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In less than half a mile, the M25 spurns us, it’s picking up momentum, a straight run on the junction with the M3 (‘a major freeflow intersection: continuous span bridges with hollow reinforced concrete decks’). We walk Indian file, Kevin has to boom to make himself heard. You can smell the panic. ‘These crazies mean it,’ he realises. ‘They are actually going to walk around the motorway.’ It’s true, I would be perfectly happy sticking with the hard shoulder if it got me through Surrey in a day. The treadmill experience is fine. Conversation dies, the countryside vanishes (tactfully screened and baffled).
‘Economically viable, environmentally sound’. The sponsor’s message. Tony Sangwine (well named), senior Highways Authority horticulturalist and expert on motorway landscaping, boasts of ‘interventions’. Drought-resistant dust. Salt-tolerant, low-maintenance grasses. Plantings of hawthorn, dogwood, the Wild Service Tree. To foster the illusion: the road is a rippling brook. Sangwine is talking Dunsinane forestry, forests that move in the night (the A2/M2 road-widening scheme). Forget your National Parks, footpaths clogged with pedestrian traffic, mountain bikers and plague-ridden beasts, the M25 is the ecological fast track. Kestrels nest on gantries. The central reservation is a wildlife sanctuary, taxonomies of flora and fauna are located in land trapped between the M40/M25 interchange.
Rudely woken from hard shoulder reverie, we find ourselves in Egham. A chainlink fence, on the edge of the escarpment, is patrolled and protected by ON-SITE GUARDING LTD (LAPD-style enforcers whispering into handsets). Security, when it got its start in the East End, was run by hoods and armbreakers. Ex-Parkhurst. ‘Security advisers’ to banks and art galleries were old Yard men who had taken early retirement (before they were found out). Down here, among the soft estates, asylum seekers carry out the night patrols. When multinationals boast about their record in employing local inhabitants, they mean issuing them with dog leads and shiny peaked caps.
Someone is building something, right on the road. JCBs, noise, a fence. No flags as yet, so it’s probably not a housing development or a motel. Renchi, perversely, takes a special interest in this hole. He sees it as a direct response to the charms of Runnymede Bridge (with its Alma-Tadema steps leading down to the river, a bathing pool for draped and languorous Roman sirens). Every time we walk the river bank, he suggests checking out the rapidly evolving building at the Egham end of the bridge.
Two years passed before we made our tour of inspection. The incongruous lighthouse that Renchi spotted from road trips and railway excursions was revealed as one of the wonders of the orbital circuit, ‘SIEBEL,’ it said. The vulgar security precautions of our first sighting were gone. Amazingly, there were no obvious CCTV cameras. No uniforms, no dogs. No checkpoints. Siebel, I recognised at once, was the future. Post-surveillance. A discretion so absolute, so understated, that criminality and vandalism were impossible concepts. Siebel was the visible manifestation of Ballard’s coming Mediparc psychopathology: intelligent buildings for soberly dressed, quiet, indecently healthy people. Health is the only valid currency. Credit-rich vampires from the old capitalist empires buy new faces, fresh blood. Middle management sweats in medieval gyms. The real players, the Siebel lighthouse-keepers, have health as part of the employment package. A few feet away from the clanking, shuddering, diesel dust-storms of the motorway, Siebel immortals float through a chlorine-glass tank. Doing nothing.
Doing nothing. Being. That’s the key. All the way down to Staines, on the car radio, I was hearing about economic disaster, global recession, the collapse of Marconi’s share price. Even the biggest, most ruthless conglomerates were going belly up because they made the mistake of investing in product. Manufacture something, anything, and you’re dead. Fashions change. Mobile phones will go the way of kipper ties. Play smart. Do nothing. New Labour (lessons of the Dome fiasco learnt) have it absolutely right: take soundings, soothe your critics, commission reports. Talk in colourless catch phrases: ‘Best Value. Economically viable, environmentally sound.’ But do nothing.
