Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Sara’s titles, delivered by her guide, are wild. She takes dictation from the dead, the disembodied. I thought she was talking about ‘bent lions’, before her finger pointed out a bend in the line . Her colours could be aphasic, vile: neon-greens, lurid oranges she would have spurned in her former life as pet portraitist. Even now she finds herself apologising for the aesthetic shortcomings of her inflexible master.

The attic is about dispersal. Moments of inspiration become, through repetition, de-energising. An hour is as much as the audience can take. Sara, brown and fit, long skirt and sandals, must tell the whole story: to the last canvas. I fixate on her mouth, the voice, the strong white teeth. She is a psychic trumpet to a performance that belongs outside our motorway orbit, far from London. Sara has been told to varnish a number of the paintings and send them to the Royal Academy.

Afternoon light thins. Our concentration makes the attic room feel cold. There is a requirement to respond, to do something with this work. I try to persuade Anna that it would make a book, the trajectory from English animals, Wiltshire garden, to the never-ending and unresolvable project. But she’s too canny. She knows how easy it would be to disappear into the tale, the obsession. We’re starting to struggle for breath. A soft white dove, said to be ‘stupid’, bangs against the window. The apparition is taken for a sign. There are trains to catch. We express, inadequately, our gratitude to Sara, and we’re back on the road.

London, by early evening, is under siege. Public transport isn’t operating and the cab rank at Waterloo is attended by travellers moving at the wrong speed — as if they’ve arrived, unprepared, from a distant country. The city is muggy, close, airless.

Getting into somebody else’s vehicle, abdicating responsibility, giving out an address, is usually a relief. You might pay for it — punitive damages on the clock, unprovoked monologue — but, weary from train-hours, the events of a long day, the indulgence is justified. Not advancing, being overtaken by pedestrians with Zimmer frames, is the norm. The taxi heart thumps, adding its fumes to the stickiness that glues the city streets. We pull all the usual cab stunts, U-turns, lane jumps, window-to-window exchanges with other initiates; it doesn’t signify. We could run west as far as Mortlake, creep east in the direction of the Blackwall Tunnel, we would never cross the river.

The protesters have succeeded in closing the bridges. Cabbies have the best take on congestion, traffic flow: they take it personally. All other life forms (mini-cab bandits, asylum seekers, politicians, cyclists, pedestrians) have it in for honest, self-employed, home-owning, golf-whenever-possible, Hertfordshire fringe, knowledge-achieved British taxi man. Cabbies don’t swear (even at the illegitimate ‘thems’ and ‘thoses’ that make their lives a misery). They’ve been schooled in rage management. They don’t want you to smoke. They keep a clean vehicle. They take some exercise. They are married, divorced, married again. They are buying in Spain. Only to discover that everything they’ve grafted for is threatened by state-sponsored anarchists.

We give it up, pay the man off. Forty minutes on the clock has carried us down the ramp at Waterloo. As soon as we begin to walk, oxygen returns to the brain. I’m living out a long dormant fantasy, London without cars. I lie down in the middle of the road on Blackfriars Bridge to take a photograph of an arrowed sign saying: CITY. At the end of the bridge, the portly silhouette of Queen Victoria on her pedestal, hands intact, winks back at the Royal Holloway College effigy.

The orderly protest processions of the morning, making their way up New Bridge Street towards Ludgate Hill, are now — thanks to armed response units, Samurai snatch squads — a small riot. Provocation and response, the dance at the end of the day. Battle honours, blood on the T-shirt, lightly worn. The two groups are like characters from different movies who have become inexplicably tangled: the last Mohicans taking on robocops. Coxcomb reflected in Plexiglas visor. I know that it’s my fault: I shouldn’t have left town. Pike lunches and weedy mill streams are not my business.

Writers, other than those who do it for money, are about as much use in times of crisis as ghost-hunter Harry Price’s curious machines (horn trumpets, boxes that record the whispers of the dead). We sit in a bar in Smithfield, relishing the riptide of energy, the necessary civic argument in which we play no part. Let the city burn for the cameras. It has happened before. This is nothing. There is worse to come. The blood on the streets is a sideshow to the café society of the meat market. They lap up tin bowls of mussels, call for Belgian beer brewed by monks. No point in trying to go home, make it a party.

16 July 1999. An underdeveloped Weybridge morning and the news is that Marc Atkins is back on the road. If you can fit him into frame, he dresses a dull walk. He knows how to catch the camera’s eye. (You’ve probably noticed him doing his starved Brando impression on the cover of the Penguin Classics Heart of Darkness .)

The moment outside Weybridge station (infiltration of enemy territory), when Marc and Renchi come face to face, is their second encounter. Marc (hands in pockets) and Renchi (hands on hips) in front of two hoardings, now you see it, NOW YOU DON’T/A DIFFERENT KIND OF STRENGTH. Marc is travelling light, black T-shirt (rolled sleeves), camera. Renchi is in a blue sweater, carrying a heavily freighted rucksack. The two men met in the Museum of London, when Renchi and I were doing the London Wall walk. Marc had been checking out an unimpressive (so he said) show of Sixties’ metropolitan photographs; fashion, celebrity, urban sentimentality (Bailey, Donovan).

Over the parapet of the bridge, we watch the commuters on Weybridge station. They advance towards the yellow line — MIND THE STEP — but do not cross it. Men in dark suits, women in summer dresses. Lines of black cases set down on the platform. Who is there to talk to, on the mobile, at seven a.m.? Answering machines that won’t answer.

If psychogeography is the theme, Weybridge has it — well disguised, screened by foliage, always present. According to Mary Caine’s zodiac, we are abseiling out of the Dog’s arse. The station, on Cobbets Hill, lies just to the north of an intriguing double bill: the former Brooklands road racing circuit (later controlled by British Aerospace) and the private estate of St George’s Hill. Today, we’re going to attempt the walk over St George’s Hill, and on towards Cobham Heath, following in the steps of Gerrard Winstanley and the community of Diggers, in the period after the English Civil War.

Brooklands was left until the M25 pilgrimage had been completed, when we were revisiting certain sites, making a series of secondary excursions. Land in the valley of the Wey arranges itself according to the conventions of science fiction. Brooklands was Ballard, before Ballard came to Shepperton. An unashamed concrete island. The name — BROOKLANDS — has been chiselled, vertically, into the grey lip of the circuit, alongside Barnes Wallis Drive. Ghost architecture (grass invaded ramps) provokes accounts of spectral sightings: record breakers who died in the attempt, blown tyres. A spook’s tour is available for those who want to tap into the crisis of sudden death.

We stood at the top of the bank and looked down into the bowl: a retail park, Marks & Spencer, Tesco. Cars massed as if for some great event: S.F. Edge’s 24 Hour Run in 1907, Percy Lambert’s 1913 feat, when he covered one hundred measured miles in an hour. (Lambert died, attempting to improve that record, a final spin before marriage. He is now an official Brooklands ghost.) Malcolm Campbell, John Cobb, Eric Fernihough. The photographs are necrophile, printed with posthumous light. Malcolm Campbell’s shed is a clapboard coffin. Eric Fernihough, hooded and leathered like Fantomas, crouches over a Brough Superior bike, a man/machine hybrid.