Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

‘Who needs West Drayton?’ you say. But you’re wrong. West Drayton is the gateway to the Green Path, a site of some significance for psychogeographers, dowsers, Zodiac conceptualists (of the K.E. Maltwood tendency).

None of these great themes was immediately obvious, as we picked our way through the urban sprawl. You could, if you pushed it, remark the Railway Arms, with its balconies and verandah; a colonial outpost fallen into disuse when travellers became commuters. The rest was a standard extrusion of hairdressers, charity caves, fast food. The difference is — thinking back to the sleepwalking hamlets of the Colne Valley — a slipstream energy derived from railway/motorway/canal systems. West Drayton is the frontier, the first whiff of the (wild) West. Bicycle shops are a nostalgic recollection of the days when H.G. Wells’s clerks took to the country roads. Tidy suburbs, brave in their pretensions, bleed into raw-elbowed commerce.

For a pound I snaffle a copy of Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (on the strength of its puff as ‘A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words’). The cover illustration (Broadmoor Special Hospital) showcases, under an operatic sky, the most extreme version of the asylums we’ve been tracking around the M25. A prison for no-hopers with no date for release. Winchester runs with the ambivalence of that term: asylum . He quotes Johnson’s Dictionary : ‘A place out of which he that has fled to it, may not be taken.’ Sanctuary, refuge; trap.

An ordinary house, in an ordinary village, in a prettily rural royal county just beyond the boundaries of London.

We have to orientate ourselves for the push south, over the M4. I like the look of a church set at the head of something called The Avenue. The church tower, if we blag our way inside, will offer a view across lagoons and gravel pits to the Tower Arms Hotel on the far side of the M25.

Lurking-with-intent, in the vicinity of a fifteenth-century church, parts of which have a thirteenth-century pedigree, when coated in the dust and dirt of a seven-mile yomp down the canal, tends to arouse a degree of suspicion in proper citizens. The solitary communicant (female) is not so bad; the parents dropping off their kids (from gleaming metro-country motors) are less happy. To the point of making the phone call. Hitting the emergency button. We have cameras and rucksacks. We’re indigents or asylum seekers, possibly paedophiles. John Piper-tendency terrorists. The ‘church as sanctuary’ deal has been discontinued, charity begins in Station Road, West Drayton, with the musty books and racks of dead clothes. Charity is a corporate enterprise, cold calls, junk mail, celebrity auctions. It’s where skimmers like Lord Archer get their start.

We persevere, follow the communicant, gain access. St Martin’s is the parish church of West Drayton. A square-towered building lodged in a small, well-kept burial ground, alongside a turreted sixteenth-century gatehouse. A good day on the hoof should include: (1) a section of river or canal, (2) a Formica-table breakfast, (3) a motorway bridge, (4) a discontinued madhouse, (5) a pub, (6) a mound, (7) a wrap of London weather (monochrome to sunburst), (8) one major surprise. So far, so good.

Being inside a church, after the locked doors of the northern quadrant, is a minor shock: the 800-year franchise works its spatial and temporal magic, the narrow building detaches itself from its surroundings, the bluster of West Drayton.

Hats off, from custom or superstition, we creep and whisper. Cruise the usual circuit, interrogating the fabric: in expectation of some clue or sign. Or confirmation. Thicker air. Stone-dust and candle grease. Stained light. Windows designed by Burne-Jones, to the memory of the Mercers. The monumental brass of Dr James Good, the Elizabethan physician. Alabaster memorials to the De Burghs — an echo from Jane Austen (Lady Catherine de Bourgh); Fysch and his wife Easter. A ‘ship’ memorial to Captain Rupert Billingsley. The suspended teardrop of the pyx — in which the sacrament is reserved. This is lowered on a cord from the opening above the tower arch. A medieval survivor? A swinging lodestone from which to navigate the next stage of our journey? Not this time. The pyx is a crafted fake, based on the canopy at Dennington, Suffolk, and created by underemployed technicians at Pinewood Studios.

The item of church furniture that pricks Renchi’s interest is the font. He chews his fingers, studies the leaflet, in which Theo Samuel sounds a cautionary note: ‘We are aware, at St Martin’s, that the beauty of the architecture and surroundings of the ancient church can contribute on the one hand to a sense of calm trust in God, but on the other to an overdependence on the achievements of the past.’ The Revd Samuel wants to shake the faithful from their torpor. They must confront ‘the everyday realities of life’, especially the needs of’ ‘the poor’. He invokes the tradition of St Martin of Tours.

Martin sounds like a useful guide: he was both bishop and hermit, missionary and wonderworker. According to my Dictionary of Saints , ‘he penetrated into the remotest part of his diocese and beyond its borders, on foot, on donkey-back, or by water’.

The whiteness of the font, with its relief figures, has a grubby pink sheen — from generations of supplicating hands that have polished, but not worn away, the curious tableaux. The font dates from the fifteenth century. Beyond the standard Christian iconography, crucifixion and pieta, is a stumpy-legged man in a cowl, brandishing a chisel or poignard. Near his right hand is a large leaf. The suggestion is that this personage is the sculptor, the stone carver working on ecclesiastical tracery. The design incorporates a vine leaf to signal the fact that the donor was a vintner (of whose trade St Martin was the patron saint).

The carver’s chisel, driven into the ground by a raised bone or dildo, marks the spot; the spring from which the Green Way begins.

It was another visit, months later, when I managed to get up into the tower. To see for myself how the land opened out: the path to St Mary’s Church at Harmondsworth. The crop of torpedo graves. The M25 with its constant flickering movement. We had stumbled on an active, but little used, pilgrims’ path. The Avenue. Heading, through a tunnel of pink blossom, towards the motorway and the site of a Benedictine priory at Harmondsworth. The sequestered principality of Heathrow.

The breeze barrelling down the long straight track — a diminishing asphalt tongue — doubled Renchi over. He leant into the wind, tugged on the straps of his rucksack like a skydiver. For the first time, since Shenley, we didn’t need maps. We trusted the ground. Snow-pink excesses of municipal cherry trees. We followed our noses.

Patches of greenery, dog grass, a few trees: they are absorbed into a grander scheme. Isolate one Lombardy pine. Stand still and listen . Outsiders are struck by effects, shifts, that locals walking their animals, or collecting their kids from a fenced-off school, take for granted. There is a mystery at the edge of great conurbations; in the light, in places travellers have passed through for centuries.

West Drayton peters out, estates double-glazed against motorway siroccos; a tangle of tree-named streets (Laurel Lane, Rowan Avenue, The Brambles). Would you fancy ‘The Brambles’ as an address? End of the line. Shuddering from traffic. Fence decorated by tossed paper, ubiquitous scraps of black plastic (burst bin bags from an ecological division of household rubbish).

I’m intoxicated by this path; a squeaky gate takes us on to a footbridge over the hectic M4. The demons are not only answering our questions, they’re shouting each other down in their eagerness to get in on the act. There’s Junction 4, the Heathrow turn-off, with its attendant fear and rage. Primal screams. And the warped rectangle of Junction 4B (M4). The infamous Junction 15 of the M25. A cat’s cradle of underpasses and flyovers, impossible decisions.