London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  Renchi, muddy boots in hand, is waiting alongside a wide-screen hoarding: ULTRA EFFECTIVE/SMOKING KILLS. In his stocking cap and libertarian red scarf, he’s a Digger, a travelling saint of the 1640s. The Silk Cut illustration is a beauty: a turnip-head archer, a scarecrow shaman in a ploughed field. The scarecrow is nailed to a spindly cross, straw feet don’t touch the ground. Gloved hand on drawstring. Slit-eyes watchful. A crow killer guarding the painted landscape that Renchi is about to enter. Archer as straw man. Archer crucified. The prophecy of Staines: don’t make them breathe your smoke.

  We drive back to Denham, another station, deeper countryside. DENHAM TWINNED WITH SHARK BAY WESTERN AUSTRALIA. In 1939 J. Arthur Rank (the Yorkshire Methodist who leased his name as a rhyming slang term for the act of self-pleasuring) bought Denham Studios, the largest in Britain, from Alexander Korda, after Korda failed to duplicate the international success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The Prudential Assurance Company had lent him the money to build Denham Studios. A none too prudent investment. Korda folded.

  Rank (dim product, sharp management) developed a production and distribution base. They went global, acquiring a quarter share in the US company Universal, which gave them the distribution rights to glitzy Hollywood product. They purchased off-highway real estate, Pinewood, Denham. They took over the Odeon chain of suburban cinemas and the Gaumont British circuit (which included, as part of the package, Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios). Rank, a late flowering of the Dissenter tradition that had once flourished in the Chiltern and Hertfordshire villages, was also a forerunner of coming multinational capitalism. The old tracks and paths that, for a few years during and after the English Civil War, allowed tinkers, visionary herdsmen, disaffected mechanics to roam, preach, discuss, debate became the super highways of petrol/burger culture.

  In the Denham bun shop, Renchi can hardly keep his eyes open, far less make a decision on what kind of cake or biscuit to munch. He was working until eleven o’clock on the previous evening, drinking too much coffee, plotting the day’s walk. The bun shop has a kind of Christmas shrine to the Death of Cinema; red paper spotted with snow, green plastic garlands, framed photos of Patrick Mower and ‘the girl who used to do high kicks on The Generation Game’. White suits. Pink flesh burnt by the shock of flash photography at some long forgotten premiere. Teeth for the camera. Twinned with Shark Bay. ‘I’m still me. I’m still here.’ The immortality of non-recognition on the wall of an early-morning bakery near a suburban railway station.

  We follow the Colne to Uxbridge. Renchi has borrowed a pocket recorder. We’ve talked a lot about sound but never cracked it. Long, rambling conversations about how to keep a useful record of what was said. ‘Um, ah, like, you know, yeah, like… right.’ There would be interrogations of persons met on the road. But no walkers are out and about, no dogs. It’s early and the light is so recessive that my colour prints look like sepia. Steam from the flat roofs of narrow boats. A weak sun caught in a thatch of spindly trees. Lakes, islands. It’s easy to imagine ourselves on Mark Twain’s ‘river road’; we drop to our knees, use that heavy sky to conjure up the Mississippi. (Think: Robert Frank. Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.)

  Sound is elusive. No slap of tide, no river romance of clicks and creaks. Our own muted footfalls on worn turf, on trampled mud, splashing through spring puddles.

  South. Under the arch of a brick bridge: REPUBLIC NOW. There is no way of accurately recalling Renchi’s monologue (even from notes taken at the time). The recorder of course is unused. Cameras can log, sketch, record graffiti, make clumsy portraits. Sound is an element. Like the canal, the motorway. We don’t have the skill, the eavesdropping genius of composer/guitarist Bruce Gilbert (once of Wire). Bruce skulks in pub corners, on station platforms, at obscure locations, sampling; gathering material to construct a sound field. He is an X-ray of Gene Hackman in Coppola’s The Conversation. From units of sound you can make a world, re-edit the past. Put it on a loop. Bruce long ago cracked the thing we were still struggling with: he learnt how to ‘play the gaps’.

  Renchi’s riverbank monologue moves ahead of him, like one of those men with red flags who preceded the first cars: ‘Father’s library… Stukeley, arcane researches… Heathrow as a kind of Avebury… keep the pattern in our heads as we enter that territory.’ In 1723 the antiquary William Stukeley investigated the earthwork known as Shasbury, or Schapsbury or Fern Hill, and pronounced it ‘Caesar’s Camp’. A ditch, earth ramparts. An enclosure, sixty feet square, with points of access at north and south. A diagonal path running through it, to other access points in east and west. Figures, perhaps surveyors, in the foreground. Holding chains. A coach pulled by six horses.

