London Orbital Read online

  Gimpo wants to be Mad Max, motorhead jester of chaos. He wants to lead an E-fuelled procession of smoking pick-up trucks, customised gas-guzzlers, Gaffa-taped camera cars, in a noise cone, a whirlwind of dead leaves and burnt rubber. A 124.5-mile, bumper-to-bumper procession: so that standing still, being held in the stream, will feel like torrential movement. The rrrr-ushh.

  ‘The further we go, the less familiar it will all become.’ That’s Drummond’s glorious expectation, the germ behind our walk. Gimpo’s gang push it – even talking of a twenty-five-day spin, further – until they achieve lift-off, white van acting like a tin opener gashing the surface of the globe, letting out chthonic spectres. Drummond realises, in one of those vulture-on-the-shoulder flashes, that he is older than Tony Blair. In actuarial time, maybe. By birth certificate. But look, on TV, at those folds, those bruised pouches; look at the eyes. Nothing on earth is older than Blair. The skin job, the hair teasing, the diamond-dust orthodontics, don’t help. The grin that threatens to meet itself at the back of the neck. Blair is so weary. He’s tireder than a coprolite. Older than oxygen. Drummond is his direct contrary, his dark twin. Their Scots heritage aligns them with Stevenson’s quarrelling cousins and potion-swallowing doctors, with James Hogg’s protagonist in The Private Memoirs and Con fessions of a Justified Sinner. Drummond is a true patriot, a grassroots football follower. He wanted to do a non-ironic recording of the national anthem, a picture of the Union Flag on the screen. With one serious prank, plotting to hang dead cows from an off-highway pylon, he was inventing eco-surrealism – in sermon form – years before Blair decided that it would be all right to do nothing, while the herds burnt, heifers were hooked and hoisted, and pigs taken out by expensively trained army marksmen.

  I’m writing this at the vernal equinox 2001, wondering if Drummond and Gimpo are still out there, addicted to addiction, to counter-inertia terrorism; spinning like a blunt needle around the groove, picking up fluff. The trees are bare, the light dead. It’s still raining. More and more of Hackney is being improved: that is, less and less of Hackney is available to pedestrians. The canal path is blocked so that authentic Victorian ironwork can be introduced. Public funds for private projects, hobbyism running amok. Building work has been going on for over a year, beyond my garden wall. Roads are closed off and tower blocks (that I saw going up in the Sixties) are being demolished. Alps of rubble. Dust clouds. The man from the mini-mart wants compensation. The residents of Queensbridge Road are being driven mad by the noise and the dirt. You can never establish the nature of these new alliances, council (bankrupt), state (emollient), developer (benign); Irish contractors, shit-shovellers, as ever, digging the ditches, LAINGS HOMES. Suburbs imported. Estates with no atmosphere but with clearly defined boundaries, points at which security slackens its grip, and you step out of the frame of the surveillance monitor.

  2

  Atkins and I waited for Bill Drummond on a bridge over the A102, alongside the Dome. When the site was no more than a few scratches in the ground, the writer Stewart Home stood here ranting about an omphalos, about Mandelson’s tent being a killing zone (exhaust fumes from the Blackwall Tunnel). The ritual sacrifice of Prince Charles. Underselling his pitch, as ever. It was the day when the news of Princess Diana’s death hit the headlines. Dome and crunched Mercedes were linked in popular consciousness. The route of the funeral procession, from Westminster Abbey to the Ml, in real-time television, proved that surveillance footage, shots of roads, could be sold to the public. The Kennedy assassination was film, home movies marketed by Time-Life. Diana’s funerary procession was drift, reverie, bouquets chucked on a glossy black bonnet. Families gathered in their living rooms, at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, to witness a solemn occasion; something that would never again happen in their lifetimes. Royalty doing the business, earning their corn, by taking part in durational theatre. Demigods who could die. Change the weather. Cure the sick. Bring the slaughtered flocks back to life.

