London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  By the time we pass through the grounds of the Royal Alexandra and Albert School, long shadows precede us. The emptiness of Deep England seems absolute: if no recreational activity is on offer, no one moves. The school serves various disadvantaged groups. Those with difficulties requiring special care. Large tin sculptures, semi-abstract (from the Kenneth Armitage/Lynn Chadwick period), have been nailed to a high brick wall. Bronze, where it has been used, has weathered to an alien green. The diminishing perspective of the evening avenue becomes a Samuel Palmer watercolour, in which silvery poplars meet in Gothic arches – and the single, symbolic pedestrian, his back to us, lurches through shadow pools. He walks on the twist; one leg, permanently bent, kicking to the east.

  Merstham nests among golf courses that have been shaved to a No. 1 fuzz. Yellow balls and red balls meticulously placed on baize. The tired metaphor has been achieved, these greens really are a snooker table. The balls, I’m told, represent positions from which golfers of different abilities, sexes, drive off. Beyond the golf course, the streaming motorway. Then a brown hill, a white scribble of sky writing. Concealed light-boxes allow the golfers to play at night.

  Without golf, the M25 would be entirely encircled by smears of oil seed rape, boarding kennels and deconstructed Victorian asylums. Golf stretches the suburban lawn into the motorway landscape; the kiddies’ sandpit, the lake that is not to be fished or swum. The sanctity of the English golf course (Wodehouse and Christie again) has facilitated the latest M25 landfill scam: permission is granted to some cowboy to dig out a brownfield site, convert it to a golf course. In roll the lorries, the JCBs. Huge pits are dug, mega-bunkers. Toxic waste is dumped. After a few months, money made, the ‘developers’ move on. ‘Golf’ has become its anagram: ‘flog’. Flog the soft estates. ‘Golf course landscaping’ is the euphemism for black bag burial. Money in dirt.

  Golf draws fringe real estate into the defensive ring. Nicely shaved fields look blameless and they have the advantage of keeping the riffraff out. Golf clubs are all about what journalist Steve Crawshaw calls ‘hermetic exclusivity’. Crawshaw reported on the mysterious events that occurred at a ‘golfers’ Garden of Eden’, near Brands Hatch (just up the Darent Valley from Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham).

  The property is known as the London Golf Club – but it’s not in London; it’s an adjunct of the infamous Swanley interchange (scene of the Kenneth Noye road rage killing). The club car park boasts the kind of motors Noye (and deceased prosecution witness Alan Decabral) favoured: alpha-male Alfas, fuck-off Ferraris, premier league Porsches, T-registration Mercs and Beamers. The course was designed by Jack Nicklaus. Members include: Sean Connery, Denis Thatcher, Gianfranco Zola, Kelvin McKenzie. A conspiracy freak’s directory. Kerry Packer paid thousands in membership fees and hasn’t been known to whack a ball in anger (on Kentish soil). Celebs are buying into a hall of mirrors. The famous looking at the famous. Discretion, servility (with a price tag). No guests can be signed in for a day’s play. ‘They can’t,’ as Crawshaw observes, ‘even get through the gates.’

  On 7 July 1999, one month before we crossed Merstham golf course, greenkeeper Steve Jones discovered the ruin of Nicklaus’s ‘Heritage’ course: infiltrators (Saddam Hussein-sponsored asylum seekers, anti-global capitalism anarchists) crept out in the night and dug up the fairways. They drew cabbalistic diagrams with weedkiller. The letter D was burnt into the middle of a green. Why D? The general manager of the club is Daniel Loha. The damage was inflicted on the 12th green (the 12th letter of the alphabet is L). The biblical Daniel was a prophet with an apocalyptic book to his name. Daniel, in Hebrew, means: ‘The Lord is my Judge.’

  Among early attempts to find scapegoats, someone to pay for this outrage – ‘It’s a war situation’ – travellers were implicated. They used to occupy the fields where the golf course was laid out. Travellers deny all knowledge, the head man says that he is very fond of the occasional round of golf.

