Common land, which Cobbett in his Rural Rides (1853) found to be nothing but ‘nasty strong dirt upon a bed of gravel… a sample of all that is bad and villainous’, had once, thanks to abundant sources of manure (human and animal), been fertile and productive. Wagons taking produce into London returned with a ballast of horse dung.
What happened, in 1943, when the Air Ministry began to evict the people of Heathrow, to tear down farms and cottages, can be interpreted as a standard Orwellian exercise: obfuscation, emollient lies, bureaucratic steamroller, oblivion. Philip Sherwood, searching Air Ministry cabinets for photographic material to illustrate his history, stumbled on files dealing with the development and compulsory purchase of land (under wartime regulations).
Sherwood writes:
The claim has always been made that Heathrow was developed as a result of an urgent need for the RAF to have a bomber base in the London area. The files in the PRO show that there never was such a need and the airfield was regarded from the start as being a civil airport for London. The War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval for the development… The Defence of the Realm Act 1939 was used by the Air Ministry to requisition land and to circumvent the public enquiry that would otherwise have had to be held.
Harold Balfour (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Air between 1938 and 1944) is breathtaking in his arrogance. Sherwood quotes a 1973 autobiography. Balfour, by then, was Lord Balfour of Inchrye. ‘Almost the last thing I did in the Air Ministry of any importance was to hi-jack for Civil Aviation land on which London Airport stands under the noses of resistant Ministerial colleagues. If hi-jack is too strong a word I plead guilty to the lesser crime of deceiving a cabinet Committee.’
Emergency wartime powers were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial deals, a major airport that was only fifteen miles from the centre of London. Much follows from the original deception. It was suggested that an airstrip had to be laid out for the transportation of troops to the Far East, when it was known that this would never be necessary and that, in any case, there were other airfields that could quite easily undertake the operation.
‘We took the land,’ Balfour boasts. ‘Hiroshima killed Phase Two (troop transport). London Airport stands.’
To the innocent, those who prefer to believe that government is always right, there is nothing very shocking in this fix. It worked. An unimportant village disappeared. Fairey Aviation, who had run an aerodrome on the chosen site, were put out of business. Bullying letters with official stamps. Compensation boards that moved with Kafkaesque torpidity. The English way. Perimeter land was tolerated for several very clear purposes: to stack the mentally inadequate, to build golf courses, to board cats and dogs, to hide toxic industries, to dump landfill and to provide bunkers, research stations and safe houses for the Secret State.
The chicanery that converted a convenient strip of ground into the madness of Europe’s busiest airport was an unexceptional piece of business. It had all happened before, in London, when the railway stations were built. Now it was the turn of the complacent country folk who got their living from trade with the city. Whingeing yokels. Serial sentimentalists. Couldn’t they appreciate the economic benefits, the cultural connections? American hotels with room service and mini-bars, instead of crusty old coaching inns.
Perhaps the original planners had an instinct for the sacred geometry of Heathrow. Measurement and surveying were always the metaphors. Three men linked by chains. A ditched field. The pattern of early settlement revealed by aerial photography. A temple of the stars.
The brick and flint church of St Mary in Harmondsworth is notable for its Norman doorway. The church, of course, is locked. But the famous tithe barn, restored, pretty much cased in perspex, is still on show: HARMONDSWORTH INVESTMENTS, XYPLEX. Neat gravel drive. Fake gas lamp standards. Coach house as office. Tall yew hedge. The corporate spread of Surrey demands its heritage tokens. Efficiency and pedigree: old but clean. Air-conditioned Elizabethan. Tithe barn with IT power lines. Miss Marple’s church and pub and village green: ten minutes from an international airport.
The Green Way slants across a recreation ground at the precise angle that keeps it in parallel with the M25. I’ll forgive Balfour all his machinations for leaving us with this definitively unresolved track between worlds, topographies. To our left – kill the scream of the jumbos – is a swoop of green; a lush crop contained by low-level industrial units, the Heathrow sliproad. A curving chainlink fence with the obligatory paraphernalia: photo-voltaic scanners, surveillance towers, radio masts. We’re in the sound spiral of the flight path, the drone of traffic. We’re on camera, obviously, the only figures in a wide-sky landscape. There are no tall buildings, nothing that might knock the wheels from a Boeing.
