Roads are narrow and straight, sparsely hedged. A man in a white Panama hat tools along in an invalid carriage. We overtake him, comfortably. Thick rubber wheels hiss on wet tarmac. The most exciting find of the morning is a trig point that tells us where we are, where we’ve gone wrong.
FREE RANGE EGGS. A giant chicken waves punters towards a brick shed. Father Christmas is parked on a red-tiled roof, with sleigh and reindeer, waiting for the big day. The pargeting fetish explodes: entire walls are given over to hunting scenes, a white world from which all colour has been leeched, OAK-WOOD, 1991: announces a Tudorbethan semi, proud of its antiquity. We’re tiptoeing through an area of beamed, forest ranger cottages with car ports for his-and-hers vehicles: a fancy jeep and a London cab (with blue wings). We’re close enough to Epping Forest to feel ourselves trespassing on reservations exclusive to those who have acquired the Knowledge.
The Royal Oak (crown in tree) features a ‘crab and lobster hut’, but it’s too early for lunch. This is a special interest landscape, SHEDS SHEDS SHEDS. The bits between villages are perpetual car boot sales. They’ll peddle anything, LOGS, MAYHEM PAINTBALL GAME. In the car park, outside a pub called the Rabbits, is a red cab with a Union Flag logo: THE ORIGINAL BEN SHERMAN. The A113 sign – (LONDON 18) ABRIDGE 2 – has been customised with an NF symbol.
Passingford Mill is a John Constable photo-op in the slipstream of the motorway. Frame out the cars. Reed beds and river and English melancholy. ‘Few excursionists,’ wrote A.R. Hope-Moncrieff in 1909, ‘but such as love quiet and go a-fishing find their way from London so far up the Roding Valley.’ He commends Passingford Bridge as ‘a pleasant halting-place, looking down to a picturesque mill, and up between the parks of Suttons and Albyns’.
The stillness of the bridge, for those who go a-walking, is more to do with the state of the road than with Mother Nature resting from her labours. Junction 27 is a bad one. Roadworks, terrorist alerts at Stansted, motorway pile-ups in fog. Potential suicides. The Mil was blocked in both directions for four hours, while police tried to talk a Chigwell jumper down from a bridge. ‘Thousands of drivers were trapped between the M25 and the North Circular.’ Angry commuters honked their horns and yelled at the hesitating depressive. One motorist, according to newspaper reports, said: ‘Let the bugger jump. It’s only 18 feet.’
Burnt-out cars replace milestones. British Telecom have built themselves a cage: BT PREMISES TRESPASS PROHIBITED. Plessy Thorn Electronics have an interest in Stapleford Aerodrome. IDEAL CHRISTMAS GIFT. A TRIAL LESSON. £30. The perfect present for al-Qa’ida sleepers. Customer-friendly airfields on the edge of the city. They are lined up, wing tip to wing tip, two- and four-seaters. From a distance, they look like gulls on the landfill mountain at Rainham.
LEA: London Executive Aviation, AEROMEGA HELICOPTERS. Renchi strides towards the corrugated sheds: THE DREAM LEISURE CLUB. Very accommodating. Fly you anywhere you want around the M25 circuit – with the exception of the Heathrow corridor.
On the far side of the Roding is Bloody Mead, a sewage farm and Hobbs Cross. One final field – PRIVATE PROPERTY – before Junction 27 of the M25; thin brown earth, flints, a few horses. With the soft going, Kevin’s decision to experiment with trainer-type footwear is not looking so clever. A no-win situation: in Surrey, his yellow American rough terrain boots were too heavy; in Essex, rubber slippers suck and drag. The weight of the two bags drives him deeper and deeper into wet mud. By the time we reach Hobbs Cross, he’s around the same height as the rest of us. Sunk to his knees in slurry.
HOBBS CROSS EQUESTRIAN CENTRE. A white wall decorated with black horses’ heads. The place must have been used for a Mafia convention. Traffic flow, at late-morning levels, is visible above a low embankment. Somebody has left an anti-aircraft gun at the bottom of the field – within easy range of the motorway.
What’s unusual about the Coppersale Lane bridge, with its vision of Junction 6 of the M11 (Junction 27 of the M25), is that Kevin isn’t carrying out running repairs on his feet. The interwoven, tumbling rush of the junction is a Niagara to motorway tourists. A border. When we step down, dodge around red and white barriers (that keep out motorists), we’ll be on the edge of the forest.
