Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

What should have been our golden road, our ‘traverse of sympathy’, carrying us outside the M25 and down to Otford, was a long-shadowed hell: Palmer’s sticky nocturnes invaded by Robert Crumb. Ugly motors eager to do damage. Rage pods caught between hedges. Better to head off, dodging oncoming traffic in the fast lane of the motorway, than stick with the Pilgrims Way. It’s a rat run, the revenge of the commuters. Deserted villages are coming to life: it’s madness, so we’re told, twice a day. And death-in-life the rest of the time. Lights on, blue TV windows, dogs to walk.

We manage to get off the road — which has no verge — and into the fields, the heavy earth; but we’re soon returned. There is no other route. Every third car is a red Jag: either they’ve been watching too many episodes of Morse , or they want to hide the roadkill on the paintwork. Otford, with its quaint High Street, its proudly timbered survivors, its pond and Tudor ruins, is notable, so far as we’re concerned, for one feature: the railway station.

Here Offa fought a great battle with the Men of Kent. He has my sympathies. A few more miles of the Pilgrims Way (twinned with Brands Hatch) and I’d be ready for Linnell’s wheelbarrow. It’s been a long haul, but we’ve made it to the Darent Valley; now we can head north, back to the Thames.

Our train journeys (reverse commuting) are always unreal. People heading into London are dressed for action, talking compulsively (if in company), unable to sit still if travelling alone. We’re slumped, dirty, silent: if we look out of the window at the flashing suburbs, it feels as if we’re cheating. Train travel is a film for which we haven’t bought a ticket. Otefort . Otta’s ford. The otter is one of the ‘clean’ animals of Zoroastrianism; which, with the dog, it is a great sin to kill. Put aside that grim final hour on the road. Let it be. We’ll be back before Palmer’s hop season is over.

We had been standing for ever, outside the station at Otford, the group of us. A hard moon pinging up and down like a table-tennis ball dancing on a fountain. Day/night, day/night: to the end of time. The death of the cosmos in William Hope Hodgson’s Wellsian fantasy, The House on the Borderland .

We posed for photographs beside the fence: WE’RE WORKING ON YOUR STATION/RAILTRACK. We were a self-conscious restatement of Samuel Palmer’s gang, the Shoreham Ancients; city folk up for a ramble. Too loud. Too early. Too many.

Time was squeezing, closing us down: 27 September 1999. We had three months — three walks? — to make it back to Waltham Abbey and down the Lea Valley to the Millennium Dome. Before the Big Night.

The Darent Valley brought them out of their pits: Kevin Jackson (who had been in strict training, jogging up library steps, marching to the bar) and Marc Atkins, loping towards the ticket machine at London Bridge, at the finely calculated last moment; the depth of stubble on his cranium precisely duplicating that on his chin. Kevin’s leather jacket, which dazzled the payroll boys in the station cafe at Staines, has contracted leprosy. It’s been on manoeuvres. It may, unilaterally, have invaded somewhere hot and dusty. Kevin grins, blinks. Hands in pockets (baggy tracksuit trousers). Trainers instead of boots. Big hair, head on the tilt. ‘Moose’, his friend Peter Carpenter calls him. I can see it, the powerful head as a trophy: nailed to the wall. He’s serious about this walk, serious about cutting back on the reference books. He’s here to be here. To pick up camera tips from Marc.

We’re happy to be heading for the Thames at Dartford. But, even though we’ll be travelling within a few fields of the M25, we are losing its acoustic footprints. The chalk hills, covered in beechwood, will act as a baffle. We have to take the continued presence of the motorway on trust; believing that it won’t let us down. It’ll be there at the finish.

A full moon, analgesic, above a double-camera surveillance pole. Crossed contrails. The pink (of an experimental rabbit’s eye) over Sevenoaks and the Weald. Rain has been promised: hence, my golfing umbrella. I picked it up in Middlesex Street for £ 3. I hate umbrellas, the way they poke at you on narrow pavements; the look of them, mean when furled, dangerous in action. A downpour drove me to it. This umbrella, brought out for the first time, gave a certain bounce to our Otford survey. It was useful for pointing at fancy brickwork, repelling the natives.

The well of St Thomas à Becket is to be found in private grounds. We prowl the boundaries. Renchi attempts conversation with a dog walker who has acquired the full English dog-walking kit: green wellies, shooting jacket (velvet shoulder-patches), Black Forest hat with optional ear flaps. A monster hound, shaggy and sodden, tracks us, barging into our knees, demanding attention.

The town is asleep and therefore as close as it’s going to come to being outside time. Otford and the Darent Valley connect with remembrances of pre-industrial Europe; poplars, gardens with statues and fountains, vineyards, grey walls topped with red tiles. Low hills in soft light. The villa. Roman traces that haven’t been totally obliterated by road and railway.

The duck pond is listed. And the ducks get a food allowance from the parish council. The greengrocer and the chemist have given up, closed down. Countryside hangs on to anything that can be turned into a postcard, but is uninterested in preserving community (though debating it continually, as a way of keeping out disruptive influences, unsuitable immigrants). It works pretty well if you can afford it; if you shop in the Bluewater quarry.

We touch the walls of buildings to dowse for lost heat. St Bartholomew’s Church, with its sharp flints and whitish clunch, ironstone from the Lower Greensand, material cannibalised from Roman middens, is a geological accretion; an expression of place scratched out of the immediate locality. Visitors moon around, in quest of revelation, expecting the unexpected, the previously unnoticed clue. Pevsner descriptions, lists of physical features, dates, methods of construction, don’t help. Old superstitions stay with us. The church as a fixture in time, a place of compulsory attendance: christened, confirmed, married, buried. Heritaged grass squeaks with forgotten voices, clumsy boots tramping over dead faces.

We have to accept the version written on the board. A detached tower stands for an ecclesiastical palace, gifted by Cranmer to Henry VIII. An outsider, such as the poet/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, can take a pile of medieval bricks, an arch or a barn, and give them back to us as an energised version of Chaucer. Riffraff and rentboys supplying the faces. The British have too much respect for antiquity to let it live. We need the strings, the madrigals, the explainers. Superstition draws us to these scars; we circle and poke. Bruce Chatwin quotes Werner Herzog: ‘Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin.’

We’re walking tourists. We pass through landscapes on which we have no claim. We spend money in pubs. We visit the obligatory sights: churches, parks, bunkers, villages with literary or painterly associations. We take photographs. But, alongside the convivial agenda, is a ritual purpose: to exorcise the unthinking malignancy of the Dome, to celebrate the sprawl of London. Historical accuracy is less important, Chatwin asserts on Herzog’s behalf, than ‘authenticity of tone’. The English look ridiculous when they try to do a Kinski, pop-eyed, dirty white suit: the glare of unconsummated narcissism. Marc, who has been known to get his kit off as a performance artist, does his best. Raise your camera and he’ll confront it. But the laugh is just a breath away, the ironic snort.