We give it up, pay the man off. Forty minutes on the clock has carried us down the ramp at Waterloo. As soon as we begin to walk, oxygen returns to the brain. I’m living out a long dormant fantasy, London without cars. I lie down in the middle of the road on Blackfriars Bridge to take a photograph of an arrowed sign saying: CITY. At the end of the bridge, the portly silhouette of Queen Victoria on her pedestal, hands intact, winks back at the Royal Holloway College effigy.
The orderly protest processions of the morning, making their way up New Bridge Street towards Ludgate Hill, are now – thanks to armed response units, Samurai snatch squads – a small riot. Provocation and response, the dance at the end of the day. Battle honours, blood on the T-shirt, lightly worn. The two groups are like characters from different movies who have become inexplicably tangled: the last Mohicans taking on robocops. Coxcomb reflected in Plexiglas visor. I know that it’s my fault: I shouldn’t have left town. Pike lunches and weedy mill streams are not my business.
Writers, other than those who do it for money, are about as much use in times of crisis as ghost-hunter Harry Price’s curious machines (horn trumpets, boxes that record the whispers of the dead). We sit in a bar in Smithfield, relishing the riptide of energy, the necessary civic argument in which we play no part. Let the city burn for the cameras. It has happened before. This is nothing. There is worse to come. The blood on the streets is a sideshow to the café society of the meat market. They lap up tin bowls of mussels, call for Belgian beer brewed by monks. No point in trying to go home, make it a party.
5
16 July 1999. An underdeveloped Weybridge morning and the news is that Marc Atkins is back on the road. If you can fit him into frame, he dresses a dull walk. He knows how to catch the camera’s eye. (You’ve probably noticed him doing his starved Brando impression on the cover of the Penguin Classics Heart of Darkness.)
The moment outside Weybridge station (infiltration of enemy territory), when Marc and Renchi come face to face, is their second encounter. Marc (hands in pockets) and Renchi (hands on hips) in front of two hoardings, now you see it, NOW YOU DON’T/A DIFFERENT KIND OF STRENGTH. Marc is travelling light, black T-shirt (rolled sleeves), camera. Renchi is in a blue sweater, carrying a heavily freighted rucksack. The two men met in the Museum of London, when Renchi and I were doing the London Wall walk. Marc had been checking out an unimpressive (so he said) show of Sixties’ metropolitan photographs; fashion, celebrity, urban sentimentality (Bailey, Donovan).
Over the parapet of the bridge, we watch the commuters on Weybridge station. They advance towards the yellow line – MIND THE STEP – but do not cross it. Men in dark suits, women in summer dresses. Lines of black cases set down on the platform. Who is there to talk to, on the mobile, at seven a.m.? Answering machines that won’t answer.
If psychogeography is the theme, Weybridge has it – well disguised, screened by foliage, always present. According to Mary Caine’s zodiac, we are abseiling out of the Dog’s arse. The station, on Cobbets Hill, lies just to the north of an intriguing double bill: the former Brooklands road racing circuit (later controlled by British Aerospace) and the private estate of St George’s Hill. Today, we’re going to attempt the walk over St George’s Hill, and on towards Cobham Heath, following in the steps of Gerrard Winstanley and the community of Diggers, in the period after the English Civil War.
Brooklands was left until the M25 pilgrimage had been completed, when we were revisiting certain sites, making a series of secondary excursions. Land in the valley of the Wey arranges itself according to the conventions of science fiction. Brooklands was Ballard, before Ballard came to Shepperton. An unashamed concrete island. The name – BROOKLANDS – has been chiselled, vertically, into the grey lip of the circuit, alongside Barnes Wallis Drive. Ghost architecture (grass invaded ramps) provokes accounts of spectral sightings: record breakers who died in the attempt, blown tyres. A spook’s tour is available for those who want to tap into the crisis of sudden death.
We stood at the top of the bank and looked down into the bowl: a retail park, Marks & Spencer, Tesco. Cars massed as if for some great event: S.F. Edge’s 24 Hour Run in 1907, Percy Lambert’s 1913 feat, when he covered one hundred measured miles in an hour. (Lambert died, attempting to improve that record, a final spin before marriage. He is now an official Brooklands ghost.) Malcolm Campbell, John Cobb, Eric Fernihough. The photographs are necrophile, printed with posthumous light. Malcolm Campbell’s shed is a clapboard coffin. Eric Fernihough, hooded and leathered like Fantomas, crouches over a Brough Superior bike, a man/machine hybrid.