  Smart money is on an insider. An ex-member, a disgruntled barman or caddy. Detectives need to look at the psychogeography of the setting: Brands Hatch is rage culture. Town/wilderness. Motorway forced through a cutting in the hills. Dangerous roundabouts. Vibes from the other side of the bridge, from Purfleet and West Thurrock. Bandit country. Kenny Noye, the well-known Freemason, was a member. Rogue trader Nick Leeson had his membership suspended after his little difficulty in Singapore. On returning to England, sentence served (book, film and subsidiary exploitation rights flogged), he rejoined. A £10,000 reward is still on offer for evidence leading to the conviction of the Green Destroyers.

  I don’t much like the sound of Merstham. I don’t like places I can’t pronounce. Before finding the station (which has some kind of pioneer commuter status), we walk out of town on to the motorway bridge – look east to the flurry of Junctions 7 and 8 (access to M23). Highways Agency horticulturalists have obscured the pitch, trees to the edge of the road. The sun drops behind us, just as my film runs out. The final shot: half a frame of red-gold meltdown, a Fiesta speed-stretched to limo status.

  3

  12 August 1999. On Merstham station, Renchi looks serious: he’s arranging his blue-shirt bandanna, it’s going to be a long day. We aim to clear the southern stretch of the M25, leaving us free to walk the Darent Valley for our next expedition. Somewhere in the vicinity of Otford ought to do.

  There is a threatening, milky haze over the town. The pattern of settlement – single street, mini-cab firms – exists to justify the railway station. Merstham is a fantasy England conjured by a distant viewer, a state-sponsored psychic: train, newspaper shop, white church with steeple. Then he ran out of inspiration, left the rest blank.

  St Katharine’s Church is on a slope, hidden among ilex, willow, yew. Trees feed on, and express, the early-morning melancholy of the burial ground. Clipped bushes and globes of yellow privet organise the mound into corridors for private walks. This is a necessary halt for pilgrims.

  We’re pleased to find an effigy of Catherine (with broken wheel) set high on the wall. The wheel, standing on its rim, could be taken as the arc of the motorway circuit that we have already covered. The second pan of our story is lost.

  St Catherine of Alexandria protested to the emperor Maxentius about the practice of worshipping idols. She demolished the arguments of the fifty philosophers sent to refute her. They were burnt for their failure. Catherine was beaten, imprisoned, fed by a dove; tied to a spiked wheel (‘Catherine wheel’) which fell to pieces. Spectators were killed by the detonated splinters. When she was beheaded, milk flowed from her neck. Her church at Merstham, with its war dead, its generations of buried villagers, is coded with the devices of martyrology (scourges, nails).

  The church door is locked. A Norman chevron decorates the arch. Renchi pauses, so that I can record another of our improvisations on Blake’s ‘Los as he entered the Door of Death’ from the Jerusalem frontispiece. Which is our own form of idolatry, offered to the spirit of place.

  Paper boys (and girls) are the only sign of life as town gives way to broken countryside. We’re trapped on another island, another microclimate of motorway-bordered land. Dwarf children (sacks on their backs) wear bright red, hooded anoraks. The houses they service are detached, ‘his and hers’ motors still in the driveways. Wistaria climbs over red brick towards leaded windows: the usual argument between Arts and Crafts, Tudor beams, lamps in alcoves, neo-Georgian urns. Pink hydrangeas, ferns and hollyhocks gesture at the sentiment of lost cottage gardens.

  Out of this resolute disregard for the M25, the intruder at the garden gate, they promote a village life from which villagers (the rural underclass) have been expelled. Country properties to delight any estate agent in Reigate or Redhill (sold instantly on the Internet) are in fief to other places: Croydon, the City, Gatwick. The suburb is no longer a suburb, it’s a denial of the motorway – on which it depends for its future survival. This is play country, a ‘lifestyle’ choice. Available to those with liquidity, equity reserves. The Balkanis
ation of the rail network, the horrors experienced by regular travellers, means that commuting is an activity for overworked, overstressed citizens who can’t quite afford to be where they are. The journey isn’t a respite, a convivial passage between work and home. It’s the focus of the day, feared and endured. The silence of these broken hamlets is the silence of deep trauma; the slow-motion sigh of those recovering from their brush with privatised transport, their hit of motorway madness. Working from home, logging on, is no solution: being part of the global telecommunications weave, you are still in Merstham. What’s here is what you have: a sequestration that takes you out of the crowd, away from noise, smell, touch. Marooned in an off-highway set, you are plunged into the monasticism that suits certain writers. It was never intended for humans. But, more and more, I sense a lack of mobility in these North Downs communities. The travel impulse has atrophied. Any contact with the territory that surrounds them is casual and unrewarding. The M25, that unmentioned cataract, is the defining reality. The road out is also the road back. A legendary presence that nobody wants to confront or confirm.

