London Orbital - Iain Sinclair

Towards the end of London Orbital, Iain Sinclair concludes “The M25 goes nowhere; it’s self-referential, postmodern, ironic. Modestly corrupt, it won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over.”

And there was I thinking it was just a road.

That quote, though, hints at the layer upon layer of symbolism, history, politics and art that Iain Sinclair creates and discovers in this furious, fascinating, multifaceted book. What starts as a walk around a road ends as a journey into the psyche of modern Britain.

Not that he starts with such an intention. His first impulse was to exorcise the Millennium Dome and all it stood for. “This unmagical orbit,” he says, referring to the motorway “is the absolute contrary of the Dome”. For one thing, it instantly exceeded its quota of users. The Dome, on the other hand is a “Teflon meteorite,” an “obscene fungus.” It stands, in Sinclair’s mind, for all the shallow newspeak and gesture politics of New Labour. The M25, despite its grimness, is real and useful. The marginal land within its acoustic footprint can reveal more about the nation than any stage-managed national celebration.

To test this hypothesis, Iain Sinclair – poet, novelist, chronicler of unseen London – embarked on a series of one-day walks. Starting in September 1998, and ending up on Millennium Eve 1999, he worked his way up the Lea Valley and then methodically anticlockwise round the orbital motorway from Waltham Abbey in Essex. This book is his account of that vast circuit. Does it sound boring? It’s anything but.

Because Sinclair brings to the walk a wealth of knowledge, research and just a little madness. His choice of walking partners too, adds further dimensions, connections and digressions. Joined at various times by photographers and journalist friends, his almost constant companion is Laurence ‘Renchi’ Bicknell - artist and mystic.

Renchi acts as a kind of spirit guide – plugging Sinclair into the ley lines and green lanes that lurk beneath the suburban surfaces. He is also the link to the kind of artist that Sinclair admires: the conceptual types who, like him, take the tawdry reality of everyday life and point out what lies beneath. This fits in well with the concern of the book with the peripheral, the marginal. Sinclair’s thesis is that the centre is dead: the interesting, subversive things are happening on the edge.

The people he interviews and quotes in the course of his trek are similarly edgy. They’re criminals, eco-protesters, graphic novelists and painters, writers such as J G Ballard. Their responses may be different, but what they share is an awareness of the corruption at the heart of the establishment. Sinclair scatters examples of this throughout the book: whether it’s the seedy links between planning councillors and the developers of housing schemes on toxic land at Enfield Lock, or the older, equally shady story of how the government acquired the land for Heathrow Airport.

Another uniting theme is madness – appropriate as outer London is fringed with former lunatic asylums, most of which Sinclair visits, only to find them being demolished to make way for swanky housing developments. And of course, many of these establishments once housed poets and artists of the sort admired by Sinclair. Now their histories are being erased, and he mourns this loss.

A related idea to which he returns is that of fugue. This, like several of his key words, had me reaching for the dictionary (it means a form of amnesia which is a flight from reality). Sinclair does not patronise. The book deals with many people I’ve never heard of, tackles concepts which baffled me. But I prefer a book that stretches me sometimes. So I now have an idea what ‘liminal’, ‘chthonic’ and ‘entoptic’ mean: all relate to ideas about surfaces and consciousness and what lies beneath them: exactly what this book is really about.

Before you go thinking that sounds like a lot of pretentious guff, it has to be said that Sinclair roots his ‘psychogeography’ in a love of grubby, even banal reality. As he suggests when he sums up the elements of a good day’s walking:

“(1) a section of river or canal, (2) a Formica-table breakfast, (3) a motorway bridge, (4) a discontinued madhouse, (5) a pub, (6) a mound, (7) a wrap of London weather (monochrome to sunburst), (8) one major surprise.”

Such grittiness is reflected in his sympathy with the dispossessed, with historical figures like the Diggers who fought to keep common land out of the hands of private landowners. Walking though the private security-guarded estates of leafy Surrey, he makes mocking comparisons with self-styled ‘working class heroes’ like John Lennon who sequestered themselves in their Weybridge mansions. He despises the soulless capitalism of ‘retail landfill’ developments like Bluewater and Lakeside, while he marvels at the futuristic nothingness of Surrey’s Siebel building. He hymns the A13, apparently without irony:

“Unlisted, this is one of Europe’s great roads. Drainage channel on one side, landfill on the other. Filthy lorries, trucks, vans trying to shove you into the ditch. A stench of unbelievable complexity: necrotic, polluted, maggotty, piscine. Magnificent.”

That quote also gives a flavour of Sinclair’s staccato, incantatory prose style. He’s a lover of the found phrase: the graffito, the handmade sign, the newsagent billboard. He says these boards fascinate him: “Anonymous poetry, urgent and anxious. Banishment of definite and indefinite articles. Present tense. Absence of lower-case lettering. It was a style to which I aspired.”

And he largely succeeds. One- and two-word sentences litter the book like the random ideas, images and connections that pop into his mind. Occasionally he becomes more expansive and drops in the odd semicolon, making the pace by turns brisk and meditative.

I kept a road atlas open to guide me along his route. Less easy to keep track of were the countless digressions and extended riffs. But they comprise the true journey in this book: a bracing and dazzling exploration of a city, a nation and a mind.

Paperback edition published by Penguin Books 2003
577pp. £7.99