London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  What is shocking, if not surprising, given the tight politics of the poetry franchise, the indifference of the world at large to language and imagination, is how inadequately Bill Griffiths’s work is known. He hasn’t, it’s true, solicited attention. The trajectory of life and career from biker youth, through a period as ‘guest worker’ in Germany, to the burning boat and the decamping to County Durham, remains a private matter; the ordinary accidents, as he would have it, of a life lived. Griffiths received the support of Professor Eric Mottram and the ever-enthusiastic polemicist Jeff Nuttall, but the broadsheets were otherwise engaged, proud of their bottomless ignorance. A collection that appeared from Paladin was very soon pulped and forgotten. The hundreds of chapbooks, the leatherbound volumes, the hand-coloured variants, pass around a small band of enthusiasts. This is a craftsman, a scholar capable of reinvigorating the language; a master of the weights and units of breath.

  Reading the selection of Griffiths’s poetry that Clive Bush gathered for the anthology Worlds of New Measure (1997), I began to superimpose those radical songs (‘Troops, curfews, and reason’) on to the Colne Valley, our march towards Heathrow. Thirteen Thoughts as though Woken at Dawn by 150 Policemen in Riot Gear with Helicopter and Film Back-up… Wandsworth (‘a turbulent river/an offer of valium’)… Star Fish Jail… The Hawksmoor Mausoleum.

  Was it legitimate to read that decade of samizdat publication (1965–75), poetry wars, readings above pubs or in disestablished chapels, as in any way analogous to the outpourings of the Dissenters (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters) in the years after the English Civil War (1646–56)? Much of the dissenting rhetoric, a country on the cusp of republicanism, had the same primitive, biblical, improvisatory meld of speech. Paragraphs were urgent and energised. With knowledge of coming defeat? Accepted truths were interrogated. Earth magic and antinomianism argued a rationale for independence, the over-throw of a Leviathan state of priests and landowners and kings.

  It was my contention, a small conceit to toy with as we moved south towards the ‘impounded’ market gardens and common land of Hounslow Heath and Harmondsworth, the lost village of Heathrow, that the group of London-based poets who read (under Mottram’s patronage), at King’s College in the Strand, represented a recrudescence of the Dissenting tradition. Griffiths, obviously, sampled the original texts and lived by their spirit. Allen Fisher (‘I am in the garden of a coming English Revolution’…’Met hunter/hungry on Sydenham Common’…‘should people of low and mean condition/cause offence by stake removal/they will be openly whipped near unto the place’) is interested in process and prophecy, the erosion of liberties and above all the corruption of language. In his ‘Letter to Eric Mottram’ (from Stane, Place Book III), Fisher is concerned about how the ‘sacred hierarchy’ dissolves into ‘stockbroker belts’. City dwellers are restless, unplaced, knowing that ‘the airport is now 60 minutes away’.

  Echoes of dissent, and the promptings of unappeased voices, are always there. Barry MacSweeney, electively possessed by Shelley and Chatterton, experienced in the blather and compromise of union meetings, wrote a book called Ranter. He worked at a desk alongside Basil Bunting in a newspaper office, keeping a none-too-fastidious record of shipping on the Tyne.

  Ranter. Call him Leveller, Lollard,

  his various modes

  Whispering sedition, libel,

  love lockets of memory

  coaxed from his memory box.

  Bunting would be an exemplar, the dissenting poet, avoiding fuss, handing out good advice to those who came close to him: ‘Cut, cut, cut.’ His name is recorded on a plain stone in the burial ground alongside the Quaker meeting house at Brigflatts; near the place where George Fox preached on one of his journeys through the north.

  At Packet Boat Lane, we came away from the tow path, twitchy to make contact with a road that went over the motorway, where a (disused) branch of the Grand Union Canal passed under it. The tarmac had broken up into sticky black granules, like a porridge made from coal. Tough spikes of grass pushed through the mantle. I lay, curved to the camber, to take a photograph; and would, if I could, have swum away to the west. The sounds of the road, as the M25 approached the tangled interchange with the M4, were compulsive; as complex and as many-voiced as a Bill Griffiths poem. A sound that was its own score.

