Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Out of this resolute disregard for the M25, the intruder at the garden gate, they promote a village life from which villagers (the rural underclass) have been expelled. Country properties to delight any estate agent in Reigate or Redhill (sold instantly on the Internet) are in fief to other places: Croydon, the City, Gatwick. The suburb is no longer a suburb, it’s a denial of the motorway — on which it depends for its future survival. This is play country, a ‘lifestyle’ choice. Available to those with liquidity, equity reserves. The Balkanisation of the rail network, the horrors experienced by regular travellers, means that commuting is an activity for overworked, overstressed citizens who can’t quite afford to be where they are. The journey isn’t a respite, a convivial passage between work and home. It’s the focus of the day, feared and endured. The silence of these broken hamlets is the silence of deep trauma; the slow-motion sigh of those recovering from their brush with privatised transport, their hit of motorway madness. Working from home, logging on, is no solution: being part of the global telecommunications weave, you are still in Merstham. What’s here is what you have: a sequestration that takes you out of the crowd, away from noise, smell, touch. Marooned in an off-highway set, you are plunged into the monasticism that suits certain writers. It was never intended for humans. But, more and more, I sense a lack of mobility in these North Downs communities. The travel impulse has atrophied. Any contact with the territory that surrounds them is casual and unrewarding. The M25, that unmentioned cataract, is the defining reality. The road out is also the road back. A legendary presence that nobody wants to confront or confirm.

The interchange of M23 and M25 is like a postcard from Oregon, a rural fantasy. Pine woods and metalled silver streams. An absence of bears. Speed and stasis co-exist. Structural solutions in steel and concrete blend the picturesque with the functional. The interchange works best for pedestrians (crossing the M23 by Rockshaw Road); the very real fear of taking a wrong decision, hurtling off towards Gatwick instead of Maid-stone, is removed. Motorists who go wrong never recover; they’re sucked in among the hospitals that surround Coulsdon. Walkers are free to appreciate the art of the landscape architects: multi-levelled, dynamic. A three-barred safety fence replaces the five-barred gate as somewhere to lean, chew a stalk of grass, watch the road. A heat-singed motorway palette encourages contemplation; dark greens and burnt browns disappearing into a range of recessive silvers and blues.

Quitting this exhibit, with some reluctance, we strike out along Pilgrims Lane.

One thing there isn’t, pilgrims or no pilgrims, is breakfast. Now that we have agreed a route, any possibility of rogue coffee-stalls or bacon-smelling caravans has vanished. We are on our own in country that doesn’t want us. It’s a strange feeling, climbing and descending, in and out of woods, views across ripe fields of corn, and being unable to get any purchase on the experience. Our walk is compromised. We’re pulled between the territorial imperatives of Surrey, Kent and Greater London. The old Green Way is barely tolerated, a dog path, a route that might, if you stick with it, offer accidental epiphanies. It’s more likely to lose heart, be swallowed by a disused chalk quarry, an agribiz farm, a radio mast. Some unexplained concrete structure, fenced in, and surrounded by tall trees.

The road hums. The more the motorway is screened, the more the farm tracks shudder with deflected acoustic back-draughts. Farms have a back country quality. We notice such things as a low-loader with a cannibalised helicopter, a pad-dock of battered racing cars. A fairytale tower in a plantation of firs. Small dogs yelp at farm gates and sometimes follow us, large dogs froth and snarl. The focus on my camera refuses to hold.

HIGH PASTURES PRIVATE. Deserted outhouses, earth churned up, animals missing — removed for slaughter? Farms that don’t farm. Farms that operate as up-market scrap yards. Farms that yield to hidden clusters of houses that don’t cohere as villages; the scattered outwash of Caterham.

In Woodland Way (red brick backing nervously into forest), we come across: Pilgrims Cottage (signature in concrete of GJ & CG Morley, 1986). The Morleys — husband and wife, siblings, father and son? — weren’t satisfied with simply setting the plaque in a grey brick (fake granite) wall (lion couchant and carriage lamp); they reprised the name on a pokerwork board. Hung it like a Red River ranch.

Coming on Fosterdown Fort and a self-advertised ‘viewing point’, it would have been churlish not to stop, sit on a bench, in a clearing above the tree line, and view away. Until our eyes bleed. Down to the road. The irregular display of topiarised bushes. The litter bins. The display board that influences your viewing, by telling you what’s out there. The sights (and sites) worth noticing.

Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ is our destination, the hoped for resolution of a day’s nervy pilgrimage — but in anticipating a coming blitz of visual sensation we have affected our approach, the long transit through the foothills. I’m having problems with focus. For some time, I’ve had to take my spectacles off , in order to read the small print on the map. These glasses are only good for middle-distance travelling. Another set comes into play when I venture on to the road in a car. And so, to keep to the spirit of the day (confusion), I leave the discarded spectacles on the bench by the viewing platform. We’re at the next map-checking spot, four miles on, before I notice what I’ve done: before I picture the bench in focus so sharp I can feel every splinter.

Dropping down through the woods, to cross the M25, the picture darkens. A red circle has been painted on the smooth grey bark of a beech tree. ( Holmes shook his head gravely. ‘Do you know, Watson,’ said he, ‘that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there. ’ The Copper Beeches.)

Renchi, placing his hand within the red circle, calls up an Ulster loyalist symbol. Further on, sprayed across a slanting ash, we notice the return of a familiar logo: NF. This is the first time that River Lea (or Grand Union) graffiti have infiltrated the pleasant Surrey hills.

Next comes a tin kettle, hung by red rope, from a low branch. The kettle has been dented and punctured with bullet holes.

At the top of a lane, on the wood’s edge, is a compound of caravans and tumbledown bungalows, guarded by dogs, XMAS TREES. A broad white arrow points towards a yard. Horses’ heads (plaster) are nailed to the gateposts. A bright yellow RASCAL van alongside a plum-coloured pantechnicon, behind a chainlink fence. A low-loader hidden under electric-green tarpaulin. Five dogs, mixed breeds, shaggy, small, ridiculously loud, snap and yelp and snarl, back off when challenged, turn — after fifteen yards — and attack again.

A bow window, with fresh white trim, is thrown open. This combination of elongated kennel and neo-Georgian improvements is unusual. A non-travelling traveller, dealer in Xmas trees (scrap-metal, poultry, the black stuff), screams abuse. Specific threats. He’s seen the camera. Luckily, he’s still in bed — in vest — possibly on the job; there’s a high flush to the man (between pleasure postponed and apoplexy). He asks if we’ll be kind enough to wait a few moments while he slips the dog. The unleashed mongrels don’t count. They nip and run. The real beasts, drooling, heads too heavy to pick from the dirt, are on chains.