London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Should I cover my shoulders?’

  I returned to Enfield Lock, to a cottage in Government Road, with the filmmakers Chris Petit and John Sergeant. We had arranged to record an interview with local activist Beth Pedder. Pedder lived on the edge of Enfield Island Village. She was one of the authors of the Unsafe as Houses report. Her testimony confirmed the impression I formed on the original walk with Bill Drummond and Marc Atkins: bad turf, suppressed history.

  Pedder became involved with community politics when she started agitating against cars and for a school. ‘Our first issues were traffic and the overloading and log jamming of our local roads, already laden with industrial traffic. We worried over the lack of health care, and the lack of a new school for an Island development of 1,300+ new homes in an area already deprived of services.’

  National journalists and television companies took an interest when the exploitation of brownfield sites was advocated as the solution to the housing problem by a telephone directory-sized report from an urban task force, chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside: Towards an Urban Renaissance. That’s Lord Rogers as in the Richard Rogers Partnership, Dome designers by appointment to Bugsby’s Marshes. Greenwich peninsula was showbiz brownfield, Peter Mandelson as Kubla Khan. Enfield Lock was left to Fairview Homes plc. They picked up the Royal Small Arms Factory makeover: land contaminated ‘with an Arsenic to Zinc range of chemical substances, plus explosives, oils and tars and the by-products of five gas works’.

  In 1984 the Ministry of Defence, which controlled a major parcel of land (very loosely mapped) around Waltham Abbey, on both sides of the M25, decommissioned the Royal Small Arms Factory and sold it to British Aerospace (BAe). British Aerospace got together with Trafalgar House to launch a joint venture company, Lea Valley Developments (LVD). Limited tests were carried out on the contaminated land. In 1996 LVD sold the land to the housing wing of Hillsdown Holdings, Fairview New Homes.

  Pedder found herself being interviewed for Panorama. ‘Wear black, cover your shoulders, get rid of the Pat Butcher earrings,’ she was told by the media Taliban. They didn’t want her coming over as a central casting hippie, a wacky-baccy anarchist of the suburbs. We didn’t care what she wore. Our motives were just as suspect. Pedder’s tattoos were a work of art: naked nymphs climbing out of lilies, with a few revisions and skin-graft cancellations elsewhere. Silver bracelets, rings. Black nail varnish.

  None of which had anything to do with what she had to say, the seriousness of her research and the effectiveness of her pursuit of the true story. She couldn’t set foot in Enfield Island Village. Conservationists, bird-watchers and tree-lovers had been chased off by the hard hats. Some had been threatened with sticks. Beth kept at it, digging for facts, writing letters to ministers, asking to see documentation. If Pedder hung on, won the day, it couldn’t be long before Julia Roberts would be hired, painted tattoos and nose-stud, to battle the corporate giants in a Californian mock-up of Enfield Lock.

  Beth spoke with feeling. ‘We were concerned that the MOD had produced no records for this site. We would be interested to know why.’ Enfield has a long tradition of enforced silence. ‘It was always a very secretive site. Ex-workers said that no one was allowed outside their own area. People didn’t have a clue what went on in other areas. We had one ex-worker who attested to the fact that the building she worked in was tested every month with a geiger-counter. They had large X-ray rooms and three lead-lined rooms with lead floors, lead ceilings. They had a rocket test tunnel that ran the length of the site. It had an internal railway. There were people with white coats and radiation badges who went further into the site than anyone else was allowed to go. Workers were blood-tested every month.’

  The zone was known as the ‘Enfield Military Complex’.

  Secret State parkland. Surrounded by water. Pedder was concerned that the local developers had no experience with contaminated land on this scale. ‘They didn’t have any MOD records. They didn’t at first acknowledge that there was much contamination, despite the fact that previous test results had shown high levels of mercury, lead, nickel, cadmium, chrome, copper, zinc. There are PCBs, high quantities of asbestos. They don’t even have a complete set of maps to show where the pipes run. There was a bash and burn policy with the MOD. They either burnt their leftovers, or they made them much smaller, bashed them up and buried them. A report was done by a Government body that expressed concern that the MOD didn’t have records for a lot of these sites, sites where radiation appeared to be present.’