  The interchange of M23 and M25 is like a postcard from Oregon, a rural fantasy. Pine woods and metalled silver streams. An absence of bears. Speed and stasis co-exist. Structural solutions in steel and concrete blend the picturesque with the functional. The interchange works best for pedestrians (crossing the M23 by Rockshaw Road); the very real fear of taking a wrong decision, hurtling off towards Gatwick instead of Maid-stone, is removed. Motorists who go wrong never recover; they’re sucked in among the hospitals that surround Coulsdon. Walkers are free to appreciate the art of the landscape architects: multi-levelled, dynamic. A three-barred safety fence replaces the five-barred gate as somewhere to lean, chew a stalk of grass, watch the road. A heat-singed motorway palette encourages contemplation; dark greens and burnt browns disappearing into a range of recessive silvers and blues.

  Quitting this exhibit, with some reluctance, we strike out along Pilgrims Lane.

  One thing there isn’t, pilgrims or no pilgrims, is breakfast. Now that we have agreed a route, any possibility of rogue coffee-stalls or bacon-smelling caravans has vanished. We are on our own in country that doesn’t want us. It’s a strange feeling, climbing and descending, in and out of woods, views across ripe fields of corn, and being unable to get any purchase on the experience. Our walk is compromised. We’re pulled between the territorial imperatives of Surrey, Kent and Greater London. The old Green Way is barely tolerated, a dog path, a route that might, if you stick with it, offer accidental epiphanies. It’s more likely to lose heart, be swallowed by a disused chalk quarry, an agribiz farm, a radio mast. Some unexplained concrete structure, fenced in, and surrounded by tall trees.

  The road hums. The more the motorway is screened, the more the farm tracks shudder with deflected acoustic back-draughts. Farms have a back country quality. We notice such things as a low-loader with a cannibalised helicopter, a pad-dock of battered racing cars. A fairytale tower in a plantation of firs. Small dogs yelp at farm gates and sometimes follow us, large dogs froth and snarl. The focus on my camera refuses to hold.

  HIGH PASTURES PRIVATE. Deserted outhouses, earth churned up, animals missing – removed for slaughter? Farms that don’t farm. Farms that operate as up-market scrap yards. Farms that yield to hidden clusters of houses that don’t cohere as villages; the scattered outwash of Caterham.

  In Woodland Way (red brick backing nervously into forest), we come across: Pilgrims Cottage (signature in concrete of GJ & CG Morley, 1986). The Morleys – husband and wife, siblings, father and son? – weren’t satisfied with simply setting the plaque in a grey brick (fake granite) wall (lion couchant and carriage lamp); they reprised the name on a pokerwork board. Hung it like a Red River ranch.

  Coming on Fosterdown Fort and a self-advertised ‘viewing point’, it would have been churlish not to stop, sit on a bench, in a clearing above the tree line, and view away. Until our eyes bleed. Down to the road. The irregular display of topiarised bushes. The litter bins. The display board that influences your viewing, by telling you what’s out there. The sights (and sites) worth noticing.

  Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ is our destination, the hoped for resolution of a day’s nervy pilgrimage – but in anticipating a coming blitz of visual sensation we have affected our approach, the long transit through the foothills. I’m having problems with focus. For some time, I’ve had to take my spectacles off, in order to read the small print on the map. These glasses are only good for middle-distance travelling. Another set comes into play when I venture on to the road in a car. And so, to keep to the spirit of the day (confusion), I leave the discarded spectacles on the bench by the viewing platform. We’re at the next map-checking spot, four miles on, before I notice what I’ve done: before I picture the bench in focus so sharp I can feel every splinter.

  Dropping down through the woods, to cross the M25, the picture darkens. A red circle has been painted on the smooth grey bark of a beech tree. (Holmes shook his head gravely. ‘Do you know, Watson,’ said he, ‘that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.’ The Copper Beeches.)

  Renchi, placing his hand within the red circle, calls up an Ulster loyalist symbol. Further on, sprayed across a slanting ash, we notice the return of a familiar logo: NF. This is the first time that River Lea (or Grand Union) graffiti have infiltrated the pleasant Surrey hills.

