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 prison. 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.
A Mercedes with darkened windows slides out from behind spiked gates that close automatically as the car pulls away. The long drive, in a herringbone pattern of pale brick, stretches into a leafy distance, perspective flattered by lines of thin aspens. Terrace, fountain. Pausing to admire the potential photo-op, we are interrogated by a security patrol. A white Fiesta draws up. A guard, in mirrored sunglasses, leans out. Courteous. ‘Just checking, sir.’
Nothing has changed since the first car challenged us, ten minutes earlier. You are allowed to walk half a mile between security shakedowns. Slow-moving Fiestas are on constant patrol. CCTV cameras, panning restlessly, alert the monitor jockeys. Calls come in from nervous watchers at windows: ‘Walkers.’ Walkers without dogs. The public aspect of this private road, between the B374 and the B365, is being subtly erased. In the end, it’s less bother to go the long way around.
As we advance down the avenue, towards the eastern checkpoint, smaller, ruder vehicles begin to appear. Domestics checking in. The occasional limo, or Range Rover, carrying uniformed children to school. We encounter the only walkers the estate allows: young women struggling with pairs, even packs, of leashed dogs. Accredited canine accompanists. Peripatetic toilet attendants scooping the lush verges. Leather lead in one hand, silver shit-shovel in the other.
The map of St George’s Hill, near the entrance gate, is highly selective: the estate is creamy-white ground, no houses are marked, roads look like rivers. Two islands of greenery represent the only named zones: Tennis Club, Golf Club. The western entrance lets you into the golf club. The eastern entrance adjoins the tennis club. There is no other reason to be here. The notice – YOU ARE HERE – is ironic. You only see it on your way out. As the barrier closes behind you. And the guard ticks you off his list. Phones down the line with an all-points warning.
This second estate, Whiteley Village, on the west side of Seven Hills Road, makes a powerful impression on the map, on my Nicholson. In its benevolent aspect, the village (with its Home of Rest) is a Jungian mandala, circular paths contained in an outer square. We are about to enter a panopticon, all areas visible from the centre. Another ambivalent asylum of the suburbs.
The approach to the village is kinder than anything we encountered on St George’s Hill, the planting is shaggier – a path vanishing into a green tunnel (one of Samuel Palmer’s oval bowers). There are gates with heraldic shields: WHITELEY VILLAGE/PRIVATE/ELDERLY RESIDENTS/PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY. But the gates are open.
Renchi strolling, hands cupped to support his awkward rucksack, leads the way. The taller, shavenheaded Marc (in black T-shirt, dark glasses, white trainers) is the inappropriate figure. He might be security. Earlier that morning, he told us how he’d been in the music business. A roadie at the tail-end of Heavy Metal, the cusp of Punk. He almost fitted on the Hill; delivering substances, a sessions man down on his luck. Up there, Renchi screamed offence: eco-warrior, sans-culotte. Ambling through these red brick bungalows, this play village, he comes into his own. A helper with rolled-up sleeves, a sympathetic listener: suitably rough at the edges, fuzzy in outline.
As with all Surrey estates, there is nobody to be seen. It’s too early for the old folk. The bungalows are generously spread out, detached, with neat garden plots; wide, trim lawns. The design is uniform but not oppressively so. Low tiled roofs on public buildings, twisted licorice pillars. Whiteley Village plays like The Prisoner – but that’s our own perversity; we’ve been schooled to be suspicious of charity, of surveillance (where it doesn’t declare itself).
At the centre of the estate is a raised garden, a plinth; a near obelisk with a stone sculpture of the seated figure of ‘Industry’. Industry is female, wide-skirted; a beehive (covered with bees) is cradled under her left arm. Beneath her, in profile, is a memorial to William Whiteley (1831–1907). Whiteley died in the year that Brooklands was launched as a motor racing circuit. He was a businessman, shopkeeper and philanthropist. His department store in Queensway, Bayswater, was a Victorian and Edwardian institution. A virtual high street with all its retail variety enclosed in a single spacious building; a way of experiencing Knightsbridge or Regent Street in the inner suburbs. Like Arding and Hobbs in Clapham Junction or Jones Brothers in Holloway Road. It was possible to promenade, fit out a house, purchase groceries, reading matter, take tea. The vision lasted for much of the century, gradually declining into situation comedy and shabby grandeur – until Whiteley’s rebranded itself as a true mall, a shelter for: Ace of Cards, Tower Records, Elegant Nails, Poons Restaurant. Railway terminus opportunism.
