Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

No members of the general public, the great unwashed, were allowed to witness the ceremony. Corporate freebies. Big time blacktop sprayers and their guests. Plus vetted journalists, Murdoch’s tame jackals. A guest list like the Dome bonanza. The first car breaks down at 11.16 a.m., precisely one minute after opening time. Within hours, it is perfectly clear that this unmagical orbit is the absolute contrary of the future Millennium Dome: the M25 instantly exceeds its expected quota of visitors, day trippers, casuals — where the flow to the Dome shrivels, week by week, until the promoters are forced to drag in school kids, the disadvantaged, confused tourists bribed with a ticket to ride the London Eye. Those who thought the downriver coda was compulsory, the price they had to pay for their ascent into the clouds.

Driving around the road was useless, as I discovered when I endured 250 miles in a day, with Chris Petit, clockwise and anticlockwise, coming in off my old favourite, the A13. And detouring into Lakeside, Thurrock. Into Theobalds Park and Heathrow. More was less, further was nowhere. In the morning, after we paid our pound and crossed the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, we dragged, lurched, crawled on a three-lane conveyor belt, side-on to single-occupant, lightweight jacket-on-hook, cellphone voyagers. Soon these unfortunates would be penalised for their brief period of meditative calm: soothing tapes, landscape-format viewing screens.

This, according to one commuter interviewed for a television documentary, was the best of it, the highpoint of the day. The only contact with the changing seasons, the Surrey hills, canny roadside plantings. With England. This was the only respite from work stress, the on-line office, domestic responsibility. A car trip, Southend to Reigate, pushed up the heart rate but smoothed the soul; easily accessed reverie, a sensuous interplay of light and movement. Novelty that is only novelty because the route is so familiar.

On summer evenings, listening to a concert or radio play, one man admitted that he would go the long way home: West Byfleet, Staines, Uxbridge, Abbots Langley, Potters Bar. But regulations, imported from the States, will tax solitary motorists, those who refuse to share their pod, those who need this quiet time; they’ll be shunted into the slow lane. Ostracised for the only reason that makes it worth running a gas-guzzling, money-burning machine.

Nobody can decide how long the road is, somewhere between 117 and 122 miles. By the time you’ve driven it, you don’t care. You should be way out in another eco-system, another culture: Newport (Mon.), or Nottingham, or Yeovil. The journey must mean something. Not a wearied return, hobbled, to the point of origin.

It was obvious, therefore, that the best way to come to terms with this beast was to walk it. To set out, counterclockwise, from Waltham Abbey, and to complete the circuit before the (official) eve of the New Millennium.

Frosted bedroom windows, one of them cracked. Cars quilted with powdered snow. We had been talking too loudly about leaving Hackney. A fantasy, obviously, after all these years, brought on by zeros, overweening house prices. The terraced cottages of city bank clerks had declined to outside-lavatory-and-tin-bath (with scrupulously tidy garden) of honest working folk; grandparents, parents, four or five kids shoehorned into a plasterboard-improved box. By the 1960s, the Haggerston/Shoreditch fringe had been infiltrated by the abdicated middle classes (layabout communards, demi-artists); then by administrators, potential curators, first-rung medicals, single parents who spoke two languages. A few years after parturition most moved on. The school opposite was now a teachers’ centre: there were more cars to catch the snowfall.

Our house didn’t like quitters. It had given us shelter for more than thirty years, witnessed childbirth, seen books written and published. Casual chatter about a shift to the seaside was a compensatory gesture, a delayed midlife crisis. It didn’t mean a thing. An excuse to sample oysters in Whitstable (Notting Hill prices), to swim at Walberswick (Southwold: the new Hampstead), to admire Charles Hawtrey’s blue plaque in Deal (retired bookdealers, everybody I used to know).

The Bethnal Green painter Jock McFadyen who was quietly building up a bleak topography of absence, doomed snooker halls, drinking clubs on the cusp of oblivion, told me that he always felt the presence of the sea, tons of dark water, lurking behind Hackney’s railway embankments and stuccoed pleasure palaces. It was only a matter of time, in his opinion, before all this trash, dirt and dust was swept away. We were amphibians in remission. On good mornings, looking out on the wet street, I was sure that he was right.

The early months of the true millennial year, 2001, had no good mornings. The house was delivering, more in sorrow than anger, its response to our treachery: the ridge from the top of my spine to my left arm was painful. The local massage man (warm office, psychology paperbacks) called the condition ‘frozen shoulder’. Two years, he reckoned, if I was lucky. I’d have to train myself to write standing up, at a lectern, one-handed like Ernest Hemingway. Pre-Hailey, Idaho. Pre-shotgun. Luckily, my former bone-tweaker, a man built like a wrestler, who operated out of Purley, wrenched the shoulder back into life. ‘Bag of frozen peas every half-hour,’ he said. ‘Work through the agony. Grab a doorknob, try a dozen kneebends.’ Within a week, I was able to manage the gears on the old BMW. I could drive around that south-east quadrant of the M25; an hour to Junction 6. The ‘shoulder’ of the motorway, Bluewater to Brands Hatch, became my shoulder; frozen by traumatised muscles and tendons, clogged by weight of traffic.

Rain was still falling. It started around September and it hadn’t stopped. Now it was turning into sleet.

Anna made the mistake. She used the word ‘Brighton’. The house didn’t care for it. The bedroom window, when she moved close to it, cracked into a lacework of tributaries. A map of the River Lea and its quarrelsome sibling, the Lee Navigation. With the New River breaking away, heading off in the general direction of Islington.

This was one of those London days when the light was no light, a grey hood. Trapped inside a gigantic light-bulb. You re-breathe, you use something that is already used up, exhausted. Cold cars coughed smoke. Walking was forbidden. North of the M25, on the far side of Waltham Abbey, footpaths had been closed off. Locally, the gates of Haggerston Park were padlocked; no access to the football pitches, no sylvan shortcut to Hackney Road. The authorities, in a frenzy of political correctness, removed the baa-lambs of the city farm from their paddock.

Driving along what had once been called the Ml6, that early section of the orbital motorway, from Waltham Abbey through the fringes of Epping Forest, south towards Purfleet and the bridge, you could see black smoke. A heavy pall over the mass graves of pigs, foot-and-mouth victims petrol-roasted in secret barbecue pits. The original outbreak had been noticed in a slaughterhouse near Brentwood. Little Warley and Great Warley, highlighted on TV’s maps of shame, were conveniently off-road, with easy access to the M25 for the meat lorries, the animal transports.

Essex was plague country. Invisible airborne contagion closed the city’s markets: the aisles of Smithfield were deserted. Hungry rhinoviruses fulfilled their destiny, causing blistered eruptions in the mouths and about the hoofs and teats of cattle, hogs and sheep. Sinister factory-farm sheds we had crept around on our M25 walk, protected by barking dogs, the hum of generators, were accused of malpractice.

The whole deal with the orbital motorway was called into question. The original Thatcherite pitch (civil engineering plus photogenic road-building programme being part of the Great Leader package) was anti-metropolitan; it was about protecting the suburbs. Nasty, dirty trade goods, all that was left of the north’s industrial heritage, could be detoured around the city — without invading, say, Finchley; or being contaminated by the alien hordes of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The road replaced the working river. Seen from a distance, across a rough pasture golf course in Essex, tarmac glistened like black ice. As soon as the M25 was opened, swans lifting from the Thames at Staines mistook the bright silver surface for water; there were several nasty accidents. A report in the Evening Standard (February 2001) described the trauma suffered by a man, on his way to visit a retired rock star in the Surrey stockbroker belt, when a large white bird crashed on to the bonnet of his car.