Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

But that’s impossible, without aborting the tour. We labour up a grassy slope, at the side of the bridge, and on to the M25. For the first time in our half-circuit, we are actually walking the motorway, and also (courtesy of Mary Caine) walking the Dog. After the oracular opulence of the space beneath the bridge, M25 reality has us rocking on our heels. Blamblam-blamblam. Ssssssssss. Grey bitumen (courtesy of Shell): the mantle of choice for Associated Asphalt, French Kier, W.C. French, London Roadstone, Redland Aggregates and Wimpey Asphalt. Blamblam. Ssss. Light is harsh and scouring. Air is filled with stinging particles. We walk towards Egham, inches away from speeding metal projectiles.

Standing on a thin strip of ground in the central reservation, traffic snarling on both sides, I stared through my long-focus lens at a range of facial expressions that would have fitted into a Victorian Bedlam collection: Criminal and Subnormal Physiognomies. V signs. Drooling narcolepsy. Trance. Fugue. Rage. Idiot grins. Nobody signalled their pleasure at the miracle of motoring over the Thames. They were part of a thrashing comet-tail. Mary Caine’s Dog was no guardian of the mysteries. It was a ravening beast, a mastiff on a chain. On Runny-mede Bridge, Cerberus claims his victims for Hades. The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.

In less than half a mile, the M25 spurns us, it’s picking up momentum, a straight run on the junction with the M3 (‘a major freeflow intersection: continuous span bridges with hollow reinforced concrete decks’). We walk Indian file, Kevin has to boom to make himself heard. You can smell the panic. ‘These crazies mean it,’ he realises. ‘They are actually going to walk around the motorway.’ It’s true, I would be perfectly happy sticking with the hard shoulder if it got me through Surrey in a day. The treadmill experience is fine. Conversation dies, the countryside vanishes (tactfully screened and baffled).

‘Economically viable, environmentally sound’. The sponsor’s message. Tony Sangwine (well named), senior Highways Authority horticulturalist and expert on motorway landscaping, boasts of ‘interventions’. Drought-resistant dust. Salt-tolerant, low-maintenance grasses. Plantings of hawthorn, dogwood, the Wild Service Tree. To foster the illusion: the road is a rippling brook. Sangwine is talking Dunsinane forestry, forests that move in the night (the A2/M2 road-widening scheme). Forget your National Parks, footpaths clogged with pedestrian traffic, mountain bikers and plague-ridden beasts, the M25 is the ecological fast track. Kestrels nest on gantries. The central reservation is a wildlife sanctuary, taxonomies of flora and fauna are located in land trapped between the M40/M25 interchange.

Rudely woken from hard shoulder reverie, we find ourselves in Egham. A chainlink fence, on the edge of the escarpment, is patrolled and protected by ON-SITE GUARDING LTD (LAPD-style enforcers whispering into handsets). Security, when it got its start in the East End, was run by hoods and armbreakers. Ex-Parkhurst. ‘Security advisers’ to banks and art galleries were old Yard men who had taken early retirement (before they were found out). Down here, among the soft estates, asylum seekers carry out the night patrols. When multinationals boast about their record in employing local inhabitants, they mean issuing them with dog leads and shiny peaked caps.

Someone is building something, right on the road. JCBs, noise, a fence. No flags as yet, so it’s probably not a housing development or a motel. Renchi, perversely, takes a special interest in this hole. He sees it as a direct response to the charms of Runnymede Bridge (with its Alma-Tadema steps leading down to the river, a bathing pool for draped and languorous Roman sirens). Every time we walk the river bank, he suggests checking out the rapidly evolving building at the Egham end of the bridge.

Two years passed before we made our tour of inspection. The incongruous lighthouse that Renchi spotted from road trips and railway excursions was revealed as one of the wonders of the orbital circuit, ‘SIEBEL,’ it said. The vulgar security precautions of our first sighting were gone. Amazingly, there were no obvious CCTV cameras. No uniforms, no dogs. No checkpoints. Siebel, I recognised at once, was the future. Post -surveillance. A discretion so absolute, so understated, that criminality and vandalism were impossible concepts. Siebel was the visible manifestation of Ballard’s coming Mediparc psychopathology: intelligent buildings for soberly dressed, quiet, indecently healthy people. Health is the only valid currency. Credit-rich vampires from the old capitalist empires buy new faces, fresh blood. Middle management sweats in medieval gyms. The real players, the Siebel lighthouse-keepers, have health as part of the employment package. A few feet away from the clanking, shuddering, diesel dust-storms of the motorway, Siebel immortals float through a chlorine-glass tank. Doing nothing.

Doing nothing. Being . That’s the key. All the way down to Staines, on the car radio, I was hearing about economic disaster, global recession, the collapse of Marconi’s share price. Even the biggest, most ruthless conglomerates were going belly up because they made the mistake of investing in product. Manufacture something, anything, and you’re dead. Fashions change. Mobile phones will go the way of kipper ties. Play smart. Do nothing. New Labour (lessons of the Dome fiasco learnt) have it absolutely right: take soundings, soothe your critics, commission reports. Talk in colourless catch phrases: ‘Best Value. Economically viable, environmentally sound.’ But do nothing .

The ideal is a building with no function other than to carry, discreetly, the company’s name. Siebel. The telescopic tower with its green-glass wings sits alongside the M25, but it is not of the M25. The motorway is as archaic as a Victorian railway, a fun fair ride. You can think of it in terms of traction engines, stagecoaches, ox carts. A Little England folly from the day it was built. Off-highway, faux-American science parks are now as pertinent as Legoland or some model village in the Cotswolds. Those CCTV camera-boxes, poking out of the shrubbery on stalks, are SF hardware from another era. Surveillance, the fortress estate, boastful flag poles, paranoid architecture: redundant.

Siebel understand. Siebel have created this beautiful bird of a building, a swan of the motorway: curved spine and neck, angular wings. Tinted windows through which you can see nothing very much. The car park comes on two levels and is almost deserted, eight or nine unostentatious motors — with space for sixty or eighty more. A roof park, spiky Mexican plants as a border. A ground level space beneath, more conceptual gallery than garage.

Yesterday there was nothing here. The Siebel building appeared, fully formed, from nowhere. You can’t date it: elements of the Thirties, Sixties, Nineties. No irony, no pastiche. Something clinical or forensic, germ-repelling. The building doesn’t impose, it insinuates: no sweat, today is your first tomorrow. A metal arm, a gesture that divides Siebel-world from the Egham underpass, creaks. The only sound in a perfectly smooth acoustic environment. A car arrives, the arm cranks up. A man in a lightweight suit, no papers, no case, saunters to the entrance, the green world of indoor tree shadows and underwater light.

Surveillance systems are unnecessary. Siebel have created a force field. Egham, a town trading on a loose connection with Runnymede and Magna Carta (sandstone effigy of King John outside the yellow-awning pavement café), needs Siebel. Siebel have put up a number of other buildings — no product mentioned — as a rebuke to earlier, urban rim outfits that made the mistake of hugging the railway. Businesses give the appearance of being on the verge of bankruptcy by simply having the wrong address, being stuck in some cosy little town rather than in the zone, the slipstream of the M25.