We have a good view of one of Tony Sangwine’s soft estates, a sand bar between motorways, a sparsely planted slope. Nothing has taken. Grass is rusty, bushes the colour of shredded tobacco. Road rubbish attracts wildlife. Squashed body cases on the hard shoulder. The only thriving crops are lighting poles and surveillance camera masts. Somewhere someone is watching us watching them. Nobody bothers with the turf island, the dead zone.
So far, so good. The Bull at Theydon Bois. Kevin has got his round in, Renchi has shot off to look for a torch. It’s getting dark and the walk through the forest is beginning to play on Kevin’s mind. The smile is still there, but it’s in danger of becoming fixed. Naked panic in his eyes. Because this time, as we move into night, there’s no way out, nothing but trees between the pub and Waltham Abbey. Trees and road.
Another pint? Postpone the moment. The pub is warm and dry. Kevin is replaying his visit to the poet Bill Griffiths in Seaham, County Durham. The shock of it. How poets live. Washing in the sink. Two rooms. With a lodger upstairs. Coal-streaked shoreline. Survivalism. And, despite or because of this, Bill produces book after book. He digs into where he is. He addresses the local and discovers coherent arguments, myths and scandals. He finds the words.
Hackney, of late, has also suffered from strange visitations. There must be something about the place I’ve missed. It’s become a second home to the Prince of Wales. Every time you run up against a police cordon, cop cars without sirens blaring, bored camera crews, you know he’s back. Showing solidarity at the mosque. He can’t keep away. Snipers on the roof of the school. The caretaker in an Italian suit. Charles dropping in on Albion Drive, the Teachers’ Centre, to take a gander at a model of Hackney. Much safer, his advisers will have told him, than sampling the real thing.
What was once a school, one of those red brick Victorian monsters (alma mater to Kray footsoldier Tony Lambrianou and a dozen premier league armed robbers), has been rationalised into a ‘professional development centre’. Rest and recreation for battle-fatigued teachers. Advice on how to cope with the latest government rethink, post-spin paperwork. There’s always a spot for those who teach the teachers, the bureaucrats of education.
In decommissioned classrooms, Hackney has been miniaturised. A bankrupt Lilliput. Papier-mâché estates, systems that work: demonstrations of electricity, machines humming and throbbing. Craftsmen have given their services. School children have carried out projects. There are tower blocks with tiny photographs of inhabitants who volunteered for the scheme; a micro-video monitor loops a sitting room. Ghosts of soon-to-be-demolished Utopian experiments.
Here is the voodoo version, the idealised borough. Without crime and drugs and craziness. Without sound or smell. Drills or dogs. The secret city in which a couple will sit smiling on a sofa: for ever. In which there is no weather, just drawings of weather. A fit principality for a future king.
‘Something must be done.’ The hereditary mantra. Heard by miners. Bangladeshis in Brick Lane. They know the proper response: a celebrity photograph to stick in the window of the curry house, an unofficial endorsement. HRH and the manager shaking hands. Part of a gallery of clapped-out media Xeroxes, cricketers on the piss. Tourists in search of the most popular English dish of the moment: Chicken Tikka Masala.
Batteries, springs, bulb. Renchi spreads them on the pub table. Puts them back into his SAS ‘power torch’ (£1.50) – and finds that it still doesn’t work. This was the best that Theydon Bois could come up with. It’s about as effective as trying to light a stick of celery.
The barman denies the existence of food. They have menus, yes, customers expect them. Visitors from London, forest sophisticates who subscribe to digital channels. But we shouldn’t take the PR too seriously. He’s pissed off because Kevin is drinking pints of orange juic
e and lemonade. In the belief that a hit of sugar will get him to the finish.
A woman who hangs about the place is more helpful. It’s late of course. You can’t expect to wander in from nowhere and be fed, just because there are signs outside punting Essex-Mex specialities. The portions, when they arrive, are Texan. My ‘small’ plate of Nachos is a challenge: crispy satchels packed with Copydex cheese.
A light rain is misting the windows. We’ll take to the forest paths later, but for now we’ll stick with the headlights, the deranged traffic on Coppice Row.
The pub sign at the edge of town does nothing to lift our spirits, SIXTEEN STRING JACK. A painting of a man in a green jacket, noose around his neck, waiting for the horse to gallop away. As light fades and the long road stretches ahead, Renchi steps it out; he disappears among the dark trees. Kevin’s hair is plastered to his skull. Rain-slicks alleviate the cold sweat of fear. Epping Forest has a master’s degree in disorientation, car-swallowing bogs out of Psycho. My snapshot of the Cantab essayist, collar up, mouth agape, makes Munch look like Millais. We’re walking into the oncoming headlights. Kevin is limping badly. I hope he’s not going to jump.