  The canal’s a soporific. Pylons, lagoons. We push closer to the M25. The strip of tolerated country between road and water is scruffier, fewer estates, more poultry farms. By the time we pass West Drayton, hippies and freebooters are disputing the right to scavenge with travellers, scrap-metal pirates, unlicensed Irishmen. You have to tread carefully when you walk these lanes with a camera in your hands. In every off-road junk yard, somebody is watching. Big dogs on small chains.

  We see distant Western Avenue, the A40, as a target, a beacon of hope. At Uxbridge we climb up to the road: a taster, a sighting. Electricity Sub-Station: DANGER OF DEATH KEEP Out. Western Avenue sounds better than it plays; a sluggish trawl of family saloons, company cars, white vans, middleweight haulage shaking itself free of London. Ribbon-development dystopia: before the motorway, Iver Heath, the woods of Langley Park and the descent into Slough.

  Uxbridge (aka Wixebrug, Uxebregg) exploits its position, where the Colne and the Grand Union Canal meet Western Avenue. Victorian trade routes. The smoke-coughing trucks that took over from the narrow boats are themselves doomed to oblivion, breakers’ yards between river and motorway embankment. Uxbridge has cornered the market in liminal architecture. (It’s here and not here. Visible, but you don’t see it.) The Battle of Britain was directed from Uxbridge, so the guidebook says, by the late Air Marshal Lord Dowding. ‘The town is perhaps noteworthy for its selection of modern and futuristic buildings in a variety of competing styles.’

  The buildings along Western Avenue don’t want to be there; they’d prefer Satellite City. Or Las Vegas. Phoenix, Arizona, with Scunthorpe weather. They’d like to be closer to Heathrow’s lingua franca. Mediterranean green glass. Low level units with a certain lazy elegance. Super-Cannes functionalism interspersed with Fifties grot. The heritaged emblems of an old riverside pub, The Swan & Bottle, have been banished by their corporate operators, Chef & Brewer, to the top of a wooden pole. That stares insolently at the slick shoebox of: X (The Document Company XEROX). The Xerox building is designed to look like office machinery, a shredder or printer. The windows are an enigmatic blue-green. Like chlorine. Xerox, Western Avenue, is a swimming pool on its side; from which, by some miracle of gravity, water doesn’t spill. That’s the concept: intelligent water. X marks the spot. Uxbridge is made from Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with barbed wire.

  The Xerox building duplicates itself; come back tomorrow and there’ll be another one, and another. And another. X started out as a narrow four-storey column, then multiplied in the night. Horizontal ‘lanes’ of aqueous green glass play with notions of flow and drift, the river captured and tamed. The front elevation, serene as it is, gives me the bends: it’s like looking down from the high board on to an Olympic swimming pool. Sun-sparkling lanes and dividing ropes which, in this case, convert into metaphors of a clean white road. Motorway and canal system seamlessly linked.

  Traffic is at a standstill. The bridge over the river, with its red brick parapet, is a sad relic. Workers and drones, in thrall to the glass beehives, plod down Slough Road, towards the UXBRIDGE sign. They have their own, end-of-the-Metropolitan Line style; viz., baggy blousons or black puffa jackets worn over lightweight grey suits, brightly polished shoes. They are bareheaded, ballasted by oversize silver attaché cas
es. That is, male and female. Trouser suits, short hair. The women carry a second bag, slung from the shoulder, for personal effects. The attaché cases are the kind that turn up on the TV news, left in cabs by Secret State bagmen. ‘Just popped into Blockbusters to pick up a video and it was gone.’ The invasion plans. The list of informers.

  Downtown Uxbridge is not a place to tease out an acceptable breakfast. We return to the canal path, head south towards Cowley. Now the green-glass buildings are lower, but they spread over a wider area (Terry Farrell’s Aztec MI6 temple at Vauxhall squashed flat). Cowley is where Mediparc pretensions devolve into muck yards and low-rent trading estates.

  TRIMITE (The Printmakers – for Industry). A collection of metal drums in green and various shades of blue; industrial conceptualism. Seven of the drums – one letter on each – spell out the brand name, trimite. They’ve executed this conceit in the style of the popular (with exiles) yeast extract paste: Marmite (‘contains 31 servings’). Red and yellow on a beef-brown background. Fantasies of squat jars with tight lids, all those B vitamins, have me salivating.

  Experience proves: where there’s a trading estate and a canal, there’s a caff, a caravan with serving hatch, a tea stall. It’s a risk worth taking, to detour from our path – fearing that once we come inside the fence we won’t be allowed back to the waterside. More vans than cars. Flat-roofed hutches bodged in asbestos. Print and salvage seem to be the principal trades (along with appearing in deleted TV cop shows).