  Next comes a tin kettle, hung by red rope, from a low branch. The kettle has been dented and punctured with bullet holes.

  At the top of a lane, on the wood’s edge, is a compound of caravans and tumbledown bungalows, guarded by dogs, XMAS TREES. A broad white arrow points towards a yard. Horses’ heads (plaster) are nailed to the gateposts. A bright yellow RASCAL van alongside a plum-coloured pantechnicon, behind a chainlink fence. A low-loader hidden under electric-green tarpaulin. Five dogs, mixed breeds, shaggy, small, ridiculously loud, snap and yelp and snarl, back off when challenged, turn – after fifteen yards – and attack again.

  A bow window, with fresh white trim, is thrown open. This combination of elongated kennel and neo-Georgian improvements is unusual. A non-travelling traveller, dealer in Xmas trees (scrap-metal, poultry, the black stuff), screams abuse. Specific threats. He’s seen the camera. Luckily, he’s still in bed – in vest – possibly on the job; there’s a high flush to the man (between pleasure postponed and apoplexy). He asks if we’ll be kind enough to wait a few moments while he slips the dog. The unleashed mongrels don’t count. They nip and run. The real beasts, drooling, heads too heavy to pick from the dirt, are on chains.

  We trot on, briskly, to the motorway bridge. From where I spot a tea stall sign. Renchi is adamant: we don’t have the time. He’s in the middle, just now, of complicated holiday season travel plans that carry him from a Wordsworth seminar in Cumbria to a New Age symposium in Portugal. He has inherited his father’s Citroën.

  Soft estate walking – there’s no other means of reconnecting with the Pilgrims Way, on the north of the M25 – is like plunging into a river in spate. Juggernauts lurch on to Junction 6 (Sevenoaks, Dartford). We opt for the A22 (E. Grinstead, Eastbourne) – before recrossing the motorway by Flower Lane.

  A police bike pulls us. No sane person would voluntarily offer themselves as roadkill. August is the optimum period for animal ironing, clogging tyre grooves with flesh and fur. Fifty thousand badgers, 100,000 foxes and at least 10 million birds: ex’d, maimed, mutilated. The Glorious Twelfth! We are walking on the day when grouse are slaughtered in the Highlands, on the Yorkshire Moors. In the south, traditionalists use the M25; a motor vehicle hurtling at seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour. There are tunnels under the road for badgers, but nothing for
humans: as we explain to the policeman. Entry to the fields is forbidden. There is no other route.

  I’ve had meals in Shoreditch where people raved over the pheasant – before discovering that the feast was roadkill. Birds scraped from tarmac. Watercress scavenged from Chiltern pools. A room of drooling carnivores begging for the recipe, the frisson of scorched rubber across traumatised meat.

  And here it is, courtesy of Jonathan Thomson:

  The entire process is as follows:

  • Having gathered the creature from the road, I check to ensure the condition of the bird is reasonable – I reject those which are infested with maggots or are too damaged from the impact of the collision.

  • Once gathered next step is to pluck the bird – I always do this while still in the country – this is a problematic task in central London.

  • A good ‘hanging’, from the neck with entrails intact, is essential to bring the flavour on – if this step is missed or the duration of the hanging is too short the meat does not develop a sufficiently ‘gamey’ flavour. The hanging process and the smell this produces stirs many adverse comments from those who live in our building; the last hanging bird was hauled down because of the strength of protest rather than the meat being sufficiently matured.

  • On completion of the hanging the bird is gutted and cleaned.

  • The cooking is as follows: I very slowly cook the legs in braise of white wine, game stock, onions, carrots, juniper berries and thyme. The dish is best cooked in a heavy skillet. Method is as follows: sear the legs over a high heat in butter and oil. Remove; add salt & pepper and sweat off onions, carrots and celery until softened – then add 2 crushed garlic cloves. Deglaze the pan with either white wine or calvados – ensure that all the sediment is scraped from the bottom of the pan. Replace the pheasant legs and add enough game stock to generously cover the bottom of the pan. Put into a moderate oven and cook slowly until tender. To finish: remove the legs (keep at serving temperature), strain off the braising vegetables and reserve the liquor in a saucepan (this is optional, the brazing vegetables can be retained). Place over a high heat and reduce, thicken the sauce with cream.