Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Service industries are the sort that always mushroom around army posts: barbers, junk food, fancy motel, bunkhouse. Looking down the line of high trucks is like peeping in at the bay windows of a suburban street with a cavalier attitude to net curtains. Fat men shave or change their shirts, spray themselves with industrial-strength deodorants. Lorry girls repair their faces. Some of them, minimally skirted, swing down from the cabs; pick up new patrons for the run north. Juggernauts block the slip roads. Brakes hiss. Radiators steam. Road dirt is sluiced.

We find a truckers’ caff, which is cheaper, better, more efficient than any of the service stations. As much coffee as you can drink, elevated screens pumping out colour TV, time to study the maps.

When, much later, Chris Petit and I, driving around the motorway for two days at a stretch, return to South Mimms, the service area has been revamped: as an air terminal. Clean, tactfully lit, unendurable. Everything is designed to get you out of there within minutes of finding a table. Crematorium muzak. Food that isn’t. Photo-booths that offer portraits in the style of Van Gogh, Renoir, Dega (sic). Concessions on the point of collapse. A major hike to locate the Gents. No alcoves or areas in which to retreat. You sit on the edge of a hard chair, waiting for your flight to be called. It’s not day or night. You’re completely disorientated. You can’t remember if you’re supposed to be travelling east or west. And then, to boost the paranoia, two genetically modified cops, one of each sex, waddle up to the burger bar. They’re wearing blue protective vests and they’re packing guns at the hips. We get the message and take off for the safety of Purfleet.

On another occasion, after filming with Petit, we found our-selves in a major traffic jam. In the South Minims car park. Gridlock. No question of reaching the road, the Al was at a standstill. It began here. Too many supplicants for motorway hospitality, too many tourist coaches. Too many admirers of the service station rock garden. North London devastated — because too many drivers were trying to get off the road at the same time.

Returned to base in Hackney, I received a letter from the poet and visionary Aidan Andrew Dun (author of Vale Royal ). ‘How far round are you on your orbital pilgrimage? You probably know this but when HMS Belfast was moored just up from Tower Bridge its monstrous gun-turret was trained on a service-station somewhere in the north-western sector of the M25, demonstrating a range of twenty-something miles. Dunno what this means. Perhaps some omen of war on the forecourt!’

Worse than that, Aidan. Worse than the blockades and the motorway slowdowns. HMS Belfast was a crucial element in architect Theo Crosby’s attempt at rewiring the Celtic Christian alignments of London (as proposed by Elizabeth Gordon in her inspirational 1914 publication, Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles ). Crosby, in a promotional booklet for his Battle of Britain monument (designed with Michael Sandle), worked everything from a point that seemed to have little significance in 1987. By whatever prophetic or occult arts, Crosby chose to launch the psychogeographic redefinition of London’s fields of force from the line of zero longitude (which he called the ‘Turner Axis’). His Speer-derived monument would be sited around Cuckold’s Point in Rotherhithe (the starting place for an historic pilgrimage to the Horn Fair in Charlton). It was, in fact, a precise equivalent (west for east) of the dead ground on which the Millennium Dome would be built (as an unconscious tribute to the spirit of Crosby).

The Turner Axis, starting on Greenwich Hill, spurned the ancient ley (the Hawksmoor line through the domes of the Naval College to St Anne’s, Limehouse), and passed through Cuckold’s Point to HMS Belfast and St Paul’s Cathedral (where it met the ‘Canaletto Axis’). The guns of the battleship were trained on the only (at that time) service station on the orbital motorway. The arc of fire represents another of London’s invisible threads of influence. In that curvature, the fall of a shell, can be seen one span of a grander dome: river to margin.

‘The place is unimportant,’ writes Crosby. ‘So is the alignment and the orientation, the magic rules of the past that governed the disposal of buildings and particularly monuments. They are the cardinal points, the directions of the equinox, the midsummer sunrise, the turning of year, the evocation of growth, the stopping of time.’

Before it was a service station, South Minims (Myms) was a hilltop village with church and notable funerary monument for the Austen family: a double plinth (the upper element decorated with a five-skull panel and crossed bones) topped by an inverted pear.

‘Pear. No, light-bulb. No, pear,’ says Renchi.

The stone pear has a vestigial stem growing from its bulb. It sucks light from dim fields. It gives nothing out. A provocative sculpture shielded from the curiosity of the vulgar by a curtain of spindly, ivy-covered trees. The pear, according to J.C. Cooper’s An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, stood for ‘hope; good health’. To the Christian it represented ‘the love of Christ for mankind’. What then of the inverted pear? The pear with pedicel growing from rounded bottom, not slender neck?

As we head across country in the direction of Shenley, navigating fields of winter cabbage, hopping brooks, appreciating the high, quilted clouds, seeing nobody, I try to explain my notion of our walk as a fugue. This improvisation would make more sense when I read Ian Hacking’s excellent account of epic, seemingly random pedestrian journeys undertaken by French labourers in the late nineteenth century. Mad Travelers (Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses) offered one perfectly reasonable ‘explanation’ of our orbital pilgrimage: an hysterical fugue — attended by the sort of minor epileptic seizures (electrical storms in the consciousness) Renchi suffered in Dublin.

Albert Dadas, a gas fitter from Bordeaux, is the pivotal figure in Hacking’s narrative. An ambitious provincial doctor, Philippe Tissie, interested himself in Dadas and wrote up the case; thereby inducting the fugueur into a Conradian tale (weather, brooding topography, fatalism). Dadas, a compulsive masturbator, would simply walk out of his quotidian life; the domestic routines, the duties he performed to his employers’ satisfaction. There was no obvious motive, no trauma to be left behind. The journeys were a willed forgetting. They were like Aboriginal songlines, enacted dreamings: Bordeaux to Moscow, to Constantinople, Algiers.

Tissie’s account of the Dadas phenomenon launched a fashion, the roads of Europe were cluttered with amnesiac pilgrims, temporary vagrants. The fugue would pass. The middle classes, metropolitans, took up the craze. Long-distance walking spread like a virus. You didn’t walk to forget, you walked to forget the walk. You carried on, often for months, years, until it was appropriate to return to your previous life.

I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word, a bloody-minded Tommy muttering over his tobacco tin in the Flanders trenches. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. The increasing lunacy of city life (in my case) and country life (in Renchi’s) forced us to take to the road. The joy of these days out lay in the heightened experience of present tense actuality, the way that we bypassed, for a brief space of time, the illusionism of the spin doctors, media operators and salaried liars. The fugue is both drift and fracture. The story of the trip can only be recovered by some form of hypnosis, the memory prompt of the journal or the photo-album. Documentary evidence of things that may never have happened. The fugue is a psychic commando course — Albert Dadas, bloody-footed, stomped seventy kilometres a day — that makes the parallel life, as gas fitter, hospital carer, or literary hack, endurable.