  Death was a spectacle, the Dome was invisible. It didn’t register. Standing right up against it, we couldn’t look at it. We looked across the water, at Canary Wharf, the ice-floe principality of Docklands. The original Tory scam would soon be realised: a temporary circus paid for by lottery funds, a lull (during which we were supposed to forget the shame), followed by property development. Well-connected investment cabals throwing up yet more riverside units.

  Rumours were surfacing about the latest think-tank solution to the M25. After megalomaniac schemes for expansion into eight, twelve, twenty-four lanes, ABCD rings, there was only one way to deal with the problem of the orbital highway. Shut it down. Abandon it. Pretend, in classic New Labour fashion, that it wasn’t there. It never happened. Not our fault. Blame it on aeons of Tory misrule. Rebrand. Henceforth, the M25 would be a Green Way. With commissioned public sculpture. Antony Gormley, obviously. Psychogeographers and alignment freaks were already at work, proving that the Greenwich tent covered the same space as all kinds of mystically significant sites.

  Drummond, hitting his final lap, had a vision. Piers Plowman in a hammock in the back of a jolting white van. ‘I dream a dream where Gimpo tells me that in the future the crusties, the ravers without hope, the feral underclasses, will live on the M25 in broken-down buses, discarded containers, packing cases and anything else that can be procured for nowt and provide shelter against the rains. The M25 will be taken over, clogged up, no longer used as a thoroughfare to nowhere. It will be like one of those forgotten canals behind backstreets in Brum, stagnant and dank, fit only for dead cats and stolen shopping trolleys, until it is ripe for future heritage culturalists to proclaim its worth as a site of special historic interest.’

  As with most of the walks I’ve undertaken with Marc Atkins, ‘we’re setting out as close as we can to six a.m. Bill Drummond will be travelling from his farmhouse near Aylesbury. He’s not driving just now. One year on from the twenty-five laps of the M25, he’s lost his licence. He arrives in an out-of-town minicab, red, with see-through panel in the roof and JET 421212 pasted across the windscreen. Bill is sitting next to the driver, who wears a laminated identity card. The ex-millionaire is a strategic walker and a frequent cab user, Aylesbury to London. Station to farm. A tall man, he hoiks himself out, sniffs the sour air. Green thornproof jacket, stout cords, red rucksack. Glasses attached by a no-nonsense loop. He is immediately into the narrative, attention engaged, notebook at the ready.

  Bill dresses like the best sort of schoolmaster, a twitcher with a dangerous laugh. Atkins is in a long black coat with felt collar (Martin Kemp as Reggie Kray); jeans, white trainers. He bleeps. He’s got a new toy, a mobile phone. His career is taking off. He’s published a book of London photographs and a booklet of nudes. He has to stay in touch with potential commissioners, picture editors, galleries. Most of the incoming calls, on this outing, seem to be domestic. Brief exchanges of pleasantries, mewings. Shopping lists for future meals.

  Dreadnought Street. The name takes Drummond’s fancy. A nautical ghost logged in his notebook, before we double back to Greenwich, climb the hill, pay our respects to the brass rule, zero longitude marker. While I dabble with the notion of tracking the line to the M25, the true conceptualist (Bill Drummond) is determined to follow it to the ends of the earth. I’ll swing west at Waltham Abbey, after a mere eighteen miles. He’ll head south, France, Spain. He’ll probably swim across to Africa. The guy has an evil glint when an idea takes root. Already, I can feel our narratives pulling away from each other. Will his version, sharper than my own, published in 1998 as ‘Breakfast with the Unabomber’, disqualify my ponderous journal?

  The work Marc Atkins does is complementary. He observes the observers; he keeps his own record of journeys that are not of his choosing. The narrative he assembles is fragmentary. It doesn’t have to be read in any particular order. Its intention is to freeze time; a deadpan gaze at some view, a building, a stretch of the river. Very often, I find these photographs more useful than my jottings o
r snapshots. In the best of Marc’s prints, spurned locations come to life. He treats the reproduction of brick courses as a form of portraiture.

