Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Renchi is waiting at Staines station: blue shirt tied into piratical bandanna, loose sweater, rucksack packed with maps, water, spare T-shirts. I pose the two men under the hoarding: the Silk Cut scarecrow has been replaced by a fake US Marine, a black and white BT ad. The affronted sergeant (old-timer with moustache) and jug-eared recruit, muddy from route march. The freshness and bright expectancy of our two strollers play ominously against their oversize counterparts.

From the window of the station café, I see the Marine sergeant, mouth wide in a silent scream. He is both promoting Cellnet and demonstrating how you can live without it: Just Shout. The sky, bad news for Kevin’s body-armour, is an unbroken blue; of a purity that cohabits with the glassy surface of the Formica rectangles on which our plates of poached eggs and thick buttery toast rest, waiting for a break in the chat.

The café, convenient for station, town and river, is so true to itself that we award it the immortality of the unnoticed. The building is twinned with the Slough Electrical repair shop, outside which is parked a Vespa motor scooter. Bodged Bauhaus. Flat roof (with shipboard rails), metal-trim windows, narrow doorways; white paint showing signs of weathering. Light pours in, casting precise shadows across wood-panel walls. Tables are small and set close together to encourage intimacy with other all-day breakfasters. If you want democracy, the free debate of the Levellers and Ranters, this is where you’ll find it. Elbow to elbow with layabouts, semi-urban casuals. Readers of yesterday’s newspapers.

Kevin Jackson’s account of the day’s walk, published in the Independent (as ‘Putting London in Its Place’), is very good on our induction into Staines café society. We noticed the other dilettantes, the early loungers (two skiving, one in permanent residence), but that didn’t stop us pulling out the maps and associated literature. Kevin, I realise, is taking everything down in a neat notebook. Like a proper journalist. Or TV policeman. (I’m with the old-time coppers who always wrote up their notes after the event. Selective memories.)

We might have got away with it — if Renchi had held back on Mary Caine’s The Kingston Zodiac , which he’d picked up on one of his visits to Glastonbury. Advancing from Waltham Abbey to Shenley, by way of Temple Bar, we were in my liminal territory, we ran with my myths: star ceilings, Rodinsky, John Clare in Epping Forest, Hawksmoor’s grave. Now that we were about to cross the river into Surrey, I was adrift. Renchi would act as our guide.

Mary Caine, inspired by Mrs Katharine Maltwood’s A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars , had marked up the country around her base in Kingston in accordance with the configurations of a spiritual zodiac. The blue and gold ceiling of Waltham Abbey church would be reasserted as a metaphor — by a walk that carried us, initially, down the back of the Dog. ‘Huge hounds guard these circles,’ warned Mary Caine.

Glastonbury, mound rising out of the Somerset levels, is easy to map (and read) in terms of gigantic ‘effigies’. Motorways, warehousing, ribbon development and private estates do not complicate the picture. The outlines of ancient field systems are still visible from the air. Mrs Maltwood’s Dog is Gwyn Ab Nudd, ‘the British Pluto’. His pedigree is Celtic and he inhabits The High History of the Holy Graal . The Hound is formed ‘by conducting channels of water between immense artificial earthworks, and by the ancient “path” bounding Aller Wall’. Maltwood quotes a section from The High History . It refers to a river as ‘water royal’.

With ‘bounding’ moors and ‘water royal’ (the Thames running through Windsor, where pedestrians are turned away from the riverbank), it would be easy to suppose that we were working from Maltwood’s text. Such speculations are energising devices; they help us to respect a landscape. The local is taken into the archetypal: contours and canals construct patterns around churches, monastic ruins, ‘historic’ houses.

‘It might be supposed,’ Mrs Maltwood writes, ‘that one could see such creatures on any map! but it would be impossible to find a circular traditional design of Zodiacal and other constellation figures, arranged in their proper order, and corresponding with their respective stars , unless they had been laid out in sequence, according to plan.’

Fold-out maps, in the 1964 reissue of Maltwood’s influential book, show star-creatures. Cloud shadows drifting over a circular bowl: ‘The Circle of Giant Effigies.’ Why not read the M25 orbit as another such circle — and let Mary Caine’s tightly packed frontispiece act as our guide to the south-west corner? Maltwood’s circle is sparsely inhabited, forms swim free; Caine’s zodiac is an exotic slum, an outstation of Thorpe Park. An orgy of symbols: interspecies collisions. The Lion of Chessington mounting the Doggy of Chobham Common. Rams, bulls, griffins, they’re all at it.

‘Kingston’s Cerberus rears his head at Egham, where Holloway Sanatorium’s tower on his nose is a landmark for miles,’ reads Renchi. Thereby alerting our shaven-headed neighbour. There’s a pair of them; one in a down-stuffed gilet, the other in flowerpot hat and blood-red spectacles. The speaker, the crop-head with scimitar sideburns, has a trace of the rent boy about him (if you were casting a drama for Channel 4). Delicate/tough and pushing it hard, to come on as a wit in Staines station café. He interrogates us, his mate does the local history. ‘Payroll boys’ with time on their hands.

‘What do you do for a living?’

‘We walk.’

‘ Walk ? They’re fucking tramps,’ shouts the old boy, barnacled to the corner.

It has to be explained: walks, photographs — then, at some future date, a book. Kevin, who is force-feeding his notebook, breaks off to dig out a mound of my back titles from his rucksack. He travels with a portable library. He is approaching this walk (and the rest of life) as a tutorial for which he is inadequately prepared. Keep talking, reminiscing, improvising. Don’t let the buggers stray anywhere near the ostensible subject.

The payroll boys are appeased: we’re nutters with a project, some remote chance of a distant pay day. We need their services. The old man snorts, returns to his Sun .

‘Bloody drug addicts!’

One breakfast under the belt, second teas and more toast on order, the lads are in good humour. A fine bright day. A light breeze from the river. The cosmological fruit machine doesn’t pay out very often, carpe diem .

Mary Caine for the spirit, the payroll boys for the nitty-gritty: our man talks of tunnels, bunkers, mysteries. This is the list. A village, Thorpe, with the longest village green in England. Brooklands racetrack with underground workings and a ghost. St George’s Hill. ‘That’s where Cliff Richard lives. Squatters took over a mansion where Tom Jones used to…’ John Lennon with his white pianos and customised Rollers. St George’s Hill is definitely on the agenda, the place where Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers launched their experiment in rustic tribalism. But we won’t make it, not this time, unless we get going.

Much of Staines is steel — shuttered, MADHOUSE UK: green lettering above an undisclosed business venture. Kevin has film in his camera (no reserve stock) and is blazing away. Renchi, more circumspect, continues his quiet logging: prompts for future paintings. We cross the bridge, pick up the Thames path, move out in the direction of the M25.

Shadows from overhanging greenery infect the river. The walk is shady, agreeable. Dappled sunlight. Kevin’s dark glasses aren’t strictly necessary. Runnymede Bridge, with its shallow span, emerges from the tree tops. It looks too slender to carry motorway traffic. My sense, when I’m driving, is that the river makes no impact on the road. Unless you know it’s there, you’ll miss it.