Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Broad streets. Privet hedges. Hillside adapted into village green. A school with a view. An ambulance, lights winking, is parked at the end of a terrace. One bright window in a lifeless street.

We amble over uncombed heathland. We’re close to the M25 at the point where it starts to pull to the east. The road yields to the gravity of Waltham Abbey.

I’ve remembered my binoculars. With foreshortening, the stalled motorway dazzles. A plantation of dead trees (‘The Osiers’, it says on the map). Black willows. Low hills. Six lines of stationary traffic: SAFEWAYS, EDDIE STOBART.

Long shadows chase us. The morning path is quilted in brown leaves. We’re back with the boarding kennels and catteries. People do things with horses. If they restore a barn or piggery, they’re sure to call it: THE FORGE. And to hang a white horse sign from a chain. Real pigs are not much in evidence. They’ve gone out of fashion, since the Seventies, when the Hosein brothers, Arthur and Nizamodeen, fed their kidnap victim, Mrs Muriel McKay, to the porkers at Rooks Farm in Stocking Pelham. (In an act of Seventies revivalism, Thomas Harris reran the plot device for his novel Hannibal, but nobody noticed.)

Rooks Farm was around the corner in Hertfordshire, but these discreet properties, hidden down farm tracks, have the authentic feel of bandit country. Convenient for the East End, Essex or Suffolk coast. They are so visible (from the M25) that nobody sees them. Gravel pits, plantations, private airfields. Barns, ponds, tin sheds. The mingled scents of heavy-duty slurry and diesel.

This walk is a nightmare for my Nicholson, every mile is a new map; we’re cutting across the squares, chasing the broad blue band of the M25. After Noak Hill, we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in Havering-atte-Bower (which behaves like a footnote from Chaucer). The path carries us through a mud yard of caged greyhounds. Who shiver, sniff and piss until the concrete steams. Chained guard dogs snarl.

The churches are all closed. St John the Evangelist at Havering-atte-Bower, with its twelfth-century font, is not interested. We have to make do with a rare example of Essex stocks on the village green. A woman puts us right for Hobbs Cross: ‘It’s a very long way.’ Not to be walked. ‘At least seven or eight miles.’ She restrains her air-boxing dogs, astonished that we intend to carry on.

Hob (or Hop) is Old Norse for ‘shelter’. Readers of Alan Moore will be aware of a darker etymology. Pigs again: ‘big pigs, and long, with one on other’s back’. Pigs and pig gods. The first voice summoned by Moore in his linked sequence of Northampton tales, Voice of the Fire, is that of’Hob’s Hog’.

The stink of piggeries, pig squit, recycled offal, rendered bone, stays with us — though no pigs, or other animals, are to be seen. If they’re here, they lead lives as resolutely ‘interior’ as the last years of Marcel Proust. Beasts bent to our convenience. Pre-processed food waiting for the short ride down the M25 to Great Warley. And the gun.

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.