Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

I bought a chocolate-bar and an apple at the mini-mart. A notice fixed to the top shelf: SORRY NO READING. Hi-gloss, washable magazines. I thought that was the whole point of the transaction. Looking and simulating. Not reading.

Golders Green retains its identity as a civic centre. You can have a pee, buy a rich Viennese pastry, find an urn for your ashes. Near the station, the little barbershop offers showbiz trims. ‘To Tony Thanks For A Perfect Cut’. More celebrity snaps: David Janssen, Johnny Mathis, Kenny Lynch.

The suburbs begin with the Crematorium: ‘50 spaces & about 60 cars’. I search out Sigmund Freud’s plaque. I walk across a buttercup meadow to admire the prospect of this red brick, hill town monastery with its cloisters and towers. I moved on and out, stepping up the pace to navigate what seemed to be an exclusively Japanese enclave; safe streets, silence, JAPAN HOMES announced the estate agent. White houses, red roof tiles, net curtains. Avenues of pollarded trees. No shops, no dogs. Bankrupt, discredited Hackney can’t afford planning officers or planning restrictions; our borough is a building site. Dust is the taste. Noise is the norm: power-drills, chainsaws. Not a leaf can be moved in Kyoto-by-Finchley Road. Not a pebble can be revised. If you talk on the street you face banishment to Hendon or Palmers Green.

The whole, deeply suspect business of hiking through this complex labyrinth of crescents and circuses and dead ends is dreamlike. De Chirico without the squares and fountains. The Crematorium is the liveliest joint in town, folk gathering to chat in the car park, strollers among the colonnades, nicely kept gardens.

Once you cross the North Circular Road you enter a different territory. You’re greeted by an ecstatic sculpture, a strong woman, naked, with an upraised sword. La Déliverance by Emile Guillaume. This is a traffic stopper and even better if you’re on foot. A Health & Efficiency nude, tiptoe, on a stone beach ball, lifting Excalibur instead of a tennis racket.

Passing through Mill Hill viaduct, and starting to climb the hill itself, is dropping into mild-mannered English science fiction; the village that is too much a village, the big house set back from the road. Captured land. Barrack blocks (remember the Mill Hill bomb?). Cult centres. A heavily protected laboratory. WARNING GUARD DOGS ON PATROL. MOD PROPERTY PRIVATE NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. UNAUTHORISED ACCESS FORBIDDEN, KEEP OUT! Chainlink fence. Lights on poles.

Outside Mill Hill East station, I see a man, encountered earlier in the day near the North Circular Road. He was sweating hard, the sweat dried on him, in a suit. Glaswegian. Searching for London. Uncertain as to the direction in which to strike out. Now he was trying to blag his “way on to a train. ‘The staff don’t want to take you. The train will be held. Police have been sent for.’

‘Ya alus pick onna feckin homeless,’ he shouts, walking off, back to Scotland.

Deep inside the National Institute for Medical Research, Erne’s photographs dress a corridor. Nocturnal streets, White-chapel, Bethnal Green, franchising paradox. Novelties to be nodded at on the way to the buffet. Beyond her dimly lit arcade, fields and greenery are always visible. Land dropping away towards the South Herts Golf Course, Dollis Brook and the beginnings of Enfield Chase. Caught, as ever with Erne’s work, between sodium flare and green window, I listened to the dry morse of a table-tennis ball bouncing from a well-sprung table. The rattle of cups.

Tuesday 28 April 1998. Bill and I decide, independently, in one swoop, to touch the Harold stone at the back of the abbey. Marc is moaning about his swollen foot and his twisted hip, the aftermath of our tramp up the Lea Valley. But he’s got the energy to pitch Bill with plans for books, exhibitions, trips to Northern Ireland. Bill has strange tales of Jimmy Savile — always a good topic — in Aylesbury, at the hospital. An anchorite in a shellsuit. A life of conspicuous charity and public secrets, bolt-holes, cigars, self-mythologising.

