Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

We follow the Colne to Uxbridge. Renchi has borrowed a pocket recorder. We’ve talked a lot about sound but never cracked it. Long, rambling conversations about how to keep a useful record of what was said. ‘Um, ah, like, you know, yeah, like… right.’ There would be interrogations of persons met on the road. But no walkers are out and about, no dogs. It’s early and the light is so recessive that my colour prints look like sepia. Steam from the flat roofs of narrow boats. A weak sun caught in a thatch of spindly trees. Lakes, islands. It’s easy to imagine ourselves on Mark Twain’s ‘river road’; we drop to our knees, use that heavy sky to conjure up the Mississippi. (Think: Robert Frank. Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana .)

Sound is elusive. No slap of tide, no river romance of clicks and creaks. Our own muted footfalls on worn turf, on trampled mud, splashing through spring puddles.

South. Under the arch of a brick bridge: REPUBLIC NOW. There is no way of accurately recalling Renchi’s monologue (even from notes taken at the time). The recorder of course is unused. Cameras can log, sketch, record graffiti, make clumsy portraits. Sound is an element. Like the canal, the motorway. We don’t have the skill, the eavesdropping genius of composer/guitarist Bruce Gilbert (once of Wire). Bruce skulks in pub corners, on station platforms, at obscure locations, sampling; gathering material to construct a sound field. He is an X-ray of Gene Hackman in Coppola’s The Conversation . From units of sound you can make a world, re-edit the past. Put it on a loop. Bruce long ago cracked the thing we were still struggling with: he learnt how to ‘play the gaps’.

Renchi’s riverbank monologue moves ahead of him, like one of those men with red flags who preceded the first cars: ‘Father’s library… Stukeley, arcane researches… Heathrow as a kind of Avebury… keep the pattern in our heads as we enter that territory.’ In 1723 the antiquary William Stukeley investigated the earthwork known as Shasbury, or Schapsbury or Fern Hill, and pronounced it ‘Caesar’s Camp’. A ditch, earth ramparts. An enclosure, sixty feet square, with points of access at north and south. A diagonal path running through it, to other access points in east and west. Figures, perhaps surveyors, in the foreground. Holding chains. A coach pulled by six horses.

The canal’s a soporific. Pylons, lagoons. We push closer to the M25. The strip of tolerated country between road and water is scruffier, fewer estates, more poultry farms. By the time we pass West Drayton, hippies and freebooters are disputing the right to scavenge with travellers, scrap-metal pirates, unlicensed Irishmen. You have to tread carefully when you walk these lanes with a camera in your hands. In every off-road junk yard, somebody is watching. Big dogs on small chains.

We see distant Western Avenue, the A40, as a target, a beacon of hope. At Uxbridge we climb up to the road: a taster, a sighting. Electricity Sub-Station: DANGER OF DEATH KEEP Out. Western Avenue sounds better than it plays; a sluggish trawl of family saloons, company cars, white vans, middleweight haulage shaking itself free of London. Ribbon-development dystopia: before the motorway, Iver Heath, the woods of Langley Park and the descent into Slough.

Uxbridge (aka Wixebrug, Uxebregg) exploits its position, where the Colne and the Grand Union Canal meet Western Avenue. Victorian trade routes. The smoke-coughing trucks that took over from the narrow boats are themselves doomed to oblivion, breakers’ yards between river and motorway embankment. Uxbridge has cornered the market in liminal architecture. (It’s here and not here. Visible, but you don’t see it.) The Battle of Britain was directed from Uxbridge, so the guidebook says, by the late Air Marshal Lord Dowding. ‘The town is perhaps noteworthy for its selection of modern and futuristic buildings in a variety of competing styles.’

The buildings along Western Avenue don’t want to be there; they’d prefer Satellite City. Or Las Vegas. Phoenix, Arizona, with Scunthorpe weather. They’d like to be closer to Heathrow’s lingua franca. Mediterranean green glass. Low level units with a certain lazy elegance. Super-Cannes functionalism interspersed with Fifties grot. The heritaged emblems of an old riverside pub, The Swan & Bottle, have been banished by their corporate operators, Chef & Brewer, to the top of a wooden pole. That stares insolently at the slick shoebox of: X (The Document Company XEROX). The Xerox building is designed to look like office machinery, a shredder or printer. The windows are an enigmatic blue-green. Like chlorine. Xerox, Western Avenue, is a swimming pool on its side; from which, by some miracle of gravity, water doesn’t spill. That’s the concept: intelligent water. X marks the spot. Uxbridge is made from Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with barbed wire.

The Xerox building duplicates itself; come back tomorrow and there’ll be another one, and another. And another. X started out as a narrow four-storey column, then multiplied in the night. Horizontal ‘lanes’ of aqueous green glass play with notions of flow and drift, the river captured and tamed. The front elevation, serene as it is, gives me the bends: it’s like looking down from the high board on to an Olympic swimming pool. Sun-sparkling lanes and dividing ropes which, in this case, convert into metaphors of a clean white road. Motorway and canal system seamlessly linked.

Traffic is at a standstill. The bridge over the river, with its red brick parapet, is a sad relic. Workers and drones, in thrall to the glass beehives, plod down Slough Road, towards the UXBRIDGE sign. They have their own, end-of-the-Metropolitan Line style; viz., baggy blousons or black puffa jackets worn over lightweight grey suits, brightly polished shoes. They are bareheaded, ballasted by oversize silver attaché cases. That is, male and female. Trouser suits, short hair. The women carry a second bag, slung from the shoulder, for personal effects. The attaché cases are the kind that turn up on the TV news, left in cabs by Secret State bagmen. ‘Just popped into Blockbusters to pick up a video and it was gone.’ The invasion plans. The list of informers.

Downtown Uxbridge is not a place to tease out an acceptable breakfast. We return to the canal path, head south towards Cowley. Now the green-glass buildings are lower, but they spread over a wider area (Terry Farrell’s Aztec MI6 temple at Vauxhall squashed flat). Cowley is where Mediparc pretensions devolve into muck yards and low-rent trading estates.

TRIMITE ( The Printmakers — for Industry). A collection of metal drums in green and various shades of blue; industrial conceptualism. Seven of the drums — one letter on each — spell out the brand name, trimite. They’ve executed this conceit in the style of the popular (with exiles) yeast extract paste: Marmite (‘contains 31 servings’). Red and yellow on a beef-brown background. Fantasies of squat jars with tight lids, all those B vitamins, have me salivating.

Experience proves: where there’s a trading estate and a canal, there’s a caff, a caravan with serving hatch, a tea stall. It’s a risk worth taking, to detour from our path — fearing that once we come inside the fence we won’t be allowed back to the waterside. More vans than cars. Flat-roofed hutches bodged in asbestos. Print and salvage seem to be the principal trades (along with appearing in deleted TV cop shows).

PINKY & PERRY’S CAFETERIA (PHONE OR FAX ORDERS WELCOME). Grinning pig’s head motif, transfer lettering on every window. The clientele (early shift) is demographically mixed. Suits (jackets slung over seats) laying down grease before the office opens. Working men with spider tattoos, oil scored into the pores of large hands. They seem happy to share this space, which is clean (yellow Formica, red bucket-chairs). The all-day breakfast floats on my hub cap of a plate like a relief map of London and the Thames Valley. Greensand, oolite, chalk. The bubble and squeak of Enfield Chase, bacon ridges of the Chilterns, rubbery fried egg of the Dome, sausage of the North Downs, bean swamp of Dagenham and Purfleet.