The Brooklands circuit, devised in 1907 by Hugh Locke King, a wealthy landowner, was a forerunner of the M25: an oval that you travelled, flogging your vehicle to its limits, only to arrive back at the point where you started. There were frequent fatalities. The circuit, according to a leaflet put out by the Brooklands Museum, was ‘a unique civil engineering achievement… one of the seven wonders of the modern world’. Locke King employed 1,500 labourers and craftsmen to reshape the landscape, to carve out a chunk of the Wey valley, to plant appropriate forestry around the rim. Instead of the paradise gardens of Enfield, the subtle interventions of the Highways Agency, here was a rich man’s park that was resolutely of its time. A maze of concrete blocks instead of a redirected river.
The pro tem nature of the sheds and garages, the demob recklessness of the early racers, gave Brooklands the spirit of a Home Counties combat squadron. Men tinkering with machines. Improvised shelters. Cars that roared out of nowhere, spitting oil and making too much noise. Why, I thought, didn’t they put the M25 on this convenient site? As a model of itself. A themed motorway. A circuit you could drive without harm or inconvenience to others. There was plenty of room to build a miniaturised Waltham Abbey, Dartford Bridge (for spectators), Swanley interchange for mock road rage duels (fought with paint guns). The retail parks, cadet versions of Bluewater and Lakeside, Thurrock, were already in place. There was even a duplicate of the Siebel building, green glass, back at the tree line; visibly invisible.
We stroll down the straight, cars skidding, slaloming around oil drums. Huge skies. In the meadow, at the end of the circuit, aircraft are parked. The 1945 Vickers Viking airliner (developed from the Wellington bomber). The Valiant (Britain’s first ‘V’ bomber). A VC10 of the Sixties. It’s an aeronautical graveyard. Some of the planes have been sliced in half.
Renchi is reading fiction that relates to areas through which we are walking: you could, in theory, string together a necklace of books, a bibliography for the motorway. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is ‘spot on’, so he says, for the move into Surrey. Predictions of science parks, research establishments of the Thames corridor. Victorian and Edwardian novelists took the trouble to place literary contrivance in a convincing – and relevant – topography. Huxley, the fashionable author of the Twenties and Thirties, might have drifted out of favour, but Renchi reckoned he was truer to the Siebel spirit than Orwell. Huxley, as the critic John Clute wrote, produced ‘the model of pharmacological totalitarianism’. The ecology of least resistance.
An empty charabanc, clouds reflected in window panels, stood at the end of the runway. Green lettering: BICKNELL’s.
Marc, heavy dark glasses perched on brow (paparazzo), and Renchi, red shirt bandanna, advance on the security checkpoint. PRIVATE ROAD. RESIDENTS ONLY. NO PARKING. Gentle, wooded hills disclose colonial estates. Disclose silence. An absence of jingly ice-cream vans, squealing tyres, yelping dogs, raised voice, ambulance sirens.
A signboard, ST GEORGE’S HILL (white on deep green): PRIVATE ESTATE. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. St George’s Hill Tennis Club. St George’s Hill Golf Club. VISITORS PLEASE STOP FOR SECURITY GUARDS.
We were expecting this. The payroll boys, back in the station cafe at Staines, alerted us to the rock star dormitory: Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, John Lennon. The sort of recreational facilities the British Raj, escaping from summer heat, always demanded. Well-defended luxury becomes an open p
rison. We can’t come in and they can’t come out. They’re not here, at home, even when they are. Security, under threat of instant dismissal, will never admit to their presence.
Locals – even Weybridge has some – can work the gate. Fill a uniform. Renchi has a cunning plan. He knows a builder who jobbed on the estate, who might be there now. A name. An address (which he has mislaid). Renchi is very good at these chats with security. The approach to St George’s Hill is orthodox Surrey: a public road that, quite suddenly, isn’t. Tarmac that gleams like polished pewter. Even the pollen has been airbrushed, tweezered by hand into the kerbside.
