Here it begins, the walk proper. No detours. No digressions. We decided to take Waltham Abbey as our starting point, the grave of King Harold, and to shadow the motorway (within audible range whenever possible) in an anticlockwise direction. We wanted, quite simply, to get around: always carrying on from where we left off at the finish of the previous excursion. From now on the road would be our focus, our guide. We’d snatch days whenever we could (when Renchi’s shifts permitted) and get it done before the millennial eve.
On 30 September 1998, we stalked into town. Renchi had been working until 10.40 on the previous night – but he arrived in Hackney by eight a.m. He read the weather as: rain trousers, heavy blue sweater, furry cap with ear-flaps. He spoke of sweat lodge ceremonies based on the number four: sixteen poles, four dances a day for four days.
He is fifty-two years old, grizzled, with a tidy silver beard, a naked scalp. He walks with his wife, every morning. The same circuit. Spurning novelty, giving the mind time to settle; noticing the unnoticeable, tiny shifts in season and climate. The work he does, as a house-parent at Mayor Treloar’s College, is physically demanding; manhandling wheelchairs, sharing the enthusiasms, sulks and piss-takes of a group of teenagers. ‘An enabling education,’ it says in the brochure. Renchi, I imagine, would be good at this.
New Age gypsies, who have been tracking me, town to town through Hertfordshire and Essex, on a counterpilgrimage, have arrived in Waltham Abbey, PSYCHIC FARE (Town Hall, Highbridge Street, Waltham Abbey). A signboard attached to the fence outside a property that doesn’t register on my Nicholson’s map. An absence. There’s nothing there, but you can’t come in: ‘Government Research Establishment’.
A day of locked gates. The abbey was off-limits, a funeral. So we wandered through the orchard, the monastic reservation, circumnavigating drained fish ponds. Nobody knows quite what to do with these green spaces: they’re not enclosed, but access isn’t free. They don’t belong to the town and locals don’t make much use of them as places for contemplation or dog walking. They’re suspended. Visitors can’t crack the behaviour code: are you a temporary believer or a confirmed sceptic? A residue of retreat, monasticism, is still present in whatever remains of the original layout; measured avenues, monuments to the godly or powerful, warm red bricks. But, play the empathy game as much as you will, you can’t escape the song of the road, the mantra of transit. A perpetual cycle of auto-prayer.
From the gardens we see traffic stall as the funeral procession arrives, led by a gleaming black stretch-limo.
Behind the abbey, we hit the meridian line. The local authorities are keen on this abstraction. They want to give it a physical form. The abbey church with its astrological ceiling is working a number with Time and Movement, the Clockwork of the Heavens, the colonisation of zero longitude.
We’ve fallen for it before and we fall for it again. The meridian walk through Cornmill Meadow. I’ve noticed granite pillars lying on the ground, aligned with church, with Greenwich, with zero. I’ve imagined cultists taking zero for their symbol. But now stones, which might have been ignored as glacial detritus, have been erected as markers for a permitted zero longitude pathway. The copywriters of the Lee Valley Park are keen ‘to develop a strategy through which Vision can be made a reality’.
It’s a typically English conceit, the millennial mile. Begin with a grey omphalos on a base of stones and shells, a suncrowned archetypal figure with a letterbox navel (into which requests, questions for the oracle, can be posted). This south-facing man/pillar is like something Renchi might have drawn, in the days when he was supposed to be studying anthropology or comparative religion. (We subsequently discover that the granite blocks once formed part of London Bridge.)
A line runs down the pillar, an apparent crack, marking zero longitude, its long flight across the Southern Ocean. We can see where we are and see what our journey should be, through Suffolk and Norfolk, to the edge of the Wash.
Renchi scoops up a feather, a section of bright orange rubber (an inner tube), a pebble.
The walk we are offered, strategic planting designed to flatter a diminishing perspective, is very seductive: the distant prospect, at the end of a closely mown avenue, of another pillar. It carries us away from the M25, but it’s irresistible. A grassed extension of the Lea. A spirit-path that runs in parallel with the Navigation, the Cornmill Stream.
We identify (or Renchi does and I note it) the call of jay and green woodpecker. But, just as we adjust to the rhythm of the green avenue, it ends; it runs up against another perimeter fence, the earthworks of the Government Research Establishment.
