Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

But Dartford hasn’t thrown in the towel. Lottery Funds have gifted the town with £ 2.25 million: for the Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Jagger — Jerry Hall, three of the kids and Jagger’s octogenarian parents, Joe and Eva — turned out for the dedication. The Duke of Kent pulled the velvet rope, unveiled the plaque; then Mick climbed on stage to read a speech to the assembled dignitaries. The centre is part of Jagger’s old school, Dartford Grammar.

Like any other crusty returnee, Mick banged on about combining performing arts with maths, science and Latin, a well-rounded education. He was modest enough to wonder why he had been selected for this tribute, rather than other notable Dartforders; such as General Havelock who relieved the siege of Lucknow — or Wat Tyler. Generals, he supposed, were no longer PC. And revolutionaries unacceptable as role models. ‘I won the honour by default.’ (Nobody considered fellow townsman Keith Richards.) Tyler and Havelock will have to be satisfied with seeing their names on dodgy pubs. Jagger, who had the sense to get out of Dartford, early and often, fronts the overendowed assembly hall.

Finding Dartford station means battling across fenced roads, dropping into pedestrian underpasses, detouring the long way around civic centres, coping with the river. Having got you, they don’t want to let you go: but a return to Cambridge, a night of revisions for the New Yorker , is suddenly very attractive to Kevin. A bone-deep drenching in torrential rain, as we try to pick up Dartford Creek, to navigate across the marshes to the Thames — by moonlight, if necessary — is an experience he is happy to imagine. As he settles back in a comfortable railway carriage.

We shake him warmly by the hand, wave him off — then spend forty minutes, trekking through dereliction, drifting west towards Crayford, snarled at by yard dogs, blanked by citizens, splashed by motorists; until we reconnect with the swollen and unrecognisable Darent. The river is tidal as far as the town bridge. Industry, on one side, pumping in noxious additives; tough vegetation on the other.

Heads down against the storm: the great moment comes when the last of the town is cleared and we swim out, exposed and ridiculous, into the apocalyptic erasure of Dartford Marshes. Buildings, road, river: revoked. Indistinguishable. We lean into the rain and navigate by touch and smell. My golf umbrella! I set it down to shake hands with Kevin. It’s still there, outside the station; a flag stuck in a cairn of stones by some doomed expedition.

On this black night, the loss is meaningless. It would be like hanging on to a parachute. It’s too dark to distinguish either of the rivers, Darent or Cray. Or the river gate that stands like the entrance to a forbidden city, turning pedestrians back for a detour of several miles across the marshes.

We live inside our discomfort. In Dartford, poring over the fiction of the map, we were impressed by the scale and structure of a hospital (the Joyce Green) that should be out there, acting as a marker. A double V pivoting on the inevitable water tower: isolation wards for the worst contagions of the East End. A secure colony-estate with a rail link to the Thames, its own jetty.

Renchi and Marc are hooded, rain cuts through the layers. I’ve picked up a small black umbrella that somebody has chucked out. No sooner opened than stripped to the prongs. We can’t see where we’re going. We try to follow the eccentricities of the Darent path — from a high bank, somewhere above the river.

The memory of our walk from Shoreham is wiped by weather, the desolation of the salt marshes. From the embankment, we can make out shapeless dunes, mud, the refuse of London, the indestructibles. For the first time (since Runny-mede Bridge), our journey has a proper conclusion: the broad Thames. Minor digressions are swept aside. We stand at the river’s edge, the point where the Darent is absorbed. Or what we take to be the edge: pipings of redshank, a slurping earth-soup. We don’t move. It’s uncomfortable, wet, cold; magnificent. The nonsense of journal-keeping and photography is exposed as sheer folly. This is almost as good as being on the river in a small boat, drifting out to sea. It’s that kind of abdication of responsibility.

Heading east, along the Thames path, the Dartford Bridge (with its necklace of slow-moving traffic) is our horizon. Smeared headlights spit their short beams into the wet night. The bridge spells civilisation. And spells it loud: FUCK OFF. Liminal graffiti. A mess of letters sprayed on grey stone windbreaks. FUCK OFF.

Soft detonations overhead: bombbombbomb. Of never-ending lorries, containers, monster rigs. The motorway streaks the land with sick light. For half a mile, in every direction, there is hard evidence: burnt-out wrecks, torched and rusting husks, solitary tyres. The trash of transit.

The sewage plant hums and seethes. National Power cooks water, fences off territory. A great chimney stack. A perimeter fence. Block buildings that shudder and hiss. Strategies of the margin (the orbital road) that we have come to know and love. In this wilderness, in our sodden wretchedness, a rush of sentiment. We are homesick for London.

If Kevin had stayed with us, we’d be discussing Eddie Constantine in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. The Paris peripheral loop as the access ramp to an intergalactic highway. That’s what the M25 needs as an interpreter: a sandpaper-skinned American playing a hardboiled detective (faked by an English author) in a French film with a Swiss director.

Exterior. Night. The suburbs of Alphaville, the Capital City of a distant Galaxy. A lone car is being driven along one of the boulevards, ablaze with flashing lights, neon signs…

Lemray(off): It was 24 hours 17 minutes Oceanic Time when I arrived at the suburbs of Alphaville.

Wormholes in the fabric of time. Mythic projections invade an unoptioned landscape, the gloom over Gravesend. The bridge is more metaphor than reality, lorries disappear into the clouds. Marc gets into character. He loops his favourite literary quotation: ‘The horror! The horror!’

And he’s right. The dominating voice on this reach of the river belongs to Joseph Conrad, out there on the other shore in his house at Stanford le Hope. (‘A whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind.’) Conrad, monocle to eye, beard elevated, stared across at us — and saw a cruising yawl, the Nellie, waiting on the tide. He fed us the line they all quote: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He’s a master of shifts and swerves, scrupulously weighted paragraphs that allow one river to fade into another. Lost lives are re-narrated, coastal places lose definition. ‘Men and sea interpenetrate.’

On this wild night, out on the Dartford Marshes, I was ready to jump ship, go native. The motorway circuit was beyond resolution. The M25 was lost. There was no access to the bridge. We stumbled through ditches, climbed slippery banks, found a road. Off-highway, in the shadow of the bridge, geometry is unbalanced: more concept than actuality. Eddie Constantine’s boulevards as dead ends. Warehouses, roundabouts, fountains. Roads peter out into swamp: Clipper Boulevard, Crossways Boulevard, Anchor Boulevard. Headlights sweep the dark. No shops, no pubs, no humans. To advance on the railway line and the Stone Crossing station, we have to navigate a series of crescents that have been designed with the sole aim of frustrating pedestrians. Momentum is directed towards the Bluewater retail quarry, the Radiant City.

Nervous motorists (a woman and her daughters) waved down, put us on track; an old green path to the station. We’re told that it’s impossible to walk across the Dartford Bridge. Absolutely forbidden. Turn up with a bicycle and they’ll transport you in a truck. Otherwise: forget it. Surveillance levels are high. Police cars are on permanent patrol. We’ve walked 270 degrees of our circuit and now it’s over, we’re trapped on the wrong shore. We discuss kitting ourselves out in hard hats and overalls, but that’s just bravado. The tour, within the acoustic footprints of the M25, is finished.