London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  The markings on the motorway are shamanic. Noise takes us out of ourselves into a dispersing landscape. Giddy, we enter movement. We could do the whole thing here, on the ramp. We could dream it.

  Renchi has his own tale to tell. His father, Peter Bicknell, a Cambridge architect and academic, accumulated a notable collection of travel journals, records of walks and alpine excursions. Limited editions, rarities, manuscripts. When Renchi visited his mother, he would rummage through the library, searching out topographical information relevant to our orbital pilgrimage. Our shambling progress around the M25 could be seen as a parodic reprise of the material that interested Peter Bicknell. Welfare State ghosts on the tramp, in the footsteps of gentleman botanists, muscular Christians.

  A Hampshire psychic told Renchi that his father’s library held a great clue. She described a room she had never seen. He should search the stacks, second shelf down, third book from the left, such and such a page.

  He left at once for Cambridge. He found the volume. It was just as she had pictured it. A handwritten journal, a journey.

  ‘What did it reveal?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Renchi said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’ A trek through the North of England, in search of nothing in particular. And not locating it. A record kept for the sake of keeping a record. A singularity that awaited a singular readership.

  The tracks, around Temple House, are clear enough on the map. Bull Cross Ride, Old Park Ride. What I didn’t realise was that ‘Ride’ meant just that. It was an order. Get in the saddle or bugger off. We trudged for a mile or so before we hit the gate. No warning. Entry denied. We should have taken the hint when we passed Gunsite Stud and Hanging Plantation. Off-motorway green belt is jealous of its status. Here are city-subsidised farms, stables, country that doesn’t have to acknowledge its rowdy southern neighbour. The M25 is a sewer of potential bandits, rustlers, burger-munching trippers carrying the virus of the slums. It’s border country and the borderers know on which side of the motorway unlicensed pedestrians belong.

  *

  Traffic snarls, the air is scented. Our route, from Whitewebbs Road into Cattlegate Road, under the Crews Hill railway bridge and up the slope towards the M25 (between Waltham Abbey and Potters Bar), shivers with ambiguity. It’s a rat run, the end of the liberties of Enfield Chase, but it is also a retail paradise. Horticultural retail. Instant gardens. Statuary. Sheds. Bedding plants. Gravel. Compost. Dutch juggernauts unloading trays of tired plants.

  Teased by television, by painted decking, water features and shivering Junos with inadequate T-shirts, householders demand flatpack gardens that can be assembled by a gang of self-promoting experts while they skive off for a round of golf. Gardening and cooking and watching celebrities take exotic holidays is the fix, the image-flood in which we float and seek our sustenance. Pleasure-provoking narcoleptics in a period of mind-numbing labour, wrecked transport systems, failing schools and hospitals. Tending the soil, snorting the night perfumes, glass of wine in hand, will heal us.

  A gentle pornography of seed catalogues, pubic thatches (in mauve and scarlet and yellow) marketed as ‘The Contemporary Grasses Collection’. The copy is a lubricious come-on. ‘Planiscapus Nigrescens: spectacular, moody… with dark-purple, almost black curving leaves. Briza media: delightful Common Quaking grass… trembling heart-shaped flower spikelets. Carex comans: dense tuft-forming sedge. Imperata cylindrica : tall sword-like green leaves which turn blood red from tips.’

  The TV garden is an extension of the house. You can still find allotments, salvaged from unexploitable buffer zones, but they are weirdly anachronistic. Strip-system allocations, fenced in and worked by elderly, all-weather gentlemen. A good example can be seen near the Sewardstone Road bridge, between cemetery and motorway, in Waltham Abbey. A solitary ancient leaning on his hoe, shuffling backwards and forwards to his shed. The villein with his small corner of England. That never changes, though such sites are threatened. They have to hide away, hope that they’ve been forgotten.

  Crews Hill services the patio-lounge fantasist. Horticulture is discussed in terms of plant furniture, colour schemes, architectural bamboos. There are flirty plants and nighty plants, stylish plants, bimbo plants and ‘as seen on television’ plants. A banana tree (‘special offer for readers of Good Housekeeping’) is pitched as a lifestyle accessory. ‘A definite “it” plant. In fact if Hello! magazine were to interview their first celebrity plant it would probably be this one.’

