Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The Brooklands circuit, devised in 1907 by Hugh Locke King, a wealthy landowner, was a forerunner of the M25: an oval that you travelled, flogging your vehicle to its limits, only to arrive back at the point where you started. There were frequent fatalities. The circuit, according to a leaflet put out by the Brooklands Museum, was ‘a unique civil engineering achievement… one of the seven wonders of the modern world’. Locke King employed 1,500 labourers and craftsmen to reshape the landscape, to carve out a chunk of the Wey valley, to plant appropriate forestry around the rim. Instead of the paradise gardens of Enfield, the subtle interventions of the Highways Agency, here was a rich man’s park that was resolutely of its time. A maze of concrete blocks instead of a redirected river.

The pro tem nature of the sheds and garages, the demob recklessness of the early racers, gave Brooklands the spirit of a Home Counties combat squadron. Men tinkering with machines. Improvised shelters. Cars that roared out of nowhere, spitting oil and making too much noise. Why, I thought, didn’t they put the M25 on this convenient site? As a model of itself. A themed motorway. A circuit you could drive without harm or inconvenience to others. There was plenty of room to build a miniaturised Waltham Abbey, Dartford Bridge (for spectators), Swanley interchange for mock road rage duels (fought with paint guns). The retail parks, cadet versions of Bluewater and Lakeside, Thurrock, were already in place. There was even a duplicate of the Siebel building, green glass, back at the tree line; visibly invisible.

We stroll down the straight, cars skidding, slaloming around oil drums. Huge skies. In the meadow, at the end of the circuit, aircraft are parked. The 1945 Vickers Viking airliner (developed from the Wellington bomber). The Valiant (Britain’s first ‘V’ bomber). A VC10 of the Sixties. It’s an aeronautical graveyard. Some of the planes have been sliced in half.

Renchi is reading fiction that relates to areas through which we are walking: you could, in theory, string together a necklace of books, a bibliography for the motorway. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is ‘spot on’, so he says, for the move into Surrey. Predictions of science parks, research establishments of the Thames corridor. Victorian and Edwardian novelists took the trouble to place literary contrivance in a convincing — and relevant — topography. Huxley, the fashionable author of the Twenties and Thirties, might have drifted out of favour, but Renchi reckoned he was truer to the Siebel spirit than Orwell. Huxley, as the critic John Clute wrote, produced ‘the model of pharmacological totalitarianism’. The ecology of least resistance.

An empty charabanc, clouds reflected in window panels, stood at the end of the runway. Green lettering: BICKNELL’s.

Marc, heavy dark glasses perched on brow (paparazzo), and Renchi, red shirt bandanna, advance on the security checkpoint. PRIVATE ROAD. RESIDENTS ONLY. NO PARKING. Gentle, wooded hills disclose colonial estates. Disclose silence. An absence of jingly ice-cream vans, squealing tyres, yelping dogs, raised voice, ambulance sirens.

A signboard, ST GEORGE’S HILL (white on deep green): PRIVATE ESTATE. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. St George’s Hill Tennis Club. St George’s Hill Golf Club . VISITORS PLEASE STOP FOR SECURITY GUARDS.

We were expecting this. The payroll boys, back in the station cafe at Staines, alerted us to the rock star dormitory: Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, John Lennon. The sort of recreational facilities the British Raj, escaping from summer heat, always demanded. Well-defended luxury becomes an open prison. We can’t come in and they can’t come out. They’re not here, at home, even when they are. Security, under threat of instant dismissal, will never admit to their presence.

Locals — even Weybridge has some — can work the gate. Fill a uniform. Renchi has a cunning plan. He knows a builder who jobbed on the estate, who might be there now. A name. An address (which he has mislaid). Renchi is very good at these chats with security. The approach to St George’s Hill is orthodox Surrey: a public road that, quite suddenly, isn’t. Tarmac that gleams like polished pewter. Even the pollen has been airbrushed, tweezered by hand into the kerbside.

Renchi marches forward, alone. We hang back, snapping away. A rusticated hut (small cricket pavilion) with white gate. Bushes, shrubs, poplars. A white Fiesta with checkered trim (faking at official status). Yellow flashing light: ST GEORGE’S HILL SECURITY.

A radio is playing, something bland and matutinal, in the deserted sentry box. Further on, at the final checkpoint, Renchi initiates a conversation with the bearded guard. The man looks the part (which covers most of his job description), but he’s decent, a local taking what he can get in the way of casual employment. Renchi mutters about his builder friend. The guard is bored enough to let us in. The status of the road is anyway ambiguous. We’re passing through, a country walk, we explain. We’ll keep our eyes to ourselves. We’re making for another estate, the workers’ village built for employees of Whiteley’s department store.

Keep moving, no detours. Heads down. No sudden, unexplained gestures. We’re on camera: all the way.

This, self-evidently, was the future: what should have happened, and now won’t. A county within a county; calmer, cleaner, emptier than the rest. A magnet for villainy. A refuge for villains. At a reading I met a student from Weybridge. She told me that the local beauty parlours, the hairdressers, were full of women in studio make-up speaking Russian. Nails sharp as daggers. Clanking with gold chains. Mafia wives from Moscow.

The road, as we wind up the hill, is spookier than Brooklands. Nature on its best behaviour, heathland smoother than a bowling green. Small plantations of red-barked conifers: BEWARE. GOLFERS PLAYING FROM THE LEFT.

The text Renchi has to hand is H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds , which he is using as a guidebook. The 1898 fantasy — alien invasion — plays very nicely against this unpeopled estate. Where better for the Martians to put their marker than a discreet private golf course? From a real-estate point of view, the Woking landfall made sense. ‘Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after; and so on for ten nights, a flame each night.’ Technologically primitive Surrey suburbanites were zapped by future war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest. Roaming bands of survivors took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine retribution. They died raving, in the rubble, doctrine decayed into a stream of incoherent curses. No building, however innocent its function, was safe from the Heat-Rays. ‘I saw the tops of the trees above the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished.’ Yes, Woking (heathland bastion of English values) had a mosque. But the ruthless invaders, who had travelled 140,000,000 miles with mayhem in mind, had no interest in cultural niceties. Burn, blast, batter. Convert the primitives of Ottershaw and Chertsey into meat. Liquidise them. Very perceptive, these foreign devils. With one glance, they understood that our soft estates were good for nothing but future golf courses, catteries, mediparcs and orbital motorways. Wells knew the geography of the perimeter, he had cycled for miles through country lanes and villages that would soon be swallowed by ribbon-development and retail landfill.