William Whiteley (of Westbourne Grove) made provision for his workers; after years behind the counter (floorwalking, packing, nodding and greeting in Bayswater), they qualified for a red brick bungalow in the Mole Valley. The memorial tablet alluded to a ‘munificent bequest’. Whiteley purchased the park and built cottages ‘for the comfort of old age and as an encouragement to others to do likewise’.
The verdigris stain made the plutocrat’s plinth look like a green fountain. Instead of being the eye of the panopticon, from which the inhabitants could be observed (and controlled), Industry and her beehive were the focal point. The spokes of the roads led attention in to the statue and its message: ‘Blessed be the man that provideth for the sick and needy.’ Charity being done, and well done, need not be inconspicuous. Retail veterans, their years of useful labour concluded, would meditate – with gratitude – on the benevolence of their patron. They would be encouraged to read his abbreviated biography, as it was carved in stone. ‘Apprenticed at the age of 16 to a drapery firm in Wakefield… went to London to see the Great Exhibition of 1851… the busy life of the Metropolis attracted him… ten years of thrift and constant study with a City firm… small business of his own at 63, Westbourne Grove… won himself the name of the universal provider… world wide reputation… pioneer of the great London retail stores of the 19th & 20th centuries… died in London…’
The memorial bench is a good place to spread our maps, assess their contradictions. St George’s Hill buffers the M25; we have lost touch with our orbital democrat, the conveyor belt of urban dreaming. We decide to follow Winstanley and the Diggers, in the direction of Cobham Heath, rather than pay any special attention to the ‘corner’, where the road begins to pull to the south-east. The Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley will have to be left for another day. It wasn’t, in any case, the gardens that pricked my interest, but the woodland car park (easy access to the motorway).
EVIL THAT LURKS AT THE GARDEN GATE: reported the Evening Standard, dressing a scare story with a photograph of cars and camper vans in a sylvan glade. The Wisley car park has become a meeting place for sex pests, weirdos, stalkers; a venue favoured by motorway prostitutes and gay cruisers. Six hundred and fifty thousand plant-fanciers visit the famous gardens every year without suspecting that the zone of car parks, each catering to a particular taste, is possessed by the Dionysiac frenzy articulated by J.G. Ballard in his 1973 novel, Crash. Adulterous couples favour one area of the woods, homosexuals another, transsexuals a third. Wisley Common, an undulating tract of heathland, Scots pine, birch and oak, is now a popular resort for sexual dalliance: the contemporary equivalent of the old riverside pleasure grounds, Vauxhall and Ranelagh.
The sixty-acre estate took shape as a garden in the 1870s, when it was purchased by George Wilson of Weybridge, a former Treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society. After Wilson’s death, the estate was acquired by Sir Thomas Hanbury, and given by him, in trust, to the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘for the purpose of an Experimental Garden and the Encouragement and Improvement of Scientific and Practical Horticulture in all its branches’. The pattern, seen in Enfield Chase, repeats itself. A paradise garden, owned by a brewer, confirms the relationship of inner and outer, city labyrinth and bucolic suburb. Hanbury, Quaker brewmaster (Truman, Hanbury and Buxton of Brick Lane), laid out a patch of ground where stressed workers could recover their vital energies by walking among beds of exotic plants. The flavour of Wisley (as represented in the RHS booklet of 1969, picked up in one of Shepperton’s many charity shops) is resolutely outer-rim M25, Surrey hill station: bright gashes of colonial colour. Evergreen azaleas, ‘Temple Belle’ rhododendrons. Alpine rockeries that ‘Gussie’ Bowles of Myddelton House would have abhorred.
Heady drenches infect the woods. Martin and Vivi Gale (in their tea-stall) are ‘plagued by predatory homosexuals’. Squelchy paths are strewn with hardcore magazines. It’s too convenient: lay-bys on either side of the A3, resinous paths, filtered light; a rapid escape route to the M25 (the ribbon connecting nowhere with everywhere).
A lorry driver called David Smith picked up Amanda Walker, a known prostitute, in Paddington. He drove her to Wisley, where he ‘mummified’ her with cling-film, before raping her. While she was still alive, he stuffed her mouth with leaves. And then he stabbed her. Her naked body was recovered from a shallow grave, found within yards of the Royal Horticultural Society gardens.