Trapped between M25 and M11, Epping Forest is a motorway island with overambitious planting. There are paths marked out for riders, paths for hikers, but I’ve never walked any distance without getting lost; expecting to emerge in Loughton, finding myself returned to Theydon Bois. Don’t ask me how it works. The spirit of the primeval forest is still present and it abhors trippers, map fetishists. Step away from the road by a few yards and the road is cancelled. It disappears. This ridge between the rivers Lea and Roding is a very public secret. Plenty of Londoners have been conceived here, in cars, on tartan rugs; plenty have died. Epping Forest is an unlicensed extension of the cemeteries that cluster around Waltham Abbey.
Five roads meet at the Wake Arms roundabout. Walking towards it in the dusk, the rain, wasn’t one of the highlights of our circuit. Dazzled, driven on to slippery verges, subject to the occasional drenching, we plodded on, increasingly locked into misery, increasingly separate. Renchi was remorseless. Kevin was brave, but hobbling. I fell back to chat to the straggler, then marched flat out to keep Renchi in sight.
To take Kevin’s mind off the horror of his situation, I asked him about writers who had died in cars. Give him a list and he’s happy. Albert Camus was an easy one. Nathanael West. John Lodwick, a novel-a-year journeyman: one of my favourites. J.G. Ballard had a front wheel blow-out on the approach to Chiswick Bridge, spun across two carriageways, turned upside-down. But he wasn’t hurt. Then we struggled. I couldn’t accept Margaret Mitchell, or Robert Lowell – who gave up the ghost after a heart attack in a taxi. The poet Weldon Kees abandoned his car to go over the side of a bridge, but must be scored as: not proven. Ditto for Manic Street Preacher Richey Edwards at the Aust Service Station. Self-mythologising T.E. Lawrence (despite his connection with Pole Hill in the forest) was out. Richard Farina also. Motorbikes were another story. They were asking for it, the Jim Morrisons of road culture. Peter Fuller (of Modern Painters) was being chauffeured back to Bath. That left W.G. Sebald, far ahead of us, and still alive. A melancholy walker, landscape fabulist, collector of photographs: what was he doing at the wheel? I stood in a lift with him once. We didn’t speak. The saddest face (moustache, glasses) I ever saw. CULT NOVELIST IN CAR ACCIDENT. The only writer I could recall who went off the M25, pranged his BMW and walked away without a scratch. Lord Archer.
The distance to the roundabout was calculable by reading debris left at the side of the road. Single cans of Foster’s (‘Official Beer of Sydney Olympics’), Stella Artois, Carlsberg Special Brew and Tango. Two packets of Walkers Crisps (Cheese & Onion), one of Salt & Vinegar. Five McDonald’s/Coca-Cola cans. One Lambert and Butler (King Size) cigarette packet. Two Marlboro. One Silk Cut. A Coconut Bar. Smilers (Tropical Pastilles). Four cans of Red Bull (‘a carbonated taurine drink with caffeine’). Three burger cartons; one milk carton (2pc fat). Diet Cola. Dr Pepper. Orange peel. Knotted condoms. One stainless steel watch (LB417, Japan). One burnt-out car: POLICE AWARE. One motorcycle engine. These are the contour rings of civilisation as they spread out from the Old Orleans (‘A Taste of the Deep South’) Roadhouse. A midden for future archaeologists. And present forest creatures: one fox, three grey squirrels.
We’ve had enough of this road; we plunge into the deep woods. And navigate by sound. It’s my intention to hit the earthworks of the Amresbury Banks. The ancient camp, excavated by the Essex Field Club (1881 and 1882), under the direction of the redoubtable General Pitt-Rivers, is now promoted as an alternative, off-highway attraction; a rival to the Old Orleans Roadhouse (with its Georgian carriage lamps). AMRESBURY BANKS IS AN ANCIENT EARTHWORK AND CAN BE SERIOUSLY DAMAGED BY CYCLING. PLEASE DO NOT RIDE YOUR MOUNTAIN BICYCLE HERE. The attention of visitors is also drawn to the fact that ‘many of the beech trees in the Forest are dead or dying’.
Dog walkers like the mounds. The Amresbury Camp, on its high ridge, was thought by Victorian antiquarians (on very little evidence) to have been occupied by Queen Boadicea, before her overthrow by Suetonius. Any convenient fable can be pressed into service to lend narrative to a resonant location. Once the storyboard is hammered into the turf, we can all relax.