The ideal is a building with no function other than to carry, discreetly, the company’s name. Siebel. The telescopic tower with its green-glass wings sits alongside the M25, but it is not of the M25. The motorway is as archaic as a Victorian railway, a fun fair ride. You can think of it in terms of traction engines, stagecoaches, ox carts. A Little England folly from the day it was built. Off-highway, faux-American science parks are now as pertinent as Legoland or some model village in the Cotswolds. Those CCTV camera-boxes, poking out of the shrubbery on stalks, are SF hardware from another era. Surveillance, the fortress estate, boastful flag poles, paranoid architecture: redundant.
Siebel understand. Siebel have created this beautiful bird of a building, a swan of the motorway: curved spine and neck, angular wings. Tinted windows through which you can see nothing very much. The car park comes on two levels and is almost deserted, eight or nine unostentatious motors – with space for sixty or eighty more. A roof park, spiky Mexican plants as a border. A ground level space beneath, more conceptual gallery than garage.
Yesterday there was nothing here. The Siebel building appeared, fully formed, from nowhere. You can’t date it: elements of the Thirties, Sixties, Nineties. No irony, no pastiche. Something clinical or forensic, germ-repelling. The building doesn’t impose, it insinuates: no sweat, today is your first tomorrow. A metal arm, a gesture that divides Siebel-world from the Egham underpass, creaks. The only sound in a perfectly smooth acoustic environment. A car arrives, the arm cranks up. A man in a lightweight suit, no papers, no case, saunters to the entrance, the green world of indoor tree shadows and underwater light.
Surveillance systems are unnecessary. Siebel have created a force field. Egham, a town trading on a loose connection with Runnymede and Magna Carta (sandstone effigy of King John outside the yellow-awning pavement café), needs Siebel. Siebel have put up a number of other buildings – no product mentioned – as a rebuke to earlier, urban rim outfits that made the mistake of hugging the railway. Businesses give the appearance of being on the verge of bankruptcy by simply having the wrong address, being stuck in some cosy little town rather than in the zone, the slipstream of the M25.
A car’s width from the hard shoulder, anything is possible. Siebel could be an illusion. A photo-realist hoarding. We walk towards the central tower, the bottle-glass Panopticon. And then we’re inside – with no memory of having passed through an automatic door. The building has no inside. There is more space as you approach the great ledge of the control desk than when you stand in the car park, looking in. The air is better, the temperature gentler. Light dazzles from every surface.
Unlike Bishopsgate in the City, or Canary Wharf, no one challenges your right to wander. The women at the desk are charming; young (but not too young), elegant (but not intimidating). They smile. They know nothing. You are welcome to see whatever you want to see, but there is no content. Glass lifts rise and fall like water features. Strollers drift from level to level, doing nothing; nodding, avoiding conversation, argument, the testosterone urgency of the market. What Siebel are peddling is: absence of attitude. Zero attrition. No cutting edge. The right decision – which is no decision.
Road-ragged pedestrians, such as Renchi and I, are welcome because we do not register. As far as the women at the desk are concerned, we do not appear on the screen. We come from another universe and very soon we’ll go back to it.
Can we make an appointment to inspect this marvellous place? Of course. But not now, not here; another tomorrow. What does Siebel produce? Who can say? Siebel is. A shimmering mirage. A virtual oasis on the edge of a collapsing motorway system. Siebel sibilates. A near anagram of e-libels.
I pick up a brochure. Fatter, glossier, more anodyne than an in-flight magazine. The atrium is the least resistant hotel lobby in the world. The ultimate waiting room. Blue-grey magazines can be carried, but not read. We settle ourselves in a set of criminally comfortable armchairs; leather too soft to wear, so tender
it feels as if it’s still alive.
Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He’s not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn’t a beard; it’s a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. ‘Customer satisfaction,’ says the brochure. ‘Seamless integration.’ ‘Comprehensive upgrade.’ Of what? I want to scream. ‘Solutions provider.’ Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.
A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: ‘You’re always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.’ Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not. ‘The Siebel eRoadmap to Successful eBusiness.’
I’ve had enough. I’m with Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition was written without the letter e. The commonest letter in the pack is an untrustworthy creature. A nark, a grass. They use it to crack codes. Too much tail, too much wiggle. A high-pitched sound. A petulant fly in an afternoon bedroom.