  We drink our tea in a pleasant kitchen, in one of the workers’ cottages from the old days of the Small Arms Factory. We walk out into the garden. Look across a brown canal at the new estate. Pedder talks about the stink from the London Waste site at Edmonton. ‘With all incinerators, there’s a five-mile circumference within which you can suffer the effects.’ Smoke. Hanging clouds that never migrate. In the early days, Pedder contacted her MP, Tim Eggar. He phoned her back. ‘This is business,’ he said. ‘There’s big money involved.’ When Pedder pressed her case, Eggar replied: ‘Are you entirely stupid? Profit before people, that’s how the world works.’

  Memory is trashed. ‘I was told by an ex-worker, at the time when the site was decommissioned, that MOD turned up and took away vast amounts of files. It looked like they had been ransacked, records and details scattered about the floor. They came and flooded the place. We understand the records were taken to Aylesbury. Without the MOD records we will never know. There could be anything. A lot of the substances are mobile in water. A lot of them are carcinogenic. Crown Immunity means the site was never inspected by a local authority. They weren’t covered by the rules for disposing of substances. The MOD’s accepted and published policy, they’ve admitted to it, was bash, burn, destroy.’

  In the Government Road terrace, between Lee Navigation and the Small Arms canal, people have suffered the effects. Bad water. High levels of phenols. ‘Some of the residents had blistered mouths and hands, terrible headaches. They were suffering nausea, dizziness, general weakness and lethargy. The children were very ill. Those that had drunk bottled water recovered.’ Fairview Homes denied all responsibility.

  Pedder got the phone calls. ‘Can you come down? We can’t breathe.’ She remembers walking along Government Road. ‘It was hitting you in the face and it was hurting. You couldn’t see. It was like grit. That was the asbestos.’ Fairview had knocked down Building 22. ‘A cloud floated towards the area of Government Road. I could see the smoke. I live probably quarter of a mile away and I could see the plume of black smoke rising up and forming this massive cloud.’

  We went back inside. There were other, off-the-record stories. Connections were exposed. Things suspected but unproven. Names. Pedder was very emotional. She had a heavy investment in this story. She lived here. We would stroll back to the car park, move on.

  Now our goal is in sight, beyond Rammey Marsh, traffic floating above water. Site clearance (leisure, commerce, heritage) pushes the horizon back. ‘A new country park is to be developed on the site of the former Royal Ordnance works,’ announces the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority’s Strategic Business Plan. ‘The site is immediately to the south of the M25, adjacent to major housing developments and strategically ideal for the Authority to pursue its remit to safeguard and expand the “Green Wedge” into London.’

  This sounds like an uncomfortable procedure. Not just ‘soil amelioration’ and ‘imaginative and sensitive landscape design’ but the effort of will to rebrand a balding and sullen inter-zone, the motorway’s sandtrap, as a wildlife habitat, ‘a vibrant waterside park’. For years, Waltham Abbey has functioned like a putting course, a splash of shaved meadow surrounded by bunkers. It was a course that had to be played with a blindfold firmly in place. Much of the territory was unlisted. ‘Government Research Establishment’ to the east of the Navigation, ‘Sewage Works (Sludge Disposal)’ to the west.

  In this red desert, sound moves from margin to margin: caterpillar-wheeled
vehicles, mud gobblers, chainsaws, pneumatic drills. The delirious swooshing of the M25.

  The bridge support, the thin line that carries all this traffic, is pale blue. The space beneath the bridge expands into a concrete cathedral, doors thrown open to light and landscape. Water transport gives way to road; the old loading bays are empty, a few pleasure boats and converted narrow boats are tied up against the east bank. Reflected light shivers on pale walls. Overhead, there is the constant thupp-thupp-thupp of the motorway. After heavy rain, the ground is puddled and boggy. Travellers haven’t settled here. The evidence is all of migration: extinguished fires, industrial-strength lager cans, aerosol messages.

