Leafing through the blue book, moving with the crowd, I make connections. Circuits, haloes, spirals, starbelts: Blake’s Dante orbits or the overlapping spheres of ‘Milton’s track’. Zones that cluster around the ‘Mundane Egg’ (or ‘Shell’). The world through which the spiritual Milton journeys. Wheels. Rings.
‘The sphere of the north heavens aligned to the Pole star touches into spheres of Earth and Sky,’ Renchi writes. Clumps and mounds and ridges and globes. ‘Vortex energy centred… serpentine lanes.’ Here is the road as a hot and angry tongue, cars like sunset coals. ‘The pilgrim following Faustus and Faustus confronting Mephistopheles.’
So I am drawn in, at last, to greet the painter. My response to his work, chat. Renchi as Paradise Pilgrim. The poet Aaron Williamson, who met him for the first time at the ‘Shamanism of Intent’ weekend in Uppingham, was walking through Hampshire. Coming into Selborne in the twilight, he chances on this show. A special night. Dublin faces, who haven’t seen each other in years, reconvene; pick up conversations, left mid-sentence in 1965.
I tell Renchi about my notion of a walk around the M25. He is, instantly, up for it. As the next project. A scheme brokered at the perfect moment. It’s mad enough. It’s inevitable.
On his return from Glastonbury, the second showing of the paintings, Renchi writes:
Being in Glastonbury for a week was brilliant and gave time to explore the old ‘Paradise Line’ which was followed by pilgrims… and has been obscured by housing and factories… At this time of year it was a great joy to walk round the small fields with apple trees in blossom and cows and calves and sheep and lambs grazing beneath. I am still very excited about the M25 post modernist mosaic and I enlisted some interesting leads… about a vibrational device that is being distributed to people in circle around London and a special music played to them at timed intervals! (More on this when we meet.) Also another site of interest near Cockfosters/New Trent – Camelot fields??
We’ll return to Waltham Abbey and wing it from there.
5
Here it begins, the walk proper. No detours. No digressions. We decided to take Waltham Abbey as our starting point, the grave of King Harold, and to shadow the motorway (within audible range whenever possible) in an anticlockwise direction. We wanted, quite simply, to get around: always carrying on from where we left off at the finish of the previous excursion. From now on the road would be our focus, our guide. We’d snatch days whenever we could (when Renchi’s shifts permitted) and get it done before the millennial eve.
On 30 September 1998, we stalked into town. Renchi had been working until 10.40 on the previous night – but he arrived in Hackney by eight a.m. He read the weather as: rain trousers, heavy blue sweater, furry cap with ear-flaps. He spoke of sweat lodge ceremonies based on the number four: sixteen poles, four dances a day for four days.
He is fifty-two years old, grizzled, with a tidy silver beard, a naked scalp. He walks with his wife, every morning. The same circuit. Spurning novelty, giving the mind time to settle; noticing the unnoticeable, tiny shifts in season and climate. The work he does, as a house-parent at Mayor Treloar’s College, is physically demanding; manhandling wheelchairs, sharing the enthusiasms, sulks and piss-takes of a group of teenagers. ‘An enabling education,’ it says in the brochure. Renchi, I imagine, would be good at this.
New Age gypsies, who have been tracking me, town to town through Hertfordshire and Essex, on a counterpilgrimage, have arrived in Waltham Abbey, PSYCHIC FARE (Town Hall, Highbridge Street, Waltham Abbey). A signboard attached to the fence outside a property that doesn’t register on my Nicholson’s map. An absence. There’s nothing there, but you can’t come in: ‘Government Research Establishment’.
A day of locked gates. The abbey was off-limits, a funeral. So we wandered through the orchard, the monastic reservation, circumnavigating drained fish ponds. Nobody knows quite what to do with these green spaces: they’re not enclosed, but access isn’t free. They don’t belong to the town and locals don’t make much use of them as places for contemplation or dog walking. They’re suspended. Visitors can’t crack the behaviour code: are you a temporary believer or a confirmed sceptic? A residue of retreat, monasticism, is still present in whatever remains of the original layout; measured avenues, monuments to the godly or powerful, warm red bricks. But, play the empathy game as much as you will, you can’t escape the song of the road, the mantra of transit. A perpetual cycle of auto-prayer.
From the gardens we see traffic stall as the funeral procession arrives, led by a gleaming black stretch-limo.
