Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

From the gardens we see traffic stall as the funeral procession arrives, led by a gleaming black stretch-limo.

Behind the abbey, we hit the meridian line. The local authorities are keen on this abstraction. They want to give it a physical form. The abbey church with its astrological ceiling is working a number with Time and Movement, the Clockwork of the Heavens, the colonisation of zero longitude.

We’ve fallen for it before and we fall for it again. The meridian walk through Cornmill Meadow. I’ve noticed granite pillars lying on the ground, aligned with church, with Greenwich, with zero. I’ve imagined cultists taking zero for their symbol. But now stones, which might have been ignored as glacial detritus, have been erected as markers for a permitted zero longitude pathway. The copywriters of the Lee Valley Park are keen ‘to develop a strategy through which Vision can be made a reality’.

It’s a typically English conceit, the millennial mile. Begin with a grey omphalos on a base of stones and shells, a suncrowned archetypal figure with a letterbox navel (into which requests, questions for the oracle, can be posted). This south-facing man/pillar is like something Renchi might have drawn, in the days when he was supposed to be studying anthropology or comparative religion. (We subsequently discover that the granite blocks once formed part of London Bridge.)

A line runs down the pillar, an apparent crack, marking zero longitude, its long flight across the Southern Ocean. We can see where we are and see what our journey should be, through Suffolk and Norfolk, to the edge of the Wash.

Renchi scoops up a feather, a section of bright orange rubber (an inner tube), a pebble.

The walk we are offered, strategic planting designed to flatter a diminishing perspective, is very seductive: the distant prospect, at the end of a closely mown avenue, of another pillar. It carries us away from the M25, but it’s irresistible. A grassed extension of the Lea. A spirit-path that runs in parallel with the Navigation, the Cornmill Stream.

We identify (or Renchi does and I note it) the call of jay and green woodpecker. But, just as we adjust to the rhythm of the green avenue, it ends; it runs up against another perimeter fence, the earthworks of the Government Research Establishment.

This site — ‘Access for All’ — is the showpiece real estate of the Lee Valley Regional Park Development. One hundred and seventy-five acres of land (‘one of the most secret places in England’) have been thrown open to the public. It’s a great day out. I was there for the postponed (foot-and-mouth) launch on 17 May 2001. And I came straight back, the following weekend, for a family picnic. A haunt of timid deer, a nesting habitat for herons, now available to ticket-buyers for the first time in 300 years. A Paradise Park formerly known as the Royal Gunpowder Mills.

Labourers, searched at the gates for flammable materials, encouraged to work at an easy pace, had lived (and died) here for generations. But the secret didn’t travel. Enclose the wildest wood in the parish, cut your own canals, build a city of sheds, blow up houses, rebuild them, stage underwater detonations, and keep it all under wraps. That mixture of timidity, diluted patriotism and an absence of curiosity, leaves great tranches of Britain unmapped; purpose and practice undisclosed. We respect secrecy. It’s for our own good, in the end. One day, when the research and development has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature, thriving in an exclusion zone, will be promoted and paraded.

The plantation of alder buckthorn through which you can tour, in a carriage tugged by a tractor (areas forbidden to walkers), is glossed as the most effective forestry for producing charcoal. Charcoal, saltpetre, sulphur: gunpowder ingredients. History is the resource. Come off the highway, using the drive-in McDonald’s as your marker; ease over the speed bumps, the sleeping-policemen, and through the new, yellow-brick estate which is being built right up against the fence of the Gunpowder Mills. Pad over the oozy foot-and-mouth cushion and enter this decommissioned nowhere.

There are promotional films (with bangs and flares), interactive games, charts, rescued nitroglycerine trucks — along with helpful guides in scarlet polo-shirts, local-history buffs (as ever) peddling sepia postcards of trams and trains, beekeepers from Enfield with pots of liquid honey.

The story is astonishing. The seventeenth-century watermill that evolves into a factory of death: Trafalgar, Waterloo, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb (you’ve seen the movie). Primitive technology shifts from fireworks and loud noises to stealth planes, non-nuclear explosives and propellants, Gulf War gizmos and guidance systems. Research that is still embargoed. ‘Access for All’, yes, but hard information stays in the files. Post-mortem reports from the Forties will be locked away for years.

From eighteenth-century cottages, through Incorporating Mills, to plantation-style bungalows and anonymous, low-level barrack blocks. The sheds, factories and storage facilities, clustered around Queen Meads, are a village without a war memorial, a cricket pitch. The invariable mix of domestic and sinister: pink, electrical junction boxes on the sides of detached Tudorbethan properties, in which covert research took place. ‘Climactic Test Cubicles’ were constructed in 1951: microclimates suitable for activities that were both jokey and fantastic. A device known as the ‘Master Slave Manipulator’ is photographed as it pours out a cup of tea for a gentleman in spectacles (with loud plaid tie). This performance is located within the ‘X-Ray Bay’ (1968).

The deserted sheds, on an overcast afternoon in early summer, present a melancholy spectacle. Suppressed noise. The clumsy architecture of asbestos, plasterboard, concrete. Slippery decks and verandahs. There are visible wounds, gaps where heavy machinery has been removed. In a restored gallery you come across a display case filled with weapons of war: death kit. Lee Enfield rifles. ‘Stock, magazine, bolt,’ mutters a Cadet Force veteran. Grenades. Bayonets. Machine guns. Antiquated ordnance playing the memory game, busking for sentiment.

Around the walls are hung photographs — from the Gunpowder Mills, from Woolwich, the Midlands — women working in armament factories; women in time of war. Elegant black and white prints. (Men, when you see them, reserved occupations, are sickly, done in, diminished by this army of powerful females.) The presiding mode is dignified surrealism: groups sitting around tables, in poses made familiar by Dutch domestic interiors, by Victorian moral fables, but they’re not weaving, working looms, carding wool, they are filling cartridge belts. In massive sheds (white light from an open door), women with covered hair stand among gleaming shells, an iron harvest. Women, hanging from overhead cranes, float above meadows of lethal toys. Women pose in groups, their uniforms hardworn, functional rather than fetishised.

A pattern of waterways confirms a formal geometry. Fat carp, protected from fishermen, glide through sunken powder boats. The skeletons of these craft are better preserved underwater. Grey ribs beneath the heavy green. Hooped bridges facilitate curved deck canopies (above leather-covered boards). Drained canals, running away from a brick tower, lead the walker towards the woods: a set, blending the pastoral with the industrial, that calls up bleaker Polish and East German settings.

The architecture of disclosed ruins is Neo-Mayan: traverses, blast-deflection walls, railway lines. The Gunpowder Press House with its powered water-wheel, its ivy-covered ramparts, has (according to the brochure) ‘become an icon’. An icon of what? Transition? Erasure? When the mills went up in a spectacular explosion in May 1861, one worker threw himself, blazing, into the pond — and survived. Another man was spotted, lying in the long grass, by the flames rising from his clothes. He died.