Diggers March on Uxbridge
Author’s note: “Diggers March on Uxbridge” is an edited extract from a book that Granta will publish in September 2002. The book is called: London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. It’s a rough and tumble account of an expedition undertaken by lain Sinclair (and the painter Renchi Bicknell) around London’s orbital motorway (in the ‘acoustic footprints’). The notion was: exorcise the malign influence of the Millennium Dome by undertaking a 120 mile pilgrimage. We started at the shabby tent on Greenwich peninsula, marched up the line of zero longitude to Waltham Abbey (burial place of King Harold), then took off in a counterclockwise direction. Arriving back at Waltham Abbey, just in time to retrace our steps down the towpath of the Lea; to drink to the Dome’s downfall—on the millennial eve.
IN THE SOUTHWEST corner, I’m as far as I’m going to be from Hackney. By the end of the day there’ll be almost as much driving as walking. 3 March 1999: Staines station. Another of our two car relays. The plan is to take the motorway back to Denham, leave one car there and begin the walk—which will carry us, along with the Colne, through an impossibly clotted landscape, to the green/brown barrier of the Thames.
It’s a 5.30 a.m. start in Albion Drive. And Marc Atkins doesn’t make it. Seduced by the promise of motorway junctions, Heathrow, reservoirs, the whole J.G. Ballard psychoclimate, Marc was about to rejoin the tour. He did a lot of book jackets but didn’t, so far as I know, read novels. He made a few exceptions: Ballard’s Crash was one of them. If he mentioned Crash it was by way of a hint that I might learn to fashion shorter, crisper sentences. I might experiment for once and try for narrative, pages that could be turned without a forklift truck. Night roads. Sex. Driving. He was fed up with pedestrianism: of concept, prose, action.
I hung on as long as I could. I tried Marc’s mobile. It was off. Always protective of his private space, mysterious in his shifting alliances, Marc had gone to ground. Self-tagged (cellphone, fax, video), the system only worked when it was switched on. I had to make the rendezvous with Renchi, who swam through currents of plural time, but was never late for a meet at the start of one of our walks.
The thing that pissed me off about Marc’s failure to show was that he would have captured some great images of this drive through the Heathrow hinterlands. There was a full moon. A morning of high, wild clouds, fast changes. Planes skimmed the road. You couldn’t help being drawn into the tremble, the jet roar, the throb of traffic streaming in every direction. M4, M25, A4, A30; slip roads, link roads, trunk roads, deleted coach roads. 200,000 vehicles a day used the section of the M25 between Junctions 13 and 14. Ballard was absolutely right: if you set aside human interference (a.k.a life), London was a mausoleum. Kensal Green Cemetery with the walls knocked down. Pompous monuments, redundant public buildings, trash commerce, heritage tags. Oxford Street was a souk. Chafing Cross Road a gutter.
The city, in its Victorian overcoat, the muck of centuries on its waistcoat, bored Ballard. He promoted this new place, the rim. The ‘local’ was finished as a concept. Go with the drift, with detachment. The watcher on the balcony. Areas around airports were ecumenical. They were the same everywhere: storage units, hangers, satellite hotels, car hire companies, apologetic farmland as a mop-up apron for Concorde disasters. If you see the soul of the city as existing in its architecture, its transport systems, its commerce and media hot spots, then Ballard’s championship of the suburbs is justified. But they’re not really suburbs if they don’t feed on the centre. The Heathrow corridor has declared its unilateral independence, that’s what makes it exciting. The abdication of responsibility and duty; glossy goods, ennui, scratched light.
London for Michael Moorcock, Ballard’s New Worlds editor and colleague, lived in memory and human traffic. That was the heart of the argument between two veteran writers. However dim and dirty the buildings, however sleazy the political games, Moorcock would identify a special spirit: the London mob. The outsider, the dope fiend, the alien. Sentiment, delivered with such gusto, such knowledge of the streets and moves, coheres and remains a powerful motor for fiction. But Moorcock, despite the many licences he inherited over the years, doesn’t drive. Doesn’t want to drive. This early morning spin down the Colnbrook Bypass is not for him. In earlier times, well insured (for the sake of the kids), he dealt with car-cramps and the dullness of the suburbs, by climbing onto the roof, feeling the wind in its hair; riding out of London like one of his Viking champions.
Staines railway station was a county affair—with too much action, too many parked cars. A decorous brick building with uncertainly heritaged globe lights, corporate logos, warnings, prohibitions, ticketing machines.
Renchi, muddy boots in hand, is waiting alongside a widescreen hoarding: ULTRA EFFECTIVE / SMOKING KILLS. In his stocking cap and libertarian red scarf, he’s a Digger, a travelling saint of the 1640s. The Silk Cut illustration is a beauty: a turnip-head archer, a scarecrow shaman in a ploughed field. The scarecrow is nailed to a spindly cross, straw feet don’t touch the ground. Gloved hand on drawstring. Slit-eyes watchful. A crow killer guarding the painted landscape that Renchi is about to enter. Archer as straw man. Archer crucified. The prophecy of Staines: DON’T MAKE THEM BREATHE YOUR SMOKE.
We drive back to Denham, another station, deeper countryside. DENHAM TWINNED WITH SHARK BAY WESTERN AUSTRALIA. In 1939 J. Arthur Rank (the Yorkshire Methodist who leased his name as a rhyming slang term for the act of self-pleasuring) bought Denham Studios, the largest in Britain, from Alexander Korda—who failed to duplicate the international success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The Prudential Assurance Company lent him the money to build Denham Studios. A none too prudent investment. Korda folded. Rank developed a production and distribution base. Rank (dim product, sharp management) went global. They acquired a quarter share in the US company Universal, which gave them the distribution rights to glitzy Hollywood product. They purchased off-highway real estate, Pinewood, Denham. They took over the Odeon chain of suburban cinemas and the Gaumont British circuit (which included, as part of the package, Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios). Rank, a late-flowering of the Dissenter tradition that had once flourished in the Chiltern and Hertfordshire villages, was also a forerunner of coming multinational capitalism. The old tracks and paths that, for a few years during and after the English Civil War, allowed tinkers, visionary herdsmen, disaffected mechanics to roam, preach, discuss, debate, became the super highways of petrol/burger culture.
