Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Our footbridge is a stopped wave. The sky, this morning, is dull and anxious; a dirty scum of cloud into which lamp standards twist their necks, in a feeding frenzy. Beyond the small lake, the tree line of Harmondsworth, planes are coming into Heathrow; a procession of them, drifting in slow motion, like thistledown over yellow fields.

Renchi squats on his heels, meditating. The footbridge trembles and vibrates. If it ran across the Thames between St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, they’d close it down. The West Drayton bridge isn’t a tourist attraction, not yet. It ought to be. All the powers and thrones and dominions of transport are here, angelic orders of diesel, jet fuel, crop spray, animal and human shit. Burial grounds of lost villages. The Perry Oaks Sludge Disposal Works.

The pond’s surface is choppy. You can imagine fat-bellied planes blown backwards. ‘Billy & Mary’ have scratched a Unionist courtship poem into the metallic handrail of the bridge. A sponsored artist has laid out a giant’s causeway of limestone rocks in an incomplete maze; an arrangement that sustains the Hegira, the secret track. Good agricultural land skirting grey water. The continuing alignment of filed-and-forgotten churches.

The account of how the Air Ministry (Civil Aviation Authority) acquired this land, as told by Philip Sherwood in The History of Heathrow (revised edition, 1993), comes to life as we move in on the erased village. It’s not just nostalgia, the loss of market gardens, farms, cottages and coaching inn. Such things have their time and are doomed to removal (as images) into local history archives — which will themselves be rationalised and dumped. Heathrow, one of a chain of small settlements to the west of Hounslow Heath, is a site with a pedigree as old or older than London itself. (Renchi and I, on our walk around the City walls, finished in the Museum of London, where one of the better exhibits featured an Iron Age village; a cluster of huts that dissolved, as you looked at them, into an aircraft taxiing on to the runway. Rub your eyes and thatched huts break through the tarmac. Neither description is definitive; one state of consciousness bleeds continually into another.)

Sherwood’s History opens with an ‘aerial view of Heathrow in 1935’. What appears to be a road choked with traffic is revealed, under magnification, as a dense hedgerow. Prime agricultural land, divided into rectangles, squares and strips, on the edge of an unseen city. The field where London Airport was to be built, in an era before crop circle frenzy, is loud with evidence of previous settlement; a square within a square, a deep ditch, secondary paths that confirm Stukeley’s 1723 drawing of ‘Caesar’s Camp’.

Stukeley’s three figures (their chains, their cloaked supervisor) anticipate the choice of this ground as a suitable location for General Roy’s establishment of a baseline of accurately measured length — which would act as the prelude to a trigonometrical survey of Great Britain. Roy spoke of ‘the extraordinary levelness of the surface’. The line was drawn, with some annoyance from coach traffic, on the ‘Great Road’ (Hounslow to Staines), between King’s Arbour at Heathrow and the Poor House at Hampton Court, a distance of five miles. Surveyors discovered that the spire of the church at Banstead in Surrey was ‘dead in line with the two ends of the base’. The work was undertaken in June and July 1784.

The terminals of the baseline were marked with wooden pipes and wagon wheels set in the ground; by 1791 these decayed and were replaced by upturned cannon. A plaque at King’s Arbour records the event. The distance, as measured by Roy, was 27404.01 feet. Captain Mudge repeated the exercise: 27404.24 feet. Finally, the Ordnance Survey Standard, as determined by Clarke, was declared at 27406.19 feet. From a pleasant suburban stroll through market gardens, heathland, river valley, the triangulation of Britain and the construction of ‘a complete and accurate map’ was begun.

Common land, which Cobbett in his Rural Rides (1853) found to be nothing but ‘nasty strong dirt upon a bed of gravel… a sample of all that is bad and villainous’, had once, thanks to abundant sources of manure (human and animal), been fertile and productive. Wagons taking produce into London returned with a ballast of horse dung.

What happened, in 1943, when the Air Ministry began to evict the people of Heathrow, to tear down farms and cottages, can be interpreted as a standard Orwellian exercise: obfuscation, emollient lies, bureaucratic steamroller, oblivion. Philip Sherwood, searching Air Ministry cabinets for photographic material to illustrate his history, stumbled on files dealing with the development and compulsory purchase of land (under wartime regulations).

Sherwood writes:

The claim has always been made that Heathrow was developed as a result of an urgent need for the RAF to have a bomber base in the London area. The files in the PRO show that there never was such a need and the airfield was regarded from the start as being a civil airport for London. The War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval for the development… The Defence of the Realm Act 1939 was used by the Air Ministry to requisition land and to circumvent the public enquiry that would otherwise have had to be held.

Harold Balfour (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Air between 1938 and 1944) is breathtaking in his arrogance. Sherwood quotes a 1973 autobiography. Balfour, by then, was Lord Balfour of Inchrye. ‘Almost the last thing I did in the Air Ministry of any importance was to hi-jack for Civil Aviation land on which London Airport stands under the noses of resistant Ministerial colleagues. If hi-jack is too strong a word I plead guilty to the lesser crime of deceiving a cabinet Committee.’

Emergency wartime powers were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial deals, a major airport that was only fifteen miles from the centre of London. Much follows from the original deception. It was suggested that an airstrip had to be laid out for the transportation of troops to the Far East, when it was known that this would never be necessary and that, in any case, there were other airfields that could quite easily undertake the operation.

‘We took the land,’ Balfour boasts. ‘Hiroshima killed Phase Two (troop transport). London Airport stands.’

To the innocent, those who prefer to believe that government is always right, there is nothing very shocking in this fix. It worked. An unimportant village disappeared. Fairey Aviation, who had run an aerodrome on the chosen site, were put out of business. Bullying letters with official stamps. Compensation boards that moved with Kafkaesque torpidity. The English way. Perimeter land was tolerated for several very clear purposes: to stack the mentally inadequate, to build golf courses, to board cats and dogs, to hide toxic industries, to dump landfill and to provide bunkers, research stations and safe houses for the Secret State.

The chicanery that converted a convenient strip of ground into the madness of Europe’s busiest airport was an unexceptional piece of business. It had all happened before, in London, when the railway stations were built. Now it was the turn of the complacent country folk who got their living from trade with the city. Whingeing yokels. Serial sentimentalists. Couldn’t they appreciate the economic benefits, the cultural connections? American hotels with room service and mini-bars, instead of crusty old coaching inns.

Perhaps the original planners had an instinct for the sacred geometry of Heathrow. Measurement and surveying were always the metaphors. Three men linked by chains. A ditched field. The pattern of early settlement revealed by aerial photography. A temple of the stars.