  He’ll go anywhere for a good shot. Or he would, in the past. He’s much busier now and has to be booked well in advance. Drummond, I felt, was more likely to ask the hard questions. Why the meridian line? Why stop at the M25? ‘Mean time.’ ‘Zero longitude.’ I liked those terms. They had an undefined, Enochian attraction: science coming to the rescue of the ley line enthusiasts who nominated Greenwich Hill as a site of occult significance. It had been possible once to imagine currents of energy running through the Queen’s House, between the twin domes of the Naval College and on to the tower of St Anne’s at Limehouse.

  The Ordnance Survey brought out a series of maps with the prime meridian clearly marked, so that millennial cultists could locate themselves at points along the line, when time ‘changed’ on 31 December 1999. These maps are to the scale of 1:25,000. The line is printed in green. We don’t have a map. But it’s easy to see that longitude zero skims the Dome, cuts through Bow Creek near the Generating Station and follows the pylons up the Lea Valley. We’ll stay as close as we can and make our rendezvous with zero at Waltham Abbey.

  What I didn’t know was that Drummond was carrying a copy of The Unabomber Manifesto, which he’d picked up the day before at a bookshop in Camden Town. He sympathised with the survivalist lifestyle, Thoreau hut, wild nature on the doorstep. He knew the names of the birds and the beasts. The Lea Valley, with its status as pretend countryside, butterfly sanctuary, deer reservation, dog track, waste disposal unit, munitions factory, wasn’t much use to him. He wanted the full-on metropolitan experience, secret histories; lunacy he could exploit. His underlying fear was that my outing would lead him to ‘the point where terrorism is the only option’. If you carry the book, Bill, be prepared to use it.

  3

  Best Value. Someone somewhere, well away from the action, decided that this banal phrase, implying its opposite, was sexy. Best Value, with the smack of Councillor Roberts’s corner-shop in Grantham, the abiding myth of Thatcherism, was dusted down and used in every public relations puff of the New Labour era. Best Value. Best buy. Making the best of it. Look on the bright side.

  The spin doctors, post-literate and self-deceiving, had no use for subtlety. Best Value. They hammered the tag into their inelegant, overdesigned freebies. These glossy publications, sweetheart deals between government and private developers, political correctness in all its strident banality, existed to sell the lie. Best Value.

  Government-sponsored brochures are got up to look like supermarket giveaways. Strap headlines in green. Articles flagged in blue. Colour photos. Designed not composed. That’s how the planners (the strategists, the salaried soothsayers) see the Lea Valley. As an open plan supermarket with a river running through it. The valley is a natural extension of the off-highway retail parks springing up around Waltham Abbey; exploiting the ever-so-slightly-poisoned territory yielded by ordnance factories, gunpowder mills, chemical and electrical industries.

  The documents put out by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority are more impressive than any inner-city PR sheets. Lee Valley Regional Park Plan, Part One: Strategic Policy Framework runs to 180 pages – with charts, illustrations, maps. Statements of intent. Best Value. Whatever turns you on, the Lea Valley has got it. A media-friendly zone (close to Docklands). A recreation zone for Essex Man (easy access to the M25). An eco-zone for butterflies, deer, asylum-seeking birds. The nice thing about no-go, Official Secrets Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick woods, screening the concrete bunkers and hunchbacked huts from the eyes of the curious, will provide an excellent habitat for shy fauna, for monkjacks. It’s gratifying to learn that, at a period when sheep and pigs and cows, all the nursery favourites, are being taken out by snipers and bulldozed into a trench on a Cumbrian airfield, the threatened Musk Beetle is thriving and multiplying in the Lea Valley wetlands. Twenty-one species of dragonfly on a good day. The regional park is a safe haven for grass snake and common toad. The Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey can claim the largest heronry in Essex, a ‘wildlife watchtower’ with ‘panoramic view’. The 175-acre site should have opened to the public in the spring of 2001, but the outbreak of foot-and-mouth led to an inevitable postponement.