  Blues and purples and mauves. Lavender and ceanothus. The drench of suburbia. Intoxicated bees reeling from flower to flower, a great year for Enfield honey. Lipsticky and dripping thick over fingers and plate rims. The hum of the pastoral, the beehive in the English garden: as depicted on the label of a honey jar.

  Crews Hill, representing the final flourish of the Lea Valley/Enfield Chase tradition (as heritaged in Joan Hessayon’s novel Capel Bells), has come to an arrangement with the motorway. Walk back towards the old town of Enfield and you’ll find the glasshouses; you’ll understand Hessayon’s thesis, the way that gardeners from the big estates began to trade in plants. An escape from patronage, servitude, the tied cottage: the realisation that plants were a commodity. This astonishing parade of drive-in retail opportunities, part Sunday excursion, part car boot sale, operates on the cusp of what has gone (genius loci) and that which is coming: Americana.

  Try this for a roadside menu: Garrick Furniture Design, Antique Fires (of Enfield), Four Seasons Pottery, Crews Hill Art & Crafts (Hang Ups), Fernleigh Landscapes, Monty’s Furniture, Three Counties Garden & Leisure Buildings, The Quilting Bee, Enfield Bird Centre, Macbar Army Surplus. Cash & Carry Winter Pansy’s (sic). These are not garden centres (for those you need to go to Suffolk, Oxfordshire), these are garden suburbs. Listen to the names of the kids who are running amok among the bedding plants: ‘Get down from that, Brandon. Leave him alone, Harrison.’

  As we slog uphill, Renchi delights in the display of slug-repelling, crushed shell mounds, bark-chip puddles, grey slabs (made to look like York stone). We negotiate fibreglass rockeries that would horrify Gussie Bowles, boulders so light you can lift them as easily as Steve Reeves in Hercules Conquers Atlantis. There are regiments of gum-coloured statues: hounds, hedgehogs, bunnies, ducks; loosely classical nudes, lions cubbed from Landseer, water-spitting gargoyles, Egyptian cat-gods tamed and domesticated. You can smell the bird house, the deceased lizards. You can purchase a hairy spider, a bag of snakes or a tray of delightful scorpions. Sniff the resin, the hothouse biodiversity. Compost that doesn’t smell like shit, but a blend of roasted coffee and turf from Galway. There are enough customised sheds and cabins and pinewood studios to house all of Jack Straw’s asylum seekers.

  The fetid concentration of this botanical stew stays with us. I am sticky with spray, perfume-processed for the next stage of our walk. I’m sure that the Crews Hill herbal affects drivers on the motorway. They open car windows, take their foot off the gas, smile. Easy country. No red cones. They’re on one of the original sections of the road, the gently weaving passage where the M25 defined itself, discovered its identity. And now, in the September evening, at the golden hour, they pick up an hallucinatory hint of paradise gardens on the outskirts of Potters Bar.

  Escaping Crews Hill, going under the M25, is a woeful experience for pedestrians; we face the oncoming traffic. A constant stream, both ways, clusters of five or six cars, nose to tail in barely controlled frustration: metal projectiles time-warped on to a drovers’ track, Cattlegate Road. In the intervals between the blam-blam-blam, Renchi hears a woodpecker in the twilight woods. There are long stretches without verges on which to walk. We are conscious of being nothing more than columns of vulnerable meat, obstacles made hazardous by the glare of the sinking sun.

  Moving west in the direction of Potters Bar, looking across the valley to the hamlet of Cuffley, we feel a nudge in our perception of space/time. Renchi relates this to certain devices in children’s fiction, the way a network of gre
en lanes can sidle alongside the densest clots of population. The walker ‘goes back’, forgets himself (or herself). A pre-visionary condition, in which it is possible to let go of the present and access an older narrative, a secret garden or enchanted wood.

  By his reading, the tunnel under the motorway is a gate of memory. Concrete walls become screens on which are projected phantasmagoric tree shapes. But reaching the tunnel, coming up against the wall – cut to fit the slope of the motorway escarpment – we find that the concrete is no casual wash. The wall is made with deep grooves, like a sheet of corrugated paper. The effect is of something wrapped and hidden, a stone curtain. Motorway sounds reverberate and shake the tunnel. Nothing to be seen, everything to be imagined.