This site – ‘Access for All’ – is the showpiece real estate of the Lee Valley Regional Park Development. One hundred and seventy-five acres of land (‘one of the most secret places in England’) have been thrown open to the public. It’s a great day out. I was there for the postponed (foot-and-mouth) launch on 17 May 2001. And I came straight back, the following weekend, for a family picnic. A haunt of timid deer, a nesting habitat for herons, now available to ticket-buyers for the first time in 300 years. A Paradise Park formerly known as the Royal Gunpowder Mills.
Labourers, searched at the gates for flammable materials, encouraged to work at an easy pace, had lived (and died) here for generations. But the secret didn’t travel. Enclose the wildest wood in the parish, cut your own canals, build a city of sheds, blow up houses, rebuild them, stage underwater detonations, and keep it all under wraps. That mixture of timidity, diluted patriotism and an absence of curiosity, leaves great tranches of Britain unmapped; purpose and practice undisclosed. We respect secrecy. It’s for our own good, in the end. One day, when the research and development has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature, thriving in an exclusion zone, will be promoted and paraded.
The plantation of alder buckthorn through which you can tour, in a carriage tugged by a tractor (areas forbidden to walkers), is glossed as the most effective forestry for producing charcoal. Charcoal, saltpetre, sulphur: gunpowder ingredients. History is the resource. Come off the highway, using the drive-in McDonald’s as your marker; ease over the speed bumps, the sleeping-policemen, and through the new, yellow-brick estate which is being built right up against the fence of the Gunpowder Mills. Pad over the oozy foot-and-mouth cushion and enter this decommissioned nowhere.
There are promotional films (with bangs and flares), interactive games, charts, rescued nitroglycerine trucks – along with helpful guides in scarlet polo-shirts, local-history buffs (as ever) peddling sepia postcards of trams and trains, beekeepers from Enfield with pots of liquid honey.
The story is astonishing. The seventeenth-century watermill that evolves into a factory of death: Trafalgar, Waterloo, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb (you’ve seen the movie). Primitive technology shifts from fireworks and loud noises to stealth planes, non-nuclear explosives and propellants, Gulf War gizmos and guidance systems. Research that is still embargoed. ‘Access for All’, yes, but hard information stays in the files. Post-mortem reports from the Forties will be locked away for years.
From eighteenth-century cottages, through Incorporating Mills, to plantation-style bungalows and anonymous, low-level barrack blocks. The sheds, factories and storage facilities, clustered around Queen Meads, are a village without a war memorial, a cricket pitch. The invariable mix of domestic and sinister: pink, electrical junction boxes on the sides of detached Tudorbethan properties, in which covert research took place. ‘Climactic Test Cubicles’ were constructed in 1951: microclimates suitable for activities that were both jokey and fantastic. A device known as the ‘Master Slave Manipulator’ is photographed as it pours out a cup of tea for a gentleman in spectacles (with loud plaid tie). This performance is located within the ‘X-Ray Bay’ (1968).
The deserted sheds, on an overcast afternoon in early summer, present a melancholy spectacle. Suppressed noise. The clumsy architecture of asbestos, plasterboard, concrete. Slippery decks and verandahs. There are visible wounds, gaps where heavy machinery has been removed. In a restored gallery you come across a display case filled with weapons of war: death kit. Lee Enfield rifles. ‘Stock, magazine, bolt,’ mutters a Cadet Force veteran. Grenades. Bayonets. Machine guns. Antiquated ordnance playing the memory game, busking for sentiment.
Around the walls are hung photographs – from the Gunpowder Mills, from Woolwich, the Midlands – women working in armament factories; women in time of war. Elegant black and white prints. (Men, when you see them, reserved occupations, are sickly, done in, diminished by this army of powerful females.) The presiding mode is dignified surrealism: groups sitting around tables, in poses made familiar by Dutch domestic interiors, by Victorian moral fables, but they’re not weaving, working looms, carding wool, they are filling cartridge belts. In massive sheds (white light from an open door), women with covered hair stand among gleaming shells, an iron harvest. Women, hanging from overhead cranes, float above meadows of lethal toys. Women pose in groups, their uniforms hardworn, functional rather than fetishised.