  PINKY & PERRY’S CAFETERIA (PHONE OR FAX ORDERS WELCOME). Grinning pig’s head motif, transfer lettering on every window. The clientele (early shift) is demographically mixed. Suits (jackets slung over seats) laying down grease before the office opens. Working men with spider tattoos, oil scored into the pores of large hands. They seem happy to share this space, which is clean (yellow Formica, red bucket-chairs). The all-day breakfast floats on my hub cap of a plate like a relief map of London and the Thames Valley. Greensand, oolite, chalk. The bubble and squeak of Enfield Chase, bacon ridges of the Chilterns, rubbery fried egg of the Dome, sausage of the North Downs, bean swamp of Dagenham and Purfleet.

  The Cowley Lock and the Cowley Peachey Junction have a particular interest for me. As far as the Grand Union Canal is concerned, Cowley marks the end of a twenty-seven-mile ‘pound’ and the start of the ascent to the Colne Valley and the Chiltern Hills. In more leisurely times, the Paddington Packet used to ply the fifteen-mile, lock-free stretch between Cowley and Paddington, pulled by four horses.

  The anarchist and libertarian graffiti of the Colne Valley shares the concrete with dopers and slackers and sticky adolescents.

  I was ere smokin weed

  I was ere but now

  I’m not round the corner

  Smoking pot I’m writing this

  To prove a point but uter shit

  Without a joint

  In another hand, the critical riposte: YOU SUCK COCK. Princess Di is memorialised by twin hearts and a question mark. A great red cock, Basquiat-hot, spurts blood. A fleshy lighthouse tower floating on a savage sea. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME…

  Low clouds part, rain in the air. Sunbeams scintillate on ruffled water. The smooth curve of a brick bridge, the Cowley moorings. There is none of the jaunty Notting Hill communalism here, decanted Sixties street warrens. The agenda is quieter, more serious. Boat people keep their heads down, mind their own business – which is often survival (the new subversion). One of the true British poets of the last half-century lived in Cowley, tactfully removed from the scene, carrying out his researches, a rate of production (a bibliography of ‘about four hundred’ items) that would shame any of our logophile novelists. Booklets flow from the grizzled (and exiled) Bill Griffiths with the regularity of newsprint. He avoids publication dates on many of his self-produced chapbooks. There’d be no point. He revises, reissues, amends, sticks on a new cover. Bill’s poems require time codes like video tape. He brings out more editions, so it seems, than the Evening Standard.

  I wrote to Bill, when he was staying in London, cataloguing the Eric Mottram archive (a monster task), and asked about his time in Cowley.

  Now, as to the Grand Union, he replied, I can tell you much or little. It was one of the last canals to be built, unifying the country’s canal system into an Orion-like configuration (now the Kennet Avon is reopened, it literally spans from Thames to Severn Estuary as well as north to south). North of Uxbridge I am not too sure about; the settlement tends to get thicker around Uxbridge itself, and I was based at Cowley, about 2–3 miles south of Uxbridge, where there is a lock, a couple of bridges and a few coveted residential moorings. Near there too is the ‘Slough Arm’, an extra limb of water, which I used in ‘Rabbit Hunt’ and which is notable for the banks of refuse from Central London deposited there in the early C20th.

  This ‘Rabbit Hunt’ was a good place to start thinking about Bill. Rabbits and boats again. Griffiths’s work atomises, splits off into discrete files or songs; his poems are many-voiced, resolutely non-hierarchic. You learn to navigate the tributaries, while waiting to be carried back to the main stream. He’s a musician who deploys subtle and shocking rhythms.

  The critic Kevin Jackson, visiting Griffiths at Seaham on the Durham coast, locates the poet as existing in ‘about the most cheerless Spartan dwelling I’ve seen since I stopped hanging around with graduate students’. In other words, a beached narrow boat. A terraced cabin in a sea-coal settlement, a few miles south of Sunderland. The only incongruous item in this brick coaster was a grand piano. Griffiths, Jackson reveals, is a virtuoso. ‘He tells me he’s been playing since the age of three and, just before I left to catch my train, underwrites the claim by running effortlessly through a complex little piece by Bartok, LOVE and HATE rippling along the keyboard so swiftly that they begin to blur.’

  Fading Hell’s Angel tattoos on the cuticle-chomped digits of a softly spoken man: LOVE/HATE. Bill wheezes, enjoys a roll-up. Beneath all that scholarship – stately build disguised under lumberjack shirt and baseball cap – is a man of the river. Dr Griffiths fits very comfortably into the ruled margins of the Cowley moorings. A boat dweller who hunts rabbits.