I use a couple of photocopied pages from a comic strip as my guide, for the walk from Waltham Cross to Theobalds Park. The story I’m working with is the preamble to a text by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Michael Zulli: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street . These days graphic novelists operate with expensive cameras (just like painters of the Hockney lineage). Before laying out a narrative, they will rehearse what they later draw: the envisioned version (dream), the enacted version (logged and recorded), the public version (smoothed, idealised).

I’d collaborated with one of the most respected artists in this field, Dave McKean, on books and films. Dave told me that he had taken part in the original Gaiman outing. He couldn’t remember exactly where they’d gone, somewhere north of the M25, by car. These boys, designer leather jackets and bright shoes, don’t do a lot of walking. They were looking for a gate, a gate to the City of London. It had gone missing from Fleet Street; hence, the connection with the mythic Sweeney Todd. Real heads, hacked off, were displayed on this gate: warning or trophy. The underlying story is occult. The barber, with his priapic pole, his ‘anything-for-the-weekend-sir?’, is an urban prankster. ‘Was your old man a barber?’ is a line of dialogue that reverberates through London pulps and chapbooks until it achieves definitive utterance in the Nicolas Roeg/Donald Cammell film, Performance .

Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, more than any of their peers, have exported contemporary deconstructions of the Gothic. The footnote, the scholarly apparatus of the graphic novel, is the only place where speculations derived from obscure poets, outer-rim science, antiquarian folklore, can frolic and interbreed. The great modernist push, the collage, the cut-up, finds a commercial outlet. Batman reworked. Mary Shelley revisited. Blake. De Quincey. Orwell. The world its own Xerox. Originality as quotation.

Gaiman’s story laid out the experience that anyone, following the trail from Waltham Cross, up Monarch’s Way to Theobalds Grove and Theobalds Lane, might enjoy: watercress beds, a park with a picturesque ruin, a flinty section of wall. ‘Ah!’ cry the unwary. ‘We’ve found it.’ The gate. A transported chunk of London real estate.

‘WE CAN ALWAYS TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ROAD,’ announces the Gaiman character, filling his bubble, ‘WE HEADED FOR JUNCTION 25 OF THE M25, SIXTEEN MILES NORTH OF THE CITY OF LONDON.’

I felt the presence of Gaiman, nosing about the Cedars Public Park, six years ahead of us, dowsing for bad memories. The folly in the park is a trap. Some excursionists go no further, believing that they’ve found the object of their quest, the Fleet Street gate. ‘MM. THAT WAS EASIER THAN I THOUGHT…’

But the phantom Gaiman has only achieved the periphery of the haunted wood, a triple-arched gateway to the mysteries. There are difficult decisions still to be taken. The graphic novelist delivers a snappy summary of the gate’s history, ‘IT WAS AT THE ENTRANCE TO FLEET STREET — PROBABLY ORIGINALLY ERECTED BY THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY… IT WAS REPAIRED FOR ANNE BOLEYN’S CORONATION… BUT ANYWAY, CHRISTOPHER WREN BUILT THIS INCARNATION IN THE EARLY 1670S…’

A convenient tea lady serves burgers and puts the seekers right, ‘TEMPLE BAR’S IN THEOBALD’S PARK, OVER THERE. NOT IN CEDAR PARK. OF COURSE THEY WAS ONCE THE SAME PLACE, BUT NOW THERE’S THE AIO IN THE MIDDLE.’

An off-highway day, sky like porridge. My colour shots, Drummond slouching, hands in pockets, are soft: grey road, grey sky. The graphic novella of our walk towards Theobalds Park contrasts with Michael Zulli’s monochrome panels (in cinemascope or church window format). His couple also keep their hands buried deep in their jeans, but they have hair, shoulder-length. Dark glasses for the Gaiman figure. Who smokes. They drive across the AIO. We stand on the verge, waiting for a gap in the morning traffic.