Ford isn’t another sentimental antiquarian (he is, but only as a convenient pose), he has a take on London that pre-empts Abercrombie and trounces the feeble private/public ditherings of New Labour with its clapped-out, expensive and dangerous transport systems. Ford, the huffing, puffing Edwardian, has a radical solution to deliver:
I should make travelling free, smooth, and luxurious. Along the railways I should set motor-ways, and, between hedges, moving platforms for pedestrians and those who need exercise. I should clean out the Thames and set upon it huge, swift, and fine express launches. Who would put up with this bottom of a basin that London is if, being as near their work and their pleasant pleasures, they could inhabit a residential London that crowned the hill tops and scattered along the beaches of the sea?
Not content with reviving the river, building motorways over tired railways, turning footpaths into open-air gymnasia, Ford lays out the first great vision of the M25: as a single sweep in a series of ever-expanding circles.
Let us consider now my outer ring of the Future… With one leg of my compasses set in Threadneedle Street, with the other I describe a great circle, the pencil starting at Oxford. (Roughly speaking, Oxford is sixty miles from London, and in my non-stop, monorail expresses, this should be a matter of half-an-hour, about as long as it takes you now to go from Hammersmith to the City.) It takes in, this circle, Winchester, the delightful country round Petersfield, Chichester, all the coast to Brighton, Hastings, Dover, all Essex, and round again by way of Cambridge and Oxford. Think of the cathedrals, the castles, the woods, the chases, the downs, and the headlands! You would not sleep in Kensington if you might as well at Lewes…
It is on the road, this change. It has got to come. All south-eastern England is just London.
Walking the South Downs, Ford remembered Holland Park; marooned in town, he dreamt of drowsy Wealden villages. Abercrombie echoed Ford. The County of London Plan of 1943 spoke of an ‘age of mobility’, avenues and radials linking parkways, eroding the distinction between town and country. ‘Also included is a parkway leading from the centre of London to Crystal Palace and its nearby hills, and thence, by existing and proposed roads, to the Downs and the coast.’
The visionaries of the inner city thought in terms of circuits, contour lines. Bernard Kops, poet and playwright, grew up in Stepney Green. The natural transit for him was White-chapel to Soho (labyrinth to labyrinth), immigrant household to the liberties of Bohemia. Divided loyalties, a hand to mouth existence as jobbing writer (bookdealing, junk), left Kops in Belmont Hospital (a bus trip from the end of the Northern Line). ‘I thought,’ he wrote, ‘neurotics were the first prophets of true sanity. “After all, if you reject the world of today you must be sane. Draw a circle anywhere in London and you’ll have a cross section as neurotic as us.’ ”
By the late Sixties, many of the orthodox Jews of White-chapel – their behaviour interpreted as eccentric – were tidied away to hospitals in what is now the southern arc of the M25. Kops in Belmont. David Rodinsky in Long Grove Hospital, Epsom. Wards like meeting rooms, soup-kitchens; like the wide pavements of Whitechapel Road and Mile End.
Kops appreciated his pastoral retreat, the slowing of city time. ‘I wrote constantly and wandered the grounds. The prolonged contact with earth helped me. But beyond the gates was London. The great filthy disease called a city.’
He had to return. He accepted the help of a fellow patient who gave him the fare to Oxford Circus.
I stood there not knowing what to do. I wanted to run but was embarrassed, so I stood buffeted by the lifeless mass of people screaming my head off inside, with my hand over my eyes unable to move. Hell! There was a band tightening around my head. Oxford Circus was a narrow ledge in endlessness. On either side was a deep abyss. I walked as if on a tightrope, thinking that the traffic would chase me up the walls or that the people would come at me with knives, tear me to ribbons.
The Circus at the centre of the centre is where the skull splits, the bands do indeed tighten until the pain is unbearable. Gerald Kersh, another Jewish writer, born in the suburbs, understood perfectly the centrifugal forces that hold the city together: Soho, or any other ghetto, is a maze within a maze. And there is no escape. In Night and the City (1938), Kersh lays it out:
He saw London as a kind of Inferno – a series of concentric areas with Piccadilly Circus as the ultimate centre. The shape of a human face, like a key, touched a series of springs beneath his consciousness, and set in motion a complicated mechanism of comparative memory which, juggling with permutations and combinations of a thousand observations, could deliver an immediate and reasonably accurate estimate of the qualities behind that face and the circle to which it belonged.
