Fantastic Metropolis

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.

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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.

In the Denham bun shop, Renchi can hardly keep his eyes open, far less make a decision on what kind of cake or biscuit to munch. He was working until eleven o’clock on the previous evening, drinking too much coffee, plotting the day’s walk. The bun shop has a kind of Christmas shrine to the Death of Cinema; red paper spotted with snow, green plastic garlands, framed photos of Patrick Mower and ‘the girl who used to do high kicks on The Generation Game‘. White suits. Pink flesh burnt by the shock of flash photography at some long forgotten premiere. Teeth for the camera. Twinned with Shark Bay. ‘I’m still me. I’m still here.’ The immortality of non-recognition on the wall of an early-morning bakery near a suburban railway station.

 

We follow the Colne to Uxbridge. Renchi has borrowed a pocket recorder. We’ve talked a lot about sound but never cracked it. Long, rambling conversations about how to keep a useful record of what was said. ‘Um, ah, like, you know, yeah, like… right.’ There would be interrogations of persons met on the road. But are no walkers are out and about, no dogs. It’s early and the light is so recessive that my colour prints look like sepia. Steam from the flat roofs of narrow boats. A weak sun caught in a thatch of spindly tees. Lakes, islands. It’s easy to imagine ourselves on Mark Twain’s ‘river road’; we drop to our knees, use that heavy sky to conjure up the Mississippi. (Think: Robert Frank. Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.)

Sound is elusive. No slap of tide, no river romance of clicks and creaks. Our own muted footfalls on worn turf, on trampled mud, splashing through spring puddles.

South. Under the arch of a brick bridge: REPUBLIC NOW. There is no way of accurately recalling Renchi’s monologue (even from notes taken at the time). The recorder, of course, is unused. Cameras can log, sketch, record graffiti, make clumsy portraits. Sound is an element. Like the canal, the motorway. We don’t have the skill, the eavesdropping genius of composer/guitarist Bruce Gilbert (once of Wire). Bruce skulks in pub corners, on station platforms, at obscure locations, sampling; gathering material to construct a sound field. He is an X-ray of Gene Hackman in Coppola’ The Conversation. From units of sound you can make a world, re-edit the past. Put it on a loop. Bruce had long ago cracked the thing we were still struggling with: he learnt how to ‘play the gaps.’

Renchi’s riverbank monologue moves ahead of him, like one of those men with red flags who preceded the first cars: ‘Father’s library… Stukeley, arcane researches… Heathrow as a kind of Avebury… keep the pattern in our heads as we enter that territory.’ In 1723 Stukeley investigated the earthwork known as Shasbury, or Schapsbury or Fern Hill, and pronounced it ‘Caesar’s Camp’. A ditch, earth ramparts. An enclosure, sixty feet square, with points of access at north and south. A diagonal path running through it, to other access points in east and west. Figures, perhaps surveyors, in the foreground. Holding chains. A coach pulled by six horses.

 

The canal’s a soporific. Pylons, lagoons. We push closer to the M25. The strip of tolerated county between road and water is scruffier, fewer estates, more poultry farms. By the time we pass West Drayton, hippies and freebooters are disputing the right to scavenge with Travellers, scrap metal pirates, unlicensed frishmen. You have to tread carefully when you walk these lanes with a camera in your hands. In every off-road junk yard, somebody is watching. Big dogs on small chains.

We see distant Western Avenue, the A40, as a target, a beacon of hope. At Uxbridge we climb up to the road: a taster, a sighting. Electricity Sub-Station: DANGER OF DEATH KEEP OUT. Western Avenue sounds better than it plays; a sluggish trawl of family saloons, company cars, white vans, middleweight haulage shaking itself free of London. Ribbon-development dystopia: before the motorway, Iver Heath, the woods of Langley Park and the descent into Slough.

Uxbridge (a.k.a Wixebrug, Uxebregg) exploits its position, where the Colne and the Grand Union Canal meet Western Avenue. Victorian trade routes. The smoke-coughing trucks that took over from the narrow boats are themselves doomed to oblivion, breakers’ yards between river and motorway embankment. Uxbridge has cornered the market in liminal architecture. (It’s here and not here. Visible, but you don’t see it.) The Battle of Britain was directed from Uxbridge, so the guide book says, by the late Air Marshal Lord Dowding. ‘The town is perhaps noteworthy for its selection of modern and futuristic buildings in a variety of competing styles.’

The buildings along Western Avenue don’t want to be there; they’d prefer Satellite City. Or Las Vegas. Phoenix, Arizona, with Scunthorpe weather. They’d like to be closer to Heathrow’s lingua franca. Mediterranean green glass. Low-level units with a certain lazy elegance. Super-Cannes functionalism interspersed with Fifties grot. The heritaged emblems of an old riverside pub, The Swan & Bottle, have been banished by their corporate operators, Chef & Brewer, to the top of a wooden pole. That stares insolently at the slick shoebox of: X (The Document Company XEROX). The Xerox building is designed to look like office machinery, a shredder or printer. The windows are an enigmatic blue/green. Like chlorine. Xerox, Western Avenue, is a swimming pool on its side; from which, by some miracle of gravity, water doesn’t spill. That’s the concept: intelligent water. X marks the spot. Uxbridge is made from Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with barbed wire.