  Grand houses dispose themselves along a golden road: IT mansions and cult centres (probably sponsored by George Harrison). White fences, gravel drives. Ironwork gates on which CCTV cameras replace heraldic beasts. JAIN ESTATE. Millionaire mendicants, spiritual conglomerates, multinational god franchises: they absorb this liminal landscape. The sign, Jain Estate, made me think of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs: Shambu Bharti Baba on the sepia cover of Indian Journals and the poet himself, pole in hand, naked and hairy, beside the Sea of Japan. Elective ecumenicism. The state of being Jain, adapting a dualistic sixth-century religion, the liberation of the soul through asceticism, to twentieth-century trauma, by the act of removing one’s clothes. I pictured the rooms of this Hertfordshire retreat as luxurious caves occupied by nude men. By stepping aside from the world, they had somehow acquired a very nice chunk of it in which to practise their austere rituals.

  The evening road to Potters Bar is an enchantment. As we walk over Hooke Hill and through Fir Wood, the sun is setting at the end of a tunnel of shadowy greenery. An image I would see many times during the course of our circuit, Renchi with pack on back striding down a long straight road. The cars have gone. The road comes into its own. A solid stream in which we wade.

  Swallowed in suburban modesty, banks of blue hydrangeas, we acknowledge that Potters is one bar we won’t cross. Potter’s forest gate: the old name. A railway town at the end of the line from Moorgate. Property values are beginning to climb as city folk appreciate the connection. It plays two ways. Once we’ve located the station we’re out of it, back home.

  6

  17 November 1998, we’re back in Potters Bar. The logistics of the walk become more complicated as we move away from the Lea Valley and its convenient rail system. Now we’re into a two-car relay. We meet at our destination. It’s an awkward choice, but we have to decide in advance where we’ll stop at the end of the day. We pick Abbots Langley, which is pretty much the top left corner of the circle. We are convinced that the M25 orbit has corners and that those corners are important. They force us to take decisions: north or south, east or west, inside or outside?

  Choice made, one car left in the grounds of a mental hospital (defunct and in turnaround), we travel back in the second car to the point where the previous walk finished. Therefore, we experience the motorway. Our status changes. I drive. It’s not a section of the road that I know. Renchi points out the usual towers on hills, buildings that might be monasteries or schools or madhouses. He talks of a meteor shower he witnessed on the previous night. A cold morning, the car windows are frosted and have to be scraped.

  Leaving the car in an underground car park, near the station in Potters Bar, it takes us a mile or so to adjust: the road on which we were recently travelling is our event horizon. We won’t be happy until we place ourselves in a steady relation to the acoustic footprints that define our pilgrimage.

  Renchi is fur-capped, mufflered, gloved. The sky is pink; the sun, as it climbs above the suburban avenue of Laurel Fields, disseminates a red-gold beam. Potters Bar is not a bad place to leave behind. On the chainlink fence of the Elm Court Youth and Community Centre: PSYCHIC FAYRE. HERE, NOV 19TH. These boys are tracking us, using us as Judas goats. They’re on our trail.

  We feel, plodding down Mutton Lane, that we’re working the crease, the fold between cultures, Essex and Hertfordshire. Out of an exhausted shopping precinct (Blockbuster Video, burger bar, hairdresser) we chance on a spanking new civic centre, bright bricks, big windows. The still green surface of an empty swimming pool seen from a cold street.

  The best way out – Potters Bar doesn’t give up easily – is to follow a fast-flowing stream that seems to carry us in the ‘wrong’ direction. Mimmshall Brook? Is that the A1 or the M25? Who cares? When you find a landscape of this quality you don’t let it go. The fields are frosted, distance is soft. From a motorway bridge we can read the road signs: the Al, heading south to the M25 interchange. On a novocaine winter morning, the motorway sleeve is suspended like a Chinese scroll painting. Wooden fence. Bare trees. Electricity poles.

  Time for breakfast. The South Mimms service station is our target. Welcome Break (the new name for Trusthouse Forte’s motorway catering) have been allocated the northern arc of the M25, licence to create an oasis of weirdness: a soft sell to road-bruised civilians. People talk affectionately about South Mimms (without the motorway it would be as obscure as its neighbours, Welham Green, Bentley Heath, London Colney). South Mimms was the first (for a long time the only) pit stop on the circuit. City boys with loud shirts and floppy hair (pre-Hugh Grant) used South Mimms as a garage, the starting flag for a lap around London.