  Bill Drummond leads the rush up the embankment. The M25, after miles of walking the ditch, is a symbol of freedom. The Amazon. A slithery, ice-silver road in the sky. I have a moment of panic. Drummond’s bulging knapsack is still unexplained, no spare sweaters, no rain kit, no cameras. Is it possible? Could he? This obsession with the Unabomber. Are we going to find ourselves on the Six O’Clock News: TERRORIST OUTRAGE ON MOTORWAY? Bill spends time in a tower in Northern Ireland. Red Hand of Ulster? Scots Prod? A fanatic certainly. Capable of anything.

  After a sharp climb, a fence hop, slipping on gravel and thin wet grass, Drummond reaches the roadside. He vaults the low barrier and performs a Calvinist version of the papal kiss. He puts his lips to tarmac, tastes the vibration of the orbiting traffic. Destination not detonation. I’m relieved and disappointed.

  Sitting on the crash barrier, feet dangling on the sand-coloured hard shoulder, we are buffeted by backdraught: the road is a blur. Clockwise: Waltham Abbey and the forest. Anticlockwise: Paradise. A chocolate-brown notice: PARADISE WILDLIFE PARK. A Lascaux sketch of stag’s horns, an arrow. A shamanic invitation to the country of parks and gardens and paradises. Lee Valley Park.

  Cars are streaming into the sunset, brake-lights bloody. Drummond wants to walk straight off down the road, west. A truck swerves and honks. I have to grab him, persuade him that I don’t intend to stay, dodging lorries in the half-dark, on the metal skin of the M25. That would be blasphemous. I’m going to stick to the countryside, as near as I can to the loop, straining to catch the hymn of traffic, hot diesel winds.

  We’ll finish the day at the abbey, the grave of King Harold, but first we look back towards London. Sunshafts over a jagged horizon, towers and chimneys, unregistered ground. The mix as it always is: off-highway Americana, secret estates (Royal Gunpowder Mills, Small Arms Factory) rebranding themselves. British Aerospace. Waltham Point (‘New 48 Acre Industrial Park’) developed by the Kier Group and Norwich Union. Earthworks. Noise. Feeder roads that glow in the dark.

  Beyond Waltham Abbey, proper countryside kicks in: the foot-and-mouth ribbons begin. The amphetamine buzz of the motorway changes everything: warehouses instead of shops, dormitory estates instead of hospitals. A road is a road is a road. When the M25 went underground, near Amesbury Bank on the northern edge of Epping Forest, they laid out a cricket pitch on the roof of the tunnel.

  The road at night is a joy. You want to imagine it from space, a jewelled belt. As a thing of spirit, it works. As a vision, it inspires. There is only one flaw, you can’t use it. Shift from observer to client and the conceit falls apart. Follow the signs for LONDON ORBITAL in your car and consciousness takes a dive. The M25 has been conceived as an endurance test, a reason for staying at home. Aversion therapy. Attempt the full circuit and you’ll never drive again.

  Paradise Gardens

  Waltham Abbey to Shenley

  1

  Looking back over my files, the excursions to the parks and gardens of Enfield Chase, I notice soft green photographs overlaid with current images (April 2001) of smoke and blight. Footpaths and designated country walks are now ribboned off, reckless hikers face £5,000 fines. The word of the moment is ‘contiguous’. Hireling academics and anonymous spokespersons, sweating under studio lights, don’t like the taste of it, this awkward term they have been instructed to employ. To be contiguous is to be served with a death warrant. Animals (pre-supermarket cellophane) face the bullet if they live in a bad neighbourhood. Reading the future by computer prediction, wanting to get shot of the whole business before a June election, government-sponsored boffins have decided to take out potential disease carriers (any unlanguaged, non-voting quadruped with a cold), and then to start again; or, better yet, turn the countryside into a memorial park. Recreation for visitors, the banning of country sports. Go and stay there, but don’t leave the hotel, that seems to be the message.

  Channel 4 News takes a perverse pleasure in its nightly apocalypse franchise, the parade of liars and shifty scientists; merciless footage of fauna carnage, pyre smoke. More upside-down cows, bigger pits; fleecy lambkins cuddled by hooded executioners in gloves and white overalls. Held up to the camera for a tearjerk CU, before being dropped off at the big shed; the killing floor of upturned, expectant faces; shine-in-the-dark eyes.