  The Lee Valley Regional Park was established in 1967, the year I moved to Hackney. We had slightly different agendas. The Park planners wanted to transform areas of neglect and desolation, the very qualities I was intent on searching out and exploiting. The first argument we had was over the name. I favoured (homage to Isaac Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double ‘e’, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of Burroughs: Sewardstone. ‘Stone’ added to the author’s middle name.

  The Lea/Lee puzzle is easily solved. The river is the Lea. It rises in a field near Luton, loses its identity to the Lee Navigation, the manmade canal, then reclaims it for the spill into the Thames at Bow Creek. The earlier spelling, in the River Improvement Acts of 1424 and 1430, was ‘Ley’, which is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any given morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir embankments, scrubby fields with scrubbier horses, pylons, filthy, smoking chimneys.

  Without the Lea Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. The Lea is nicely arranged, walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an Edwardian sense of excursion, pleasure, time out.

  Dr Jim Lewis in his affectionate tribute, London’s Lea Valley (Britain’s Best Kept Secret), promotes the Lea as cradle and forcing-house of the ‘post-industrial revolution’: water power facilitated flour mills, shipbuilding, the manufacture of porcelain; then came armaments, gunpowder, chemicals, furniture, bricks; until we arrive at Lewis’s golden age, the moment when entrepreneur and investor get it together in a landscape nobody notices, or wants to protect. Settlers moved into suburbs, before there were suburbs; they cosied up to a working stream. In the same way that a wealthy Victorian brewer, picking out an estate in Enfield Chase, might marry one of his barmaids.

  Everything starts in the Lea Valley, all the global franchises; electricity, TV, computers, killing machines. Forget Silicon Valley, this is Ponders End. Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, attended the Revd Stephen Freeman’s school at Enfield. As a sickly boy he was interested in ghosts. He made a pact with a friend that whoever should die first would return. Seances in a cold bedroom. No word from the corpse.

  Jim Lewis tells us that, at Ponders End, Joseph Watson Swan ‘demonstrated a crude form of electric lamp almost twenty years before the American Thomas Alva Edison had registered his own version’. But the Yank was a sharper operator and put in for the patent. Rather than become involved in costly legal wrangling, an early corporate monster was formed, the Ediswan Company.

  John Ambrose Fleming, like a minor alchemist, joined Ediswan to investigate the causes of ‘blackening on the inside of light bulbs’. Swan filled his laboratory with experimental models, lamps with an extra electrode. He became a consultant with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, where he worked on improving methods for the detection of radio waves. By the turn of the century, alliances between shifting trade associations who would be given favoured status by government, lavished with defence contracts, were in place. And that place was the Lea Valley.

  The military/indus
trial complex, demonised in the USA by Sixties radicals, was well established around Waltham Abbey before the First World War. Dr Chaim Weizmann, first president of the state of Israel, began his working life as a biochemist. In March 1916 he was approached by Sir Frederick Nathan, head of the Admiralty Powder Department, who was trying to cope with a serious shortage of acetone, a solvent used in the manufacture of cordite. Winston Churchill had demanded 30,000 tons of the stuff. So Weizmann, using the Nicholson gin distillery (on the site currently known as Three Mills) at Bow, obliged. Contacts were established and favours returned. Sir Arthur Balfour declared his support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

  Another figure championed by Jim Lewis is Sir Jules Thorn, founder of Thorn Electrical Industries, who is praised for his ‘courageously entrepreneurial spirit’ in importing lamps from Hungary. With a base in Angel Road, Edmonton, Thorn began flogging domestic radio receivers from a rental shop in Twickenham. He bought up the Ferguson Radio Corporation Limited and acquired a factory in Lincoln Road, Enfield – ‘on the site of a former nursery’.

  Thorn’s activities, his way of operating, fit quite snugly with my conceit: that the Lea Valley aspires to the condition of the supermarket (wide aisles, every product showcased in its own area, cheap and cheerful). Ex-rental TV sets heaped into pyramids, at South Mill Fields. Coffee stall alongside the Navigation beyond Tottenham Marsh. Fruit and veg at the roadside, as you approach Epping Forest.