Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

They miss the signs at the edge of the wood.TESCO COUNTRY CLUB. THEOBALDS PARK, ABBEY NATIONAL CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE. The royal palace, the hunting lodge, the gardens laid out by John Tradescant, having passed through the hands of the brewer, Meux, are now in the keeping of a supermarket chain (the source of Lady Shirley Porter’s wealth) and a building society. The gate is spiked. Drummond examines the sign and roars with laughter. Through another set of padlocked gates we can see the New River, heading towards London. NO SWIMMING.

Atkins has his camera out faster than the lads in the comic strip, FALLING MASONRY: an alien structure banged down across the full double-page spread. A turn in the track, the entrance to Lady Meux’s estate (furnished with gate-keepers in Joan Hessayon’s romance), and here is Temple Bar. Christopher Wren’s Fleet Street gate, slightly distressed, rescued and reassembled, lifted beyond the pull of the M25. The brewer Meux made various improvements, extensions, rooms in which to entertain his guests.

It’s still impressive, this Essex captive. There has been talk recently of finding a couple of million quid to knock it down, carry it back to dress a portion of river frontage, around St Paul’s. Much better to extend it, stretch it, slap it over the M25. You can hear the wind, the traffic sirocco, howling through the gap, rattling the corrugated sheets. Temple Bar is reinstated as an energy gate, a switch, a consciousness junction.

Marc scoots around the masonry, finding ways to circumvent the fence, keep it out of shot. Surveillance cameras swivel, not much interested in his antics. From the woods, bird noises that Drummond can identify, if you ask him: garden warbler, blackcap, lesser spotted woodpecker.

A certain unease, ‘IT’S SITTING HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE LIKE AN UNEXPLODED BOMB’, thinks the Gaiman character. His pal, Mike, goes over the fence. As does Marc, factoring images, cramming his camera with potential light-sculptures to be brought back to his London studio. History leaks.

Wren rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 designs a triumphal arch for Fleet Street: Temple Bar (completed 1672). Fire and water (Fleet River) are both invoked by this structure. A gate through which the traffic of the city will flow. A gate aligned with other gates, with Lud Gate, with the effigies of King Lud and his sons.

John Collet’s painting ( c . 1760) presents the western prospect of Temple Bar. Narrower and taller in aspect. Lacking the wings that Meux used to unbalance the original design, lacking the stone balustrades. Lacking royal figures in the alcoves on either side of the window above the gate. Perspective is worked, so that Fleet Street gives Temple Bar its wings. There is meaning in this placement. It harks back to the Roman model, the imperium. It’s fated to become a traffic hazard, an absurdity in such a narrow thoroughfare. Displaced, fenced in, misaligned, it has become a provocation, Gothic furniture. The unwieldy backdrop for a Sweeney Todd musical. ‘History out of context,’ as Gaiman has it.

The best we can do is turn it over to Marc, in the expectation that his tunnel vision, his gift for excluding the unnecessary, will release the arch, or place it in his catalogue of archetypes. With the collection of obelisks, doorways, church towers, graveyard statuary. Temple Bar, removed from its location, is also removed from time. Its energies are released.

A quick hit of the M25 from Bulls Cross Bridge; the confirmation that the metal river still flows. A photo opportunity at the dogs’ home. Drummond caressing a black, plaster bulldog: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO STROKE DOGS. Surveillance cameras on poles. Severed heads. A cacophony of yelps and snarls, pooch to German shepherd, as we slouch along the edge of the Whitewebbs Lane rat run. A country track has been overwhelmed by shorthaul motorway users. Pedestrians, heading for Enfield Chase, are squeezed between a mesh fence and a screen of thorns.