The Xerox building duplicates itself; come back tomorrow and there’ll be another one, and another. And another. X started out as a narrow four storey column, then multiplied in the night. Horizontal ‘lanes’ of aqueous green glass play with notions of flow and drift, the river captured and tamed. The front elevation, serene as it is, gives me the bends: it’s like looking down from the high board onto an Olympic swimming pool, sun-sparkling lanes, dividing ropes—which, in this case, convert into metaphors of a clean white road. Motorway and canal system seamlessly linked.

Traffic is at a standstill. The bridge over the river, with its red brick parapet, is a sad relic. Workers and drones, in thrall to the glass beehives, plod down Slough Road, towards UXBRIDGE sign. They have their own, end-of-the-Metropolitan-line style; viz., baggy blousons or black puffa jackets worn over lightweight grey suits, brightly polished shoes. They are bareheaded, ballasted by oversize silver attache cases. That is, male and female. Trouser suits, short hair. The women carry a second bag, slung from the shoulder, for personal effects. The attache cases are the kind that turn up on the TV news, left in cabs by Secret State bagmen. ‘Just popped in to Blockbusters to pick up a video and it was gone. The invasion plans. The list of informers.’

Downtown Uxbridge is not a place to search out an acceptable breakfast. We return to the canal path, head south towards Cowley. Now the green-glass buildings are lower, but they spread over a wider area (Terry Farrell’s Aztec M16 temple at Vauxhall squashed flat). Cowley is where Mediparc pretensions devolve into muck yards and low rent trading estates.

TRIMITE (The Printmakers—for Industry). A collection of metal drums in green and various shades of blue; industrial conceptualism. Seven of the drums—one letter on each—spell out the brand name, TRIMITE. They’ve executed this conceit in the style of the popular (with exiles) yeast extract paste, Marmite (‘contains 31 servings’). Red and yellow on a beef-brown background. Fantasies of squat jars with tight lids, all those B vitamins, have me salivating. Breakfast.

Experience proves: where there’s a trading estate and a canal, there’s a caff, a caravan with serving-hatch, a tea stall. It’s a risk worth taking, to detour from our path—fearing that once we come inside the fence we won’t be allowed back to the waterside. More vans than cars. Flat-roofed hutches bodged in asbestos. Print and salvage seem to be the principal trades (along with appearing in cop show TV).

PINKY & PERKY’S CAFETERIA (Phone or Fax Orders Welcome). Grinning pig’s head motif, transfer lettering on every window. The clientele (early shift) is demographically mixed. Suits (jackets on backs of chairs) laying down grease before the office opens. Working men with spider tattoos, oil scored into the pores of large hands. They seem happy to share this space, which is clean (yellow Formica, red bucket-chairs). The all-day breakfast floats on my hub cap of a plate like a relief map of London and the Thames Valley. Greensand, oolite, chalk. The bubble and squeak of Enfield Chase, bacon ridges of the Chilterns, rubbery fried egg of the Dome, sausage of the North Downs, bean swamp of Dagenham and Purfleet.

 

The Cowley Lock and the Cowley Peachey Junction have a particular interest for me. As far as the Grand Union Canal is concerned, Cowley marks the end of a 27 mile ‘pound’ and the start of the ascent to the Colne Valley and the Chiltern Hills. In more leisurely times, The Paddingon Packet used to ply the 15 mile, lock-free stretch between Cowley and Paddington, pulled by four horses.

The anarchist and libertarian graffiti of the Colne Valley shares the concrete with dopers and slackers and sticky adolescents.

I WAS ERE SMOKIN WEED
I WAS ERE             BUT NOW
I’M NOT ROUND THE CORNER
SMOKING POT I’M WRITING THIS
TO PROVE A POINT BUT UTER SHIT
WITHOUT A JOINT

In another hand, the critical riposte: YOU SUCK COCK. Princess Di is memorialised by twin hearts and a question mark. A great red cock, Basquiat hot, spurts blood. A fleshy lighthouse tower floating on a savage sea. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME…

Low clouds part, rain in the air. Sunbeams scintillate on ruffled water. The smooth curve of a brick bridge, the Cowley moorings. There is none of the jaunty Notting Hill communalism here, decanted Sixties street warrens. The agenda is quieter, more serious. Boat people keep their heads down, mind their own business—which is often survival (the new subversion). One of the true British poets of the last half-century lived in Cowley, tactfully removed from the scene, carrying out his researches, a rate of production (a bibliography of ‘about four hundred’ items) that would shame any of our logophile novelists. Booklets flow from the grizzled (and exiled) Bill Griffiths with the regularity of newsprint. He avoids publication dates on many of his self-produced chapbooks. There’d be no point. He revises, reissues, amends, sticks on a new cover. Bill’s poems require time codes like video tape. He brings out more editions, so it seems, than the Evening Standard.

I wrote to Bill, when he was staying in London, cataloguing the Eric Mottram archive (a monster task), and asked about his time in Cowley.

