Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The tracks, around Temple House, are clear enough on the map. Bull Cross Ride, Old Park Ride. What I didn’t realise was that ‘Ride’ meant just that. It was an order. Get in the saddle or bugger off. We trudged for a mile or so before we hit the gate. No warning. Entry denied. We should have taken the hint when we passed Gunsite Stud and Hanging Plantation. Off-motorway green belt is jealous of its status. Here are city-subsidised farms, stables, country that doesn’t have to acknowledge its rowdy southern neighbour. The M25 is a sewer of potential bandits, rustlers, burger-munching trippers carrying the virus of the slums. It’s border country and the borderers know on which side of the motorway unlicensed pedestrians belong.

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Traffic snarls, the air is scented. Our route, from Whitewebbs Road into Cattlegate Road, under the Crews Hill railway bridge and up the slope towards the M25 (between Waltham Abbey and Potters Bar), shivers with ambiguity. It’s a rat run, the end of the liberties of Enfield Chase, but it is also a retail paradise. Horticultural retail. Instant gardens. Statuary. Sheds. Bedding plants. Gravel. Compost. Dutch juggernauts unloading trays of tired plants.

Teased by television, by painted decking, water features and shivering Junos with inadequate T-shirts, householders demand flatpack gardens that can be assembled by a gang of self-promoting experts while they skive off for a round of golf. Gardening and cooking and watching celebrities take exotic holidays is the fix, the image-flood in which we float and seek our sustenance. Pleasure-provoking narcoleptics in a period of mind-numbing labour, wrecked transport systems, failing schools and hospitals. Tending the soil, snorting the night perfumes, glass of wine in hand, will heal us.

A gentle pornography of seed catalogues, pubic thatches (in mauve and scarlet and yellow) marketed as ‘The Contemporary Grasses Collection’. The copy is a lubricious come-on. ‘ Planiscapus Nigrescens : spectacular, moody… with dark-purple, almost black curving leaves. Briza media : delightful Common Quaking grass… trembling heart-shaped flower spikelets. Carex comans : dense tuft-forming sedge. Imperata cylindrica : tall sword-like green leaves which turn blood red from tips.’

The TV garden is an extension of the house. You can still find allotments, salvaged from unexploitable buffer zones, but they are weirdly anachronistic. Strip-system allocations, fenced in and worked by elderly, all-weather gentlemen. A good example can be seen near the Sewardstone Road bridge, between cemetery and motorway, in Waltham Abbey. A solitary ancient leaning on his hoe, shuffling backwards and forwards to his shed. The villein with his small corner of England. That never changes, though such sites are threatened. They have to hide away, hope that they’ve been forgotten.

Crews Hill services the patio-lounge fantasist. Horticulture is discussed in terms of plant furniture, colour schemes, architectural bamboos. There are flirty plants and nighty plants, stylish plants, bimbo plants and ‘as seen on television’ plants. A banana tree (‘special offer for readers of Good Housekeeping ’) is pitched as a lifestyle accessory. ‘A definite “it” plant. In fact if Hello! magazine were to interview their first celebrity plant it would probably be this one.’

Blues and purples and mauves. Lavender and ceanothus. The drench of suburbia. Intoxicated bees reeling from flower to flower, a great year for Enfield honey. Lipsticky and dripping thick over fingers and plate rims. The hum of the pastoral, the beehive in the English garden: as depicted on the label of a honey jar.

Crews Hill, representing the final flourish of the Lea Valley/Enfield Chase tradition (as heritaged in Joan Hessayon’s novel Capel Bells ), has come to an arrangement with the motorway. Walk back towards the old town of Enfield and you’ll find the glasshouses; you’ll understand Hessayon’s thesis, the way that gardeners from the big estates began to trade in plants. An escape from patronage, servitude, the tied cottage: the realisation that plants were a commodity. This astonishing parade of drive-in retail opportunities, part Sunday excursion, part car boot sale, operates on the cusp of what has gone ( genius loci ) and that which is coming: Americana.

Try this for a roadside menu: Garrick Furniture Design, Antique Fires (of Enfield), Four Seasons Pottery, Crews Hill Art & Crafts (Hang Ups), Fernleigh Landscapes, Monty’s Furniture, Three Counties Garden & Leisure Buildings, The Quilting Bee, Enfield Bird Centre, Macbar Army Surplus. Cash & Carry Winter Pansy’s (sic). These are not garden centres (for those you need to go to Suffolk, Oxfordshire), these are garden suburbs. Listen to the names of the kids who are running amok among the bedding plants: ‘Get down from that, Brandon. Leave him alone, Harrison.’

As we slog uphill, Renchi delights in the display of slug-repelling, crushed shell mounds, bark-chip puddles, grey slabs (made to look like York stone). We negotiate fibreglass rockeries that would horrify Gussie Bowles, boulders so light you can lift them as easily as Steve Reeves in Hercules Conquers Atlantis . There are regiments of gum-coloured statues: hounds, hedgehogs, bunnies, ducks; loosely classical nudes, lions cubbed from Landseer, water-spitting gargoyles, Egyptian cat-gods tamed and domesticated. You can smell the bird house, the deceased lizards. You can purchase a hairy spider, a bag of snakes or a tray of delightful scorpions. Sniff the resin, the hothouse biodiversity. Compost that doesn’t smell like shit, but a blend of roasted coffee and turf from Galway. There are enough customised sheds and cabins and pinewood studios to house all of Jack Straw’s asylum seekers.

The fetid concentration of this botanical stew stays with us. I am sticky with spray, perfume-processed for the next stage of our walk. I’m sure that the Crews Hill herbal affects drivers on the motorway. They open car windows, take their foot off the gas, smile. Easy country. No red cones. They’re on one of the original sections of the road, the gently weaving passage where the M25 defined itself, discovered its identity. And now, in the September evening, at the golden hour, they pick up an hallucinatory hint of paradise gardens on the outskirts of Potters Bar.

Escaping Crews Hill, going under the M25, is a woeful experience for pedestrians; we face the oncoming traffic. A constant stream, both ways, clusters of five or six cars, nose to tail in barely controlled frustration: metal projectiles time-warped on to a drovers’ track, Cattlegate Road. In the intervals between the blam-blam-blam, Renchi hears a woodpecker in the twilight woods. There are long stretches without verges on which to walk. We are conscious of being nothing more than columns of vulnerable meat, obstacles made hazardous by the glare of the sinking sun.

Moving west in the direction of Potters Bar, looking across the valley to the hamlet of Cuffley, we feel a nudge in our perception of space/time. Renchi relates this to certain devices in children’s fiction, the way a network of green lanes can sidle alongside the densest clots of population. The walker ‘goes back’, forgets himself (or herself). A pre-visionary condition, in which it is possible to let go of the present and access an older narrative, a secret garden or enchanted wood.

By his reading, the tunnel under the motorway is a gate of memory. Concrete walls become screens on which are projected phantasmagoric tree shapes. But reaching the tunnel, coming up against the wall — cut to fit the slope of the motorway escarpment — we find that the concrete is no casual wash. The wall is made with deep grooves, like a sheet of corrugated paper. The effect is of something wrapped and hidden, a stone curtain. Motorway sounds reverberate and shake the tunnel. Nothing to be seen, everything to be imagined.