It’s damp, it’s green and it’s English. And Drummond, the displaced Scot, cackles over it. This obstacle course of negatives: DO NOT ATTEMPT… NO SWIMMING… NO HORSE RIDING… NO STOPPING… KEEP OFF… KEEP OUT. Drummond is upbeat. He recommends ornithological textbooks as tools for the replenishment of language. ‘Yaffle’ is a recent favourite: the sound of the green woodpecker. We yaffle. We do the I-Spy country walk. We eye-swipe bluebell carpets, ex-squirrels. Bill holds a dead shrew in his hand, so that Atkins can photograph it (looking like a moustache that has just fallen off).

Tackier properties, shacks with bits of farm machinery, chicken coops, have handpainted notices (white gloss on hard-board): BEWARE BAD DOG. They can’t afford the animal. They’re saving up for a pit bull recording. Ironwork gates, all curls and commas, are deceptive. Slow down and the dogs, which usually operate in pairs, will have you. Lean-ribbed black ones with slavering fangs. If their tails haven’t been docked, they wag.

Detached houses on the edge of the motorway are a shopping mall for thieves with wheels. A nice run out from Dalston or Canning Town, straight up the M11. Hoist a bit of garden statuary, an urn, carry it back to its place of origin.

Once we achieve the path through White Webbs Park, skirting the golf course, heading south-west, it gets easier. We don’t bother with the map. Green patch leads to green patch. Clay Hill to Trent Park. Drummond identifies an Aylesbury duck by its orange beak.

Permitted pedestrianism is still a source of pleasure, old woodland, meadows, brooks. The obelisk in Trent Park is a memorial to the Duke of Kent. Royalty continues to leave markers on the outer suburbs, WATCH OUT THERE’S A PLANT THIEF ABOUT.

What I love about this ‘empty’ quarter of London (if it is London) is the way that, out of nowhere, supervised parkland, suburban clutter, you suddenly find yourself on a long, straight stretch of country road. It’s dreamlike: telegraph poles, hedges, a red farmhouse tucked under a line of low hills. You’re still carrying the weight of the city, the density of talk and noise and interference, quick-twitch nerves that keep you from being run down; but you let it go, bleed away. Momentary transcendence. Soft warm air. Birdsong. And, in the distance, over the horizon, the mortality whisper of the orbital motorway.

In this hallucinatory half-country, we come across a building that is difficult to interpret, easy to admire: a white cube, its windows blinded with hardboard. The boards have been cut to fit their apertures. The shadow of a downward pointing security light throws an elongated cone across the white wall. The building, an assembly of smooth, chalky blocks, reminds me of Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost . Lacking discernible narrative, this structure is an unrequired art work. In a gallery it would solicit cultural comparisons, validation. Out here we can do nothing, beyond registering its presence, the displacement it achieves. The way it offers itself as a memory-flash, between the Trent Park obelisk and the hospital on the hill.

By now, we’re beginning to look at our watches. We stride out. I can’t remember if the Jochen Gerz lecture is at one or at one-thirty. But that doesn’t stop us logging the drift. Twin urns on a gatepost, TRENT PARK CEMETERY, ANOTHER SERVICE PROVIDED BY ISLINGTON COUNCIL. A stretch-limo, selfconsciously mirror polished, outside II Vesuvio Trattoria Italiana . Nothing like playing up to racial stereotypes.

Cockfosters. New Barnet. Cherry blossom hamlets. Drummond gives a sympathetic nod to Barnet FC, a team who will soon be appearing on his beloved Non-League circuit. (I picked up a nice piece of football/motorway ephemera. A booklet entitled Inside the M25: The Football Programmes . A road map linking future nowheres, dormitories, slumped industrial huddles, by the colours of their football programmes: Becken-ham Town, Chingford, Boreham Wood, Erith & Belvedere, Rainham Town, Ford United. Glories of the Delphian, Spartan, Aeolian, Corinthian Leagues. Dagenham linked with deepest Surrey. Harrow with hop fields. Dockside with Dorking.) Bill Drummond’s green anorak comes into his own as he waxes lyrical on the Aylesbury FC experience, the windy terraces, the pies, the purity of kick and rush, the yarning of the mob.