A pattern of waterways confirms a formal geometry. Fat carp, protected from fishermen, glide through sunken powder boats. The skeletons of these craft are better preserved underwater. Grey ribs beneath the heavy green. Hooped bridges facilitate curved deck canopies (above leather-covered boards). Drained canals, running away from a brick tower, lead the walker towards the woods: a set, blending the pastoral with the industrial, that calls up bleaker Polish and East German settings.
The architecture of disclosed ruins is Neo-Mayan: traverses, blast-deflection walls, railway lines. The Gunpowder Press House with its powered water-wheel, its ivy-covered ramparts, has (according to the brochure) ‘become an icon’. An icon of what? Transition? Erasure? When the mills went up in a spectacular explosion in May 1861, one worker threw himself, blazing, into the pond – and survived. Another man was spotted, lying in the long grass, by the flames rising from his clothes. He died.
The drift through these woods, jolting over rough tracks, induces reverie: angular shapes among the dense branches, sites that are still forbidden. Elements of the megalithic, primitive mounds and encirclements, disguise Crimean War technology. Ziggurat walls, slanted, necrophile, guard a woodland clearing; a village green, known as ‘The Burning Ground’, on which discarded explosives were destroyed. It would be impossible, from this catalogue of post-industrial relics, to work your way back to any culture. This is all that’s left, monuments returned to nature, photographs in a reclaimed shed.
We breakfasted in an Italian place that looked out on Waltham Cross. There is a cross, a nibbled Gaudí pillar, a monument marking the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I. Her body (she died while travelling to Scotland to join the king) was brought back from Harby, Nottinghamshire, for burial at Westminster Abbey. Crosses were erected to witness every stage of this journey.
Webbed-in with protective nets, restored, cleaned to an ivory sheen, the Eleanor Cross is more like a radio mast than an item of funerary sculpture. It’s the focal point of this prolapsed market town: red litter bins, benches for drunks, a pedestrianised precinct (that repels walkers). The original effigies from the Cross, the work of Alexander Abyndome, are now housed in Cheshunt Public Library.
Renchi likes it. He whips out a sketchbook and settles, cross-legged, on a white stone bollard. GOLDSTEIN (FINANCIAL ADVISERS), COFFEE HOUSE: DOLCI, CAFFE, PASTA, FISHPONDS BUDGET SHOWROOMS.
There’s a background buzz of barely suppressed aggression underwriting Renchi’s Ruskinian seizure: civic architecture has got it badly wrong. A semi-circle of scarlet metal benches attracts other transients, strong lager fanciers who have made contact with some of the local barechest boys. A breakfast brew. A bit of a domestic is in progress; raised voices, repetitive insults escalating towards resolution. You can see the coffee-shop women pausing mid-sip, cappuccino moustaches. There’s quite a clique of these ladies in Waltham Cross, with the Italian place as their obvious hangout. Walnut-coloured leisure wives, still steaming from tanning beds. Metallic blondes with vivid nails. Very trim in fiercely pressed jeans.
A doppelganger manifests at Renchi’s shoulder. It’s Renchi himself, ten years older, ten years frostier in the beard. A messenger from the future steps up, loaded plastic bags in hand, nautical cap on head, to adjudicate the drawing. Renchi talks about going beyond preservation (the photograph); he wants more of an exchange with the recorded object. Sketching frees the hand. We listen, sympathetically, to our Ancient Mariner: another paroled artist who has wandered abroad and found his place.
He sets us on our way: charity shops, post-mortem clothes, financial services, stalls stacked with cheap tat. Waltham Cross has a boutique favoured by Victoria Adams (Mrs Beckham, Posh Spice). Tarty with class (the price tag grants respectability to the diamanté thong). Victoria is a local. Visit Waltham Cross and her otherness comes into focus. All the women in the coffee-bar have that hard sheen, the laminate of non-specific celebrity. Interspecies. They look as good as the photographs in the magazines. Their faces are stiff, moving like heavy paper. You can acquire, if you concentrate, follow the regime, a toxicology of fame. A fame cosmetic. Like whacking up the colour balance. Achieving alien status: part ennui, part peevishness, part camera flirtation.
