Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

It would be better to swim. These are sacred places, where road meets river. Staines and Dartford, very different Thames crossings, are the highlights of any motorway circuit. On the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, road dominates. The tidal Thames is unwalkable, unswimmable; impossible. Literally suspending disbelief, to drive over the broad span of water, as it opens (storage tanks and container ships) to the World Ocean, marks you. You die into what you see. You purchase vision at the expense of mortality. You relish the play of cables as they flick against riverlight. You feel younger, stronger, elevated by a section of motorway that isn’t motorway: the only point in the circuit where imagination overrides the M25’s compulsive reductionism.

Coming on Runnymede Bridge, white stone, is less dramatic: water shimmers, plays with sound. Here is the cathedral of the motorway: an open-sided temple of transformation. Perch on one of the broad ribs, tight under the road, and watch curved concrete sail on green water like a crescent moon. A single arch, mirrored in the dark river, becomes a cave. Light dances on the rough underlay of the M25. Passing craft set up surges that turn the reflections on the far bank into spirals of smoke. You could treat these spaces beneath the motorway as cubicles of incubation; cold bunks in which to dream of fantastic journeys.

This structure, set across the Thames, is discussed in terms of Egypt or Babylon. A water shrine in which to acknowledge and record the passage of the sun. Steps down to the river. Slopes leading up to the road. The bridge is actually two bridges, one for each carriageway of the M25. Arriving from Staines, you see a plain, functional structure, something like Waterloo Bridge; walking east from Runnymede, back towards London, you notice the decorative features, stone balusters that belong in a country park.

The harmonious linking of disparate elements, a symbolic marriage of river and road, has a simple history: in terms of civil engineering. The 1961 bridge, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, was incorporated into ‘a graceful concrete structure’ by Arup Associates and the consultant engineers, Ove Arup and Partners. Genteel Surrey rustification. The Lutyens bridge would carry the northbound traffic of the M25 and the A30; the Arup bridge the southbound carriageways of both. The new bridge was 138 metres long. The tender price was £ 6.4 million. And the contractor was Bovis Fairclough.

Walking from bright sunlight into this cool darkness — reflections, brilliant bars moving across ruffled water — is always exhilarating. Excursion parties break up: somebody will climb on to the arch, somebody will lounge against a pillar. Renchi, this time, puts himself in the split between the southbound carriageway and the supporting arch. Graffiti (tagged by Blade ’98) is minimalist: a name becomes a labyrinth, with arrows and hearts. Tribes are invited to advance on Stonehenge for the summer solstice.

Kevin, still armoured in his heavy jacket, takes photographs. He thinks he might approach Marc Atkins, make him the subject of a dissertation. He accesses a John Boorman reference; the director mentioning the fact, in an interview, that he used to swim in the Thames near Runnymede Bridge. A Wordsworthian encounter with a shadow on the water, the Green Man.

He remembers a friend, Dr Dylan Francis. ‘We were like Little and Large,’ he says. Kevin is always generous, reaching for books that might help other writers. Thick fingers drum on his head as he tries to fix the wording of the pertinent quotation. Right books into right hands and the world is reconfigured. He sent me a copy of Dylan Francis’s posthumous collection, The Risk of Being Alive (Writings on Medicine, Poetry and Landscape) — for which he had done the introduction. He highlighted: the ‘incomparable conversation’ of his friend, ‘the swift workings of his mind’.

Francis, I discovered, was a scholar with a Double First in English from Cambridge; a philosopher, a poet, a doctor of medicine who worked in neurology and cardiology. He was connected with St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield. He read voraciously and aggressively, was interested in Robert Fludd and William Harvey. He took off, whenever he could, into the Lake District or the Welsh borders; he walked his demons down: ‘[J.H.] Prynne under one arm & Gray’s Anatomy under the other’. A Romantic sensibility, scrupulous in address, compares and contrasts landscape in terms of his own emotions, with relevant literary asides. Like all Romantics, he pushes it, language; wanting nature to behave with more sensitivity, more intelligence. The responsibility of poetic tone threatens to undo him:

From Hereford through wind and bright sunlit rain resilvering and quenching the day, reflections shivering & amazed across blurred tillage pocked with rain, pleached hedgerows, the sun barely lifting above the churned earth’s rim but to be ploughed under/where outlying rains trace & retrace lines of descent… to Hay.

Something was wrong and walking couldn’t solve it. Francis speaks frequently of ‘pressure’; pressure to perform, refine, perfect. Pressure of circumstance. Being in London, in the hospital, getting away; roaming, reading, making notes for undefined future projects. ‘I’ve turned this sort of “get-beside-yourself-in-London-then-jump-into-a-car-and-drive-to-some-where-remote-and-walk-around-by-yourself” into something of a genre.’

Francis killed himself in December 1992. The collection edited by Kevin Jackson opens with an essay on ‘William Harvey and the “Motion in a Circle’ ”. This is reprinted from Bart’s Journal (Summer 1982). And what a useful prompt it proves: microcosm and macrocosm, the alchemists of St Bartholomew’s Close, circuits of blood that mimic the passage of the sun. Dr Dylan Francis carrying me straight back to Dr Francis Anthony’s memorial in St Bartholomew’s Church. Nagging away, at the back of our orbital walk, were recurrent themes, unsolved puzzles.

Paracelsus, ‘the Swiss physician, alchemist, mystic and pioneer of chemotherapy’ (as Francis glosses him), is the presiding influence.

He held that:

Man and the universe had the same form and had behind them the same reason. He likened the circle of heaven to man’s skin, and discerned a pulse in the firmament, spirits in the winds, fevers in the motions of the earth, and chiromancy in minerals.

My superstition, sympathetic to Fludd and Paracelsus, persists: the walk around London’s orbital motorway is personal . From Harefield to Purneet, the rushes, surges of excitement, are connected to an imagined — solar powered? — circulation of blood. We can’t resurrect the period when the ‘objective method’ (scientific induction) co-existed with older notions of mystical correspondences; a time (the 1620s) when John Donne was a patient of Harvey, folding the surgeon’s ‘research into the capacity of the heart and other hollow viscera’ into his verse.

Dr Francis concludes his essay with reflections on Robert Fludd’s Anatomiae Amphitheatrum (1623). As with Blake’s cosmological epics, his forcing of humble place names into a mythic structure — and, on a humbler scale, Mary Caine’s zodiacal configurations — Fludd reads topography in terms of the human body. The walk we take, from that first step, progresses by analogy:

Since, as the sun travels around the earth daily in a circle, it impresses on the winds — which contain the breath of God — a similar circular motion, this moving air is breathed by man, reaches the blood, and from the heart the spirit of life is thus carried around the body in an imitation of divine circularity.

The spaces under Runnymede Bridge, cool shadows, flicker of sunlight, wash from passing rivercraft, encourage metaphysical speculation. We should stay here, stretch out on our curved shelves. Dream. Follow the Egyptian script, the journey of the sun boat.