Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Grand houses dispose themselves along a golden road: IT mansions and cult centres (probably sponsored by George Harrison). White fences, gravel drives. Ironwork gates on which CCTV cameras replace heraldic beasts. JAIN ESTATE. Millionaire mendicants, spiritual conglomerates, multinational god franchises: they absorb this liminal landscape. The sign, Jain Estate, made me think of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs: Shambu Bharti Baba on the sepia cover of Indian Journals and the poet himself, pole in hand, naked and hairy, beside the Sea of Japan. Elective ecumenicism. The state of being Jain, adapting a dualistic sixth-century religion, the liberation of the soul through asceticism, to twentieth-century trauma, by the act of removing one’s clothes. I pictured the rooms of this Hertfordshire retreat as luxurious caves occupied by nude men. By stepping aside from the world, they had somehow acquired a very nice chunk of it in which to practise their austere rituals.

The evening road to Potters Bar is an enchantment. As we walk over Hooke Hill and through Fir Wood, the sun is setting at the end of a tunnel of shadowy greenery. An image I would see many times during the course of our circuit, Renchi with pack on back striding down a long straight road. The cars have gone. The road comes into its own. A solid stream in which we wade.

Swallowed in suburban modesty, banks of blue hydrangeas, we acknowledge that Potters is one bar we won’t cross. Potter’s forest gate: the old name. A railway town at the end of the line from Moorgate. Property values are beginning to climb as city folk appreciate the connection. It plays two ways. Once we’ve located the station we’re out of it, back home.

17 November 1998, we’re back in Potters Bar. The logistics of the walk become more complicated as we move away from the Lea Valley and its convenient rail system. Now we’re into a two-car relay. We meet at our destination. It’s an awkward choice, but we have to decide in advance where we’ll stop at the end of the day. We pick Abbots Langley, which is pretty much the top left corner of the circle. We are convinced that the M25 orbit has corners and that those corners are important. They force us to take decisions: north or south, east or west, inside or outside?

Choice made, one car left in the grounds of a mental hospital (defunct and in turnaround), we travel back in the second car to the point where the previous walk finished. Therefore, we experience the motorway. Our status changes. I drive. It’s not a section of the road that I know. Renchi points out the usual towers on hills, buildings that might be monasteries or schools or madhouses. He talks of a meteor shower he witnessed on the previous night. A cold morning, the car windows are frosted and have to be scraped.

Leaving the car in an underground car park, near the station in Potters Bar, it takes us a mile or so to adjust: the road on which we were recently travelling is our event horizon. We won’t be happy until we place ourselves in a steady relation to the acoustic footprints that define our pilgrimage.

Renchi is fur-capped, mufflered, gloved. The sky is pink; the sun, as it climbs above the suburban avenue of Laurel Fields, disseminates a red-gold beam. Potters Bar is not a bad place to leave behind. On the chainlink fence of the Elm Court Youth and Community Centre: PSYCHIC FAYRE. HERE, NOV 19TH. These boys are tracking us, using us as Judas goats. They’re on our trail.

We feel, plodding down Mutton Lane, that we’re working the crease, the fold between cultures, Essex and Hertfordshire. Out of an exhausted shopping precinct (Blockbuster Video, burger bar, hairdresser) we chance on a spanking new civic centre, bright bricks, big windows. The still green surface of an empty swimming pool seen from a cold street.

The best way out — Potters Bar doesn’t give up easily — is to follow a fast-flowing stream that seems to carry us in the ‘wrong’ direction. Mimmshall Brook? Is that the A1 or the M25? Who cares? When you find a landscape of this quality you don’t let it go. The fields are frosted, distance is soft. From a motorway bridge we can read the road signs: the Al, heading south to the M25 interchange. On a novocaine winter morning, the motorway sleeve is suspended like a Chinese scroll painting. Wooden fence. Bare trees. Electricity poles.

Time for breakfast. The South Mimms service station is our target. Welcome Break (the new name for Trusthouse Forte’s motorway catering) have been allocated the northern arc of the M25, licence to create an oasis of weirdness: a soft sell to road-bruised civilians. People talk affectionately about South Mimms (without the motorway it would be as obscure as its neighbours, Welham Green, Bentley Heath, London Colney). South Mimms was the first (for a long time the only) pit stop on the circuit. City boys with loud shirts and floppy hair (pre-Hugh Grant) used South Mimms as a garage, the starting flag for a lap around London.

One of the mysteries of the M25 (as it might be pitched by Carlton TV) is the ‘badly mutilated’ body of a woman, discovered near the South Mimms service station in 1990. The woman is still unidentified. Her age was put by the pathologist as ‘somewhere between 30 and 50’. She was 5 foot 5 inches tall, with short dark hair and grey/blue eyes. She was buried in an unmarked grave as ‘Jane Doe’.

News of this coincidence, nameless victim and recently completed service station, coming a few years after Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, with its ritual sacrifices, dead children secreted in the foundations of London churches, provoked all kinds of rumours. Bill Drummond and Gimpo, scratching away the earth at the side of the road, near this site, to hide the plaque commemorating their spring equinox drive, seemed to be responding to the same imperative. If vampires are buried at crossroads, stake through the heart, to trap and confuse unresting spirits, then what torment did the South Mimms inhumation represent? A poor soul pitched against interlinked spirals, under and over, the multi-choice channels at Junction 23 of the M25.

Appeasing savage dogs at the gates of scattered properties, we creep up on the service area by way of the Forte Posthouse Motel, a Southern Californian Mission-style, white-walled pastiche, with awnings and arches. You could call the look: Epping Forest pueblo. A good set on which to remake The Magnificent Seven. An effect that’s tricky to pull off without the weather, the desert. The Posthouse Motel is the bright-windowed fortress of an alien culture. They’re not in the hot pillow trade, catering for lazy afternoons, sticky liaisons, legovers for the entrepreneurial classes of Potters Bar, Hatfield and Barnet. They’re touting for power brunches, coffee-and-croissant bull sessions: conference facilities in the ‘theatre style’ with a seating capacity of 170, or ‘classroom style’ for eighty-five, or ‘banquet style’ for 120, or ‘boardroom style’ for forty. Between arse-kicking and number-crunching, laminated badge-wearers can make use of an indoor swimming pool, a sauna solarium, Jacuzzi spa and gym.

But they can’t, just now, drop into the service station to pick up a newspaper, magazine, CD or fast-food snack. South Mimms is a burnt-out shell. UNSAFE STRUCTURE, NO UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. Our breakfast is in ruins. Someone has torched the gaff, WELCOME LODGE FULLY OPEN. Says the sign. But it’s only open as a rest area, a parking site; somewhere to piss in the bushes. Fire-blackened struts poke over a blue and white fence, the exoskeleton of a pleasure dome.

If you’ve been on the road long enough to let your personal grooming slip, you can always book in for a shave and trim. THE HAIR BUS. A customised chara in the lorry park, MEN’S HAIRDRESSING SALON. Truckers with gently protuberant T-shirts are settled on their thrones, catching up with the gossip, while clippers snap and shears buzz. The mobile barber came out on spec, one day, and launched a new career. Nothing pleasanter than a tool around the motorway for a No. 1 crop, before a Full English breakfast in South Mimms.