Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

We’re in a twilight mood. Emerging from the final clump of settlement, another deserted common planted with lines of dwarf trees, we recognise the sign — ELDERLY PEOPLE— as an appropriate message. There aren’t any on the street. They must have taken the warning to heart and stayed indoors. If there were humans in this part of Surrey, they would certainly be elderly. The road is elderly. Its energies have diminished to the point where it can do nothing but trickle into the brash sweep of the M25, spin on to Chartwell, Tunbridge Wells and the coast, or risk an outing to the Bluewater shopping experience.

There’s a three-mile stretch, pretty straight, between Great Bookham Common and the Leatherhead Junction; a chance to go for it, pedal to the floor. Tony Sangwine’s modulated landscape planting doesn’t register with these high-speed dolts. What do they care about interestingly crinkled trees chosen for their ability to peep over fences? They’ll never see, as we do, the hidden spaces, the rampant ecology, weeds, wild flowers; hawthorn, dogwood, hedge-parsley, willowherb, tormentil.

A detour into Leatherhead is debated; briefly. Epsom is still the target, but there’s a church I want to visit. Renchi is always up for a church, any church. He’s soon bounding across roads, confronting citizens, women with bags of shopping. The Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Peter? There is a reason for my interest. The church has a series of panels carved by Eric Gill, the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Gill features in a novel I’m trying to write, as the paterfamilias of the small community at Capel-y-ffin in the Ewyas Valley on the Welsh borders.

As we draw towards the end of the day’s business, Marc’s mobile starts to trill; friends and potential commissioners activate his signature tune. ‘I’m out on the M25, somewhere in Surrey. Don’t know when we’ll finish.’ Sounds implausible but, this time, it’s true.

A slightly disgruntled priest — Father Paddy — gives us a key. He’s pissed off with a sale sign outside the presbytery. There should be enough elderly people to keep the church afloat, even in Leatherhead — but, in a period of economic instability, realisable assets have to be cashed in.

The church was built in 1923. Father Redway, ‘remembered principally as a man of holiness and poverty’, secured the patronage of Sir Edward Hulton, the Leatherhead-domiciled newspaper magnate. Hulton agreed to guarantee the costs of the church’s construction. He also, having viewed the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, commissioned the Gill panels.

Gill was responsible for more stations than British Rail. They came off a production line: Westminster Cathedral, St Alban’s (Oxford), St Cuthbert’s (Bradford), the Church of Our Lady and St Peter (Leatherhead). The panels for Leatherhead were cut in Gill’s Ditchling studio and fixed in groups of two or three. The last panel was finished in April 1925. Hulton died a month later. The car, taking his body to London for burial, paused at the church gates for a blessing.

None of us, tracking around the Stations of the Cross, is inspired by them. Maybe that’s the point: Gill didn’t want the church to be a gallery showcasing his genius. The panels were there to do a job, provide illustration, mark out the route for a series of devotional exercises. These low reliefs, produced in the Twenties, long after Cubism, Vorticism, Suprematism, seem perverse in their customised antiquity. Innocence of vision is hard to fake. Primitivism, smoothed and stroked, looks coy. It’s an art for believers — many of whom, astonished by the eccentricity of the stone carver, didn’t want it. More accurately, it was an art for patrons. In paying for a work that demonstrated their taste, their selfless generosity, they bought a short-term immortality.

It worked. We had come here for Gill’s panels: to see how an orbital journey could be mapped as an album of stone cartoons. The Passion of Christ as a graphic novel, a storyboard. Gill modelled (in the tenth panel at Westminster Cathedral) for the figure of Christ — by standing naked in front of a mirror. In the submissive curves of these low reliefs, the thrusts of staves and crosses, is a masochistic eroticism; in the gilded detail, a tinsel coarseness. The antiquarianism hasn’t lasted. It doesn’t offend, it’s all of a piece with Paul Woodroffe’s stained glass windows, his version of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World .

The Gill project doesn’t help Renchi to decide how he’ll put together his own panels, a record of our journey which has to be both documentary and mythic. He sits in a pew, studying his Ordnance Survey map, plotting the best way out of here. As I click the camera, Marc (the Catholic boy) lifts his left forefinger in a parodic blessing, a mirror image of the Holman Hunt window.

Around Junction 9 the M25 is in spate. Heading north, over the motorway bridge, for our late-afternoon walk to Epsom, we pause to admire the eight lanes of moving traffic. There is no congestion, white vans and light-load heavy goods vehicles (returning to base) are snowflakes dissolving in a fast, grey stream. The central reservation is paved, without impact barriers or any form of planting; a few brave weeds push between the cracks. When the Highways Agency photograph a scene like this (for the brochure, Towards a Balance with Nature ), they make sure that motor traffic is an out-of-focus blur; roadside flowers and grassy banks are pin sharp. Roads, the promoters suggest, are not about cars. Roads are landscape improvements, an architecture of ‘managed’ space. My snapshots, freezing the action, tell a different tale; a fast shutter pins each vehicle to the board. Safe distances are observed. Travellers, gunning for Gatwick, have no hold-ups to panic them, no jackknifed articulated lorries. The Leatherhead stretch, on this July evening, is leisured, a mini-autobahn, a military highway of the kind Margaret Thatcher fantasised when she cut the ribbon. The principal difference, so far as I can see, between the Thatcherite Vision of the Eighties and National Socialism in the Germany of the Thirties is that Thatcher couldn’t make the trains run on time. The M25 never was an invasion route down which the master race could roll, just a three-hour fairground ride with dull views.

But here, at Junction 9, the M25 almost succeeds in living up to its statement of intent; Box Hill directly to the south, the genteel Clacket Lane Service Station (the best on the road) up ahead; swathes of unoptioned greenery, a literal green belt, downs and commons and broadleaf woods. At Dorking there is a gap in the ring of hills which protect always-timorous London. We discuss that gap, recall fantasies of future war. George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) is generally acknowledged to have launched the genre: landscape paranoia (with an undertow of viral sex horror, the Home Counties ravished by cruel Huns). The Germans (Russians, Kosovans, Martians) were coming to Surrey. ‘The line of the great chalk-range was to be defended,’ wrote Chesney — who looked, resolutely, back to the future. Let the suburbs spread and before you know it brutish Prussians will be advancing on Epsom, occupying Thames Ditton.

The streets reached down to Croydon and Wimbledon, which my father could remember quite country places; and people used to say that Kingston and Reigate would soon be joined to London. We thought we could go on building and multiplying for ever.

Sir George Tomkyns Chesney was a military man, a lieutenant colonel, founder of the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College at Staines. Suburban complacency brought the risk, so Chesney thought, of a weakening in moral fibre. We were unprepared for the coming hordes: tunnel-rushing aliens. Premature Euro-scepticism was a popular fictional brand. Iain Duncan Smith ghosted by H.G. Wells.