Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The walls of Churchill’s studio are hung with his back catalogue, crammed like the Royal Academy Summer Show — in the days when Palmer found his paintings perched a few inches from the ceiling. The lakes and springs and orchards of Chartwell, by Churchill’s mediation, do not become sites of vision. His canvases are resolutely occasional, holiday memories, overworked postcards from the Med; grace and favour villas and yachts. A Cook’s Tour of hobbyism: Marrakech, Venice, Monte Carlo, Jamaica. The Surf Club at Miami. Hot colour generously applied. Lashings of Sickert gravy. There is no attempt to work, by series or season, towards an understanding of this Kentish landscape; no fixation, no obsessive return, under different conditions of light, to the garden and the surrounding countryside.

Churchill didn’t look, he sat. He passed the time. The trick of painting, begun ‘by accident’ (as his daughter Mary Soames explains), ‘took the role of a therapy, distracting him from the traumatic debacle of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign’. No such therapy was available to those unfortunates who were there, in the hell of it. The endless views strung around the Chartwell estate become a gloss on dark history; florid rehabilitation, a strategy for elective amnesia. The paintings are never about the situation the painter is confronting, they confirm the position in which he set his stool: lakes and arbours and beaches. A few palm trees, a distant snow-covered range of mountains.

Churchill took up this practice, as a relief from deep depression, while staying in a rented farmhouse, near Godalming. A tame expert was wheeled in for complimentary advice: society portraitist Sir John Lavery. Then came Sickert, the friend of Degas, frequenter of music halls, murder obsessive: master of varnished darkness, half-drunk pints, the urban condition (boredom). Sickert, not ashamed to use a newspaper photograph as the basis for a composition, taught Churchill to project slides on to canvas, to bypass line-drawing.

If brought to it, if forced, Churchill could be ‘paintatious’ (his word) about Chartwell. The Weald, under snow, as seen from the drawing-room window. The Honorary Academician Extraordinary, exhibiting under the pseudonym of ‘David Winter’, had no trouble in being accepted for the summer show. Samuel Palmer sweated on rejection. The Golden Valley of Underriver was his invention, he affected it; the way future generations have come to see it. He imagined — and therefore established — a secret paradise; accessible in a period of innocence, then lost. The Palmer industry is rudimentary, a few walkers, an art school. The only book on Palmer stocked by Tate Britain was not displayed on the shelves, had to be searched out when I requested it. There was a late flurry of interest in Palmer when his works were faked by Tom Keating, the tricks of vision easily duplicated.

Churchill’s Painting as a Pastime remains in print, along with postcard reproductions, videos, mugs, coasters, key rings. This much-visited, much-admired National Trust property is the ultimate point for the tourist who wants to leave London without leaving London; the paradox of an open asylum in which the demons of history can be drugged with scents, bright colours and a prostituted landscape.

After Westerham, we cross the young Darent, and then the M25; heading north. The six-lane section of motorway (naked central reservation, modestly planted soft estate) is balm to our spirits. In the distance, to the east, the road is beginning to curve, anticipating our journey up the Darent Valley. For once the speeding transients are playing it by the book, observing the correct distances between vehicles. There are no jousting heavy-goods lorries travelling in packs. Our river/road is sublimely democratic: it has endured Surrey and Kent, counties that prefer to pretend it’s not there, and it is heading home. Of course, an orbital motorway can’t have a home, but it can have memory, a starting point: Junction la with its toll booths, its sense of being a frontier post. The crossing of the Thames at Dartford. Multiple-choice highways. Essex or the coast. Canterbury, Greenwich. The Bluewater retail pit.

In my mythology, the M25 is born of the Thames: conceived at Runnymede (by Staines), dying at Dartford. In bloody twilight. Echoes of Eliot: ‘Burning burning burning burning.’ Misbegotten in an up river canoe. Expiring in oil slicks. Grey to grey: the immense skies of the Thames Estuary. Liquid to light: an Aegyptian temple beneath Runnymede Bridge (with its golden bars, its smoky shadows). Out of these mysteries comes a metalled ribbon of consciousness, that saga of simultaneity: a tidal motorway carrying the psychic freight of all the landmass it contains.

The uplift, after the deadening effect of Westerham, is in finding ourselves on Beggars Lane — which flows into Green Lane, before being absorbed by the Pilgrims Way. It feels as though we have come through some sort of test. The hedges are high and the air is ripe (humming, throbbing) — with slurry. We might be the last humans. Uninhabited lanes and deserted farmhouses (protected by barking dogs) remind us, yet again, of The War of the Worlds . Complacency and patriotism, the givens of a great empire, challenged by fanatical aliens, viral invaders, off-screen primitives. It’s wafer thin, a membrane, the liberal-democratic consensus: aspirations, dialogue, technological advances. Pyres of dead sheep, smouldering dumps, are always in the next field. The estate, hidden behind a screen of poplars, contains a row of bacteriological research prefabs, where whitecoats are paid to think the unthinkable. To amuse themselves with ‘worst case’ scenarios.

On a farm, between the M25 and the Pilgrims Way, I take the final photograph that turns out to be something close to what I intended: a mass of tyres holding down a black polythene mound. A long-roofed barn, the kind Samuel Palmer liked to sketch, peeps over the curve of this Michelin dome. Call it: Death of the Motorway . A beach of black rubber necklaces. A negative of the Great White Tent on Bugsby’s Marshes.

Focus, which had been playing up since we left Merstham, gave way entirely: into the Valley of Vision . My spectacles were lost, abandoned, and my camera had a bad case of the Gerhard Richters: Richter pastoral. Snapshots with the shivers. The results, from here on, were truer to the way I felt, the way I really saw the road, than all my previous impersonal loggings. Incompetence meant: insight. Inscapes. The photograph of ‘Renchi on the Pilgrims Way’ is a painterly stew, not an identity card. The abandoned blue shirt, hanging across the white ground of the T-shirt, is a squeeze of Vlaminck.

There is liberation in these soft images. The road sign I recorded, PILGRIMS WAY, is now a long thin shape that defies interpretation; you can’t tell if it’s stone or tin. But the green that surrounds it, busy with black smears, white floaters, has a wondrous ambiguity. I’ve never (on our orbital walk) had the courage to let go in this way, the economics of photography require a visible return. I’m only doing it to keep a record of where we’ve been, the provocative details I’m sure to forget.

There is no detail. Wrecked focal length has pushed me into territory explored and espoused by visionary filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage (friend of the Black Mountain poets). The optics of risk. (‘My first instruction, then: if you happen to have a light meter — give it away,’ Brakhage wrote. ‘We must deal with the light of Nature, then with the Nature of Light. And set your science aside, please, as we’ve no more use for it than what is of it as embodied in the camera in hand.’)

The blurred images, first, simplify the narrative — then worry me towards a deeper, more considered sense of place. What doesn’t matter — script, commentary, hierarchy of significance — vanishes. It seems that the ‘faulty’ camera is now dictating the terms: I didn’t pass it over to anyone met on the road, no such person existed. And yet, here we are, developed print in hand: Renchi and I in the same image. Two figures standing in a gap in the hedge. Distance is realised by bands of colour. The white lines on the road float free — like angelic footsteps. The camera, unprompted, has produced a double portrait.