Renchi marches forward, alone. We hang back, snapping away. A rusticated hut (small cricket pavilion) with white gate. Bushes, shrubs, poplars. A white Fiesta with checkered trim (faking at official status). Yellow flashing light: ST GEORGE’S HILL SECURITY.
A radio is playing, something bland and matutinal, in the deserted sentry box. Further on, at the final checkpoint, Renchi initiates a conversation with the bearded guard. The man looks the part (which covers most of his job description), but he’s decent, a local taking what he can get in the way of casual employment. Renchi mutters about his builder friend. The guard is bored enough to let us in. The status of the road is anyway ambiguous. We’re passing through, a country walk, we explain. We’ll keep our eyes to ourselves. We’re making for another estate, the workers’ village built for employees of Whiteley’s department store.
Keep moving, no detours. Heads down. No sudden, unexplained gestures. We’re on camera: all the way.
This, self-evidently, was the future: what should have happened, and now won’t. A county within a county; calmer, cleaner, emptier than the rest. A magnet for villainy. A refuge for villains. At a reading I met a student from Weybridge. She told me that the local beauty parlours, the hairdressers, were full of women in studio make-up speaking Russian. Nails sharp as daggers. Clanking with gold chains. Mafia wives from Moscow.
The road, as we wind up the hill, is spookier than Brooklands. Nature on its best behaviour, heathland smoother than a bowling green. Small plantations of red-barked conifers: BEWARE. GOLFERS PLAYING FROM THE LEFT.
The text Renchi has to hand is H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which he is using as a guidebook. The 1898 fantasy – alien invasion – plays very nicely against this unpeopled estate. Where better for the Martians to put their marker than a discreet private golf course? From a real-estate point of view, the Woking landfall made sense. ‘Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after; and so on for ten nights, a flame each night.’ Technologically primitive Surrey suburbanites were zapped by future war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest. Roaming bands of survivors took to the hills; the defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine retribution. They died raving, in the rubble, doctrine decayed into a stream of incoherent curses. No building, however innocent its function, was safe from the Heat-Rays. ‘I saw the tops of the trees above the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished.’ Yes, Woking (heathland bastion of English values) had a mosque. But the ruthless invaders, who had travelled 140,000,000 miles with mayhem in mind, had no interest in cultural niceties. Burn, blast, batter. Convert the primitives of Ottershaw and Chertsey into meat. Liquidise them. Very perceptive, these foreign devils. With one glance, they understood that our soft estates were good for nothing but future golf courses, catteries, mediparcs and orbital motorways. Wells knew the geography of the perimeter, he had cycled for miles through country lanes and villages that would soon be swallowed by ribbon-development and retail landfill.
Orson Welles launched his career by shifting invasion paranoia to American radio in 1940. Premature anti-fascists under every bed. The youthful Orson met the literary globe-trotter, H.G. Wells, at a radio station in Texas. Both versions of The War of the Worlds haunted the Surrey section of our walk; the reverberation of those names, Wells and Welles, staying with us until the true wells, medicinal and salty, could be located at Epsom.
In his 1997 film, Robinson in Space, Patrick Keiller’s narrator takes Robinson on an outing to inspect the Martians’ crater, at Horsell Common, near Woking.
He told me that there are more than 100 patents in microelectronics, nanotechnology and other fields for uses of buckminsterfullerenes, the large, spherical carbon molecules discovered in cosmic dust by British and other scientists, but they are all held abroad.
The Martians destroyed most of Surrey. Five hundred tons of Mars are estimated to land on Earth each year.
Robinson’s excursion party moves on – by car, unfortunately – from Woking to St George’s Hill. A sacred place for dissenters. Common land was developed as a private estate in 1911. The hurt remains. There was every reason for the guards to feel uneasy, they were protecting the unprotectable. Robinson recalls the occupation of land at Wisley, near St George’s Hill, by a group of eco-campaigners. This is the doctrine: off-road incursions (by British Aerospace, weapons technology, biological research facilities) celebrated by the arrival of the tribes. The worst piracies solicit attention by the freest spirits, activists. Flies drawn to the stink of rotten meat. Protesters promote chainsaw-security, tree-police. Occupation of threatened sites turns political argument into ritual theatre.
