Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

In December 1999 the Cabinet Office issued a consultation paper, the green belt had created an undesirable ‘moat effect’. A moat or ditch or ha-ha to keep out, as architect Nicholas Hawksmoor wrote of the denizens of Whitechapel, ‘filth Nastyness & Brutes’. The document was, in effect, an early warning on behalf of the developers, the mall conceptualists, the rewrite industry. Government “was pure Hollywood: hype, the airbrushing of bad history; dodgy investors, a decent wedge in disgrace or retirement. A pay-off culture of bagmen and straightfaced explainers.

‘Special protection for the best agricultural land would be removed, while farmers would be encouraged to launch new kinds of businesses.’ What businesses? Barbecue pits? Landfill? Ski slopes (of carcasses) to rival Beckton? There must, said the report, be ‘a general presumption in favour of market forces’. A sweeping away of fussy restrictions. ‘A planning system more supportive of an enterprising countryside.’ The only way the countryside could become enterprising was to cease to be countryside: to become ‘off-highway’, a retail resort (like Bluewater), a weekend excursion that depended on a road that we were being advised to avoid. Tony Blair’s ‘Performance and Innovation Unit’ (a thirteen-strong team of academics and civil servants, ‘overseen’ by Andrew Smith, Chief Secretary to the Treasury) made the dissolution of the green belt a major element in an attempt at joined-up’ government.

Metropolitans need this green fantasy, the forest on the horizon, the fields and farms that represent a picture book vision of a pre-Industrial Revolution past. We need the illusion of sap in the vein. We hanker after market gardens, allotments bedded out with the latest horticultural novelties. The M25 is tolerable because it moves through an extended parkland (Epping Forest, the Thames Crossing, North Downs). The green belt, futile as it is, turns London into one of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. Howard’s vision, originally published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform , imagined a Utopian community, public buildings at the centre, surrounded by parks, houses with gardens, set within ‘an agricultural reservation’. Such reservations, check out Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City, don’t really work. It’s too swift an enactment of something that needs to evolve, through compromise and bodge, through centuries. Lay it out overnight and you get a Mormon dormitory or an unoccupied cemetery that looks great in the catalogue.

But the green belt is on a grander scale, conceived in desperation. G.L. Pepler’s ‘Greater London’ (published in the RIB A Town Planning Conference — Transactions , 1911) proposed a parkway encircling London at a ten-mile radius from Charing Cross (from the monument that marked the last stage of the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I). The parkway would act as a ring road and as the basis for a necklace of garden suburbs.

Arthur Crow, also writing in 1911, went further; he wanted to connect ten ‘Cities of Health’ (Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Dartford, Epping, Epsom, Romford, Uxbridge, Waltham, Watford). They would be joined by a ‘Great Ring Avenue’, a fantastic Egyptian or Mayan conceit, radiant settlements as outstations to a centre given over to public buildings, places of ceremony, commerce and worship. The avenue would be 500 feet wide and eighty-eight miles in circumference.

By the time Londoners had seen their city bombed, riverside industries destroyed, they were ready to think of renewal, deportation to the end of the railway line, the jagged beginnings of farmland. Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan 1944 (published in 1945) still worked through concentric bands: the Inner Urban Ring (overcrowded, fire-damaged), the Suburban Ring (to which inner-city casualties would migrate), the green belt (ten miles beyond the edge of London), and the Outer Country Ring, which would extend to the boundary of the regional plan.

Visionary maps, in muted Ben Nicholson colours, were produced. Lovely fold-out abstractions. Proposals in soft grey, pale green, blue-silver river systems. But always with the blood circuit of ring roads, the pastoral memory rind at the edge of things, at the limits of our toleration of noise and speed and grime. There must, said William Bull (in 1901), be ‘a green girdle around London’s Sphere… a circle of green sward and trees which would remain permanently inviolate’.

Until now. The first usage of the term ‘Green Belt’, in a London County Council resolution of 1924, stressed the same terms: ‘an inviolable rural zone around London’.

By the 1960s there was substantial ‘nibbling’ into that inviolable belt; Hertfordshire and Essex were targeted for housing schemes ‘because spare railway capacity existed’. Surrey and Kent could look after themselves. The Lea Valley with its disused greenhouses was approved as a residential area (for those opting to quit the increasingly ‘multicultural’ inner cities). A 400-acre green belt site was cleared for development in 1966.

New Labour, masters of double-talk, gesture politics, non-consenting consensus, were reversing the old Tory sentimentality over Metroland and the suburbs (Edward Heath in Bexleyheath, Margaret Thatcher in Finchley, Michael Portillo in Southgate). Thatcherites hated the inner cities (Hackney, Lambeth). Their pitch was simple: turn proles into home-owning suburbanites, stakeholders, share-buyers. London would be ring-fenced into ghetto, city of surveillance, privately policed estate. New Labour went further, a two (two dozen in the case of Michael Meacher) home portfolio; town house and country house. Wilderness was abhorrent. Rough pasture must be rationalised into Best Value recreational zones, retirement homes for happy butterflies. Farm animals were dirty, smelly, unreconstructed: cull them. What was required was a vertical wedge through the landscape (the Lee Valley Regional Plan), a designated hierarchy (media, recreation, development). What was not required was an holistic vision, any talk of belts or girdles or circuits. What was lost was the old dream of paradise gardens.

Enfield Chase tucks neatly into the north-east corner, where the A10 (the Great Cambridge Road) meets the pale blue horizontal of the M25. My Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas is a well-travelled, one-and-a-half-kilo wad of overan-notated pulp. The white blank of Enfield Chase is dressed with parks, enclosures, gardens, woodland walks: Clay Hill, White Webbs Park, Forty Hill (Museum), Capel Manor, Trent Park. Greenness slips under the motorway, Rorschach blots mopping up the grey.

On the eastern slope of the Lea Valley is Epping Forest; the people’s forest, festooned with burger cartons, silver cans, ghosts of prisoners, runaways, pastoral melancholies (cop killer Harry Roberts, poets John Clare, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Thomas). On the west is the old forest of Middlesex, Enfield Chase. The broad, marshy floodplain of the Lea is a natural boundary.

The royal family were the first suburbanites, recognising that London was only tolerable if you could run second (third, fourth, fifth) homes in the country, in easy commuting distance. And, if that proved expensive, or you became bored by your own furnishings, you could always land on a neighbour and bankrupt him. The first circle around London, precursor to the orbital highway, was the property portfolio of royal palaces: Greenwich and Eltham in Kent, Havering in Essex, Hampton Court in Middlesex, Nonsuch, Richmond and Oatlands in Surrey. As with the M25 — the ‘missing’ service station on the west side — there was a gap in the chain. Theobalds Park, just north of Enfield Chase, was not in royal hands. It belonged to a servant of the crown, master of the Secret State: William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. His son Robert, Earl of Salisbury, handed the place over to James I (taking Hatfield House, twinned with Welwyn Garden City, in exchange).