If we believe in the Siebel world, we might as well give up the walk now. But there’s another option: I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone?
It was a day when the weather was so warm, the view from the slow train (M3 across golf paddocks and ‘refuse transfer stations’) so seductive, that any sane North European would begin to think the unthinkable: climate change. This greenery with its huddles of loud-leisure golfers, traffic breezing westward, is future desert. The Drought. Ballard isn’t dealing in metaphors, he means it. The wise men (poets, social scientists, demagogues, Diggers, anti-psychiatrists) gathered at the Roundhouse in Camden Town in 1967, for the epochal ‘Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation’, all talked about one thing: Gregory Bateson’s riff on melting polar ice-caps, carbon dioxide emissions, the squandering of fossil fuels. Bateson wasn’t messianic. He didn’t rant and rage like Stokely Carmichael. He didn’t hide, junk sick, behind dark glasses, muttering apocalypse and revenge (like Emmett Grogan). He was very reasonable, steady voiced; the dark humour of an implacable logic.
So we accelerated our road building programme in the white hot technology of Old Labour. We put a necklace around London, from the Exxon/Mobile (Esso) storage tanks at Purfleet to the jumbo-park of Heathrow. We burnt the city’s waste at Enfield, then fed the compacted dust back into new motorways.
Out in Shepperton, Ballard was as calm, as rational as Bateson. They were both Cambridge men who had lived abroad. Ballard was a copywriter for the Book of Revelations, the final dissolution. He skimmed technical journals, adapted their vocabulary. He was on friendly terms with scientists like Chris Evans. From such apparently innocent documents as the Siebel brochure, he factored the terminology for a sinister poetic. That’s where the virus was located, in the blandest of all forms, the puff, the free-sheet, the trade launch. The Motor Show at Earl’s Court, as Ballard recognised, would prove to be a more subversive gathering than the coming together of counter-cultural magi in Camden Town. William Burroughs, a major influence on Ballard, had been saying it for years: read the financial reports from IBM, cut them against a travel book by Graham Greene, a rhapsodic paragraph of Conrad, a snapshot from Tangier.
Burroughs took a dozen lifetimes to grow into his face, that prescient skull. A dozen lifetimes to arrive at the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas. Ballard made it to Shepperton in the 1960s. The Drowned World. This was never an exile. You can only achieve exilic status when you’d prefer to be somewhere else, when you acknowledge the power of the centre. For Ballard the transit out of West London was a spin to the colonies, the desert resorts of his fiction, not a banishment. The metropolis, so far as he is concerned, can sink into the swamp. The buildings are old and dirty and uninteresting and the furniture is dull. Ballard, at twenty-one, was an enthusiastic visitor to the Festival of Britain. The Skylon. The conjunction with the river. Those Swedish chairs!
Ballard’s fiction, reprising and reworking its own templates, is not prophetic in a way that would be recognised by H.G. Wells or George Griffith. The tone is matter of fact. Seemingly extraordinary or perverse episodes can be traced back to images in art books, cuttings from magazines, nightcap television: trade journalism and copywriting with their hypnotic present-tense blandishments, when you microwave them, turn feral. Let out the demons. Ballard doesn’t use a PC, he hammers away on a trusted portable. These are some of the books in his library (1984), as logged by interviewers from RE/SEARCH. The Warren Commission Report. Céline: A Biography by Patrick McCarthy. Stanley Spencer catalogue from the Royal Academy. White Women by Helmut Newton. The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. Mountbatten by Richard Hough. ‘I don’t have much to do with those literary people,’ Ballard told me.
I was delighted to learn that Ballard, who previewed the target towers of Canary Wharf in High-Rise (1975), had come to town to check out the Millennium Dome. His account of the excursion dealt, for the most part, with the journey. East London is a mystery to him. He’s read about it, but he has no desire to sample it first hand, other than through the window of a car. The Dome was nothing. He’d conjured up just this kind of hucksterist tent show (carny booths, empty car parks, toxic mutations, cyber-sell) in his early fiction. The Dome, as a concept, lagged years behind the Festival of Britain. The Dome was a marquee from a Regency pleasure park, Ranelagh or Vauxhall, visited by offcuts from a novel by William Thackeray.
