god-folk were outfitted well short of Songs of Praise; they weren’t expecting cameras. Thin-framed spectacles glinted in candlelight. Footballer-evangelical rather than ritualistic High Church; they weren’t tambourine-bashers but neither did they go in for vestments and Latin and incense.

  Superstitiously, I kept to the end of the row – in case I had to make a run for it. But the service, good Essex voices reverberating through that tall building with its twisted Norman columns, contained satisfyingly pagan elements. A ‘Hope Tree’ had been set up, to which we were invited to attach postcards, millennial wishes. We weren’t, by then, in a fit state to write, but I lurched up the aisle and shoved my fractured telegram in among the pine needles.

  The church was packed, the ritual unforced, the location powerful and pertinent. In such a place, the vertical view of history holds: the back story is not forgotten. The important dead are given their alcoves. Nothing disappears without trace. No part of this evening’s ceremony shames the past, or forces present quietude into some gaudy exhibition that it will be unable to sustain. ‘Time’ is coded into the celestial zodiac, the syphilitic alabaster of the dignitaries, landowners, floating in their niches. ‘Time and Eternity’ is the tag line for this service. ‘For the Passing of One Age and the Beginning of a New Millennium. Looking Back – Looking Forward.’

  Heads down in prayer or private meditation; audible creaks as the congregation struggle to their feet, to let rip with the first hymn. Some of them are in wheelchairs. There is one black family. We have been instructed to assemble cardboard boxes which will contain millennial candles. Not easy with a fistful of palsied thumbs.

  Parson: Jesus Christ is the light of the world.

  Congregation: A light no darkness can quench.

  So out of the church we straggle, smiley-touchy, in it together, candles cupped against the breeze and the damp night, over the meridian flagstone and down towards the car park at the back of the abbey. Singing as we process: ‘Don’t carry a load in your pack/you don’t need two shirts on your back.’ That one wasn’t written by a walker, I thought. The second shirt is to get you into the pub at the end of the day, when the first one is sweat-soaked, streaked with the colour of your cheap rucksack.
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  Stern, sheepy heads of the elderly; mortality shadows, so many other services to recall. The younger, louder couples, families, are clustering around the beacon, a brazier on a pole, that will be lit at midnight. Essex, England. Munitions factories. Official Secrets Act. Parkland cleaned up by the Lee Valley Authority. Exotic plantings that have survived only because they were on protected government land. The picnic grounds on the west side of Horsemill Stream are, apparently, very popular with Balkan refugees. They gather on Sunday afternoons, balalaikas and barbecued chicken.

  The revelry, as we approach midnight, is coming from transistors. Subdued citizens in masks with flashing lights, wobbly antennae, stand around waiting for the heavens to crack open. Small groups have gathered in the drizzle, camp stools and folding tables, crackers, bottle of fizz, to see in the millennium: right on the line, zero longitude, listening to the distant hum of the orbital motorway, tyres on a wet road.

  The millennial brazier is actually an elongated Bunsen burner, a cough of gas waiting for a spark. There’s a village feel to the event; a release from corporate sponsorship. Public spectacles that only succeed in messing up the quality of everyday life by imposing road barriers, razorwire, CCTV and ubiquitous gooseberry-fool security jackets (lapel-connected to unseen controllers). The colours of the city at the end of the century: luminous custard with a drape of blue and white plastic ribbons. Smoking holes in which something has happened. Sirens. Cone islands. Chemically upbeat breakfast-time TV presenters announcing another snarl-up on the M25, slowmoving traffic between Junctions 12 and 16, an overturned lorry at Hobbs Cross; Kent disappearing underwater.