Behind the abbey, we hit the meridian line. The local authorities are keen on this abstraction. They want to give it a physical form. The abbey church with its astrological ceiling is working a number with Time and Movement, the Clockwork of the Heavens, the colonisation of zero longitude.
We’ve fallen for it before and we fall for it again. The meridian walk through Cornmill Meadow. I’ve noticed granite pillars lying on the ground, aligned with church, with Greenwich, with zero. I’ve imagined cultists taking zero for their symbol. But now stones, which might have been ignored as glacial detritus, have been erected as markers for a permitted zero longitude pathway. The copywriters of the Lee Valley Park are keen ‘to develop a strategy through which Vision can be made a reality’.
It’s a typically English conceit, the millennial mile. Begin with a grey omphalos on a base of stones and shells, a suncrowned archetypal figure with a letterbox navel (into which requests, questions for the oracle, can be posted). This south-facing man/pillar is like something Renchi might have drawn, in the days when he was supposed to be studying anthropology or comparative religion. (We subsequently discover that the granite blocks once formed part of London Bridge.)
A line runs down the pillar, an apparent crack, marking zero longitude, its long flight across the Southern Ocean. We can see where we are and see what our journey should be, through Suffolk and Norfolk, to the edge of the Wash.
Renchi scoops up a feather, a section of bright orange rubber (an inner tube), a pebble.
The walk we are offered, strategic planting designed to flatter a diminishing perspective, is very seductive: the distant prospect, at the end of a closely mown avenue, of another pillar. It carries us away from the M25, but it’s irresistible. A grassed extension of the Lea. A spirit-path that runs in parallel with the Navigation, the Cornmill Stream.
We identify (or Renchi does and I note it) the call of jay and green woodpecker. But, just as we adjust to the rhythm of the green avenue, it ends; it runs up against another perimeter fence, the earthworks of the Government Research Establishment.
This site – ‘Access for All’ – is the showpiece real estate of the Lee Valley Regional Park Development. One hundred and seventy-five acres of land (‘one of the most secret places in England’) have been thrown open to the public. It’s a great day out. I was there for the postponed (foot-and-mouth) launch on 17 May 2001. And I came straight back, the following weekend, for a family picnic. A haunt of timid deer, a nesting habitat for herons, now available to ticket-buyers for the first time in 300 years. A Paradise Park formerly known as the Royal Gunpowder Mills.
Labourers, searched at the gates for flammable materials, encouraged to work at an easy pace, had lived (and died) here for generations. But the secret didn’t travel. Enclose the wildest wood in the parish, cut your own canals, build a city of sheds, blow up houses, rebuild them, stage underwater detonations, and keep it all under wraps. That mixture of timidity, diluted patriotism and an absence of curiosity, leaves great tranches of Britain unmapped; purpose and practice undisclosed. We respect secrecy. It’s for our own good, in the end. One day, when the research and development has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature, thriving in an exclusion zone, will be promoted and paraded.
The plantation of alder buckthorn through which you can tour, in a carriage tugged by a tractor (areas forbidden to walkers), is gl
ossed as the most effective forestry for producing charcoal. Charcoal, saltpetre, sulphur: gunpowder ingredients. History is the resource. Come off the highway, using the drive-in McDonald’s as your marker; ease over the speed bumps, the sleeping-policemen, and through the new, yellow-brick estate which is being built right up against the fence of the Gunpowder Mills. Pad over the oozy foot-and-mouth cushion and enter this decommissioned nowhere.
There are promotional films (with bangs and flares), interactive games, charts, rescued nitroglycerine trucks – along with helpful guides in scarlet polo-shirts, local-history buffs (as ever) peddling sepia postcards of trams and trains, beekeepers from Enfield with pots of liquid honey.
The story is astonishing. The seventeenth-century watermill that evolves into a factory of death: Trafalgar, Waterloo, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb (you’ve seen the movie). Primitive technology shifts from fireworks and loud noises to stealth planes, non-nuclear explosives and propellants, Gulf War gizmos and guidance systems. Research that is still embargoed. ‘Access for All’, yes, but hard information stays in the files. Post-mortem reports from the Forties will be locked away for years.
