Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The developers, Fairview, take a relaxed view of the past. ‘New’ is a very flexible term. ENFIELD ISLAND VILLAGE, AN EXCITING NEW VILLAGE COMMUNITY. A captured fort. A workers’ colony for commuters who no longer have to live on site. The village isn’t new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is suddenly ‘stylish’. The Fairview panoramic drawing, removed from its hoarding, could illustrate a treatise on prison reform: a central tower and a never-ending length of yellow brick with mean window slits.

We’ve had our lunchtime drink. Marc’s rested his foot, which is now quite swollen. And Bill has grilled me on the motivation for my orbital circuit of the M25. Why counter clockwise he wants to know. I dodge that one by moving sideways into a discussion of J.G. Ballard and the western approaches. I admire the way that Ballard has stayed put in Shepperton, same house, same themes. He can hear the traffic, he can hear the planes overhead; he has no responsibility for either of them. Blinds drawn, brain in gear. Three hours a day at the typewriter. Future memories, prophetic TV.

The answer to Bill’s question has something to do with Italianate towers, the only surviving markers of hospitals and factories. Our walk is a way of winding the clock back. But I haven’t worked out the details. We haven’t set eyes yet on the M25. Like America to the Norsemen, it’s still a rumour.

If you knew nothing about the Small Arms Factory, and were wandering innocently along the towpath, you’d pick up the message: keep going. Government Road. Private Road. Barrier Ahead. The pub, Rifles, must be doing well; it has a car park the size of the Ford Motor Plant at Dagenham.

Rifles isn’t somewhere you’d drop into on a whim. The black plastic awning features weaponry in white silhouette, guns crossed like pirate bones. TRAVELLER NOT WELCOME. ‘Which traveller?’ I wondered. Has word of our excursion filtered down the Lea? OVER 21’s. SMART DRESS ONLY. Is it the migratory aspect that these Enfield islanders object to? Or the clothes? What were they expecting, red kerchiefs, broad leather belts, moleskin waistcoats?

Whatever it is they don’t like, we’ve got it. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. Do they know something we don’t? Are they expecting an invasion from the forest?

Enfield Lock has an embargo on courtesy. In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old track. Who walks? ‘There used to be a road,’ they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. ‘Village’ is the giveaway. Village is the sweetener that converts a toxic dump into a slumber colony. You can live ten minutes from Liverpool Street Station and be in a village. With CCTV, secure parking and uniformed guards.

The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes plc are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: ‘Strangers. Travellers.’

The FIND YOUR WAY AROUND ENFIELD ISLAND VILLAGE map doesn’t help. Interesting features are labelled ‘Future Phase’. You’d have to be a time-traveller to make sense of it. A progression of waterways like an aerial view of Venice, YOU ARE HERE. If you’re reading this notice, you’re fucked. That’s the message.

‘Building on toxic timebomb estate must be halted,’ said the London Evening Standard (12 January 2000). ‘A report published today calls for an immediate halt to a flagship 1,300-home housing development on heavily polluted land at the former Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock.’

The drift of the piece by Stewart Payne is that the Enfield Lock scheme was the model for the decontamination of a series of other brownfield sites, worked-out sheds, shacks and bunkers that once operated alongside London’s rivers and canals. A cosmetic scrape at the topsoil, a capping of the lower levels, wouldn’t do.

An attitude of mind that found its apotheosis in the Millennium Dome on Greenwich peninsula was evident throughout New Labour’s remapping of the outer belts, the ex-suburbs. Nobody can afford to live at the heart of the city, unless they are part of the money market (or its parasitical forms). The City of London is therefore the first Island Village; sealed off, protected, with its own security. Middle-grade workers and service industry Transit van operatives will be pushed out towards the motorway fringes. The hollow centre will then be divided up: solid industrial stock, warehouses and lofts, will go to high-income players (City, media); Georgian properties (formerly multiple-occupied) will recover their original status (and double as film sets for costume dramas); jerrybuilt estates will go to the disenfranchised underclass, junkies and asylum seekers.

Unsafe as Houses: Urban Renaissance or Toxic Timebomb (Exposing the methods and means of building Britain’s homes on contaminated land) . A report, commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Enfield Lock Action Group Association, revealed that planning permission had been granted before questions about contamination had been resolved. Planning permission was, in fact, granted on the basis of information supplied by the developers. Enfield Council’s chief planning officer, Martin Jarvis, stepped down from that role. He soon found a new position: as a director of Fairview Homes. He was among familiar faces. His son also worked for Fairview, as did the daughter of Richard Course, chairman of the council’s environment committee.

‘Should I cover my shoulders?’

I returned to Enfield Lock, to a cottage in Government Road, with the filmmakers Chris Petit and John Sergeant. We had arranged to record an interview with local activist Beth Pedder. Pedder lived on the edge of Enfield Island Village. She was one of the authors of the Unsafe as Houses report. Her testimony confirmed the impression I formed on the original walk with Bill Drummond and Marc Atkins: bad turf, suppressed history.

Pedder became involved with community politics when she started agitating against cars and for a school. ‘Our first issues were traffic and the overloading and log jamming of our local roads, already laden with industrial traffic. We worried over the lack of health care, and the lack of a new school for an Island development of 1,300+ new homes in an area already deprived of services.’

National journalists and television companies took an interest when the exploitation of brownfield sites was advocated as the solution to the housing problem by a telephone directory-sized report from an urban task force, chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside: Towards an Urban Renaissance . That’s Lord Rogers as in the Richard Rogers Partnership, Dome designers by appointment to Bugsby’s Marshes. Greenwich peninsula was showbiz brownfield, Peter Mandelson as Kubla Khan. Enfield Lock was left to Fairview Homes plc. They picked up the Royal Small Arms Factory makeover: land contaminated ‘with an Arsenic to Zinc range of chemical substances, plus explosives, oils and tars and the by-products of five gas works’.

In 1984 the Ministry of Defence, which controlled a major parcel of land (very loosely mapped) around Waltham Abbey, on both sides of the M25, decommissioned the Royal Small Arms Factory and sold it to British Aerospace (BAe). British Aerospace got together with Trafalgar House to launch a joint venture company, Lea Valley Developments (LVD). Limited tests were carried out on the contaminated land. In 1996 LVD sold the land to the housing wing of Hillsdown Holdings, Fairview New Homes.