  One of the mysteries of the M25 (as it might be pitched by Carlton TV) is the ‘badly mutilated’ body of a woman, discovered near the South Mimms service station in 1990. The woman is still unidentified. Her age was put by the pathologist as ‘somewhere between 30 and 50’. She was 5 foot 5 inches tall, with short dark hair and grey/blue eyes. She was buried in an unmarked grave as ‘Jane Doe’.

  News of this coincidence, nameless victim and recently completed service station, coming a few years after Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, with its ritual sacrifices, dead children secreted in the foundations of London churches, provoked all kinds of rumours. Bill Drummond and Gimpo, scratching away the earth at the side of the road, near this site, to hide the plaque commemorating their spring equinox drive, seemed to be responding to the same imperative. If vampires are buried at crossroads, stake through the heart, to trap and confuse unresting spirits, then what torment did the South Mimms inhumation represent? A poor soul pitched against interlinked spirals, under and over, the multi-choice channels at Junction 23 of the M25.

  Appeasing savage dogs at the gates of scattered properties, we creep up on the service area by way of the Forte Posthouse Motel, a Southern Californian Mission-style, white-walled pastiche, with awnings and arches. You could call the look: Epping Forest pueblo. A good set on which to remake The Magnificent Seven. An effect that’s tricky to pull off without the weather, the desert. The Posthouse Motel is the bright-windowed fortress of an alien culture. They’re not in the hot pillow trade, catering for lazy afternoons, sticky liaisons, legovers for the entrepreneurial classes of Potters Bar, Hatfield and Barnet. They’re touting for power brunches, coffee-and-croissant bull sessions: conference facilities in the ‘theatre style’ with a seating capacity of 170, or ‘classroom style’ for eighty-five, or ‘banquet style’ for 120, or ‘boardroom style’ for forty. Between arse-kicking and number-crunching, laminated badge-wearers can make use of an indoor swimming pool, a sauna solarium, Jacuzzi spa and gym.

  But they can’t, just now, drop into the service station to pick up a newspaper, magazine, CD or fast-food snack. South Mimms is a burnt-out shell. UNSAFE STRUCTURE, NO UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. Our breakfast is in ruins. Someone has torched the gaff, WELCOME LODGE FULLY OPEN. Says the sign. But it’s only open as a rest area, a parking site; somewhere to piss in the bushes. Fire-blackened struts poke over a blue and white fence, the exoskeleton of a pleasure dome.

  If you’ve been on the road long enough to let your personal grooming slip, you can always book in for a shave and trim. THE HAIR BUS. A customised chara in the lorry park, MEN’S
HAIRDRESSING SALON. Truckers with gently protuberant T-shirts are settled on their thrones, catching up with the gossip, while clippers snap and shears buzz. The mobile barber came out on spec, one day, and launched a new career. Nothing pleasanter than a tool around the motorway for a No. 1 crop, before a Full English breakfast in South Mimms.

  Service industries are the sort that always mushroom around army posts: barbers, junk food, fancy motel, bunkhouse. Looking down the line of high trucks is like peeping in at the bay windows of a suburban street with a cavalier attitude to net curtains. Fat men shave or change their shirts, spray themselves with industrial-strength deodorants. Lorry girls repair their faces. Some of them, minimally skirted, swing down from the cabs; pick up new patrons for the run north. Juggernauts block the slip roads. Brakes hiss. Radiators steam. Road dirt is sluiced.

  We find a truckers’ caff, which is cheaper, better, more efficient than any of the service stations. As much coffee as you can drink, elevated screens pumping out colour TV, time to study the maps.

  When, much later, Chris Petit and I, driving around the motorway for two days at a stretch, return to South Mimms, the service area has been revamped: as an air terminal. Clean, tactfully lit, unendurable. Everything is designed to get you out of there within minutes of finding a table. Crematorium muzak. Food that isn’t. Photo-booths that offer portraits in the style of Van Gogh, Renoir, Dega (sic). Concessions on the point of collapse. A major hike to locate the Gents. No alcoves or areas in which to retreat. You sit on the edge of a hard chair, waiting for your flight to be called. It’s not day or night. You’re completely disorientated. You can’t remember if you’re supposed to be travelling east or west. And then, to boost the paranoia, two genetically modified cops, one of each sex, waddle up to the burger bar. They’re wearing blue protective vests and they’re packing guns at the hips. We get the message and take off for the safety of Purfleet.