Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Notice: a dead hare. Leaping. Flying. A messenger spirit; ears erect, hind legs stretched. With sharp focus, the creature is a roadside casualty, crawling with flies. Roadkill unworthy of the satchel. Now it’s a force of nature.

The rest of our walk is recorded on the same terms: soft shapes, ripe colour, more dream than document.

Our way, respecting the lie of the land, was straightforward: in theory, on the map. A footpath through Chevening Wood, across the north-flowing M25, to Otford. It had been a long day, but the early evening light, the North Downs behind us, churches among woods, brought us close to Samuel Palmer and his nocturnal wanderings.

I was delighted to find, in a letter from Palmer to George Richmond (fellow ‘Ancient’), intimations of the appropriate astigmatic vision. Palmer, met in town, was an eccentric figure: short, enveloped at all seasons in a trailing coat, protected by the broad rim of a Mad Hatter’s topper. His arms and legs were afterthoughts, vestigial appendages on a stubby torso. He felt the cold. He wore long white mufflers, layers of waistcoat. His coat was a tent. Every stroll through London was an expedition: pockets bulging with spare rations (biscuits, pies, cheese), inkwells, pens, sketch pads and libraries of books. Eyebrows lofted in an expression of perpetual surprise — the world too much in his face — he blinked behind a pair of large round spectacles. He was well aware of his own absurdity, he knew that he set young ladies ‘a-giggle’. From Shoreham, on 14 November 1827, he wrote to Richmond:

Tell them that herein is my disadvantage — whereas mine eyes are dim save when I look at a fair lady — and whereas I can only see their lustre thro’ my goggles, those said unlucky goggles so scratch’d and spoil’d that all the fire of the love darting artillery of my eyes is lost upon them and rebounds not to my advantage, the ladies seeing only two huge misty spheres of light scratchd and scribbled over like the sun in a fog or dirty dish in a dark pantry, as lustre lacking, as leaden and as lifeless as a lad without a lady. But tell them sometimes to think on me, as I very often think of them, as in sullen twilight rambles, sweet visions of lovely bright eyes suddenly sparkle round me, lume my dusky path — double the vigour of my pace, rebuild my manhood and renew my youth.

Our sullen twilight ramble ran straight up against the Chevening Estate; private road, path denied. A considerable detour. Arthur Mee in his guide to Kent writes of ‘a beautiful public walk through the park’. A walk that is now off-limits. We strain local hospitality by finding a hosepipe, with which to top up our water bottles, alongside a muck heap in the Home Farm.

‘Kent has no lovelier corner so near to London,’ gushes Mee. ‘It comes at the end of a lane that has no turning.’ This is very true. But turn we must, for a weary half-circuit of the park, dropping close to the motorway — before coming back to the village and St Botolph’s Church.

Chevening was the home of the Stanhopes. The house, Mee guessed, was ‘basically probably Inigo Jones’. Basically probable or not, the version I carried home, a smudge among the trees, would require an Indiana Jones to unravel its secrets: the private chapel, the Tudor and Elizabethan tombs that predated the Stanhopes.

Also buried here was the third earl, Charles Stanhope, politician and experimental scientist, who married William Pitt’s sister. Stanhope, aspiring to oblivion, erasure, asked to be interred at Chevening: as ‘a man of no account’. As a politician, the third earl acquired the nickname of ‘Citizen Stanhope’, by proposing to acknowledge the French Revolution. He found himself in a parliamentary minority of one. A medal was struck with that motto.

Mee glosses Citizen Stanhope’s scientific achievements: ‘He invented means for safe-guarding buildings against fire, took out patents for steam vessels, devised printing appliances which he presented to the public, perfected a process of stereotyping, had original ideas about electricity, shared lightning-conductor experiments with Benjamin Franklin, invented a microscopic lens which bears his name, devised a new way of making cement more durable, and found a way of curing wounds in trees.’

He walked about the village, alone, talking to himself, gesturing violently; a care-in-the-community aristo who brooded on cement overcoats for patching wounds in lightning-struck trees. The sort of free-associating, lateral-thinking boffin who might well have conceived of an orbital motorway — before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Before television existed to feather his pension.

My slanted, out-of-focus church tower (St Botolph’s) is a homage to Stanhope. We have to conjure some human presence to revive this latest empty village, this evening set. We’re in the claw of the motorway, the volute of Junction 5. From the road, motorists barely notice the hills, parks, spires: Samuel Palmer quotations. They have no sense of what it is to be in the village of Chevening at twilight; the golds and the greens, the avenue alongside the burying ground. Such (oppressive) tranquillity can only be achieved by taking land into the custodianship of the MOD, the National Trust, an exclusive golf course. The Pilgrims Way, a clear path from Titsey to Otford, suffers from indignities inflicted by private landlords and estate managers.

Closing on the M25, by Lime Pit Lane, we pass Morant’s Court Farm. This was where London carters, coming out of town through Bromley, dropped Samuel Palmer’s visitors: the Ancients, John Linnell, William and Catherine Blake. Palmer would send out a boy to meet them, guide them in, by just the way we were walking. Linnell, notoriously careful with his cash, tried to arrange his own transport on carts carrying furniture or farm produce. In 1829, unwell, in need of recuperation, revival of spirits, he arrived with George Richmond at Morant’s Court Hill: to be greeted by ‘a strangely dressed figure with a wheelbarrow’. He was trundled away, oblivious to the remarks of coachman and passengers, towards the village of Shoreham.

The delusion persists: the Valley of Vision, Earthly Paradise, is a one-day walk from London (Charing Cross or Millennium Dome, according to taste). A few hours, drudging through industrial dereliction, suburbs, captured villages, will carry the walker into Arcadia. Or, at worst, the town dweller’s version of it. The dream. Linnell, broken in health, vexed by his large family, wrote to Palmer: ‘I have found so much benefit from my short visit to your valley… I Dream of being there every night almost and when I wake it is some time before I recollect that I am at Bayswater.’

Sleep channels open. Lost highways matted with grass. City life is made tolerable by the knowledge that a single day’s travel will deposit you in this bowl of tranquillity. Waltham Abbey, Shoreham, the Lea and Darent Valleys: paradise reservations. So it seemed. So the Victorian artists (craftsmen, seekers) insisted: selective vision. Varnished and glowing; red and gold and green. William Blake’s methods adapted to piety and sentiment. Rick burning, trade unionism, Luddite outrages: such manifestations of rural discontent were denounced. The Valley of Vision was a Tuscany for weekend runaways in search of the Simple Life (i.e. cheap farmhouse lodgings, cider, music, the romance of hop picking). Palmer loved September. He was always trying to persuade his mates to come down for the hop season; so picturesque, autumnal — exclusive.

The forensic sharpness of Linnell, Palmer — and, in due course, the Pre-Raphaelites — is contradicted by the evidence of my out-of-focus camera. The motorway really could be water. When Blake made his only visit to Shoreham, in a stage wagon (like a pioneer trekking to the American West), drawn by a team of horses, he didn’t appear as outlandish as the Ancients — who wandered the countryside declaiming from Macbeth and talking talking talking. Blake settled in a smoky chimney-corner with his churchwarden pipe, to discuss (with Palmer’s rackety, bookseller father) what they called ‘the traverse of sympathy’.