  4

  We lost the Colne at Cowley and now, at West Drayton, we bid farewell to the eastward swerving Grand Union Canal. Off-highway territory is cake-sliced into discrete bands; the natural flow, of water and footpath, is to the south, the Thames, but the Money requires a series of difficult-to-negotiate horizontal barriers. Railway (out of Paddington). M4. A4 (Bath Road). The inscrutable geometry of Heathrow’s terminals, runways, hangars and car parks. How are we going to walk through that lot?

  Our first step must be to the west, in the direction of the vertical blue band of the M25 (colour co-ordinated on my Nicholson with its mate the Colne). River and road define the westerly limits of London Airport’s piracy. The land-grab that will never be satisfied. Terminals 5, 6, 7: it’s not enough. Flight-zone must be bigger than the city it serves. In five years, so the planners tell us, there will be four-hour intervals (on good days) between leaving the centre of London and being called for your flight. (Such optimistic forecasts were soon overtaken by events: four hours might get you down the Euston Road, invalid carriages sailing past the window of your cab, limping backpackers leaving you in their wake. Heathrow was the holiday. You’d be lucky to get out of there in a week, patted down by security, papers checked, sleep on a bench. The full asylum-seeker experience for the price of a bucket-shop ticket.) Check-in queues will stretch back to that model Concorde on its traffic island, to the M4. Severed communities, such as Harmondsworth, are under threat; in time, West Drayton itself will be swallowed.

  A theatre of catastrophe in which all the global disasters play: heightened security, longer waits. More time for comfort-blanket shopping malls, bad coffee. Flight after flight of Third World drug mules, snacked to the eyeballs on coke-flavoured condoms. More desert parking lots for unwanted aircraft. Why not use the M25, stack ‘em nose-to-tail, Colnbrook to Leather-head?

  ‘Who needs West Drayton?’ you say. But you’re wrong. West Drayton is the gateway to the Green Path, a site of some significance for psychogeographers, dowsers, Zodiac conceptualists (of the K.E. Maltwood tendency).

  None of these great themes was immediately obvious, as we picked our way through the urban sprawl. You could, if you pushed it, remark the Railway Arms, with its balconies and verandah; a colonial outpost fallen into disuse when travellers became commuters. The rest was a standard extrusion of hairdressers, charity caves, fast food. The difference is – thinking back to the sleepwalking hamlets of the Colne Valley – a slipstream energy derived from railway/motorway/canal systems. West Drayton is the frontier, the first whiff of the (wild) West. Bicycle shops are a nostalgic recollection of the days when H.G. Wells’s clerks took to the country roads. Tidy suburbs, brave in their pretensions, bleed into raw-elbowed commerce.

  For a pound I snaffle a copy of Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (on the strength of its puff as ‘A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words’). The cover illustration (Broadmoor Special Hospital) showcases, under an operatic sky, the most extreme version of the asylums we’ve been tracking around the M25. A prison for no-hopers with no date for release. Winchester runs with the ambivalence of that term: asylum. He quotes Johnson’s Dictionary: ‘A place out of which he that has fled to it, may not be taken.’ Sanctuary, refuge; trap.

  An ordinary house, in an ordinary village, in a prettily rural royal county just beyond the boundaries of London.

  We have to orientate ourselves for the push south, over the M4. I like the look of a church set at the head of something called The Avenue. The church tower, if we blag our way inside, will offer a view across lagoons and gravel pits to the Tower Arms Hotel on the far side of the M25.

  Lurking-with-intent, in the v
icinity of a fifteenth-century church, parts of which have a thirteenth-century pedigree, when coated in the dust and dirt of a seven-mile yomp down the canal, tends to arouse a degree of suspicion in proper citizens. The solitary communicant (female) is not so bad; the parents dropping off their kids (from gleaming metro-country motors) are less happy. To the point of making the phone call. Hitting the emergency button. We have cameras and rucksacks. We’re indigents or asylum seekers, possibly paedophiles. John Piper-tendency terrorists. The ‘church as sanctuary’ deal has been discontinued, charity begins in Station Road, West Drayton, with the musty books and racks of dead clothes. Charity is a corporate enterprise, cold calls, junk mail, celebrity auctions. It’s where skimmers like Lord Archer get their start.