The image of the Inferno is a constant in the literature of London. Poets, hacks, lively journeymen, they all return to this sense of entrapment, the heart as a labyrinth. Maureen Duffy in her wonderfully strange 1975 novel, Capital, anticipates Michael Moorcock’s Mother London. The person who undertakes research into the city’s history, minutiae and odd particulars, will become unbalanced. Identification with London’s biography is too intense. The familiar mental bonds tighten. Duffy (in character) writes:
I suddenly saw the city as a series of anonymous concentric rings each further and further from the centre point which is always I or in childhood me: department, faculty, college, university, city, each increasing the depth of anonymity and isolation, wrapping the gauze layers tighter and tighter until all sound and sensation are padded away. Only the eyes are left free to blink and water as they stare at a world that they can’t make meaning of by themselves.
Peter Ackroyd, completing his magnum opus, London: The Biography, suffers a heart attack. Typescript on desk. Quadruple bypass. Biography of city: autobiography of city writer. Resurgam.
Breaking away from the motorway, Renchi and I spent a day in London. I guided him around a few of my favourite loci: the remnant of the City’s Roman walls, lanes and passageways near St Paul’s, Fountain Court and the Temple Church. The Round Church, consecrated on 10 February 1185, was built on the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The building, found within the collegiate enclosure of the Inner Temple (cloisters, courts, gardens, Oxbridge name boards), is a respite from the east/west fluster of Fleet Street. The traffic chaos that was already being felt at the time of the demolition of Temple Bar. The Temple Church, in plan, resembles a stubby thermometer: an elongated chancel with the mercury bulb at the west end. The church has no parish and is not subject to the authority of the Bishop of London.
We come to the Round Church with firm but undefined expectations. There is, inevitably, some talk of the Templars, the way London divides into enclosures, cities within cities; the survival of this spirit in the area around Smithfield. It is the effigies of the sleeping knights, within a circle of six pillars, to which we are drawn. The status of the knights is a matter of debate; Templar or Templar associate, it is unresolved. Here are William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and his sons, Gilbert and William the younger. Hands on sword pommels, shields at the ready, feet (in some cases) resting on heraldic beasts. The circuitry is still active. It’s easy to promote these rafts of the dead as the original circle from which all the other rings of energy drift out. Memory and meaning have a form. The church is both accessible and private, known but not overwhelmed with fake narrative. It has presence in place of the strident absence of the Millennium Dome, the money-eating tent. We see the mandala of the fixed effigies, within the circumference of Purbeck marble pillars, as an earthing device for the M25; a validation of the motorway as a symbol of wholeness, without end or beginning.
Renchi sits on a stone bench to ponder the complex geometry of triangles within the nave, pillar to pillar; window, column, arch. How does the circular nave relate to the rest of the building? The Round Church to the Inner Temple? The Inner Temple to the other Inns of Court? The Inns of Court to the heart of London?
Edward Clarkson, in Illustrati
ons and Account of the Temple Church, published in 1838, outlined his notion of the mystical significance of the six free-standing four-faced columns. David Lewer and Robert Dark, in The Temple Church in London (1997), explain Clarkson’s theory. When the columns were taken ‘together with twelve columns of the aisle walls, within which are seven minor columns, the 42 columns of the triforium arranged in groups of seven, he concluded that this was no accident but had direct links with sacred numbers that can be traced back to Egyptian masonry, Jewish cabalists, Pythagorians, Gnostics, the Romans and the Druids’.
The cross-legged knights were repositioned more than once. The fact that they are unbearded has to be taken as evidence that they were not Knights Templar. They may or may not have been crusaders. The effigies are made from Sussex marble, Reigate stone, Purbeck marble. What we project, as we drift around the knights, around the church, is the emblematic force of the figures as the true patrons of our journey. They seem to be sleepwalkers, laid on boards, frozen in mid-stride. They died on their travels and were brought back, rotting, to this place; the sanctity of the enclosure.
