Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

After a sharp climb, a fence hop, slipping on gravel and thin wet grass, Drummond reaches the roadside. He vaults the low barrier and performs a Calvinist version of the papal kiss. He puts his lips to tarmac, tastes the vibration of the orbiting traffic. Destination not detonation. I’m relieved and disappointed.

Sitting on the crash barrier, feet dangling on the sand-coloured hard shoulder, we are buffeted by backdraught: the road is a blur. Clockwise: Waltham Abbey and the forest. Anticlockwise: Paradise. A chocolate-brown notice: PARADISE WILDLIFE PARK. A Lascaux sketch of stag’s horns, an arrow. A shamanic invitation to the country of parks and gardens and paradises. Lee Valley Park.

Cars are streaming into the sunset, brake-lights bloody. Drummond wants to walk straight off down the road, west. A truck swerves and honks. I have to grab him, persuade him that I don’t intend to stay, dodging lorries in the half-dark, on the metal skin of the M25. That would be blasphemous. I’m going to stick to the countryside, as near as I can to the loop, straining to catch the hymn of traffic, hot diesel winds.

We’ll finish the day at the abbey, the grave of King Harold, but first we look back towards London. Sunshafts over a jagged horizon, towers and chimneys, unregistered ground. The mix as it always is: off-highway Americana, secret estates (Royal Gunpowder Mills, Small Arms Factory) rebranding themselves. British Aerospace. Waltham Point (‘New 48 Acre Industrial Park’) developed by the Kier Group and Norwich Union. Earthworks. Noise. Feeder roads that glow in the dark.

Beyond Waltham Abbey, proper countryside kicks in: the foot-and-mouth ribbons begin. The amphetamine buzz of the motorway changes everything: warehouses instead of shops, dormitory estates instead of hospitals. A road is a road is a road. When the M25 went underground, near Amesbury Bank on the northern edge of Epping Forest, they laid out a cricket pitch on the roof of the tunnel.

The road at night is a joy. You want to imagine it from space, a jewelled belt. As a thing of spirit, it works. As a vision, it inspires. There is only one flaw, you can’t use it. Shift from observer to client and the conceit falls apart. Follow the signs for LONDON ORBITAL in your car and consciousness takes a dive. The M25 has been conceived as an endurance test, a reason for staying at home. Aversion therapy. Attempt the full circuit and you’ll never drive again.

Looking back over my files, the excursions to the parks and gardens of Enfield Chase, I notice soft green photographs overlaid with current images (April 2001) of smoke and blight. Footpaths and designated country walks are now ribboned off, reckless hikers face £ 5,000 fines. The word of the moment is ‘contiguous’. Hireling academics and anonymous spokespersons, sweating under studio lights, don’t like the taste of it, this awkward term they have been instructed to employ. To be contiguous is to be served with a death warrant. Animals (pre-supermarket cellophane) face the bullet if they live in a bad neighbourhood. Reading the future by computer prediction, wanting to get shot of the whole business before a June election, government-sponsored boffins have decided to take out potential disease carriers (any unlanguaged, non-voting quadruped with a cold), and then to start again; or, better yet, turn the countryside into a memorial park. Recreation for visitors, the banning of country sports. Go and stay there, but don’t leave the hotel, that seems to be the message.

Channel 4 News takes a perverse pleasure in its nightly apocalypse franchise, the parade of liars and shifty scientists; merciless footage of fauna carnage, pyre smoke. More upside-down cows, bigger pits; fleecy lambkins cuddled by hooded executioners in gloves and white overalls. Held up to the camera for a tearjerk CU, before being dropped off at the big shed; the killing floor of upturned, expectant faces; shine-in-the-dark eyes.

By the spring of 2001, barred from the motorway orbit, I was trying to exorcise the embargoed Dome ( £ 80 a minute to the taxpayer) by carrying out a series of walks, from Greenwich peninsula to various motorway interchanges. Heading southeast towards Swanley, you get a good sense of how one zone (generous proportions of Blackheath, grim bus shelters of Shooters Hill) gives way to another; small architectural revisions causing major shifts in the psychic balance. Complacency to rage within 200 yards: out of ribbon-development, the poly-filled Tudorbethan avenues of New Eltham, into the heritage Kentish village of Chislehurst (rain, caves closed, footpaths forbidden). Vehicles change from silver, mercury bubbles tucked away in car ports to four-wheel-drive cruisers with gentleman farmer aspirations.

The Swanley interchange is the spiral gate where South London lowlifes go head-to-head with drug barons and currency dealers. But, just now, according to the Evening Standard bulletin boards, the motorway, like the country paths of the Green Loop, is verboten. OFFICIAL: STAY OFF THE M25 IN RUSH HOUR.

This is too bizarre. It’s been rumoured for some time that New Labour want to downgrade (re-evaluate) the M25, turn it into the equivalent of a defeated candidate for Mayor of London or Mo Mowlam. Leakages have been hissing for months, penalties for single-occupant vehicles, but this announcement is still a surprise. A motorway, built to solve the problems of flow and congestion, has now become the problem. Success has killed it. The M25 is too popular, people use it indiscriminately: thieves on away days, touring the bosky suburbs; sexual service industries taking advantage of the excellent parking facilities and discreet greenery of the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley; walkers, random inner-city strollers trying to define the point where London abdicates.

So let’s celebrate the first non-motoring motorway, the ‘girdle’ imagined by altruistic planners in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. The road is tired, it can’t take the stress of traffic; 170,000 vehicles a day going nowhere, wearing away the tarmac mantle. The solution is obvious: steer clear of the road at times when the road is most needed. Without traffic, the M25 is a marvel, a delight to the senses. Leaflets have been printed for distribution to travellers at service stations, channel ports and airports: KEEP OFF. Detour around the road that takes you around London. The Highways Agency understands that future autobahns will be virtual rather than actual. In time, the clapped-out circuit will be covered with Barratt homes, Fairview Estates, Laing’s flagpoles; 120 miles of housing stock, pedestrianised.

Once the M25 was redefined as a special-needs case, a privileged unfortunate soon to be granted heritage status, it was time to deal with contiguous countryside. The road that was no longer a road was sandwiched by fields that were no longer fields (golf courses, boarding kennels, pig sheds, reinvented woodland). The next step was obvious: downsize the green belt, slip the corset. Brownfield was the preferred option, trashed land nobody had any use for, armament factories, bone yards, gas works, could be computer-swiped into paradise pastures.

The first intimations that green belt was no longer acceptable in think-tank circles came when books started to appear promoting ‘blue sky’ fantasies. What is said is always the opposite of what is to be done. I was nervous when I read Bob Gilbert’s The Green London Way , an eco-excursionist book put out by those decent old leftists Lawrence and Wishart. Hand-drawn maps of a new London dreaming; anecdotes, small histories. The London Loop by David Sharp continued the process of opening up the suburbs, linking patches of woodland, riverside paths, tracks across chalk and greensand. These men saw London in its entirety, as a fortunate mixture of town and country, speculative development and eccentric vision, follies, palaces, water towers, footpaths that had been walked for generations. They respected the geography, the pattern of rivers and hills. Their conclusions were based on experience. They had been out there with their notebooks and cameras. They had done it.