  We persevere, follow the communicant, gain access. St Martin’s is the parish church of West Drayton. A square-towered building lodged in a small, well-kept burial ground, alongside a turreted sixteenth-century gatehouse. A good day on the hoof should include: (1) a section of river or canal, (2) a Formica-table breakfast, (3) a motorway bridge, (4) a discontinued madhouse, (5) a pub, (6) a mound, (7) a wrap of London weather (monochrome to sunburst), (8) one major surprise. So far, so good.

  Being inside a church, after the locked doors of the northern quadrant, is a minor shock: the 800-year franchise works its spatial and temporal magic, the narrow building detaches itself from its surroundings, the bluster of West Drayton.

  Hats off, from custom or superstition, we creep and whisper. Cruise the usual circuit, interrogating the fabric: in expectation of some clue or sign. Or confirmation. Thicker air. Stone-dust and candle grease. Stained light. Windows designed by Burne-Jones, to the memory of the Mercers. The monumental brass of Dr James Good, the Elizabethan physician. Alabaster memorials to the De Burghs – an echo from Jane Austen (Lady Catherine de Bourgh); Fysch and his wife Easter. A ‘ship’ memorial to Captain Rupert Billingsley. The suspended teardrop of the pyx – in which the sacrament is reserved. This is lowered on a cord from the opening above the tower arch. A medieval survivor? A swinging lodestone from which to navigate the next stage of our journey? Not this time. The pyx is a crafted fake, based on the canopy at Dennington, Suffolk, and created by underemployed technicians at Pinewood Studios.

  The item of church furniture that pricks Renchi’s interest is the font. He chews his fingers, studies the leaflet, in which Theo Samuel sounds a cautionary note: ‘We are aware, at St Martin’s, that the beauty of the architecture and surroundings of the ancient church can contribute on the one hand to a sense of calm trust in God, but on the other to an overdependence on the achievements of the past.’ The Revd Samuel wants to shake the faithful from their torpor. They must confront ‘the everyday realities of life’, especially the needs of’ ‘the poor’. He invokes the tradition of St Martin of Tours.

  Martin sounds like a useful guide: he was both bishop and hermit, missionary and wonderworker. According to my Dictionary of Saints, ‘he penetrated into the remotest part of his diocese and beyond its borders, on foot, on donkey-back, or by water’.

  The whiteness of the font, with its relief figures, has a grubby pink sheen – from generations of supplicating hands that have polished, but not worn away, the curious tableaux. The font dates from the fifteenth century. Beyond the standard Christian iconography, crucifixion and pieta, is a stumpy-legged man in a cowl, brandishing a chisel or poignard. Near his right hand is a large leaf. The suggestion is that this personage is the sculptor, the stone carver working on ecclesiastical tracery. The design incorporates a vine leaf to signal the fact that the donor was a vintner (of whose trade St Martin was the patron saint).

  The carver’s chisel, driven into the ground by a raised bone or dildo, marks the spot; the spring from which the Green Way begins.

  It was another visit, months later, when I managed to get up into the tower. To see for myself how the land opened out: the path to St Mary’s Church at Harmondsworth. The crop of torpedo graves. The M25 with its constant flickering movement. We had stumbled on an active, but little used, pilgrims’ path. The Avenue. Heading, through a tunnel of pink blossom, towards the motorway and the site of a Benedictine priory at Harmondsworth. The sequestered principality of Heathrow.

  The breeze barrelling down the long straight track – a diminishing asphalt tongue – doubled Renchi over. He leant into the wind, tugged on the straps of his rucksack like a skydiver. For the first time, since Shenley, we didn’t need maps. We trusted the ground. Snow-pink excesses of municipal cherry trees. We followed our noses.

  Patches of greenery, dog grass, a few trees: they are absorbed into a grander scheme. Isolate one Lombardy pine. Stand still and listen. Outsiders are struck by effects, shifts, that locals walking their animals, or collecting their kids from a fenced-off school, take for granted. There is a mystery at the edge of great conurbations; in the light, in places travellers have passed through for centuries.

  West Drayton peters out, estates double-glazed against motorway siroccos; a tangle of tree-named streets (Laurel Lane, Rowan Avenue, The Brambles). Would you fancy ‘The Brambles’ as an address? End of the line. Shuddering from traffic. Fence decorated by tossed paper, ubiquitous scraps of black plastic (burst bin bags from an ecological division of household rubbish).