Our London wanderings follow contrails of previous excursions. Fleet Street, Farringdon Road, Smithfield. The church of St Bartholomew-the-Great with its dim interior, incense, its flattened circuit. A walk around the pillars, the stone forest of London’s most numinous church, is a re-dedication of our motorway trance. This, at last, was the paradigm, the contemplative circuit that would make our 120-mile slog tautologous.
I knew that a circle of alchemists, among whom David Dee (kinsman of Dr John Dee and rector of St Bartholomew’s) had been a prominent member, were associated with Bartholomew Close. I explored the Close, photographing fig trees, dirty lab coats hanging on pegs; the film was lost. I guided Renchi around the church, monument to monument, in search of one name: Dr Francis Anthony (1549–1623).
The monuments, Elizabethan and Jacobean, were like stage sets in alabaster. Posed groups that presented an idealised, three-dimensional portrait of a life. Francis Anthony was on the north wall. If the nave is a model of the M25, then Francis Anthony must be lodged in Waltham Abbey. His epitaph was composed by his son John.
Religion, virtue and thy skil did raise
A threefold pillar to thy lasting Fame
Though poisonous envye ever sought to blame
Or hyde the fruits of thy intention
Yet shall they all commend that high desygne
Of purest gold to make a medicine
That feel thy helpe by that thy rare invention.
Anthony discovered and marketed ‘Aurum Potabile’, a gold extract which, when dissolved, was a cure-all for the credulous. The doctor’s fortune was made. He bought property near the church. He wrote a defence of his potion and dedicated it to Michael Maier. Maier, author of Arcana Arcanissima, was a considerable figure in hermetic circles in Europe. He had been court physician to Rudolph II in Prague. Joy Hancox in her book The Byrom Collection (Renaissance Thought, the Royal Society and the Building of the Globe Theatre) quotes Elias Ashmole on Maier, saying that he came to England that he might ‘so understand our English Tongue, as to translate Norton’s Ordinall into Latin verse!’
Hancox tells us that ‘Maier visited Anthony in Bartholomew’s Close and also met Robert Fludd’. One of the illustrations she publishes from Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens shows ‘a philosopher pointing with dividers to a geometrical figure which consists of two circles, a square, a triangle and, at the heart of the pattern, a man and a woman… It is entitled “Monas or the One”, a clear reference to John Dee.’
We were close to the ‘heart of the pattern’, but it would only become clear when we moved back, out to the road. Part of John Anthony’s epitaph for his father was clarified by the design that went with it. ‘A threefold pillar to thy lasting Fame.’ The three pillars carved on the monument are crowned by a chaplet of roses, a Rosicrucian emblem for our orbital pilgrimage. As we turn away from the monument to the church itself, we find the arrangement repeated, made actual in the galleries. Stuart monument mirrors Norman stone. The first and last three-line elements of Anthony’s coded epitaph play against the middle line, the reflecting surface. The message is revealed by reading the capital letters (RAFT), against the neutral line’s ‘Or’. And then the reversed capitals of the second triplet: TOY. We had our instruction: RAFT Or TOY.
Church and priory, dedicated to the flayed St Bartholomew, maintain a connection with the hospital. In 1609 William Harvey became a physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. In 1615 he was appointed to the Lumleian lectureship of the college. His first published work was An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood (1649). From the manuscript notes for Harvey’s lectures in 1615, it is clear that he had already decided that blood can pass from arteries to veins; that the heart was a muscle, its valves served to prevent flow in a reverse direction. While the heart beats there is ‘a perpetual motion of the blood in a circle’.
With the blood banks of Harefield, the distribution depot of Count Dracula at Carfax, the discoveries of William Harvey, our project was in imminent danger of cardiac arrest. Circulation: blood and the road. An orbital motorway contracting London’s hammered heart. It was time to get back to water, the Grand Union Canal.
