Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

They came, the lady and her husband, from Epsom; retreating to the green fringe when demolition contractors started to cut down the trees around the hospital colony. Dances, croquet, tennis parties: the asylums were so much a part of her social life. The town, she felt, had lost its soul.

Our soul, as ever, is the M25; to which at last we have returned. There’s a convenient bridge, coming out of the woods; then, sparkling beneath us like silver river-sand, the eight lanes of the motorway. Planting, at this point (between Walton Heath and Buckland Hills), is dense; a deep green gorge with nothing, so far as motorists are concerned, beyond it.

One man (with his dog, an Alsatian) leans on the parapet, chin resting on cupped hand. Tracksuit trousers, sports shirt, trainers. He pats the dog’s head. This view is all he desires. The motorway has replaced the riverbank he might once have made his destination. Standing where he always stands, cars glint in the shallows, lorries cruise like pike. Lighting poles stretch into the distance: angling rods. Speed-trap cameras hook the unwary. We are those fleeting figures glimpsed by cruising motorists; lesser life forms, bridge-hugging gawpers.

Going outside the M25 is a large undertaking: we’ve already noted the Walton Oaks laboratories, the Hermitage and the ‘Experimental Farm’. Walking won’t be easy. The idea is: stay on the bank, the verge, follow the North Downs path to Merstham. And then take a train for London.

LAING. MCGEE. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. That’s better. We’re back with the script. Radiant tarmac flattering the Pilgrims Way, heading east in the general direction of Canterbury. Property held in some undeclared public/private partnership. Big construction firms. Crop modifiers. Chainlink fences topped with backward-leaning barbed wire strands. This is what we’re used to, this is what we like. Something ugly enough to be worth photographing.

With a machete and a pouch of coca leaves, we could probably hack a passage through the roadside jungle. Highways Agency horticulturalists always plant to keep pedestrians out (for their own safety); thorn thickets, whiplash branches that slash at neck and eyes. We love it, hearing the race of the road, as we advance at one mile an hour. High on diesel fumes and plastic-tasting water.

Given this abandoned farm, the new drive (with ramps for lorries), screen of Scots pine and clipped yew, we’re duty bound to stick our noses in, investigate. A bungalow gate-lodge with tile roof, a barrier and a surveillance camera on a tall pole. The set is now easily recognisable: it’s called ‘The Future’. It’s what happens to liminal land, between motorway and heritage countryside, PFIZER/WALTON OAKS.

Pfizer is good. The name fizzes in the mouth like an effervescent hangover cure. Various conspiracy buffs (Chris Petit, John Sergeant) are convinced that there’s a relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the motorway corridor: convenient for Heathrow and Gatwick. Petit reckons that the more extreme forms of animal (and probably human) testing for pharmaceutical products take place in Turkey. Much less red tape. An unholy congruence of asylum seekers (finding themselves on involuntary round-trips; returned from Budapest), Swiss banks, construction firms with sweetheart contracts, poisons the off-highway biosphere. New commodities are in play. New targets. Global cigarette manufacturers, with dumped politicians as ambassadors, are targeting the Third World. Outdated medicines are repackaged in Tijuana.

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The gate-keepers of the Pfizer estate are happy to point us in the right direction: swallowed footpaths, a hack through Bushfield Wood, a vermin-tunnel on the very edge of the motorway. Here and there, we come across hints of the Pilgrims Way; civil engineers have stuck with the flow of ancient footpaths. Sometimes we disappear into chest-high corn and have to navigate by occasional glimpses of lighting poles on the M25. The afternoon sky is as blue as the end of the world, cumulus continents broken into puff balls.

For an hour or two, we enjoy the kind of walking: The London Loop, The Green London Way, Country Walks Around London, The Shell Book of British Walks. The Shell Book of British Walks ? That sounds a bit odd, hikes sponsored by a Dutch oil company. ‘At a time when life for most of us has become more complex than ever before and more filled with possessions, it is no coincidence that so many people are turning to the simplest of all pastimes: walking.’ Available at all good service stations.

The editor of The Shell Book that guidebooks promote of British Walks lets us know that ‘a few hundred yards from the room where I am writing, there is a delightful footpath winding through woodlands and over a favourite hillside where I can see from the Surrey down-land across to the Kentish hills’. We are on this fortunate man’s heels, passing his garden gate, alerted to ‘huge notices warning that the land off the path is private’.

I’m fond of these books with their selective maps, line drawings that try to look like woodcuts, topographic views. The walking they promote is benign: it begins at a car park, saunters, by way of a quaint church and some ‘typical high downland scenery’, to ‘the highest point in south-east England’. Hikers are discreet, eyes averted from contemporary horrors, tutting from time to time at the excesses of developers or upwardly mobile vulgarians. These are strolls for the visually impaired, guided tours with checklists of flora, fauna, archaeological remains. The walk is an interlude of ‘somewhere between an hour-and-a-half and three hours’. It’s good for you. And it brings you back to the point from which you set out. To the car.

Following a commentary we have to imagine, we climb — by easy increments — on to the North Downs. The landscape drops away into a pattern of small fields, copses, hillocks, a lush bowl unimpeded by visible roads or settlements, with the South Downs as the distant, blue rim. The Weald of Kent, Box Hill. Renchi can piece it together, fit each location to a chapter of autobiography.

Above Reigate, couples are lounging on sun-bleached grass. There’s no better place to ‘sky’, as the meteorologist Luke Howard called it; to watch clouds mass and break, adopt the shapes he named and categorised. The Pilgrims Way has become a paradise path. Walking is drifting and we’re not quite easy about it; Surrey is too soft. We must be missing something.

The folds of the land are unreadable: to an East Londoner, clogged with blight. No script. No graffiti. No prohibitions. Planes do not circle continuously overhead. The only celestial markers are miles away: sky scratches, contrails, that fix Gatwick Airport.

My sense of unreality is confirmed by coming, out of nowhere, on to a small Grecian temple. Gifted to the hillside in 1909. So that pedestrians from Reigate might offer up a prayer, they are the blessed of the earth. This is a generic temple, circular, colonnaded — without content. No walls, no Vestal virgins. (Hawksmoor’s mausoleum at Castle Howard — without the gravitas, the morbid stone.) The altar, at the centre of this temple, is a device — highly polished — with which travellers can align themselves: distances to notable destinations. The table becomes a pool, reflecting trees and clouds — and Renchi (as he leans in to make his readings). On the ceiling is a golden sun, bright as an egg dropped in a pan.

A uniquely ordinary English evening, warm, calm, finds us on the high ridge, moving east: water tanks, tall masts barnacled with boosters for mobile phones. The route, in its day, was a green road, favouring the lie of the land, hill forts, camps. It’s not much used; the more a path receives official designation, the more it is written up in guidebooks, the more the surrounding country withdraws, protects its ‘territorial security’. As a public park from which the public have been excluded.