  By the spring of 2001, barred from the motorway orbit, I was trying to exorcise the embargoed Dome (£80 a minute to the taxpayer) by carrying out a series of walks, from Greenwich peninsula to various motorway interchanges. Heading southeast towards Swanley, you get a good sense of how one zone (generous proportions of Blackheath, grim bus shelters of Shooters Hill) gives way to another; small architectural revisions causing major shifts in the psychic balance. Complacency to rage within 200 yards: out of ribbon-development, the poly-filled Tudorbethan avenues of New Eltham, into the heritage Kentish village of Chislehurst (rain, caves closed, footpaths forbidden). Vehicles change from silver, mercury bubbles tucked away in car ports to four-wheel-drive cruisers with gentleman farmer aspirations.

  The Swanley interchange is the spiral gate where South London lowlifes go head-to-head with drug barons and currency dealers. But, just now, according to the Evening Standard bulletin boards, the motorway, like the country paths of the Green Loop, is verboten. OFFICIAL: STAY OFF THE M25 IN RUSH HOUR.

  This is too bizarre. It’s been rumoured for some time that New Labour want to downgrade (re-evaluate) the M25, turn it into the equivalent of a defeated candidate for Mayor of London or Mo Mowlam. Leakages have been hissing for months, penalties for single-occupant vehicles, but this announcement is still a surprise. A motorway, built to solve the problems of flow and congestion, has now become the problem. Success has killed it. The M25 is too popular, people use it indiscriminately: thieves on away days, touring the bosky suburbs; sexual service industries taking advantage of the excellent parking facilities and discreet greenery of the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley; walkers, random inner-city strollers trying to define the point where London abdicates.

  So let’s celebrate the first non-motoring motorway, the ‘girdle’ imagined by altruistic planners in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. The road is tired, it can’t take the stress of traffic; 170,000 vehicles a day going nowhere, wearing away the tarmac mantle. The solution is obvious: steer clear of the road at times when the road is most needed. Without traffic, the M25 is a marvel, a delight to the senses. Leaflets have been printed for distribution to travellers at service stations, channel ports and airports: KEEP OFF. Detour around the road that takes you around London. The Highways Agency understands that future autobahns will be virtual rather than actual. In time, the clapped-out circuit will be covered with Barratt homes, Fairview Estates, Laing’s flagpoles; 120 miles of housing stock, pedestrianised.

  Once the M25 was redefined as a special-needs case, a privileged unfortunate soon to be granted heritage status, it was time to deal with contiguous countryside. The road that was no longer a road was sandwiched by fields that were no longer fields (golf courses, boarding kennels, pig sheds, reinvented woodland). The next step was obvious: downsize the green belt, slip the corset. Brownfield was the preferred option, trashed land nobody had any use for, armament factories, bone yards, gas works, could be computer-swiped into paradise pastures.

  The first intimations that green belt
was no longer acceptable in think-tank circles came when books started to appear promoting ‘blue sky’ fantasies. What is said is always the opposite of what is to be done. I was nervous when I read Bob Gilbert’s The Green London Way, an eco-excursionist book put out by those decent old leftists Lawrence and Wishart. Hand-drawn maps of a new London dreaming; anecdotes, small histories. The London Loop by David Sharp continued the process of opening up the suburbs, linking patches of woodland, riverside paths, tracks across chalk and greensand. These men saw London in its entirety, as a fortunate mixture of town and country, speculative development and eccentric vision, follies, palaces, water towers, footpaths that had been walked for generations. They respected the geography, the pattern of rivers and hills. Their conclusions were based on experience. They had been out there with their notebooks and cameras. They had done it.

  In December 1999 the Cabinet Office issued a consultation paper, the green belt had created an undesirable ‘moat effect’. A moat or ditch or ha-ha to keep out, as architect Nicholas Hawksmoor wrote of the denizens of Whitechapel, ‘filth Nastyness & Brutes’. The document was, in effect, an early warning on behalf of the developers, the mall conceptualists, the rewrite industry. Government “was pure Hollywood: hype, the airbrushing of bad history; dodgy investors, a decent wedge in disgrace or retirement. A pay-off culture of bagmen and straightfaced explainers.