Coming away from Harefield, we collected the car at Denham, drove back to Abbots Langley: a day’s walk undone in a few minutes of motorway transit. Trying to shake Renchi’s hand, on parting at the Leavesden Hospital, in the chill twilight, is like reaching out for a glove of air. We fade, the handshake remains: one of those Masonic symbols found on sooty gravestones in obscure London burial grounds.
3
In the south-west corner, I’m as far as I’m going to be from Hackney. By the end of the day there’ll be almost as much driving as walking. 3 March 1999: Staines station. Another of our two-car relays. The plan is to take the motorway back to Denham, leave one car there and begin the walk – which will carry us, along with the Colne, through an impossibly clotted landscape, to the green-brown barrier of the Thames.
It’s a 5.30 a.m. start in Albion Drive. And Marc Atkins doesn’t make it. Seduced by the promise of motorway junctions, Heathrow, reservoirs, the whole J.G. Ballard psycho-climate, Marc was about to rejoin the tour. He did a lot of book jackets but didn’t, so far as I know, read novels. He made a few exceptions: Ballard’s Crash was one of them. If he mentioned Crash it was by way of a hint that I might learn to fashion shorter, crisper sentences. I might experiment for once and try for narrative, pages that could be turned without a forklift truck. Night roads. Sex. Driving. He was fed up with pedestrianism: of concept, prose, action.
I hung on as long as I could. I tried Marc’s mobile. It was off. Always protective of his private space, mysterious in his shifting alliances, Marc had gone to ground. Self-tagged (cellphone, fax, video), the system only worked when it was switched on. I had to make the rendezvous with Renchi, who swam through currents of plural time, but was never late for a meet at the start of one of our walks.
The thing that pissed me off about Marc’s failure to show was that he would have captured some great images of this drive through the Heathrow hinterlands. There was a full moon. A morning of high, wild clouds, fast changes. Planes skimmed the road. You couldn’t help being drawn into the tremble, the jet roar, the throb of traffic streaming in every direction. M4, M25, A4, A30; slip roads, link roads, trunk roads, deleted coach roads. Two hundred thousand vehicles a day used the section of the M25 between Junctions 13 and 14. Ballard was absolutely right: if you set aside human interference (aka life), London was a mausoleum. Kensal Green Cemetery with the walls knocked down. Pompous monuments, redundant public buildings, trash commerce, heritage tags. Oxford Street was a souk. Charing Cross Road a gutter.
The city, in its Victorian overcoat, the muck of centuries on its waistcoat, bored Ballard. He promoted this new place, the rim. The ‘local’ was finished as a concept. Go with the drift, with detachment. The watcher on the balcony.
Areas around airports were ecumenical. They were the same everywhere: storage units, hangars, satellite hotels, car hire companies, apologetic farmland as a mop-up apron for Concorde disasters. If you see the soul of the city as existing in its architecture, its transport systems, its commerce and media hot spots, then Ballard’s championship of the suburbs is justified. But they’re not really suburbs if they don’t feed on the centre. The Heathrow corridor has declared its unilateral independence, that’s what makes it exciting. The abdication of responsibility and duty; glossy goods, ennui, scratched light.
London for Michael Moorcock, Ballard’s New Worlds editor and colleague, lived in memory and human traffic. That was the heart of the argument between two veteran writers. However dim and dirty the buildings, however sleazy the political games, Moorcock would identify a special spirit: the London mob. The outsider, the dope fiend, the alien. Sentiment, delivered with such gusto, such knowledge of the streets and moves, coheres and remains a powerful motor for fiction. But Moorcock, despite the many licences he inherited over the years, doesn’t drive. Doesn’t want to drive. This early morning spin down the Colnbrook Bypass is not for him. In earlier times, well insured (for the sake of the kids), he dealt with car-cramps and the dullness of the suburbs, by climbing on to the roof, feeling the wind in his hair; riding out of London like one of his Viking champions.
Staines railway station was a country affair – with too much action, too many parked cars. A decorous brick building with uncertainly heritaged globe lights, corporate logos, warnings, prohibitions, ticketing machines.
London Orbital Page 21