  Waltham Abbey is the cathedral of the motorway. I feel as if we’ve just listened to Father Mapple’s sermon, from the pulpit with the rope ladder in the whaling port of New Bedford, at the opening of Moby-Dick, before setting out on a hazardous voyage. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

  Up goes the flame, like an over-oiled chip-pan; fizzing white at the edges against the dull night. Up go the fireworks, splinters of light, coronas and diadems and pink-gold ruffs. Muffled detonations. Public and private displays. City under siege. Blitz memories. A spectacular burst, sequential and increasing in noise and circumference, has some of the old-timers believing that the munitions factory has exploded. But it’s no longer there; like everything with a dark industrial history, the Royal Gunpowder Mills are in the process of being turned into a visitor centre, a heritage attraction.

  Christians embrace and link arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On a portable television set, belonging to one of the picnicking families, we see the Thames, the Teflon Toadstool, the crowds; warped and rolling. We can just make out the ironed faces of the national waxworks, dutifully mouthing doggerel of the Scottish borders. What a bizarre spectacle: ‘Piety’ Blair (as Michael Moorcock christened him in his novel King of the City), Edinburgh-educated, grappling with the Germano-Highlander Elizabeth II (inspiration for the Dartford Bridge), in a rictus of homage, pantomimed ecstasy. The certain knowledge that New Labour’s patronage of this awful tent was a disaster. And, worse, they are stuck with it. He can feel the laser glare of all those newspaper editors, fruit-fly celebs, who were kept hanging about on a Jubilee Line platform in the middle of the night. And who now face a nightmare journey home through the disgruntled mob.

  *

  Heading back down the Lea Valley, I stand on the Seward-stone Bridge over the M25, to watch the lights of the cars: two streams, gold and red. It never stops. Firework displays on the horizon. Flares and flashes reflected in the reservoirs. There was still, at this distance, something epic about the idea of London, the crenellation of bright towers.

  Later, I would hear my children’s accounts of their night in the thick of it, down at the river: nothing much to see, a moving stream of fire that didn’t, unremarkable fireworks, trains not running or impossibly crowded. Young girls who fainted or were attacked and couldn’t be got to hospital, or were turned away from police stations. Epic traverses in unsuitable shoes, further and further east, to escape the crush, the craziness. A decent party, all things considered. A subdued rave. Very average. Better next time, next millennium.

  I thought of the cheery foursome from the Shuhag. If their night went as expected, the glamour of the big city, Last-Night-of-the-Proms with Catherine wheels, they were prepared, for the first time, to walk home; the full fifteen or twenty miles, they weren’t sure, up the Lea Valley to Waltham Abbey. Madness. A journey no sane Londoner could be accused of attempting.

  Soothing the Seething

  Up the Lea Valley with Bill Drummond

  (and the Unabomber)

  1

  27 March 1998. Greenwich peninsula. The Dome. I’ve been here before, many times, in all weathers, picking at the scab. I’ve been here with the photographer Marc Atkins. The river is always a buzz. Atkins was working then in black and white, future memories anticipated, instinctive retrievals; the darkness he tried to draw out, heavy skies reconfigured in an improvised darkroom, secret weathers. The point of the day, the walk, was to lift that grey lid, the miasma of depression that hangs over the city and its inhabitants. To wait for the moment when the sun breaks through, evening beams cartwheeling over an heroic landscape. You have to be out there all day to be sure of getting it. The remission. The pay-off that makes urban life worth enduring.

  Atkins, allowed into the tent at an early stage, when there was nothing to be seen except loose cables and optimistic Zone signs, was defeated. The photographers hung back from the print journalists, they tracked each other. If Atkins stood still, the guy from the Mirror and the girl from the Docklands giveaway froze with him. If he scratched, they scratched. He was taller than they were, he had the advantage; he didn’t have to carry an aluminium ladder. But, this time, he couldn’t help. The site had nothing to offer, dead ground; poisoned earth that refused to glow. Bugsby’s Marshes had its own special magic: negativity. Nothingness. Zero with a skin on it. I watched the camera obscura table at the Greenwich Observatory as it scrolled in the local landscape, an invisible meridian line fired across the bows of the Dome.