  I’m intoxicated by this path; a squeaky gate takes us on to a footbridge over the hectic M4. The demons are not only answering our questions, they’re shouting each other down in their eagerness to get in on the act. There’s Junction 4, the Heathrow turn-off, with its attendant fear and rage. Primal screams. And the warped rectangle of Junction 4B (M4). The infamous Junction 15 of the M25. A cat’s cradle of underpasses and flyovers, impossible decisions.

  Our footbridge is a stopped wave. The sky, this morning, is dull and anxious; a dirty scum of cloud into which lamp standards twist their necks, in a feeding frenzy. Beyond the small lake, the tree line of Harmondsworth, planes are coming into Heathrow; a procession of them, drifting in slow motion, like thistledown over yellow fields.

  Renchi squats on his heels, meditating. The footbridge trembles and vibrates. If it ran across the Thames between St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, they’d close it down. The West Drayton bridge isn’t a tourist attraction, not yet. It ought to be. All the powers and thrones and dominions of transport are here, angelic orders of diesel, jet fuel, crop spray, animal and human shit. Burial grounds of lost villages. The Perry Oaks Sludge Disposal Works.

  The pond’s surface is choppy. You can imagine fat-bellied planes blown backwards. ‘Billy & Mary’ have scratched a Unionist courtship poem into the metallic handrail of the bridge. A sponsored artist has laid out a giant’s causeway of limestone rocks in an incomplete maze; an arrangement that sustains the Hegira, the secret track. Good agricultural land skirting grey water. The continuing alignment of filed-and-forgotten churches.

  The account of how the Air Ministry (Civil Aviation Authority) acquired this land, as told by Philip Sherwood in The History of Heathrow (revised edition, 1993), comes to life as we move in on the erased village. It’s not just nostalgia, the loss of market gardens, farms, cottages and coaching inn. Such things have their time and are doomed to removal (as images) into local history archives – which will themselves be rationalised and dumped. Heathrow, one of a chain of small settlements to the west of Hounslow Heath, is a site with a pedigree as old or older than London itself. (Renchi and I, on our walk around the City walls, finished in the Museum of London, where one of the better exhibits featured an Iron Age village; a cluster of huts that dissolved, as you looked at them, into an aircraft taxiing on to the runway. Rub your eyes and thatched huts break through the tarmac. Neither description is definitive; one state of consciousness bleeds continually into another.)

  Sherwood’s History opens with an ‘aerial view of Heathrow in 1935’. What appears to be a road choked with traffic is revealed, under magnification, as a dense hedgerow. Prime agricultural land, divided into rectangles, squares and strips, on the edge of a
n unseen city. The field where London Airport was to be built, in an era before crop circle frenzy, is loud with evidence of previous settlement; a square within a square, a deep ditch, secondary paths that confirm Stukeley’s 1723 drawing of ‘Caesar’s Camp’.

  Stukeley’s three figures (their chains, their cloaked supervisor) anticipate the choice of this ground as a suitable location for General Roy’s establishment of a baseline of accurately measured length – which would act as the prelude to a trigonometrical survey of Great Britain. Roy spoke of ‘the extraordinary levelness of the surface’. The line was drawn, with some annoyance from coach traffic, on the ‘Great Road’ (Hounslow to Staines), between King’s Arbour at Heathrow and the Poor House at Hampton Court, a distance of five miles. Surveyors discovered that the spire of the church at Banstead in Surrey was ‘dead in line with the two ends of the base’. The work was undertaken in June and July 1784.

  The terminals of the baseline were marked with wooden pipes and wagon wheels set in the ground; by 1791 these decayed and were replaced by upturned cannon. A plaque at King’s Arbour records the event. The distance, as measured by Roy, was 27404.01 feet. Captain Mudge repeated the exercise: 27404.24 feet. Finally, the Ordnance Survey Standard, as determined by Clarke, was declared at 27406.19 feet. From a pleasant suburban stroll through market gardens, heathland, river valley, the triangulation of Britain and the construction of ‘a complete and accurate map’ was begun.