In the Government Road terrace, between Lee Navigation and the Small Arms canal, people have suffered the effects. Bad water. High levels of phenols. ‘Some of the residents had blistered mouths and hands, terrible headaches. They were suffering nausea, dizziness, general weakness and lethargy. The children were very ill. Those that had drunk bottled water recovered.’ Fairview Homes denied all responsibility.
Pedder got the phone calls. ‘Can you come down? We can’t breathe.’ She remembers walking along Government Road. ‘It was hitting you in the face and it was hurting. You couldn’t see. It was like grit. That was the asbestos.’ Fairview had knocked down Building 22. ‘A cloud floated towards the area of Government Road. I could see the smoke. I live probably quarter of a mile away and I could see the plume of black smoke rising up and forming this massive cloud.’
We went back inside. There were other, off-the-record stories. Connections were exposed. Things suspected but unproven. Names. Pedder was very emotional. She had a heavy investment in this story. She lived here. We would stroll back to the car park, move on.
Now our goal is in sight, beyond Rammey Marsh, traffic floating above water. Site clearance (leisure, commerce, heritage) pushes the horizon back. ‘A new country park is to be developed on the site of the former Royal Ordnance works,’ announces the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority’s Strategic Business Plan. ‘The site is immediately to the south of the M25, adjacent to major housing developments and strategically ideal for the Authority to pursue its remit to safeguard and expand the “Green Wedge” into London.’
This sounds like an uncomfortable procedure. Not just ‘soil amelioration’ and ‘imaginative and sensitive landscape design’ but the effort of will to rebrand a balding and sullen inter-zone, the motorway’s sandtrap, as a wildlife habitat, ‘a vibrant waterside park’. For years, Waltham Abbey has functioned like a putting course, a splash of shaved meadow surrounded by bunkers. It was a course that had to be played with a blindfold firmly in place. Much of the territory was unlisted. ‘Government Research Establishment’ to the east of the Navigation, ‘Sewage Works (Sludge Disposal)’ to the west.
In this red desert, sound moves from margin to margin: caterpillar-wheeled vehicles, mud gobblers, chainsaws, pneumatic drills. The delirious swooshing of the M25.
The bridge support, the thin line that carries all this traffic, is pale blue. The space beneath the bridge expands into a concrete cathedral, doors thrown open to light and landscape. Water transport gives way to road; the old loading bays are empty, a few pleasure boats and converted narrow boats are tied up against the east bank. Reflected light shivers on pale walls. Overhead, there is the constant thupp-thupp-thupp of the motorway. After heavy rain, the ground is puddled and boggy. Travellers haven’t settled here. The evidence is all of migration: extinguished fires, industrial-strength lager cans, aerosol messages.
Bill Drummond leads the rush up the embankment. The M25, after miles of walking the ditch, is a symbol of freedom. The Amazon. A slithery, ice-silver road in the sky. I have a moment of panic. Drummond’s bulging knapsack is still unexplained, no spare sweaters, no rain kit, no cameras. Is it possible? Could he? This obsession with the Unabomber. Are we going to find ourselves on the Six O’Clock News: TERRORIST OUTRAGE ON MOTORWAY? Bill spends time in a tower in Northern Ireland. Red Hand of Ulster? Scots Prod? A fanatic certainly. Capable of anything.
After a sharp climb, a fence hop, slipping on gravel and thin wet grass, Drummond reaches the roadside. He vaults the low barrier and performs a Calvinist version of the papal kiss. He puts his lips to tarmac, tastes the vibration of the orbiting traffic. Destination not detonation. I’m relieved and disappointed.
Sitting on the crash barrier, feet dangling on the sand-coloured hard shoulder, we are buffeted by backdraught: the road is a blur. Clockwise: Waltham Abbey and the forest. Anticlockwise: Paradise. A chocolate-brown notice: PARADISE WILDLIFE PARK. A Lascaux sketch of stag’s horns, an arrow. A shamanic invitation to the country of parks and gardens and paradises. Lee Valley Park.