Posh Spice, an odd label for a person, suits this location. It reminds me of the Indian restaurant at Waltham Abbey on millennial eve: exotic, dusky, dangerously perfumed. Victoria Beckham is the future Eleanor Cross. The name of a dumpy, longlived Germanic royal inherited by a whippet-ribbed starveling. Who shops. Who is famous for shopping. Who arrives, incognito, at a modest boutique on the Essex/Herts border: and makes sure that her visit is widely reported.
We don’t spend much time in Cedars Park, or at Temple Bar, we want to get back to the road; to attempt the north side of the M25, a network of paths and rides that go west towards Potters Bar. This area, just outside the motorway, is a blank: woods, stables, kennels.
The gates of the Western Jewish Cemetery are locked, even though we have arrived within the advertised opening hours. WHEN GATES/ARE CLOSED/ALSATIANS/ARE ON PATROL. What I’m pursuing is the burial place of the Spitalfields scholar and hermit, David Rodinsky. A long quest has been resolved by artist and archivist Rachel Lichtenstein. The haunting story of a locked room, a vanished man, has been grounded. Rachel found a death certificate, the suburban hospital where Rodinsky died, a grave with a metal name-plate. The grave, Rachel said, was near Waltham Abbey. I guessed, since I had passed this place so many times, that the beginning of my new project, the M25 walk, might overlap with my previous one, the Rodinsky story. Time after time, urban obsessions would be resolved at the very point where London lost heat, lost heart, gave up its clotted identity.
The lodge-keeper, skull covered, put us right. This had been an insensitive blunder on my part, the intrusion at the cemetery gates. Today was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; a time for abstinence and prayers of repentance. (Rachel told me that she finished work on her part of the Rodinsky book at 2.30 a.m., on the morning before Yom Kippur.)
The structure of our walk is elegiac: discontinued rituals, closed shrines. The funeral service, the emptied pond. The horse-trough near Theobalds Grove station filled with flower petals. Fenced off monuments and gates that are not gates.
We sit for a time under the Bulls Cross Bridge, watching the tide of traffic, the hallucinatory rush. Listening to the shift in the tyre sounds as the road surface changes, the thunderous amplification of the bridge. Renchi sprawls on hexagonal tiles, white road-dirt in the grooves of his boots.
I read him a quotation from Paul Devereux that seems pertinent: ‘One of the key entoptics is the spiral-tunnel-vortex, which heralds a shift from merely observing the entoptic and iconic imagery to participating in it. There is a sense of the self’s becoming mobile, leaving the body, and rushing down a tunnel or being sucked into the eye of the spiral or vortex… It is with this specific entoptic that the out-of-body or spirit-flight is associated. This entoptic tunnel could be the neurological blueprint for the straight line on the shamanic landscapes.’
The markings on the motorway are shamanic. Noise takes us out of ourselves into a dispersing landscape. Giddy, we enter movement. We could do the whole thing here, on the ramp. We could dream it.
Renchi has his own tale to tell. His father, Peter Bicknell, a Cambridge architect and academic, accumulated a notable collection of travel journals, records of walks and alpine excursions. Limited editions, rarities, manuscripts. When Renchi visited his mother, he would rummage through the library, searching out topographical information relevant to our orbital pilgrimage. Our shambling progress around the M25 could be seen as a parodic reprise of the material that interested Peter Bicknell. Welfare State ghosts on the tramp, in the footsteps of gentleman botanists, muscular Christians.
A Hampshire psychic told Renchi that his father’s library held a great clue. She described a room she had never seen. He should search the stacks, second shelf down, third book from the left, such and such a page.
He left at once for Cambridge. He found the volume. It was just as she had pictured it. A handwritten journal, a journey.
‘What did it reveal?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ Renchi said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’ A trek through the North of England, in search of nothing in particular. And not locating it. A record kept for the sake of keeping a record. A singularity that awaited a singular readership.
The tracks, around Temple House, are clear enough on the map. Bull Cross Ride, Old Park Ride. What I didn’t realise was that ‘Ride’ meant just that. It was an order. Get in the saddle or bugger off. We trudged for a mile or so before we hit the gate. No warning. Entry denied. We should have taken the hint when we passed Gunsite Stud and Hanging Plantation. Off-motorway green belt is jealous of its status. Here are city-subsidised farms, stables, country that doesn’t have to acknowledge its rowdy southern neighbour. The M25 is a sewer of potential bandits, rustlers, burger-munching trippers carrying the virus of the slums. It’s border country and the borderers know on which side of the motorway unlicensed pedestrians belong.