  Longitude was the bait for Bill Drummond (KLF activist, pop star, inventor of bands). Drummond was an interestingly complex mix of artist and anti-artist, performer and hermit, scholar, iconoclast, polemicist, prankster and well-grounded human. More than most, he honoured the past – particularly his own – even when he had to invent it. His Scottishness was important to him, although he’d lived for years in England; Corby, Liverpool, Buckinghamshire. He went north, to the island of Jura, when he decided to burn a million quid. (As a way of shaming the substance, the wads of paper, Drummond always referred to it as ‘quid’, never pounds. Quid gave the condemned loot an agricultural classification. Chewed and hawked tobacco. Quid was nineteenth-century slang for the vagina.) Using bundles of banknotes as peat was a transgressive act that prefigured the grotesque barbecues of farm animals, the smoke plumes that marked out the north-east corner of the M25.

  Drummond was into a form of conceptual art that had mud on its boots. It was meant to work. You didn’t just photograph it and file it away. The ashes from Jura were a register of ugliness that would be swept up and compressed into a brick. Another notion that Drummond played with, talked about, was to infiltrate this brick, bad karma, into the wall of Gilbert Scott’s power station (soon to be revised as Tate Modern).

  Bill’s sidekick Gimpo (visionary ex-squaddie) had a very clear take on the M25. He saw it as something to be circumnavigated at the vernal equinox; pile into a van at South Mimms (everything starts there) and keep going, wired and crazy, cameras rolling. Gimpo was the inspiration and Drummond the scribe. Bill wrote about the affair in a piece entitled ‘Gimpo’s 25’ which he published in the collection 45. By that point, the onetime manipulator of the charts, theatre designer, was blown: he had come out in the identity he had been sliding towards for years, writer (i.e. leper, outcast). Writer
and self-publisher. Double whammy. Most of us started that way – and kept quiet about it – but Drummond had triumphantly descended the evolutionary scale. He’d chucked away his chance of an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother to scribble in cafés, hang out in small town libraries – and plod up the Lea Valley with a pair of distressed psychogeographers.

  Gimpo is the white-van man of your worst nightmares. See him parked up in South Mimms and you’d leave three or four clear bays on either side. Drummond, as he recounts, responded very positively to the idea of an orbital spin: ‘Fuckin’ brilliant idea, Gimpo. Can I come with you?’ This was back in the days when the motorway could be seen as a video game, an arcade challenge (such things were actually marketed). Even earlier, at the outset, Thatcherite city boys re-enacted movies they’d never viewed, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point. Head-to-head, from South Mimms to South Mimms, at night: cash-splash, noise, nothing to see. Like driving down the barrel of a gun. Jogging on a treadmill.

  Precise to the point of pedantry, Drummond calculates that it’s 124.5 miles around the circuit. Gimpo is aiming to stick to the fast lane, the outer rim; bugger petrol consumption. His stated aim is to find out where the M25 leads. The demented wheelman’s ambition, according to Drummond, is to ‘soothe his seething’. Like extinguishing a small blaze in a frying pan by dowsing it with kerosene. The M25 is seething incarnate. Gimpo is practising sympathetic magic, treating like with like in sanity-defying doses. Nietzsche believed that ‘only thoughts which come from walking have any value’. And look what happened to him, seething till his eyes popped out, conversations with horses.

  The Gimpo/Drummond equinoctial circumnavigation was a primary inspiration for my M25 pilgrimage, the leisurely twelve-part walk. I liked the way Drummond responded to the Queen Elizabeth Bridge; the pleasure he derived from civil engineering, from the overview of the Purfleet diaspora, oil tanks, wilderness gardens, gleaming blue tractors waiting for export. Distribution and storage (human and otherwise) was the name of the game. Riding the high road over the Thames was the only point on the circuit where the motorway achieves the condition of vision. The rest is foot-down, fingers drumming on the wheel. But the Bridge is not, officially, part of the M25. It’s where walkers are refused entry, pulled over by a cop car, told to swim for it.