Cars are streaming into the sunset, brake-lights bloody. Drummond wants to walk straight off down the road, west. A truck swerves and honks. I have to grab him, persuade him that I don’t intend to stay, dodging lorries in the half-dark, on the metal skin of the M25. That would be blasphemous. I’m going to stick to the countryside, as near as I can to the loop, straining to catch the hymn of traffic, hot diesel winds.
We’ll finish the day at the abbey, the grave of King Harold, but first we look back towards London. Sunshafts over a jagged horizon, towers and chimneys, unregistered ground. The mix as it always is: off-highway Americana, secret estates (Royal Gunpowder Mills, Small Arms Factory) rebranding themselves. British Aerospace. Waltham Point (‘New 48 Acre Industrial Park’) developed by the Kier Group and Norwich Union. Earthworks. Noise. Feeder roads that glow in the dark.
Beyond Waltham Abbey, proper countryside kicks in: the foot-and-mouth ribbons begin. The amphetamine buzz of the motorway changes everything: warehouses instead of shops, dormitory estates instead of hospitals. A road is a road is a road. When the M25 went underground, near Amesbury Bank on the northern edge of Epping Forest, they laid out a cricket pitch on the roof of the tunnel.
The road at night is a joy. You want to imagine it from space, a jewelled belt. As a thing of spirit, it works. As a vision, it inspires. There is only one flaw, you can’t use it. Shift from observer to client and the conceit falls apart. Follow the signs for LONDON ORBITAL in your car and consciousness takes a dive. The M25 has been conceived as an endurance test, a reason for staying at home. Aversion therapy. Attempt the full circuit and you’ll never drive again.
Paradise Gardens Waltham Abbey to Shenley
1
Looking back over my files, the excursions to the parks and gardens of Enfield Chase, I notice soft green photographs overlaid with current images (April 2001) of smoke and blight. Footpaths and designated country walks are now ribboned off, reckless hikers face £5,000 fines. The word of the moment is ‘contiguous’. Hireling academics and anonymous spokespersons, sweating under studio lights, don’t like the taste of it, this awkward term they have been instructed to employ. To be contiguous is to be served with a death warrant. Animals (pre-supermarket cellophane) face the bullet if they live in a bad neighbourhood. Reading the future by computer prediction, wanting to get shot of the whole business before a June election, government-sponsored boffins have decided to take out potential disease carriers (any unlanguaged, non-voting quadruped with a cold), and then to start again; or, better yet, turn the countryside into a memorial park. Recreation for visitors, the banning of country sports. Go and stay there, but don’t leave the hotel, that seems to be the message.
Channel 4 News takes a perverse pleasure in its nightly apocalypse franchise, the parade of liars and shifty scientists; merciless footage of fauna carnage, pyre smoke. More upside-down cows, bigger pits; fleecy lambkins cuddled by hooded executioners in gloves and white overalls. Held up to the camera for a tearjerk CU, before being dropped off at the big shed; the killing floor of upturned, expectant faces; shine-in-the-dark eyes.
By the spring of 2001, barred from the motorway orbit, I was trying to exorcise the embargoed Dome (£80 a minute to the taxpayer) by carrying out a series of walks, from Greenwich peninsula to various motorway interchanges. Heading southeast towards Swanley, you get a good sense of how one zone (generous proportions of Blackheath, grim bus shelters of Shooters Hill) gives way to another; small architectural revisions causing major shifts in the psychic balance. Complacency to rage within 200 yards: out of ribbon-development, the poly-filled Tudorbethan avenues of New Eltham, into the heritage Kentish village of Chislehurst (rain, caves closed, footpaths forbidden). Vehicles change from silver, mercury bubbles tucked away in car ports to four-wheel-drive cruisers with gentleman farmer aspirations.