When our path abandons us, without warning, on the A4 (the Colnbrook Bypass), it’s disorientating. This is flags-of-all-nations hotel territory: Sheraton, Heathrow Park (aka Alamo). Stars and stripes on the highest pole. People (J.G. Ballard, Jean-Luc Godard) have discovered eroticism in the conjunction of hotel and airport. This, I suppose, would be the ‘rubber insulated sex’ that the judge at the first Archer trial found so distasteful. Anonymity. Processing plants through which faceless couples pass without leaving a trace. A sound-baffled cell. A power shower. Neutral ground. Oblique glimpses, through gauze, of aircraft on the runway.
The concessionary buses (‘Courtesy Service’) that shuttle customers into the Alamo look like ambulances. German transport to an American hotel. A hard road to cross.
Pulling west, down a vestigial trace of the old Bath Road, we recover a taste of what was lost when Heathrow (the village) turned into landfill. A run of deep-England gardens, thatched wishing wells, early season blooms, determined to ignore the incursions of an international airport. This is a notion as perverse as Derek Jarman’s rock garden in the lee of the nuclear power station, the off-channel gales of Dungeness. Windows shudder, tiles are threatened. Any day now a brick of frozen shit, a lump of aircraft debris, a falling asylum seeker, will crash through the roof. But, with leaded panes, net curtains, white doors, beds of hardy perennials, carpet-sized lawns, the rustic fantasy thrives. You can’t hear yourself speak, the flow of traffic is continuous and agitated. The quirkily local is asserted in the teeth of the architectural Esperanto of Heathrow’s expanding purlieus.
On a bridge over a tributary of the Colne, stamped with a brightly gilded crown from the reign of William IV (1834), we watch an airbus skid over the protective fence of the Western Perimeter Road. Heathrow is its own city, a Vatican of the western suburbs. London flatters itself in insisting on the connection. The airport complex with its international hotels, storage facilities, semi-private roads, is as detached from the shabby entropy of the metropolis as is the City, the original walled settlement. They have their own rules, their own security forces, the arrogance of global capitalism. They service Moloch in whatever form he chooses to reveal himself; they facilitate drug/armament, blood/oil economies.
Negotiating Stanwell Moor Road, with the Colne and the elevated M25 to our right, we hit one of those passages where the Green Way is swallowed and overridden by furiously competing narratives. Dwarfish lighting poles, bright yellow cruciform structures (flight-path indicators) in roadside fields. Planes coming in at various heights. The vibrations shake our skeletons, loosen fillings. The madness of this pilgrimage through a landscape that challenges or defies walkers is a pure adrenalin rush. At the big roundabout, the blue and white sign – M25 – is a holy relic on our Milky Way. Renchi, resting at the verge, cross-legged, hood up, contemplates the vortex: planes, vans, airport buses. Tremendous discriminations of noise.
If you want a severed community (cut off and proud of it), try Stanwellmoor. Airport access roads on two sides, M25 and King George VI Reservoir on the others. Rabbit killers, poachers, dealers in whatever can be shaken loose from Heathrow (definitively misdirected luggage), Stanwellmoor has them all. Living in an easygoing, freebooters’ paradise,
under the flight path; under the tons of stored water. I like what there is of it, a couple of dozen houses and two pubs. The first is open, but won’t feed us.
‘Do you do food?’
‘Yes, but not this week. Kitchen’s closed.’
We plod on. At the roadside, in a wire cage, is a notable collection of broken plaster statuary: praying hands, decapitated madonnas, oyster shells, tortoises. Renchi fishes out a draped, classical figure – Minerva? – and poses, his large bearded face in place of her missing head. The white of the plaster has worn away, revealing runs of terracotta that look like roadkill. I dip for trophies, shoving a few amputated limbs in my rucksack for replanting in Hackney.
The Hope Inn, oxymoronic, is nicely situated on the moor’s edge; a friendly, but essentially hopeless enterprise. Asserting its humanity in a place that has no use for it. Remove the Hope Inn to somewhere between Winchelsea and Dymchurch, give it a pedigree as a haunt of smugglers, and it might work. Ploughing through a ploughman’s mighty roll, washed down with cider, I understand why the Industrial Revolution succeeded: ploughmen were doubled over with stomach cramps, mouths gummy and snag-toothed. The quantity of this lunch-time treat is overgenerous, a brick of orange cheese, a tub of onions and pickles on a bed of lettuce (the size of rhubarb leaves).