*
Traffic snarls, the air is scented. Our route, from Whitewebbs Road into Cattlegate Road, under the Crews Hill railway bridge and up the slope towards the M25 (between Waltham Abbey and Potters Bar), shivers with ambiguity. It’s a rat run, the end of the liberties of Enfield Chase, but it is also a retail paradise. Horticultural retail. Instant gardens. Statuary. Sheds. Bedding plants. Gravel. Compost. Dutch juggernauts unloading trays of tired plants.
Teased by television, by painted decking, water features and shivering Junos with inadequate T-shirts, householders demand flatpack gardens that can be assembled by a gang of self-promoting experts while they skive off for a round of golf. Gardening and cooking and watching celebrities take exotic holidays is the fix, the image-flood in which we float and seek our sustenance. Pleasure-provoking narcoleptics in a period of mind-numbing labour, wrecked transport systems, failing schools and hospitals. Tending the soil, snorting the night perfumes, glass of wine in hand, will heal us.
A gentle pornography of seed catalogues, pubic thatches (in mauve and scarlet and yellow) marketed as ‘The Contemporary Grasses Collection’. The copy is a lubricious come-on. ‘Planiscapus Nigrescens: spectacular, moody… with dark-purple, almost black curving leaves. Briza media: delightful Common Quaking grass… trembling heart-shaped flower spikelets. Carex comans: dense tuft-forming sedge. Imperata cylindrica : tall sword-like green leaves which turn blood red from tips.’
The TV garden is an extension of the house. You can still find allotments, salvaged from unexploitable buffer zones, but they are weirdly anachronistic. Strip-system allocations, fenced in and worked by elderly, all-weather gentlemen. A good example can be seen near the Sewardstone Road bridge, between cemetery and motorway, in Waltham Abbey. A solitary ancient leaning on his hoe, shuffling backwards and forwards to his shed. The villein with his small corner of England. That never changes, though such sites are threatened. They have to hide away, hope that they’ve been forgotten.
Crews Hill services the patio-lounge fantasist. Horticulture is discussed in terms of plant furniture, colour schemes, architectural bamboos. There are flirty plants and nighty plants, stylish plants, bimbo plants and ‘as seen on television’ plants. A banana tree (‘special offer for readers of Good Housekeeping’) is pitched as a lifestyle accessory. ‘A definite “it” plant. In fact if Hello! magazine were to interview their first celebrity plant it would probably be this one.’
Blues and purples and mauves. Lavender and ceanothus. The drench of suburbia. Intoxicated bees reeling from flower to flower, a great year for Enfield honey. Lipsticky and dripping thick over fingers and plate rims. The hum of the pastoral, the beehive in the English garden: as depicted on the label of a honey jar.
Crews Hill, representing the final flourish of the Lea Valley/Enfield Chase tradition (as heritaged in Joan Hessayon’s novel Capel Bells), has come to an arrangement with the motorway. Walk back towards the old town of Enfield and you’ll find the glasshouses; you’ll understand Hessayon’s thesis, the way that gardeners from the big estates began to trade in plants. An escape from patronage, servitude, the tied cottage: the realisation that plants were a commodity. This astonishing parade of drive-in retail opportunities, part Sunday excursion, part car boot sale, operates on the cusp of what has gone (genius loci) and that which is coming: Americana.
Try this for a roadside menu: Garrick Furniture Design, Antique Fires (of Enfield), Four Seasons Pottery, Crews Hill Art & Crafts (Hang Ups), Fernleigh Landscapes, Monty’s Furniture, Three Counties Garden & Leisure Buildings, The Quilting Bee, Enfield Bird Centre, Macbar Army Surplus. Cash & Carry Winter Pansy’s (sic). These are not garden centres (for those you need to go to Suffolk, Oxfordshire), these are garden suburbs. Listen to the names of the kids who are running amok among the bedding plants: ‘Get down from that, Brandon. Leave him alone, Harrison.’