We crossed busy Epping Road, picked up another Green Lane, and soon found ourselves clear of the forest. The rain had eased, the sky was pink above a layer of deep blue cloud. From a modest eminence we looked down on the spread of Enfield Chase and the lights of Waltham Abbey. For all of us, including Kevin (whose ruined feet were forgotten), this was a great moment. The sun had dipped below the horizon and there was an unsourced glow in the landscape, as if a deep fire were burning within. The woods were black, the Lea Valley an inky blue. The M25 snaked through like a lava stream; red brake-lights, golden beams.
We were on Crown Hill Bridge, the very spot to which Tony Sangwine (the Highways Agency landscaper) had brought us – when he wanted to show the best the motorway could offer. Sangwine’s vision is not so far removed from the builders of the Amresbury Camp. ‘I think we’ve done a good job in treating the road here. Not just the planting but also the alignment. The way the earthworks have been blended. A combination of good engineering practice, good landscape architecture, good horticulture.’
The M25, if it is ever to work as archaeology, as a circuit that combines ‘good engineering practice’ with good faith, will depend on the quiet labours of men like Sangwine, practical transcendentalists. Think of the motorway in terms of Maiden Castle or Avebury, earth engines, machines designed to provoke enlightenment. The hoop of continually moving light is a gigantic crop circle, visible from space. A doughnut of powdered glass. A winking eye.
Renchi, who has treated the walk as a pilgrimage, who carries stones and feathers and lumps of chalk in his pockets, often speaks of the friendship between two families, the Bicknells and the Trevelyans. Sir George Trevelyan wrote about areas where hard science intersected with mysticism. Discussing the moon landing, he said: ‘It becomes clear that a different form of space exploration is possible by crossing the frequency-rates which demarcate different levels of being and thus entering into an expanded dimension of thought. We have to realise that higher worlds are not merely higher in space but are planes of consciousness and “being” existing in a different vibrational band and therefore quite invisible to our five senses and earth-bound consciousness. Nevertheless, human thinking, when strengthened and lifted through meditation, is a universal organ which can blend with the Thinking which is the very stuff of the universe.’
This is what the M25 must do, shift the frequency-rates, access higher levels of consciousness. Liat Uziyel’s notion of a building wrapped around a motorway junction (not far from here), the museum of memory, is a theoretical demonstration of the road’s potentiality as a device for hitting ‘different vibrational bands’. Breaking the trance. Achieving the drift of plural time.
Tony Sangwine saw the bridge on whi
ch we were standing as an evolving art work, a performance piece. ‘The bridge emerges from the green estate and leaps across the road… There was the question of trying to keep away from the various settlements along the route, and finding a path which made use of the topography to mask the road and to help depress the sound.’
As light goes, sound revives and clarifies. Our senses adjust. We follow our feet down the hill. So many of our suspended narratives find resolution near Junction 26 of the M25. Just a few yards off the road, on Skillet Hill, is the Jewish Cemetery where Rachel Lichtenstein discovered the pauper’s grave of the Whitechapel hermit David Rodinsky. A rusting metal plaque to mark the burial place of a man whose final journey took him from Epsom to Waltham Abbey. Thanks to the patronage of Artangel, a headstone and a marble book (with blank pages) were erected at a service of dedication. When Rachel brought her young son David out here for the first time, he led the way. ‘Why are we taking this path?’ he said. Before arranging black stones on the grave.
On the slope above the cemetery, at the forest’s edge, Tennyson had a house. He came to High Beach (or Beech) in 1837, for a stay which falls, as might be expected, into the ‘silent and morose decade’ that followed the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. High Beach does silent and morose very well. The forest and the world-weary poet’s beard were in profound sympathy.
‘I have been at this place all the year,’ he wrote to Emily Sellwood (from Beech Hill House, High Beach), ‘with nothing but that muddy pond in prospect, and those two little sharp-barking dogs.’
High Beach incubated melancholy. Tennyson complained of the absence of birdlife in the forest, the horrors of local society: ‘frozen, cold, lifeless’. He drudged, he brooded; the only advantage in his situation was the proximity of London. Londoners came to Epping in excursion mood and went home drunk, dirty, scratched, soaked, disorientated. Wandering the forest tracks, the Earl’s Path, the earthworks at Loughton and Amresbury, was like losing yourself in a Gothic cathedral; Durham with the roof lifted off. Tree-pillars extended in every direction. They wouldn’t release you. They swallowed light.
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