Rain is jabbing at the moor. It’s comfortable in here; genial folk hitch themselves on to stools, nobody bothers much about two gently steaming walkers with massive packs. I stretch the break with a dried-out cigar, take it with me when we move on, down the Bonehead Ditch. Along the embankment of the King George VI Reservoir.
We agree: this is the most inspiring section we have so far encountered on our M25 orbit. The road keeps its distance. We can hear it, but we’re closer to the spirit of the Colne as it wriggles across Stanwellmoor.
How could you get a car on to this path? Reservoir on one side, Bonehead Ditch on the other. And here is a burnt-out shell, on its back, scaly with rust; the kind of trophy joyriders leave in Epping Forest. With a POLICE AWARE notice.
Renchi decides to go through the fence, to climb the slope to the reservoir. Burdened with broken statuary, Nicholson’s map, spare sweater and water bottle, I don’t follow him. I photograph his progress – as he turns into a chalk figure, cousin to the Long Man of Wilmington. Red scarf tossed by the wind, pitched against clouds, he looks heroic. What he sees, the mystery of dark water, is not revealed – until I come back, in the summer, to do some filming. Even in my snapshots, you find something that announces: Big Subject. Thunder skies pressing on an inland sea (a Soviet-style secret); concrete fence posts dividing the unwalked reservoir fringe from the lush yellow slopes of the embankment. It’s like working your way around a Dorset earthwork – and still being in sight of Heathrow. Thomas Hardy or John Cowper Powys cohabiting with J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon. Land, where it is forbidden, is also preserved: the reservation reserves time, that which is unviewed becomes the ultimate view. The recognition of a dream place.
After the taboo-defying vision, the Green Way ties all the loose ends together: Colne, pylons, Staines Bypass. On the rough wall of the dual-carriageway underpass is an arrow and a strange graffito: INIT ILAND. Cockney paraphrase of Inuit? Green weed in swift-flowing water. Our track winds its way through the dormitory estates of Staines. We’ve made it, the town, the railway station. The car.
Ad Pontes, the Romans called it: a place of bridges, over the two rivers, Thames and Colne. There was once a stone, in a meadow beside the bridge, known as the London Stone, said to mark the western limit of the jurisdiction of the City of London over the Thames. The back story has been quietly buried, tidied away into a museum around the side of the (discontinued) town hall. A few main street pubs peddle their pedigree. Staines is best known these days as the fictional base for the comedic celebrity, Ali G. A branded look: dark aviator glasses, sock-hat, male jewellery, white as black. A voice, innit?
The market element of the Roman town is still present in a scatter of sweet stalls and a lorry dispensing fruit and veg. The museum boasts of Staines as the world capital for the manufacture of linoleum. That’s about it.
A statue of Queen Victoria, a war memorial angel that everyone (including me) photographs, access to the Thames path. For the first time, since we lost sight of the Millennium Dome, we’re back with the river: in all its sovereign dignity. The sun is going down behind the bridge, the familiar sludge-coloured waters, running smooth and swift, are fired. Like a petrol spill. We stand at the point where the weary Colne rushes under a footbridge and into the main stream, the Thames.
On another day, we might have plunged into the water. The Swan Hotel, with its sloping lawns, looks inviting. Reality inhibits instinct: we trudge, through evening traffic, back to the station.
The shamanic archer has vanished. In the course of our day’s walk, the Silk Cut poster has been papered over. Scarecrow, smoke warning, fields: deleted.
Diggers & Despots
Cutting the Corner,
Staines to Epsom
1
Picking my way early through Shepherd’s Bush: 26 May 1999. Associated as it is with stop/start journeys out of town – the grot-shock of the Green – this is not an area with which I’m comfortable. I’ve never walked it, other than rapid hikes through Popular Book Centres on my way down to the original Any Amount of Books in Hammersmith. I came here recently to interview J.G. Ballard for a book I was doing on Cronenberg’s film of Crash. Ballard weekends in the borough. It’s as close as he wants to come to London.