From eighteenth-century cottages, through Incorporating Mills, to plantation-style bungalows and anonymous, low-level barrack blocks. The sheds, factories and storage facilities, clustered around Queen Meads, are a village without a war memorial, a cricket pitch. The invariable mix of domestic and sinister: pink, electrical junction boxes on the sides of detached Tudorbethan properties, in which covert research took place. ‘Climactic Test Cubicles’ were constructed in 1951: microclimates suitable for activities that were both jokey and fantastic. A device known as the ‘Master Slave Manipulator’ is photographed as it pours out a cup of tea for a gentleman in spectacles (with loud plaid tie). This performance is located within the ‘X-Ray Bay’ (1968).
The deserted sheds, on an overcast afternoon in early summer, present a melancholy spectacle. Suppressed noise. The clumsy architecture of asbestos, plasterboard, concrete. Slippery decks and verandahs. There are visible wounds, gaps where heavy machinery has been removed. In a restored gallery you come across a display case filled with weapons of war: death kit. Lee Enfield rifles. ‘Stock, magazine, bolt,’ mutters a Cadet Force veteran. Grenades. Bayonets. Machine guns. Antiquated ordnance playing the memory game, busking for sentiment.
Around the walls are hung photographs – from the Gunpowder Mills, from Woolwich, the Midlands – women working in armament factories; women in time of war. Elegant black and white prints. (Men, when you see them, reserved occupations, are sickly, done in, diminished by this army of powerful females.) The presiding mode is dignified surrealism: groups sitting around tables, in poses made familiar by Dutch domestic interiors, by Victorian moral fables, but they’re not weaving, working looms, carding wool, they are filling cartridge belts. In massive sheds (white light from an open door), women with covered hair stand among gleaming shells, an iron harvest. Women, hanging from overhead cranes, float above meadows of lethal toys. Women pose in groups, their uniforms hardworn, functional rather than fetishised.
A pattern of waterways confirms a formal geometry. Fat carp, protected from fishermen, glide through sunken powder boats. The skeletons of these craft are better preserved underwater. Grey ribs beneath the heavy green. Hooped bridges facilitate curved deck canopies (above leather-covered boards). Drained canals, running away from a brick tower, lead the walker towards the woods: a set, blending the pastoral with the industrial, that calls up bleaker Polish and East German settings.
The architecture of disclosed ruins is Neo-Mayan: traverses, blast-deflection walls, railway lines. The Gunpowder Press House with its powered water-wheel, its ivy-covered ramparts, has (according to the brochure) ‘become an icon’. An icon of what? Transition? Erasure? When the mills went up in a spectacular explosion in May 1861, one worker threw himself, blazing, into the pond – and survived. Another man was spotted, lying in the long grass, by the flames rising from his clothes. He died.
The drift through these woods, jolting over rough tracks, induces reverie: angular shapes among the dense branches, sites that are still forbidden. Elements of the megalithic, primitive mounds and encirclements, disguise Crimean War technology. Ziggurat walls, slanted, necrophile, guard a woodland clearing; a village green, known as ‘The Burning Ground’, on which discarded explosives were destroyed. It would be impossible, from this catalogue of post-industrial relics, to work your way back to any culture. This is all that’s left, monuments returned to nature, photographs in a reclaimed shed.
We breakfasted in an Italian place that looked out on Waltham Cross. There is a cross, a nibbled Gaudí pillar, a monument marking the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I. Her body (she died while travelling to Scotland to join the king) was brought back from Harby, Nottinghamshire, for burial at Westminster Abbey. Crosses were erected to witness every stage of this journey.
Webbed-in with protective nets, restored, cleaned to an ivory sheen, the Eleanor Cross is more like a radio mast than an item of funerary sculpture. It’s the focal point of this prolapsed market town: red litter bins, benches for drunks, a pedestrianised precinct (that repels walkers). The original effigies from the Cross, the work of Alexander Abyndome, are now housed in Cheshunt Public Library.
Renchi likes it. He whips out a sketchbook and settles, cross-legged, on a white stone bollard. GOLDSTEIN (FINANCIAL ADVISERS), COFFEE HOUSE: DOLCI, CAFFE, PASTA, FISHPONDS BUDGET SHOWROOMS.
