Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Orson Welles launched his career by shifting invasion paranoia to American radio in 1940. Premature anti-fascists under every bed. The youthful Orson met the literary globe-trotter, H.G. Wells, at a radio station in Texas. Both versions of The War of the Worlds haunted the Surrey section of our walk; the reverberation of those names, Wells and Welles, staying with us until the true wells, medicinal and salty, could be located at Epsom.

In his 1997 film, Robinson in Space , Patrick Keiller’s narrator takes Robinson on an outing to inspect the Martians’ crater, at Horsell Common, near Woking.

He told me that there are more than 100 patents in microelectronics, nanotechnology and other fields for uses of buckminsterfullerenes, the large, spherical carbon molecules discovered in cosmic dust by British and other scientists, but they are all held abroad.

The Martians destroyed most of Surrey. Five hundred tons of Mars are estimated to land on Earth each year.

Robinson’s excursion party moves on — by car, unfortunately — from Woking to St George’s Hill. A sacred place for dissenters. Common land was developed as a private estate in 1911. The hurt remains. There was every reason for the guards to feel uneasy, they were protecting the unprotectable. Robinson recalls the occupation of land at Wisley, near St George’s Hill, by a group of eco-campaigners. This is the doctrine: off-road incursions (by British Aerospace, weapons technology, biological research facilities) celebrated by the arrival of the tribes. The worst piracies solicit attention by the freest spirits, activists. Flies drawn to the stink of rotten meat. Protesters promote chainsaw-security, tree-police. Occupation of threatened sites turns political argument into ritual theatre.

Keiller footnotes the invasion of St George’s Hill:

The group was ‘The Land is Ours’ and the spokesman was George Monbiot, writer and Fellow of Green College, Oxford. St George’s Day is April 23rd. The site was ‘set-aside’ land beside the disused Wisley aerodrome. On Friday the 28th, the group processed to St George’s Hill and performed a play, based on the legend of St George and the Dragon, on the practice range of the golf-course.

I heard about this procession from Billy Bragg, who featured a Digger song at a Blake evening in the Festival Hall. Bragg recommended Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down ( Radical Ideas during the English Revolution ). It’s easy to feel sentimental about the one period in English life when we played at being a Republic; court and courtiers were discounted. Splinter groups, fanatics and visionaries of every stamp, took to the roads. Churches and civic buildings were used for debate: hamlet to hamlet, along the Thames from Putney to Kingston. Agitators, appointed by their fellow soldiers, argued against parliamentary orthodoxy. Levellers, Diggers, Ranters. Veterans of the Sixties are drawn to this period, the late 1640s and early 1650s: they know about splits and schisms, expulsion, denunciation. Impotence.

St George’s Hill was a place of pilgrimage. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers camped on the common, cultivated the ground — much to the annoyance of the squirearchy. The Diggers called themselves The True Levellers, believing that land belonged to those who worked it. The first Digger commune was established by Winstanley and the others on 1 April 1649. By August, hostility from local interests drove them on to Cobham Heath. The following year, like asylum seekers, they were ‘dispersed’.

Winstanley received, so he asserted, divine inspiration, while in a trance. There must be common ownership of all means of production and distribution, complete freedom of worship, compulsory education for both sexes. When the voice of God triumphed, the formal authority of the state would wither away.

In The True Leveller Standard Advanced , a tract published in 1649, Winstanley made his ‘declaration to the powers of England and all the powers of the world, shewing the cause why the common people of England have begun and gives consent to dig up, manure and sow corn upon George Hill in Surrey; by those that have subscribed, and thousands more that give consent’.

BEWARE OF GOLFERS PLAYING FROM THE RIGHT. Slanting shadows across road and heath. Morning light, revisited months later in a Marc Atkins print, is exquisite. The lifting sun glints from dust-free windows, hidden among the trees. Roof tiles, gables, tall chimneys. Water towers disguised as Rapunzel follies. A white club house for the private golf course: imposing as a country hotel.

On St George’s Hill, no two properties are the same; that’s the point. This is not a Barratt asylum conversion. You get the ironwork gates, lions on pedestals, the cute names (WITS END) — but the Hill doesn’t have much truck with Essex ranch-style, or faux-Mediterranean coke haven. Did Lennon ( Working Class Hero ), playing posh, remember Winstanley? A friend of mine, a schoolteacher from Leamington Spa, pitching some Utopian scheme, visited the Beatle in his den. Time was different, he recalled, for the seriously rich. Place was accidental. From the moment you stepped through the door, you were on the point of leaving. There was nowhere to hang your coat. It took an entire evening not to get the cup of coffee, offered as you searched for a chair, or cushion, or appropriate yard of floor space.

Walkers fall under immediate suspicion. Those who ‘travelled the country’, as Christopher Hill points out, were thought to be conveyors of intelligence, spies, plotters, heretics. A new type, the gamekeeper (suborned working man), was invented to guard against wanderers. The genial tramps of English fiction, colourful trespassers in villages curated by Richmal Crompton and P.G. Wodehouse, might be John Buchan agents in disguise. Discharged soldiers, lunatics. Joseph Salmon, a Ranter, told how, in the days of his trance, he had ‘walked in unknown paths, and become a madman, a fool among men’.

Winstanley, defeated, returned to London where he had been an apprentice in the cloth trade, a freeman of the Merchant Taylors Company. He played no further part in public life. As a corn merchant, his fortunes revived. He lived in the modest obscurity that is London’s greatest benefit. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, he became a Quaker. He died in 1676 — by which time laws had been passed giving gamekeepers free access to the cottages of those they suspected of being poachers. Weapons could be confiscated at will. Dissenters were persecuted. Justices of the Peace harassed and imprisoned vagrants. England was brought to that happy state where those who roamed — without good reason, without passports and permissions — were liable to be defined as being out of their wits, Tom O’Bedlams. Trance-travellers, like common ground, suffered compulsory enclosure.

A Mercedes with darkened windows slides out from behind spiked gates that close automatically as the car pulls away. The long drive, in a herringbone pattern of pale brick, stretches into a leafy distance, perspective flattered by lines of thin aspens. Terrace, fountain. Pausing to admire the potential photo-op, we are interrogated by a security patrol. A white Fiesta draws up. A guard, in mirrored sunglasses, leans out. Courteous. ‘Just checking, sir.’

Nothing has changed since the first car challenged us, ten minutes earlier. You are allowed to walk half a mile between security shakedowns. Slow-moving Fiestas are on constant patrol. CCTV cameras, panning restlessly, alert the monitor jockeys. Calls come in from nervous watchers at windows: ‘Walkers.’ Walkers without dogs. The public aspect of this private road, between the B374 and the B365, is being subtly erased. In the end, it’s less bother to go the long way around.