Keiller footnotes the invasion of St George’s Hill:
The group was ‘The Land is Ours’ and the spokesman was George Monbiot, writer and Fellow of Green College, Oxford. St George’s Day is April 23rd. The site was ‘set-aside’ land beside the disused Wisley aerodrome. On Friday the 28th, the group processed to St George’s Hill and performed a play, based on the legend of St George and the Dragon, on the practice range of the golf-course.
I heard about this procession from Billy Bragg, who featured a Digger song at a Blake evening in the Festival Hall. Bragg recommended Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (Radical Ideas during the English Revolution). It’s easy to feel sentimental about the one period in English life when we played at being a Republic; court and courtiers were discounted. Splinter groups, fanatics and visionaries of every stamp, took to the roads. Churches and civic buildings were used for debate: hamlet to hamlet, along the Thames from Putney to Kingston. Agitators, appointed by their fellow soldiers, argued against parliamentary orthodoxy. Levellers, Diggers, Ranters. Veterans of the Sixties are drawn to this period, the late 1640s and early 1650s: they know about splits and schisms, expulsion, denunciation. Impotence.
St George’s Hill was a place of pilgrimage. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers camped on the common, cultivated the ground – much to the annoyance of the squirearchy. The Diggers called themselves The True Levellers, believing that land belonged to those who worked it. The first Digger commune was established by Winstanley and the others on 1 April 1649. By August, hostility from local interests drove them on to Cobham Heath. The following year, like asylum seekers, they were ‘dispersed’.
Winstanley received, so he asserted, divine inspiration, while in a trance. There must be common ownership of all means of production and distribution, complete freedom of worship, compulsory education for both sexes. When the voice of God triumphed, the formal authority of the state would wither away.
In The True Leveller Standard Advanced, a tract published in 1649, Winstanley made his ‘declaration to the powers of England and all the powers of the world, shewing the cause why the common people of England have begun and gives consent to dig up, manure and sow corn upon George Hill in Surrey; by those that have subscribed, and thousands more that give consent’.
BEWARE OF GOLFERS PLAYING FROM THE RIGHT. Slanting shadows across road and heath. Morning light, revisited months later in a Marc Atkins print, is exquisite. The lifting sun glints from dust-free windows, hidden among
the trees. Roof tiles, gables, tall chimneys. Water towers disguised as Rapunzel follies. A white club house for the private golf course: imposing as a country hotel.
On St George’s Hill, no two properties are the same; that’s the point. This is not a Barratt asylum conversion. You get the ironwork gates, lions on pedestals, the cute names (WITS END) – but the Hill doesn’t have much truck with Essex ranch-style, or faux-Mediterranean coke haven. Did Lennon (Working Class Hero), playing posh, remember Winstanley? A friend of mine, a schoolteacher from Leamington Spa, pitching some Utopian scheme, visited the Beatle in his den. Time was different, he recalled, for the seriously rich. Place was accidental. From the moment you stepped through the door, you were on the point of leaving. There was nowhere to hang your coat. It took an entire evening not to get the cup of coffee, offered as you searched for a chair, or cushion, or appropriate yard of floor space.
Walkers fall under immediate suspicion. Those who ‘travelled the country’, as Christopher Hill points out, were thought to be conveyors of intelligence, spies, plotters, heretics. A new type, the gamekeeper (suborned working man), was invented to guard against wanderers. The genial tramps of English fiction, colourful trespassers in villages curated by Richmal Crompton and P.G. Wodehouse, might be John Buchan agents in disguise. Discharged soldiers, lunatics. Joseph Salmon, a Ranter, told how, in the days of his trance, he had ‘walked in unknown paths, and become a madman, a fool among men’.
Winstanley, defeated, returned to London where he had been an apprentice in the cloth trade, a freeman of the Merchant Taylors Company. He played no further part in public life. As a corn merchant, his fortunes revived. He lived in the modest obscurity that is London’s greatest benefit. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, he became a Quaker. He died in 1676 – by which time laws had been passed giving gamekeepers free access to the cottages of those they suspected of being poachers. Weapons could be confiscated at will. Dissenters were persecuted. Justices of the Peace harassed and imprisoned vagrants. England was brought to that happy state where those who roamed – without good reason, without passports and permissions – were liable to be defined as being out of their wits, Tom O’Bedlams. Trance-travellers, like common ground, suffered compulsory enclosure.
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