I took the wrong road, involved myself in an unnecessary detour, a swing past Fortress BBC in White City. I was looking for a side street, a right-hander off Wood Lane. The conjunction of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, Westway and the White City estates struck me as a convenient accident of civic planning. Empty-headed fools, heading for the TV studios, drive through here with their windows down, flashing conspicuous expenditure in the form of a Rolex. Masochists blabber on cell-phones. East Acton to White City (desolate rat runs between Westway and the Uxbridge Road) is bandit country. I was fortunate, it was first light. The bandits were sleeping it off. And, in any case, as was obvious to the most shortsighted teenage toller: I was unreconstructed Swatch Man in a twelve-year-old motor. An ex-drug dealer BMW with one active headlamp and moss emphasising the rectangle of the sunroof.
Now that our orbital walk had crossed the river and – if you included the Lea Valley opener – reached its halfway point, I made the mistake of talking about it. A journalist (autodidact, radio producer, scriptwriter, assembler of micro-books that come in alphabetically arranged units) thought he might be able to punt a piece, written while accompanying us on the next leg of the journey. Kevin Jackson, in his day, had wallpapered most of the broadsheets: Blake, Ruskin, Humphrey Jennings, Anthony Burgess, Surrealism. You hum it, he’ll play it: Alan Moore, Bill Griffiths, a photographer called Richard Heeps who chased the Greenwich Meridian Line across Cambridge-shire. Jackson tags Heeps as working ‘the old Modernist Project of Making It Strange’. If there is anything stranger than camping (without coercion) in the triangulation between the West-way, Scrubs Lane and Harrow Road, I don’t want to know about it.
Kevin uses his West London property as a bibliophile’s crash-pad. He lives elsewhere. With his interests, the need to hit libraries on a daily basis, do jokes in Greek and Latin, eat competitive dinners, it was inevitable that he’d return to Cambridge. He acts as generous patron to the sort of troop Sandy Macken-drick assembled for The Ladykillers. Undiscovered geniuses of the city, free (for a time) to pursue arcane researches or compose intricately layered epics set in suburban hinterlands. The bathroom was an unrequired extra. The fridge contained a pot or two of outdated yogurt.
The bell doesn’t ring. Kevin’s house is posthumous, dead in the definitive way East Acton houses die: theoretical tenants come and go, you never see them. The front door is a coffin lid. This byway is a Prozac dormitory, a self-referential nexus feeding on a busy through-road. In
East London it would be squatted. And the hallway decorated with hanging bicycle parts. Alongside Wood Lane you have invisible Crusoes, let go by Radio 3; decent souls enduring an exile at the limits of the possible (where the Central Line loses contact with the centre).
6.15 a.m. The figure at the upstairs window is Kevin Jackson. Dressed and ready. He’s been waiting there all night. Tall, quite sturdy, with a full head of hair. Bounding downstairs and out of the door, he employs a manly handshake. I’m not convinced that Wardrobe have come up with the optimum outfit for a hike through the Surrey countryside on a warm day. If you spotted Kevin, hanging about the bus stop near TV Centre, you might guess: alpha male from Blake’s Seven – a British lead with Californian aspirations. Wardrobe has gone with Sam Shepherd leather (improperly distressed). Combat veteran. This can perform, coupled with circular (Dr Strange-love) spectacles, quite effectively on a filigree-featured miniature like Tom Cruise. Kevin is no miniature; he’s the proper size for an English gentleman, head and shoulders above the mob.
This overload of culture references, film titles, anecdotes, fits the man. He’s lived in America, labouring on (unmade) scripts with Paul Schrader. He’s worked with an Oscar-winning documentary director. He’s edited and written episodes of The Archers. He’s visited Ballard in Shepperton (New Worlds fan from the age of eleven). He’s just back from Scotland. On his way to…
Kevin is the freelance’s freelance. Whatever hours you burn – essays in New York, reviews in London, radio, TV, presentation, production, small press squib, large press remainder – you sink a little deeper each year. It never comes in as fast as it goes out. Success kills you. Copy is edited on the phone as you wait for the next appointment. You review your own reviews. A day on the hoof is just what Kevin needs – but he’s lumbered himself with having to write as he walks. He’s doing a photography course and a Latin course and he’s dropping out of social anthropology. By the time we reach the M4, he’ll have compiled (by alphabet) a list of British road movies, a dictionary of motorway fiction, a critique (illustrated) of Manser Associates Hilton Hotel at Heathrow (glass-fronted fridge for body parts).
London Orbital Page 24