Driving through the weekend-dead Isle of Dogs, underpasses, captured water, quotation architecture, was a nostalgic, back-to-the-future exercise. The septuagenarian writer, car window like a cinema screen, slides through a manifestation of short stories sold to pulp magazines at the period when his career was launched. Silvertown Airport is an epiphany, no flights, tropical vegetation splitting the quays of the deepwater docks, jet-skiers bumping over choppy water. Nothing pleases Ballard more than to walk in, unexpectedly, on one of his own sets. He is redundant, he can let go. Achieved fiction writes itself. He knows, after all these years, he has reached that point. Silvertown as a suburb of Vermilion Sands.
I arrived at Shepperton a couple of hours before I was due to meet Ballard at the station. Bad Day at Black Rock. The paper-shop was closing, Ballard told me, because Shepperton had run out of commuters. The dozy, sun-hammered town was an island settlement, between the wide blue of the motorway (M3 rushing into M25) and the meandering Thames. Ballard has reversed Edwardian polarities, he weekends in London – where the earlier inhabitants came out to their bungalows, huts, hutches, on Shepperton’s two islands, to get away from the pressures of the city. A ferry at Weybridge is still operative, summoned by a bell that may be rung at quarter-hourly intervals.
Main street, Shepperton, is a carousel of estate agents (£300,000 upwards for a riverfront box) and charity caves; a library (closed on Thursday mornings), a video shop, a specialist in TV memorabilia, toys and annuals. You can do the river-bank or stroll (across a bridge over the M3) to Shepperton Green and the film studios. ‘You walked?’ said Ballard, incredulously. ‘We do have buses in Shepperton.’
It was a scorcher, the midpoint in a freak heat wave. They didn’t need to drain the River Ash, which passes through the studio estate. The river was my target. Three significant ‘river’ films had been shot here: John Huston’s version of C.S. Forester’s The African Queen; the heritage Tudor barges of A Man for All Seasons, stately as a Hampton Court son et lumière; and the notorious colonial fantasy, Sanders of the River. In 1935 Zoltan Korda, adapting an Edgar Wallace novel, built an East African village on the banks of the Ash, and cast Paul Robeson, a leftist Othello in a loincloth, as Bosambo, the native chief. The rest of the tribe were bussed in from Tiger Bay in Cardiff. Jomo Kenyatta, President of Kenya (1964–78), had a bit part as a grass-skirted spear-waver.
Shepperton Studios spread themselves at the foot of the earth banks that conta
in the Queen Mary Reservoir (the site where E-culture, motorway raves began). Taking the twenty-minute walk from Shepperton station, close to where Ballard has his house, to the security gates of the studios, I travel through the landscape of Ballard’s fiction: lagoon (reservoir), motorway (Heathrow traffic defining the edge of the frame), wide-aisled supermarket (through which sleepwalking suburban adulteresses can practise their ‘amiable saunter’). To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that oeuvre.
‘Where else is there to go?’ Ballard said. ‘The past is a biological swamp, the future is a sandy desert – and the present is a concrete playpen.’
From the shade of a balding tree, I watched Ballard’s car pull up at the station. He didn’t look like any of the other early-afternoon motorists; he was in Mediterranean mode (straw hat, dark glasses, open-necked purple shirt). We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. ‘You know, I haven’t been in this place for fifteen years.’ Finding somewhere to park, Ballard reckons, is the biggest problem of contemporary life.
He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters. The periphery, according to him, is where the future reveals itself. New Labour, he asserts, was hatched in airport satellite-strips and gated communities. The child terrorists of Running Wild are the result of benevolent eugenic planning; Internet education, leavened by supervised abseiling, white-water rafting, paragliding, will result in the spook children of Blair and flinty Jack Straw. Ordinary hormonal adolescents making a mess of it, spewing on pavements, dealing dope.
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