As we slog uphill, Renchi delights in the display of slug-repelling, crushed shell mounds, bark-chip puddles, grey slabs (made to look like York stone). We negotiate fibreglass rockeries that would horrify Gussie Bowles, boulders so light you can lift them as easily as Steve Reeves in Hercules Conquers Atlantis. There are regiments of gum-coloured statues: hounds, hedgehogs, bunnies, ducks; loosely classical nudes, lions cubbed from Landseer, water-spitting gargoyles, Egyptian cat-gods tamed and domesticated. You can smell the bird house, the deceased lizards. You can purchase a hairy spider, a bag of snakes or a tray of delightful scorpions. Sniff the resin, the hothouse biodiversity. Compost that doesn’t smell like shit, but a blend of roasted coffee and turf from Galway. There are enough customised sheds and cabins and pinewood studios to house all of Jack Straw’s asylum seekers.
The fetid concentration of this botanical stew stays with us. I am sticky with spray, perfume-processed for the next stage of our walk. I’m sure that the Crews Hill herbal affects drivers on the motorway. They open car windows, take their foot off the gas, smile. Easy country. No red cones. They’re on one of the original sections of the road, the gently weaving passage where the M25 defined itself, discovered its identity. And now, in the September evening, at the golden hour, they pick up an hallucinatory hint of paradise gardens on the outskirts of Potters Bar.
Escaping Crews Hill, going under the M25, is a woeful experience for pedestrians; we face the oncoming traffic. A constant stream, both ways, clusters of five or six cars, nose to tail in barely controlled frustration: metal projectiles time-warped on to a drovers’ track, Cattlegate Road. In the intervals between the blam-blam-blam, Renchi hears a woodpecker in the twilight woods. There are long stretches without verges on which to walk. We are conscious of being nothing more than columns of vulnerable meat, obstacles made hazardous by the glare of the sinking sun.
Moving west in the direction of Potters Bar, looking across the valley to the hamlet of Cuffley, we feel a nudge in our perception of space/time. Renchi relates this to certain devices in children’s fiction, the way a network of green lanes can sidle alongside the densest clots of population. The walker ‘goes back’, forgets himself (or herself). A pre-visionary condition, in which it is possible to let go of the present and access an older narrative, a secret garden or enchanted wood.
By his reading, the tunnel under the motorway is a gate of memory. Concrete walls become screens on which are projected phantasmagoric tree shapes. But reaching the tunnel, coming up against the wall – cut to fit the slope of the motorway escarpment – we find that the concrete is no casual wash. The wall is made with deep grooves, like a sheet of corrugated paper. The effect is of something wrapped and hidden, a stone curtain. Motorway sounds reverberate and shake the tunnel. Nothing to be seen, everything to be imagined.
Grand houses dispose themselves along a golden road: IT mansions and cult centres (probably sponsored by George Harrison). White fences, gravel drives. Ironwork gates on which CCTV cameras replace heraldic beasts. JAIN ESTATE. Millionaire mendicants, spiritual conglomerates, multinational god franchises: they absorb this liminal landscape. The sign, Jain Estate, made me think of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs: Shambu Bharti Baba on the sepia cover of Indian Journals and the poet himself, pole in hand, naked and hairy, beside the Sea of Japan. Elective ecumenicism. The state of being Jain, adapting a dualistic sixth-century religion, the liberation of the soul through asceticism, to twentieth-century trauma, by the act of removing one’s clothes. I pictured the rooms of this Hertfordshire retreat as luxurious caves occupied by nude men. By stepping aside from the world, they had somehow acquired a very nice chunk of it in which to practise their austere rituals.
The evening road to Potters Bar is an enchantment. As we walk over Hooke Hill and through Fir Wood, the sun is setting at the end of a tunnel of shadowy greenery. An image I would see many times during the course of our circuit, Renchi with pack on back striding down a long straight road. The cars have gone. The road comes into its own. A solid stream in which we wade.
Swallowed in suburban modesty, banks of blue hydrangeas, we acknowledge that Potters is one bar we won’t cross. Potter’s forest gate: the old name. A railway town at the end of the line from Moorgate. Property values are beginning to climb as city folk appreciate the connection. It plays two ways. Once we’ve located the station we’re out of it, back home.