Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Coming into Whitewebbs Lane, with the notion of finding a bridge over the M25, I heard a sound, a howling, that was to be one of the defining characteristics of my motorway walk: the chorus of the boarding kennels. Domestic animals are dumped, out on the fringes, where their din will cause least offence. On a working day, the yelps and snarls, the prolonged baying, would be muffled in traffic, minute-shavers hustling towards the motorway.

On Bull’s Cross bridge (one of the current 264 that span the M25), you could hear it, acoustic layering; the way tyre-hum modulates as speeding vehicles move from grey to blacktop. Then the dogs and cats in their cages, riders coming out of the woods around Theobalds Park. A fragment of chat from two dog walkers who passed me on the bridge: ‘In exchange for a pension, they gave him a gravel pit.’

A fox, emerging from the Western Jewish Cemetery, shot me a baleful glance and stalked into a roadside copse. White Webbs Park, on the south side of the M25, had been pleasant enough — as long as you kept to the designated walkways: PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT, ARCHERY IN PROGRESS. This was a day for family groups, adults talking, children impatient, new mittens, new bicycles. Theobalds Park: a royal residence, landscaped by Tradescant, then the estate of a brewing family who could afford to reassemble Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar at the bottom of the garden as an overambitious folly. And now? The Abbey National Centre of Excellence. A surveillance checkpoint and voice box to interrogate unlicensed visitors. I loved it. This was the true territory for the fiction that is England.

You could slither down a slope, on the north side of the road, and sit under the motorway bridge (the New River insinuates itself beside you). There’s an Ice Warning box (ready to flag the next glaciation). A mosaic ramp with hexagonal panels, regular as crystal. Tough grass breaks the tiles. Feral picnickers have been here before me, leaving punctured tins and cans of strong lager; soggy handbags and soggier documents.

I sit, comfortably, with my back to one of the piers, munching my sandwiches and deciding that, yes, I want to walk around the orbital motorway: in the belief that this nowhere, this edge, is the place that will offer fresh narratives. I don’t want to be on the road any more than I want to walk on water; the soft estates, the acoustic footprints, will do nicely. Dull fields that travellers never notice. Noise and the rush of traffic, twenty-four hours a day, has pushed ‘content’ back. An elaborate scheme of planting (two million trees and shrubs, mostly in Surrey and Kent) would hide the nasty ditch with its Eddie Stobart lorries, its smoke belchers. The M25 walk was the next project. The form it would take and the other people who might be persuaded to come along, to liven up the tale, was still to be decided.

Those boards outside newsagents’ shops, with their broken haikus, fascinate me. DIANA’S RESTING PLACE CHANGED. ROYALS URGED TO SELL BRITAIN. SPICE GIRLS ‘SPLIT’ FEAR. FOOT AND MOUTH ARMY MOVE IN. Anonymous poetry, urgent and anxious. Banishment of definite and indefinite articles. Present tense. Absence of lower-case lettering. It was a style to which I aspired. The city composing its own disposable legend. Royalty, crime, transport, weather. On a daily basis. Unselfconscious surrealism. Even the one-eyed got the message. Burdening yourself with a newspaper was a waste of time. Terse black-on-white newscasts told you everything you needed to know. More effective than contradictory traffic updates and fog warnings flashed from gantries above motorways.

On the final afternoon of the old millennium, the boards predicted DOME FIASCO, hours before it happened; hours before the salaried opinion-makers and big cheeses were abandoned on a cold station platform in Stratford East. Up to that point, they’d bought the New Labour spin, the shameless bullshit. The Dome, an obscene fungus on Bugsby’s Marshes, empty of content, serviced by a flamboyant Underground link, had received a good or neutral press. The Jubilee Line had been shoved through (magnificent stations, no customers) while Hackney was kept in purdah, outside the system. Just because the brand name of this expensive interloper sounded regal and upbeat.

East London stayed indoors. The Acorn pub on Queens-bridge Road promised: CONTINUOUS SKY. Motor traffic was forbidden to pull over, take a look at the river or the preparations for the big night. MILLENNIUM CLEARWAY. SPECIAL. CONTROLS APPLY. NO STOPPING.

Helicopters droned overhead like a gangland funeral. Some of the Wapping riverside balconies made a halfhearted attempt at getting into the spirit of things by hanging year 2000 banners and a few coloured balloons. A melancholy airship drifted over the News International fortress. Knots of well-wrapped folk gathered in front of the Tower Hotel, gazing hopefully upstream at the gothic spires of H. Jones’s nineteenth-century bridge. Whose party was it? Had they been invited? Where was the action?

I wanted to stay with the story — Dome, Millennium, meridian line — but I couldn’t face the orchestrated riverside jollity. The Thames resisted such vulgar and ill-considered nonsense, an evening of stage-managed spontaneity: ‘rivers of fire’, red, green and gold starbursts, the spinning of the new Ferris wheel, the London Eye. The Eye wasn’t working, it had failed its safety check. The heavens were shrouded, rain beads hung in the heavy air.

My first notion was to try the Beckton Alp. Far enough out, down the A13, to avoid the crush; high enough to see the fire-stream as it raced, barge to barge, along the river. This manmade conical wonder, a ski slope overlooking the City Airport at Silvertown (retail park, golf driving range, Northern Sewage Outfall, arterial roads), seemed to be the ideal platform. It had everything I looked for, a privileged overview as grand as anything produced by the early London mapmakers, Anthony van den Wyngaerde or Wenceslaus Hollar. The Alp had been perfect for the solar eclipse, attracting locals and periscope-wielding enthusiasts, but it might prove bleak and damp, and difficult to reach, on the last night of the millennium.

The other obvious choice, honouring the Greenwich meridian, was Waltham Abbey. My circumnavigation of the M25 had begun and ended there; I would align myself with the fuss at the Dome, but drift to the perimeter, staying alert for distant noises, flares in the sky. I booked a table at the Shuhag Balti house (WE ONLY SERVE CHICKEN BREAST); I’d noticed the Millennium Special menu as I’d plodded through town on the last leg of my walk.

Anna, by now, was used to my unorthodox notions of a good night out. Waltham Abbey had the edge on Beckton Alp. In light rain, we ambled out of a deserted car park.

Early evening, around seven o’clock, it didn’t seem as if much was happening. We tried to get into the Welsh Harp, a quiet enough pub at the end of a day’s tramp. It’s a special feeling to pull off that double, abbey and pub. The great church doors of Holy Cross and St Lawrence were always locked when we made our starts, just after first light. And locked again when we returned in the dark. The presence of this sealed building, its surrounding orchards and fishponds, travelled with us. The astrological ceiling, with its zodiac symbols, deep blues, golds and whites, was a conceptual umbrella carried into the Essex countryside. The ceiling had been designed by the eccentric William Burges and put in place in the 1860s. Its theme, according to the brochures, was Time.

The guy on the door of the Welsh Harp, no bulge-eyed bouncer, let us know that the pub was off-limits, a private party. Through soft rain, we tramped the wet flags of the market square, the spokes of medieval street pattern, pedestrianised (but lacking pedestrians): the usual small-town English mix of charity shops, minicabs (Abbey Cars), insurance, junk food. As the locus for a millennial celebration, Waltham Abbey was looking pretty good. Picture-book pubs closed to strangers. Motorway fringe motels booked solid with revellers. Slithery streets. Church bells. The Lea in spate, and soon to flood the ground-floor rooms of outwardly mobile retirees. Cue: local news interview as the three-piece suite floats out of the window.