There’s a background buzz of barely suppressed aggression underwriting Renchi’s Ruskinian seizure: civic architecture has got it badly wrong. A semi-circle of scarlet metal benches attracts other transients, strong lager fanciers who have made contact with some of the local barechest boys. A breakfast brew. A bit of a domestic is in progress; raised voices, repetitive insults escalating towards resolution. You can see the coffee-shop women pausing mid-sip, cappuccino moustaches. There’s quite a clique of these ladies in Waltham Cross, with the Italian place as their obvious hangout. Walnut-coloured leisure wives, still steaming from tanning beds. Metallic blondes with vivid nails. Very trim in fiercely pressed jeans.
A doppelganger manifests at Renchi’s shoulder. It’s Renchi himself, ten years older, ten years frostier in the beard. A messenger from the future steps up, loaded plastic bags in hand, nautical cap on head, to adjudicate the drawing. Renchi talks about going beyond preservation (the photograph); he wants more of an exchange with the recorded object. Sketching frees the hand. We listen, sympathetically, to our Ancient Mariner: another paroled artist who has wandered abroad and found his place.
He sets us on our way: charity shops, post-mortem clothes, financial services, stalls stacked with cheap tat. Waltham Cross has a boutique favoured by Victoria Adams (Mrs Beckham, Posh Spice). Tarty with class (the price tag grants respectability to the diamanté thong). Victoria is a local. Visit Waltham Cross and her otherness comes into focus. All the women in the coffee-bar have that hard sheen, the laminate of non-specific celebrity. Interspecies. They look as good as the photographs in the magazines. Their faces are stiff, moving like heavy paper. You can acquire, if you concentrate, follow the regime, a toxicology of fame. A fame cosmetic. Like whacking up the colour balance. Achieving alien status: part ennui, part peevishness, part camera flirtation.
Posh Spice, an odd label for a person, suits this location. It reminds me of the Indian restaurant at Waltham Abbey on millennial eve: exotic, dusky, dangerously perfumed. Victoria Beckham is the future Eleanor Cross. The name of a dumpy, longlived Germanic royal inherited by a whippet-ribbed starveling. Who shops. Who is famous for shopping. Who arrives, incognito, at a modest boutique on the Essex/Herts border: and makes sure that her visit is widely reported.
We don’t spend much time in Cedars Park, or at Temple Bar, we want to get back to the road; to attempt the north side of the M25, a network of paths and rides that go west towards Potters Bar. This area, just outside the motorway, is
a blank: woods, stables, kennels.
The gates of the Western Jewish Cemetery are locked, even though we have arrived within the advertised opening hours. WHEN GATES/ARE CLOSED/ALSATIANS/ARE ON PATROL. What I’m pursuing is the burial place of the Spitalfields scholar and hermit, David Rodinsky. A long quest has been resolved by artist and archivist Rachel Lichtenstein. The haunting story of a locked room, a vanished man, has been grounded. Rachel found a death certificate, the suburban hospital where Rodinsky died, a grave with a metal name-plate. The grave, Rachel said, was near Waltham Abbey. I guessed, since I had passed this place so many times, that the beginning of my new project, the M25 walk, might overlap with my previous one, the Rodinsky story. Time after time, urban obsessions would be resolved at the very point where London lost heat, lost heart, gave up its clotted identity.
The lodge-keeper, skull covered, put us right. This had been an insensitive blunder on my part, the intrusion at the cemetery gates. Today was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; a time for abstinence and prayers of repentance. (Rachel told me that she finished work on her part of the Rodinsky book at 2.30 a.m., on the morning before Yom Kippur.)
The structure of our walk is elegiac: discontinued rituals, closed shrines. The funeral service, the emptied pond. The horse-trough near Theobalds Grove station filled with flower petals. Fenced off monuments and gates that are not gates.
We sit for a time under the Bulls Cross Bridge, watching the tide of traffic, the hallucinatory rush. Listening to the shift in the tyre sounds as the road surface changes, the thunderous amplification of the bridge. Renchi sprawls on hexagonal tiles, white road-dirt in the grooves of his boots.
I read him a quotation from Paul Devereux that seems pertinent: ‘One of the key entoptics is the spiral-tunnel-vortex, which heralds a shift from merely observing the entoptic and iconic imagery to participating in it. There is a sense of the self’s becoming mobile, leaving the body, and rushing down a tunnel or being sucked into the eye of the spiral or vortex… It is with this specific entoptic that the out-of-body or spirit-flight is associated. This entoptic tunnel could be the neurological blueprint for the straight line on the shamanic landscapes.’
London Orbital Page 13
