Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Pedder found herself being interviewed for Panorama . ‘Wear black, cover your shoulders, get rid of the Pat Butcher earrings,’ she was told by the media Taliban. They didn’t want her coming over as a central casting hippie, a wacky-baccy anarchist of the suburbs. We didn’t care what she wore. Our motives were just as suspect. Pedder’s tattoos were a work of art: naked nymphs climbing out of lilies, with a few revisions and skin-graft cancellations elsewhere. Silver bracelets, rings. Black nail varnish.

None of which had anything to do with what she had to say, the seriousness of her research and the effectiveness of her pursuit of the true story. She couldn’t set foot in Enfield Island Village. Conservationists, bird-watchers and tree-lovers had been chased off by the hard hats. Some had been threatened with sticks. Beth kept at it, digging for facts, writing letters to ministers, asking to see documentation. If Pedder hung on, won the day, it couldn’t be long before Julia Roberts would be hired, painted tattoos and nose-stud, to battle the corporate giants in a Californian mock-up of Enfield Lock.

Beth spoke with feeling. ‘We were concerned that the MOD had produced no records for this site. We would be interested to know why.’ Enfield has a long tradition of enforced silence. ‘It was always a very secretive site. Ex-workers said that no one was allowed outside their own area. People didn’t have a clue what went on in other areas. We had one ex-worker who attested to the fact that the building she worked in was tested every month with a geiger-counter. They had large X-ray rooms and three lead-lined rooms with lead floors, lead ceilings. They had a rocket test tunnel that ran the length of the site. It had an internal railway. There were people with white coats and radiation badges who went further into the site than anyone else was allowed to go. Workers were blood-tested every month.’

The zone was known as the ‘Enfield Military Complex’.

Secret State parkland. Surrounded by water. Pedder was concerned that the local developers had no experience with contaminated land on this scale. ‘They didn’t have any MOD records. They didn’t at first acknowledge that there was much contamination, despite the fact that previous test results had shown high levels of mercury, lead, nickel, cadmium, chrome, copper, zinc. There are PCBs, high quantities of asbestos. They don’t even have a complete set of maps to show where the pipes run. There was a bash and burn policy with the MOD. They either burnt their leftovers, or they made them much smaller, bashed them up and buried them. A report was done by a Government body that expressed concern that the MOD didn’t have records for a lot of these sites, sites where radiation appeared to be present.’

We drink our tea in a pleasant kitchen, in one of the workers’ cottages from the old days of the Small Arms Factory. We walk out into the garden. Look across a brown canal at the new estate. Pedder talks about the stink from the London Waste site at Edmonton. ‘With all incinerators, there’s a five-mile circumference within which you can suffer the effects.’ Smoke. Hanging clouds that never migrate. In the early days, Pedder contacted her MP, Tim Eggar. He phoned her back. ‘This is business,’ he said. ‘There’s big money involved.’ When Pedder pressed her case, Eggar replied: ‘Are you entirely stupid? Profit before people, that’s how the world works.’

Memory is trashed. ‘I was told by an ex-worker, at the time when the site was decommissioned, that MOD turned up and took away vast amounts of files. It looked like they had been ransacked, records and details scattered about the floor. They came and flooded the place. We understand the records were taken to Aylesbury. Without the MOD records we will never know. There could be anything. A lot of the substances are mobile in water. A lot of them are carcinogenic. Crown Immunity means the site was never inspected by a local authority. They weren’t covered by the rules for disposing of substances. The MOD’s accepted and published policy, they’ve admitted to it, was bash, burn, destroy.’

In the Government Road terrace, between Lee Navigation and the Small Arms canal, people have suffered the effects. Bad water. High levels of phenols. ‘Some of the residents had blistered mouths and hands, terrible headaches. They were suffering nausea, dizziness, general weakness and lethargy. The children were very ill. Those that had drunk bottled water recovered.’ Fairview Homes denied all responsibility.

Pedder got the phone calls. ‘Can you come down? We can’t breathe.’ She remembers walking along Government Road. ‘It was hitting you in the face and it was hurting. You couldn’t see. It was like grit. That was the asbestos.’ Fairview had knocked down Building 22. ‘A cloud floated towards the area of Government Road. I could see the smoke. I live probably quarter of a mile away and I could see the plume of black smoke rising up and forming this massive cloud.’

We went back inside. There were other, off-the-record stories. Connections were exposed. Things suspected but unproven. Names. Pedder was very emotional. She had a heavy investment in this story. She lived here. We would stroll back to the car park, move on.

Now our goal is in sight, beyond Rammey Marsh, traffic floating above water. Site clearance (leisure, commerce, heritage) pushes the horizon back. ‘A new country park is to be developed on the site of the former Royal Ordnance works,’ announces the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority’s Strategic Business Plan . ‘The site is immediately to the south of the M25, adjacent to major housing developments and strategically ideal for the Authority to pursue its remit to safeguard and expand the “Green Wedge” into London.’

This sounds like an uncomfortable procedure. Not just ‘soil amelioration’ and ‘imaginative and sensitive landscape design’ but the effort of will to rebrand a balding and sullen inter-zone, the motorway’s sandtrap, as a wildlife habitat, ‘a vibrant waterside park’. For years, Waltham Abbey has functioned like a putting course, a splash of shaved meadow surrounded by bunkers. It was a course that had to be played with a blindfold firmly in place. Much of the territory was unlisted. ‘Government Research Establishment’ to the east of the Navigation, ‘Sewage Works (Sludge Disposal)’ to the west.

In this red desert, sound moves from margin to margin: caterpillar-wheeled vehicles, mud gobblers, chainsaws, pneumatic drills. The delirious swooshing of the M25.

The bridge support, the thin line that carries all this traffic, is pale blue. The space beneath the bridge expands into a concrete cathedral, doors thrown open to light and landscape. Water transport gives way to road; the old loading bays are empty, a few pleasure boats and converted narrow boats are tied up against the east bank. Reflected light shivers on pale walls. Overhead, there is the constant thupp-thupp-thupp of the motorway. After heavy rain, the ground is puddled and boggy. Travellers haven’t settled here. The evidence is all of migration: extinguished fires, industrial-strength lager cans, aerosol messages.

Bill Drummond leads the rush up the embankment. The M25, after miles of walking the ditch, is a symbol of freedom. The Amazon. A slithery, ice-silver road in the sky. I have a moment of panic. Drummond’s bulging knapsack is still unexplained, no spare sweaters, no rain kit, no cameras. Is it possible? Could he? This obsession with the Unabomber. Are we going to find ourselves on the Six O’Clock News: TERRORIST OUTRAGE ON MOTORWAY? Bill spends time in a tower in Northern Ireland. Red Hand of Ulster? Scots Prod? A fanatic certainly. Capable of anything.