Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

When I look at my country as it is now — its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay — when I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live!

Box Hill was England. The recollection of childhood, picnics, walks. Literature. John Keats, at the Burford Bridge Inn, finishing ‘the last five hundred lines’ of Endymion . George Meredith at Flint Cottage, a solitary walker, visited by Robert Louis Stevenson — and later by Leslie Stephen and his ‘Sunday Tramps’. Meredith pronounced: ‘I am neither German nor French, nor, unless the nation is attacked, English. I am European and Cosmopolitan — for humanity.’

But ‘one of the most beautiful scenes in England’ (as Chesney called it) was also one of the most vulnerable.

The shoulder of this ridge overlooking the gap is called Box Hill, from the shrubbery with which it was covered… The weak point was the gap; the ground at the junction of the railways and the roads immediately at the entrance of the gap formed a little valley, dotted, as I said, with buildings and gardens.

Geological trauma: the break in the ‘great chalk-range which extends from beyond Aldershot in the east to the Medway’. We found in the course of our orbital circuit that the fear of invasion was still an active concern; horticulturalists were employed to screen numerous MOD properties. The M25 was London’s perimeter fence. The outer suburbs were infested with bunkers, deep-shelters, airfields, tunnels, tank traps, concrete pillboxes, radar beacons, telecommunications dishes. The architecture of paranoia mushroomed around London. Private researchers, hearing about my walk, deluged me with local evidence: maps, photos, sketches, copies of letters. The main defensive rings — established in the 1890s — started about fifteen miles out from Charing Cross. I visited the once secret Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey and one of the government’s nuclear bunkers (disguised as a farmhouse) at Kelvedon Hatch, Essex. How many more ‘conversions’ were there? How much more unmapped territory?

Junction 9 and its complimentary system of baffle-boards, pedestrian overpasses, had its own architectural style: pastoral/schizo. Our old green path was back (not quite wide enough for two men to pass without touching), but it ran between high fences. If Renchi stood on Marc’s shoulders, he still wouldn’t see over the top. On one side, the road (audible behind clean timber boards); on the other, impenetrable chain-link. Scrubby, sandy soil. No detours, no way out. Graffito with literary pretensions: YOUR SHAPE, MY EYES, THE FAN TASTICAL, PHASES — MY HEART IS A TOOL, A DEVICE, A TOOL/A SAVIOUR.

Walking this narrow path is like patrolling forbidden ground: we don’t know what we’re guarding. We’ve lost all sense of direction. Sound is doctored. We trudge on towards a distant circle of light, the end of the green tunnel. Noise is managed. Noise is subject to ‘reduction technology’. Tyres kiss sympathetic surfaces. Curtains of aspen swallow engine shrieks. Acoustic ‘footsteps’ are plotted by Highways Agency snoops; spectral footfalls in country lanes; posthumous whispers down secret paths that shadow the motorway.

At Ashtead we cross the railway line. Two young lads (one Arsenal, one Spurs) are the only human figures in the landscape. They’re tugging a bright red trolley which contains a yellow plastic sack. Newspapers, GUARDIAN. Are all the inhabitants of Ashtead liberal-leftists? And why do they get their papers at night? The news a day ahead of itself.

Renchi has information, somewhere at the bottom of his rucksack, on the well at Epsom. We can’t go home until we’ve found it. The railway bridge, unlike the user-friendly span over the M25, is from another era; it bristles with spikes — if you’re determined to throw yourself off, you are going to be punctured on the way.

Ashtead Common (‘Camp: Remains Of’) has an excess of paths, decisions to be made. We tack, north/south, east/west, until our enthusiasm flags. It’s been a long day. Marc and I would be happy to hold the well over for the start of the next walk. But Renchi is hot on wells (friend of Glastonbury). Magnesium sulphate constipation remedies (taken in pints from a stone beaker) I can leave alone. I did ten years in Cheltenham. I have something of an allergy to spa towns (twinned, as in Cheltenham’s case, with post-colonial residues and Secret State listening posts, high frequency huts).

Even here, deep in the woods, Renchi locates someone to interrogate, a ranger in a green jeep. We’re realigned. We head off towards the snail-shell spiral of ‘The Wells’, sited on what’s left of Epsom Common. On the map, this is a maze: take the wrong road and you’ll circle aimlessly for hours. The area has ambitions to be suburban-sprawl. ‘The Crescent’, boasts a streetsign. ‘The Greenway’.

The well on the Common was Epsom’s original, the beginning of England’s fashion for spas. Salts and sediments were plentiful (hence the brand name, the universal white tin, Epsom Salts) — but the water supply was mean. At the height of Epsom’s popularity (end of the sixteenth century, beginning of the seventeenth), rumours of sharp practice abounded: the well drunk dry by mid-morning was surreptitiously topped up with buckets from elsewhere.

Everybody sampled the waters, once; Pepys, Defoe, John Aubrey. Thomas Shadwell had a hit with his theatrical romp, Epsom Wells . The combination of bodily purging with amorous adventure, gaming houses, gluttony, was perfectly suited to the English love of ‘Carry On’ humour. Farts, gropes, excursions.

Many of the earliest visitors walked from London. Successful men set themselves up with country estates. John Aubrey, who wrote the first known history of Surrey in the 1670s (published 1718), carried out experiments to analyse Epsom Water. His property, Woodcote Park, was visited by Pepys in 1667. Voluntary rustification was all very well, Pepys thought, but a day trip was as much country living as he could tolerate. His diary account of an excursion to Epsom is still a model for M25 Man: arrive early, try the waters, gossip about Lord Buckhurst and Nell Gwynn, pub lunch, siesta, buy souvenir bottles, back to the pub for dinner, home. Better to invest in a coach than a burdensome house, miles from the City. Provincial novelty is all very well, but the journey is the best of it.

In 1662 a Dutch artist, William Schellinks, walked from Kingston to Epsom Common with the son of a shipping magnate he was shepherding around England. The drawing of the Old Wells that Schellinks made on 5 June reveals the true nature of the scam: a turf-roofed hut of the kind you usually encounter at the edge of Indian territory in an Anthony Mann western, a blasted heath. Coin paid, visitors were encouraged to swallow ten or fifteen pints of murky water; after which, segregated by sex, they trotted up and down until their bowels loosened. The canny employed youths to reserve a bush, warn off intruders. The tumbleweed of the Common shook with bad wind, episodes of projectile vomiting.

None of this dubious history deters Renchi. It’s obvious from the Ordnance Survey map of 1866 that the well, on Oldwells Farm, is at the heart of a cosmic maze, a slice of brain coral. Well Way, if we hit it, will carry us directly to the sacred spot. And so, plodding through what seems like a translation of the less exciting areas of Hampstead Garden Suburb, it proves.

The ‘new’ Old Well, designed by pupils from Epsom High School, dedicated in June 1989, has a touch of the fishing leprechaun about it. Brick steps leading to a circular well — which is topped with a glass light-globe supported by four metal pillars. A grille prevents you getting at the doubtful water. Lepers and tremblers, the spleen-sick, need no longer apply. The Old Well is lost heritage. Aubrey boiled gallons of the stuff to provide himself with a tobacco-box of grey sediment that nobody wanted. We twist through painful contortions, floor to wall, trying to contrive a reasonable visual record of this place. Then we leg it for the station.