Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The brick and flint church of St Mary in Harmondsworth is notable for its Norman doorway. The church, of course, is locked. But the famous tithe barn, restored, pretty much cased in perspex, is still on show: HARMONDSWORTH INVESTMENTS, XYPLEX. Neat gravel drive. Fake gas lamp standards. Coach house as office. Tall yew hedge. The corporate spread of Surrey demands its heritage tokens. Efficiency and pedigree: old but clean. Air-conditioned Elizabethan. Tithe barn with IT power lines. Miss Marple’s church and pub and village green: ten minutes from an international airport.

The Green Way slants across a recreation ground at the precise angle that keeps it in parallel with the M25. I’ll forgive Balfour all his machinations for leaving us with this definitively unresolved track between worlds, topographies. To our left — kill the scream of the jumbos — is a swoop of green; a lush crop contained by low-level industrial units, the Heathrow sliproad. A curving chainlink fence with the obligatory paraphernalia: photo-voltaic scanners, surveillance towers, radio masts. We’re in the sound spiral of the flight path, the drone of traffic. We’re on camera, obviously, the only figures in a wide-sky landscape. There are no tall buildings, nothing that might knock the wheels from a Boeing.

When our path abandons us, without warning, on the A4 (the Colnbrook Bypass), it’s disorientating. This is flags-of-all-nations hotel territory: Sheraton, Heathrow Park (aka Alamo). Stars and stripes on the highest pole. People (J.G. Ballard, Jean-Luc Godard) have discovered eroticism in the conjunction of hotel and airport. This, I suppose, would be the ‘rubber insulated sex’ that the judge at the first Archer trial found so distasteful. Anonymity. Processing plants through which faceless couples pass without leaving a trace. A sound-baffled cell. A power shower. Neutral ground. Oblique glimpses, through gauze, of aircraft on the runway.

The concessionary buses (‘Courtesy Service’) that shuttle customers into the Alamo look like ambulances. German transport to an American hotel. A hard road to cross.

Pulling west, down a vestigial trace of the old Bath Road, we recover a taste of what was lost when Heathrow (the village) turned into landfill. A run of deep-England gardens, thatched wishing wells, early season blooms, determined to ignore the incursions of an international airport. This is a notion as perverse as Derek Jarman’s rock garden in the lee of the nuclear power station, the off-channel gales of Dungeness. Windows shudder, tiles are threatened. Any day now a brick of frozen shit, a lump of aircraft debris, a falling asylum seeker, will crash through the roof. But, with leaded panes, net curtains, white doors, beds of hardy perennials, carpet-sized lawns, the rustic fantasy thrives. You can’t hear yourself speak, the flow of traffic is continuous and agitated. The quirkily local is asserted in the teeth of the architectural Esperanto of Heathrow’s expanding purlieus.

On a bridge over a tributary of the Colne, stamped with a brightly gilded crown from the reign of William IV (1834), we watch an airbus skid over the protective fence of the Western Perimeter Road. Heathrow is its own city, a Vatican of the western suburbs. London flatters itself in insisting on the connection. The airport complex with its international hotels, storage facilities, semi-private roads, is as detached from the shabby entropy of the metropolis as is the City, the original walled settlement. They have their own rules, their own security forces, the arrogance of global capitalism. They service Moloch in whatever form he chooses to reveal himself; they facilitate drug/armament, blood/oil economies.

Negotiating Stanwell Moor Road, with the Colne and the elevated M25 to our right, we hit one of those passages where the Green Way is swallowed and overridden by furiously competing narratives. Dwarfish lighting poles, bright yellow cruciform structures (flight-path indicators) in roadside fields. Planes coming in at various heights. The vibrations shake our skeletons, loosen fillings. The madness of this pilgrimage through a landscape that challenges or defies walkers is a pure adrenalin rush. At the big roundabout, the blue and white sign — M25 — is a holy relic on our Milky Way. Renchi, resting at the verge, cross-legged, hood up, contemplates the vortex: planes, vans, airport buses. Tremendous discriminations of noise.

If you want a severed community (cut off and proud of it), try Stanwellmoor. Airport access roads on two sides, M25 and King George VI Reservoir on the others. Rabbit killers, poachers, dealers in whatever can be shaken loose from Heathrow (definitively misdirected luggage), Stanwellmoor has them all. Living in an easygoing, freebooters’ paradise, under the flight path; under the tons of stored water. I like what there is of it, a couple of dozen houses and two pubs. The first is open, but won’t feed us.

‘Do you do food?’

‘Yes, but not this week. Kitchen’s closed.’

We plod on. At the roadside, in a wire cage, is a notable collection of broken plaster statuary: praying hands, decapitated madonnas, oyster shells, tortoises. Renchi fishes out a draped, classical figure — Minerva? — and poses, his large bearded face in place of her missing head. The white of the plaster has worn away, revealing runs of terracotta that look like roadkill. I dip for trophies, shoving a few amputated limbs in my rucksack for replanting in Hackney.

The Hope Inn, oxymoronic, is nicely situated on the moor’s edge; a friendly, but essentially hopeless enterprise. Asserting its humanity in a place that has no use for it. Remove the Hope Inn to somewhere between Winchelsea and Dymchurch, give it a pedigree as a haunt of smugglers, and it might work. Ploughing through a ploughman’s mighty roll, washed down with cider, I understand why the Industrial Revolution succeeded: ploughmen were doubled over with stomach cramps, mouths gummy and snag-toothed. The quantity of this lunch-time treat is overgenerous, a brick of orange cheese, a tub of onions and pickles on a bed of lettuce (the size of rhubarb leaves).

Rain is jabbing at the moor. It’s comfortable in here; genial folk hitch themselves on to stools, nobody bothers much about two gently steaming walkers with massive packs. I stretch the break with a dried-out cigar, take it with me when we move on, down the Bonehead Ditch. Along the embankment of the King George VI Reservoir.

We agree: this is the most inspiring section we have so far encountered on our M25 orbit. The road keeps its distance. We can hear it, but we’re closer to the spirit of the Colne as it wriggles across Stanwellmoor.

How could you get a car on to this path? Reservoir on one side, Bonehead Ditch on the other. And here is a burnt-out shell, on its back, scaly with rust; the kind of trophy joyriders leave in Epping Forest. With a POLICE AWARE notice.

Renchi decides to go through the fence, to climb the slope to the reservoir. Burdened with broken statuary, Nicholson’s map, spare sweater and water bottle, I don’t follow him. I photograph his progress — as he turns into a chalk figure, cousin to the Long Man of Wilmington. Red scarf tossed by the wind, pitched against clouds, he looks heroic. What he sees, the mystery of dark water, is not revealed — until I come back, in the summer, to do some filming. Even in my snapshots, you find something that announces: Big Subject. Thunder skies pressing on an inland sea (a Soviet-style secret); concrete fence posts dividing the unwalked reservoir fringe from the lush yellow slopes of the embankment. It’s like working your way around a Dorset earthwork — and still being in sight of Heathrow. Thomas Hardy or John Cowper Powys cohabiting with J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon. Land, where it is forbidden, is also preserved: the reservation reserves time, that which is unviewed becomes the ultimate view. The recognition of a dream place.