Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Driving through the weekend-dead Isle of Dogs, underpasses, captured water, quotation architecture, was a nostalgic, back-to-the-future exercise. The septuagenarian writer, car window like a cinema screen, slides through a manifestation of short stories sold to pulp magazines at the period when his career was launched. Silvertown Airport is an epiphany, no flights, tropical vegetation splitting the quays of the deepwater docks, jet-skiers bumping over choppy water. Nothing pleases Ballard more than to walk in, unexpectedly, on one of his own sets. He is redundant, he can let go. Achieved fiction writes itself. He knows, after all these years, he has reached that point. Silvertown as a suburb of Vermilion Sands .

I arrived at Shepperton a couple of hours before I was due to meet Ballard at the station. Bad Day at Black Rock . The paper-shop was closing, Ballard told me, because Shepperton had run out of commuters. The dozy, sun-hammered town was an island settlement, between the wide blue of the motorway (M3 rushing into M25) and the meandering Thames. Ballard has reversed Edwardian polarities, he weekends in London — where the earlier inhabitants came out to their bungalows, huts, hutches, on Shepperton’s two islands, to get away from the pressures of the city. A ferry at Weybridge is still operative, summoned by a bell that may be rung at quarter-hourly intervals.

Main street, Shepperton, is a carousel of estate agents ( £ 300,000 upwards for a riverfront box) and charity caves; a library (closed on Thursday mornings), a video shop, a specialist in TV memorabilia, toys and annuals. You can do the river-bank or stroll (across a bridge over the M3) to Shepperton Green and the film studios. ‘You walked ?’ said Ballard, incredulously. ‘We do have buses in Shepperton.’

It was a scorcher, the midpoint in a freak heat wave. They didn’t need to drain the River Ash, which passes through the studio estate. The river was my target. Three significant ‘river’ films had been shot here: John Huston’s version of C.S. Forester’s The African Queen ; the heritage Tudor barges of A Man for All Seasons , stately as a Hampton Court son et lumière ; and the notorious colonial fantasy, Sanders of the River . In 1935 Zoltan Korda, adapting an Edgar Wallace novel, built an East African village on the banks of the Ash, and cast Paul Robeson, a leftist Othello in a loincloth, as Bosambo, the native chief. The rest of the tribe were bussed in from Tiger Bay in Cardiff. Jomo Kenyatta, President of Kenya (1964–78), had a bit part as a grass-skirted spear-waver.

Shepperton Studios spread themselves at the foot of the earth banks that contain the Queen Mary Reservoir (the site where E-culture, motorway raves began). Taking the twenty-minute walk from Shepperton station, close to where Ballard has his house, to the security gates of the studios, I travel through the landscape of Ballard’s fiction: lagoon (reservoir), motorway (Heathrow traffic defining the edge of the frame), wide-aisled supermarket (through which sleepwalking suburban adulteresses can practise their ‘amiable saunter’). To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that oeuvre.

‘Where else is there to go?’ Ballard said. ‘The past is a biological swamp, the future is a sandy desert — and the present is a concrete playpen.’

From the shade of a balding tree, I watched Ballard’s car pull up at the station. He didn’t look like any of the other early-afternoon motorists; he was in Mediterranean mode (straw hat, dark glasses, open-necked purple shirt). We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. ‘You know, I haven’t been in this place for fifteen years.’ Finding somewhere to park, Ballard reckons, is the biggest problem of contemporary life.

He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters. The periphery, according to him, is where the future reveals itself. New Labour, he asserts, was hatched in airport satellite-strips and gated communities. The child terrorists of Running Wild are the result of benevolent eugenic planning; Internet education, leavened by supervised abseiling, white-water rafting, paragliding, will result in the spook children of Blair and flinty Jack Straw. Ordinary hormonal adolescents making a mess of it, spewing on pavements, dealing dope.

But it’s not suburbia. Suburbia is drift-Hackney (relocated to Chingford). Bethnal Green and Limehouse, once seen as the epitome of urban experience (immigrant, criminous, highly spiced), are now models of Neo-Suburbia: expensive dormitories, Barratt and Laing estates, commuters working elsewhere. The concerned middle classes discussing equity, schools; laying out gardens (even on roofs).

Ballard referred me to a piece he had written, ‘Welcome to the Virtual City’, for Tate magazine:

But Shepperton, for what it’s worth, is not suburbia. If it is a suburb of anywhere, it is of London Airport, not London. And that is the clue to my dislike of cities and my admiration for what most people think of as a faceless dead-land of inter-urban sprawl. Hurrying back from Heathrow or a West Country weekend to their ludicrously priced homes in Fulham or Muswell Hill, they carefully avert their gaze from this nightmare terrain of dual carriageways, police cameras, science parks and executive housing, an uncentred realm bereft of civic identity, tradition or human values, a zone fit only for the alienated and footloose, those without past or future.

And that, of course, is exactly what we like about it… The triangle formed by the M3 and the M4, enclosing Heathrow and the River Thames, is our zone of possibility…

He doesn’t speak badly of anybody, any named individual. It’s almost a superstition, no gossip. The enemy is generic and vague: ‘the literary mob’, ‘cities’, ‘dull furniture’. Like Burroughs, he might not choose to join the club, but he passes very effectively: a voice from another world, good manners. It’s very decent of him to give me this riverside afternoon. He doesn’t take a drink before eight o’clock. I don’t need what Ballard says, I know what he says, I’ve read the books. What I need is the chance to pay homage, in the course of this mad orbital walk, to the man who has defined the psychic climate through which we are travelling. It’s a romantic foible on my part, the impulse that once had De Quincey tramping off to the Lake District, to make a nuisance of himself in Wordsworth’s cottage.

The hair is long and silvery, the skin ivory coloured. Ballard, through his long residence and his riverine hermeticism, has joined the company. He looks and behaves like a magus, like Dr John Dee: modesty of address enlivened by a proper arrogance about how his vision of the world has been confirmed. I show him the Siebel brochure, but it means nothing. He knows . Blake at Lambeth, Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternative universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core.

Ballard drove me back to the station. The streets were deserted. We passed some white, flat-roofed, vaguely Thirties properties. ‘I thought of trying one of those,’ he said. The paint was peeling. A failed experiment, a Utopian fantasy that had run out of puff. A warehouse, near the river, was used for shooting TV commercials. I thought of Crash . ‘I aimlessly followed the perimeter roads to the south of the airport, feeling out the unfamiliar controls among the water reservoirs of Stanwell.’