Now, as to the Grand Union, he replied, I can tell you much or little. It was one of the last canals to be built, unifying the country’s canal system into an Orion-like configuration (now the Kennet Avon is reopened, it literally spans from Thames to Severn Estuary as well as north to south). North of Uxbridge I am not too sure about; the settlement tends to get thicker around Uxbridge itself, and I was based at Cowley, about 2-3 miles south of Uxbridge, where there is a lock, a couple of bridges and a few coveted residential moorings. Near there too is the ‘Slough Arm’, an extra limb of water, which I used in ‘Rabbit Hunt’ and which is notable for the banks of refuse from Central London deposited there in the early C20^th.

The critic Kevin Jackson, visiting Griffiths at Seaham on the Durham coast, locates the poet as existing in ‘about the most cheerless Spartan dwelling I’ve seen since I stopped hanging around with graduate students.’ In other words, a beached narrow boat. A terraced cabin in a sea-coal settlement, a few miles south of Sunderland. The only incongruous item in this brick coaster was a grand piano. Griffiths, Jackson reveals, is a virtuoso. ‘He tells me he’s been playing since the age of three and, just before I left to catch my train, underwrites the claim by running effortlessly through a complex little piece by Bartok, LOVE and HATE rippling along the keyboard so swiftly that they begin to blur.’

Fading Hell’s Angel tattoos on the cuticle-chomped digits of a softly-spoken man: LOVE / HATE. Bill wheezes, enjoys a roll-up. Beneath all that scholarship—stately build disguised under lumberjack shirt and baseball cap—is a man of the river. Dr Griffiths fits very comfortably into the ruled margins of the Cowley moorings. A boat-dweller who hunts rabbits.

As someone who has survived a number of rackety voyages with percussionist and sound-pirate Paul Burwell, and other less competent skippers, I can vouch for the accuracy—and wit—of Bill’s Conradian scripts. Place gets at poet. The structure has to encompass sea shanty, camp fire yarn, hero tale; the hiss and spit of masterless men, rogue spirits who passed through Cowley. In the upheaval of the English Civil War, discharged soldiers, freelance prophets, took to the roads. There were meetings, debates; chapbooks and pamphlets were produced and distributed. Dissent worked its way around the western fringes of the capital; Enfleld, Iver, Kingston, Weybridge, Cobham. Griffiths’ associates, his tribal connections (from Hell’s Angels to the narrow boat survivalists), are aligned with traditions of independence, the freedom to roam and rant. In the shadow of grandiose civil engineering projects, scavengers camp out like seventeenth-century Diggers. In his letter, Bill spoke of ‘a family with houseboat and own view onto waste land near Heathrow’.

What is shocking, if not surprising, given the tight politics of the poetry franchise, the indifference of the world at large to language and imagination, is how inadequately Bill Griffiths’ work is known. He hasn’t, it’s true, solicited attention. The trajectory of life and career from biker youth, through a period as ‘guest worker’ in Germany, to the burning boat and the decamping to County Durham, remain a private matter; the ordinary accidents, as he would have it, of a life lived. Griffiths received the support of Professor Eric Mottram and the ever-enthusiastic polemicist Jeff Nuttall, but the broadsheets were otherwise engaged, proud of their bottomless ignorance. A collection that appeared from Paladin was very soon pulped and forgotten. The hundreds of chapbooks, the leatherbound volumes, the hand-coloured variants, pass around a small band of enthusiasts. This is a craftsman, a scholar capable of reinvigorating the language; a master of the weights and units of breath.

Reading the selection of Griffiths’ poetry that Clive Bush gathered for the anthology, Worlds of New Measure (1997), I began to superimpose those radical songs (“Troops, curfews, and reason”) onto the Colne Valley, our march towards Heathrow. Thirteen Thoughts as though Woken at Dawn by 150 Policemen in Riot Gear With Helicopter and Film Back-Up… Wandsworth (‘a turbulent river an offer of valium’). Star Fish Jail… The Hawksmoor Mausoleum.

Was it legitimate to read that decade of samizdat publication (1965-1975), poetry wars, readings above pubs or in disestablished chapels, as in any way analogous to the outpourings of the Dissenters (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters) in the years after the English Civil War (1646-1656)? Much of the dissenting rhetoric, a country on the cusp of republicanism, had the same primitive, Biblical, improvisatory meld of speech. Paragraphs were urgent and energised. With knowledge of coming defeat? Accepted truths were interrogated. Earth magic and antinomianism argued a rationale for independence, the overthrow of a Leviathan state of priests and landowners and kings.

At Packet Boat Lane, we came away from the tow path, twitchy to make contact with a road that went over the motorway, where a (disused) branch of the Grand Union Canal passed under it. The tarmac had broken up into sticky black granules, like a porridge made from coal. Tough spikes of grass pushed through the mantle. I lay, curved to the camber, to take a photograph; and would, if I could, have swum away to the west. The sounds of the road, as the M25 approached the tangled interchange with the M4, were compulsive; as complex and as many-voiced as a Bill Griffiths poem. A sound that was its own score.