The M25 shifts cargo, transports workers from Middlesex into Surrey. It carries contraband, dodgers of excise duty, grotesquely stacked humans, prepared to pay a premium for a ticket out of some Balkan hellhole. The road has become the business, while the river, emptied of everything except landfill barges and cheerless pleasure craft, is a backdrop to computer-enhanced heritage and development scams. The Thames is a false memory, constantly referred to in terms of its back story: the Globe Theatre (faked), madeover power stations, blacking factories and tanneries reinvented as luxury apartments, self-governing islands with top dollar security. You see the river but it isn’t there. You hear the road but the noise is explained away as part of the general acoustic interference that assaults our ears.
The M25, from being the pet and the pride of an autocratic government, has been rapidly downgraded to a rage-inducing asteroid belt, debris bumping and farting and belching around a sealed-off city. The orbital motorway is a security collar fixed to the neck of a convicted criminal. It enforces a nocturnal quarantine.
Launched, mysteriously, as a highway to the wide world, it was soon revealed as the inspiration for tabloid headlines, YES, I AM THE M25 KILLER: Daily Mail (31 March 2000). M25 KILLER NOYE GUILTY OF MURDER: Evening Standard (14 April 2000). HOW TO SURVIVE THE M25 (We explain how to use your cut-and-keep maps): Daily Mail (24 January 1988).
The M25 wasn’t a way of avoiding London, or a way of protecting the shires from urban corruption (socialists, non-voters); it was a convenient back lane for housebreakers, a shuttle into the excavated chalk quarries (ghosts of wartime tunnels and bunkers) now imagineered into virtual unreality shopping cities. Planet Retail. Satellite Ikea. These off-highway zones, on either side of the Dartford Crossing — Lakeside, Thur-rock, and Bluewater — set up their own impenetrable micro-geographies; traffic islands, loops, dead ends that mimicked the motorway system. Bluewater looked like the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, a duty-free holding area. Water was the pitch, the selling device. A park, an idyll, a day out: a destination for those who have no good reason to travel. The old Cockney favourites, Margate, Ramsgate, Southend, Hastings, were superseded, given over to asylum seekers, banished inner-city dole bandits, workshy inadequates. Bluewater was a real outing to an unreal place. Once you’ve been there, in the silence, the aftershock of travel, when the skin of the car stops vibrating, you learn the awful secret: there is no there. The question remains: ‘How many compulsory purchases do I have to make to get out?’
What else is the M25 good for? Auto-jousting: the classic road rage scenario. The Brinks-Mat alchemist (Kenneth Noye) in the Land Rover Discovery, travelling into town from his well-protected Kentish pile, arrives at the Swanley interchange at the same moment as red Rascal van-man (Stephen Cameron) and his girlfriend. A traffic light at a sliproad holding impatient motorists a beat too long. There are so many CCTV cameras on poles around the orbital motorway that this affray is pretty much an audition for Crimewatch, or another botched British gangland feature film.
‘He stabbed me, Dan.’ With a four-inch blade, which Noye happened to have about his person. Through the heart and liver. The witness, called at the trial, was piloting a white Roller.
The crime seems to be a straightforward confrontation, a matter of hierarchy, aspirational lifestyles. Noye, the wealthy Mason, with plenty of good chums on the force, the chancer who has made it into Kent, colliding with a kid from the South London suburbs in a red van. The shocked Roller-owner, a solid businessman, is there to keep a disinterested eye on the vulgar affray.
But it’s not quite as simple as that. Roller-man, Alan Decabral, has substance, it’s true: twenty-odd stone of it, in a red and black rugby jersey. His eyes, in press photographs, are wary, nested in pouches of angry skin. The beard is grey, hair long and unruly. Rings, bracelets, thin watch. Antiques, guns, Hell’s Angels, drugs: Decabral was a fairly typical new-money Kentish rate-dodger. Everything about him — shirt, beard, biography — solicited disaster.
‘The man who put road-rage killer Kenneth Noye behind bars,’ according to the Observer (15 October 2000), ‘was sitting in his son’s car outside Halford’s in Ashford, Kent, when a man appeared at his window and shot him once in the side of the head.’
The participants in the Swanley interchange drama, two dead and one imprisoned, drift from newspaper shorthand to full-blown figures of myth. Driving on the M25, coming over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, fumbling for your coin to pay the road toll, nurdling into the right lane, brings out the stories. Every cab driver has a Kenny Noye yarn: bent coppers, Masonic conspiracies, buried bullion. It is always assumed, rumoured, that the three men — killer, victim and witness — had plenty of previous, criminal connections. Three cars, three lifestyle statements, converging in the wrong place: one of the gates that act as circuit breakers, disturbing the energy generator that hums continually around the undisciplined body-mass of London.
The orbital motorway, opened in a spirit of jingoistic triumphalism, rapidly declined into a service road for toxic landfill, somewhere to shift an earlier era’s mess; the rubble of asylums and hospitals, munitions factories and firing ranges. The road gave access to new Legoland housing developments. The curvature of the M25 was a fraud, reality was a series of badly stapled straight lines, local sprints (Potters Bar to Waltham Abbey, Upminster to Purfleet, Shoreham to Godstone), or ramps leading directly into the major off-highway retail parks, Bluewater and Lakeside, Thurrock.
Any attempt to drive the circuit, or to come to terms with that journey, enforced metaphors of madness. The motorist in his helmet-on-wheels, with its petrol-burning engine, dirty exhaust plumes, faulty electronic circuits, entered into a contract with sensory derangement, diesel-induced hallucinations. He (or she) underwent the sort of voyage towards insanity, breakdown and reintegration that R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatrists of the Sixties advocated. Solitary Italianate water towers, at points of vantage around the road, on hillocks at Shenley and Claybury and Dartford, become the markers, compass points in a map of madness. Because something has vanished, because it can no longer be seen, doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
The M25, previously known (through brief trespass, short-hauls to Gatwick or Heathrow), was a thing to be tolerated, endured rather than experienced. The trick was to move back, step away, treat the road as a privileged entity, a metaphor of itself. Enlightenment came with distance, detachment.
At the cold turn of the year, on 1 January 1998, it began. I drove out to Enfield Chase. The area around Bull’s Cross, parks behind red brick walls, garden centres, stables, eerily quiet roads, was very seductive to me. The ‘story’, if there was a story, had moved away from my old Whitechapel midden, from the river: developers and visible artists, explainers, exploiters, had taken care of all that. Whenever a heritage is recognised and celebrated — a moment such as the staging of an exhibition in acknowledgement of the legacy of the Whitechapel Library, Isaac Rosenberg and the circle of Yiddish poets (just as the Library is closed) — is the time to move on, move out.