  ‘The Rabbit Hunt’ comes from The Book of the Boat, which, in standard Griffiths fashion, appears in various undated editions. The original would seem to be the Writers Forum version in blue covers, with repro-holograph text, line drawings, stapled sheets. An attractive variant was issued from Seaham by the poet’s own Amra Press: spiral bound with hand-coloured drawings. The Book of the Boat celebrates an odyssey, a serpentine voyage from Cowley through London’s canal system to the Thames at Bow Creek, and around the Essex coast to Brightlingsea.

  As someone who has survived a number of rackety voyages in that direction, with percussionist and sound-pirate Paul Burwell, and other less competent skippers, I can vouch for the accuracy – and wit – of Bill’s base account. Place gets at poet. The structure has to encompass sea shanty, camp-fire yarn, hero tale; the hiss and spit of masterless men, rogue spirits who passed through Cowley. In the upheaval of the English Civil War, discharged soldiers, freelance prophets, took to the roads. There were meetings, debates; chapbooks and pamphlets were produced and distributed. Dissent worked its way around the western fringes of the capital; Enfield, Iver, Kingston, Weybridge, Cobham. Griffiths’s associates, his tribal connections (from Hell’s Angels to the narrow boat survivalists), are aligned with traditions of independence, the freedom to roam and rant. In the shadow of grandiose civil engineering projects, scavengers camp out like seventeenth-century Diggers. In his letter, Bill spoke of ‘a family with houseboat and own view onto waste land near Heathrow’.

  Mythologically astute, Griffiths begins The Book of the Boat with a passage through the Blisworth Tunnel (or birth canal); a ‘ballad’ he calls it. Once boats had to be ‘legged’ through the second longest tunnel open to navigation (3,057 yards beneath Blisworth Hill). Now travestied water folk queue up to chug down the dark bore. Griffiths has fun with those
who sentimentalise history, closet antiquarians who think a voyage into the past is a matter of wearing the right hat.

  All folk-fakery is a bare-arsed bane, and lace & bonnets &

  [waistcoats are a

  shame, awful to tell as th’opening time came near, they most

  [dressed up in quaint

  Victorian gear.

  To match these ghouls was not an easy task, we settled for

  [lots of balloons &

  pirate masks, soon the boat was trimmed with bobbing skulls.

  Disposing of this tame carnival, the narrator goes off on a ‘Rabbit Hunt’. Stuart has the gun and is ‘speechlessly quiet: & mute of eye’. Barry is ‘a guy who knows about holes & rabbits’. What a revelation the hunt is: ‘snow set in the sky’, ‘a good deal of slow introduction’. It is late afternoon before this half-wild bunch move off into the real and actual landscape. Don’t they know about the superstitions, rabbits and boats? The hare-fields of the heart hospital? The necessary appeasement of lunar gods? Ancient gravity that will put lead in their boots?

  They drink: ‘like unpacked astronauts’. It’s ‘beer, beer, beer, lovely luring beer’ as they stand in ‘a magic circle’, hallucinating rabbits who will never hop into their pot.

  I stare. & I crunch, but and I weave, all around the waste-way.

  after him. (I like to keep the gun in front). I’m no nearer a catch.

  than is Alf: Why not the geese? (I ask).

  Geese or swans, sheep, chickens, dogs, cats: anything with flesh. They must live, but the hunt is a chance to walk out in company, to drink, and know the country.

  Alf walks by the Colne: I take the upper plateau still. I see one

  [rabbit.

  I whistle for him. I catch the boots I found on the tip. and give

  [up: go home.

  Nothing shot, no kill. Hare and heart safe. The voyage begins.

  The reading and knowing and experiencing of Bill Griffiths’s work, over a quarter of a century, has bred a firm conviction in me, a trust: how these plural voices move and operate. The right place and the right response, reports from Whitechapel prefabs, tribal rucks. (‘The real war was Essex! One of them blasted w/- a shotgun//on Chelsea Bridge, Levi I remember and one other. They had//a caravan on the North Circular and their speaking and planning//was well OK, sunshiny.’) And then the canny recyclings of M.R. James, Christopher Smart and less-known witnesses, journal keepers and correspondents. Everything is ghost. Lurid and swift, in pulse and being. Cowley, by its secret melancholy, its sprawling mess (backing on to waste mounds and dead water) was a place worth looking at; the knowledge that Bill Griffiths had lived here for a time (before the loss of his boat in a fire) made it special.