Smith, who is thought to have used the motorway system to identify and secure women for ritualistic sexual practices, was a Wisley regular. He liked to see what other couples got up to in their cars. An enterprising white-van owner used to charge drifters for watching while he had sex with underage girls. And, being a favoured resort for cruising men, the park also attracted homophobe gangs.
A vicious attack on a couple in a parked car in a quiet Surrey lane (an Austin Princess with a brown top) launched the night of violence that resulted in the unsafe conviction of the men known as the ‘M25 Three’. One of the victims, Peter Hurburgh, kicked and beaten (by machete), drenched in petrol, died. The other, Alun Ely, survived: to offer a number of contradictory accounts of his ordeal.
The orbital motorway was still a novelty, operative for two years, when the assault, burglary and murder occurred in December 1988. The road solicited crime. The accused men lived in Sydenham, an easy-going culture of amateur drug dealing, car theft, fencing and serial fatherhood. It didn’t seem like crime, the life. It was what everybody did. Everybody lied, everybody informed. Everybody was fitted up. Short spells on the Isle of Sheppey got your head together.
The new motorway was a route into previously inaccessible territories; you could spin Surrey, explore Kent. The expedition for which the M25 Three went down began with the theft of a Triumph Sprite – abandoned when Alun Ely’s Austin Princess was commandeered. And so on, car for car, through Leatherhead and Oxted. When the police started to get heavy, the surviving motors were torched. None of the witnesses can remember their assailants: white becomes black, dreadlocks and long greasy hair are confused. Stories are subject to infinite revision, adjustments of time and place. The cars are never forgotten. A woman coming home late remarks the Union Flag logo on the Sprite. The pub musician at the White Hart, William ‘Budgie’ Robins, who vaguely noticed a gay man in white, paid far more attention to the motor in the car park. That yellow/brown combo, he reckoned, was ‘a bit special’.
With the advent of this bright new motorway, a support belt beneath South London’s sagging suburbs, criminal imagination was booted into a higher register. Street crims became upwardly mobile; they were soon thieving beyond their capacity to fence, dishing out grief where it was least appreciated. With substantial rewards from insurance companies and tabloids on the table, with the constabulary ready as ever to customise a fiction, the comfortable laissez-faire, live-and-let-live of the Sydenham, Catford, Croydon lowlife imploded.
Like a powerful magnetic field, the west/east pull of the M25 affected old alignments, the familiar runs towards Brighton and the coast. Narrative fractured. Verbals didn’t stand up. Confessions wouldn’t cohere. The motorway was loud with Chinese whispers. When dusk fell, villains took to their (borrowed-without-the-owner’s-consent) cars. On the cruise. Tooled up with hand guns, machetes, petrol cans, monkey wrenches.
Nothing in ‘The Case of the M25 Three’ makes sense. Alun Ely, who admitted in court to ‘careless handling of the truth’, drops off his girl friend and then drives aimlessly around Croydon for hours, down to a Fina petrol station on the Brighton road – before parking up for sex with Peter Hurburgh. A man walking a dog remembers the car but doesn’t know what day of the week it was. Girl friends of the accused men (Raphael Rowe, Michael Davis, Randolph Johnson) receive stolen jewellery and forget the donors. The grey sprawl of South London subtopia bleeds into Croydon: nothing is fixed, journeys overlap. Speed chilled with puff. None of the men packed into the stolen car wears a watch. Time is crosschecked by hallucinating a petrol tanker refuelling a set of red-and-green pumps in an oasis of yellow-white light, in the middle of nowhere.
Surrey declines to acknowledge these incursions. Surrey celebrates private estates, notable gardens, the E.M. Forster movie franchise. Bandits who motor through leafy lanes sussing properties, preying on deviants, wired to the eyeballs, don’t register. They are as invisible as scuttling things in the long grass of the central reservation. Landscape artists of the Highways Agency have made access tunnels for badgers, there is no human equivalent. Ratepayers see the M25 as a barrier to be defended, villains know it as a job opportunity.
The Whiteley Village golf course, unlike the striped sward on St George’s Hill, is in use. Early. Old chaps greet us with a wave. They’re happy to debate a path to carry us over the Mole, the A3, and into Cobham. THIS SPACE COULD BE PROMOTING YOUR COMPANY LOGO: IS the message on a green hydrant.
The Mole is reedy, nettles and willowherb and field pansies in profusion; there’s no way we can wade across, we hear traffic on the far side. A Pre-Raphaelite stream and a functional dual-carriageway running in parallel. A neat bridge with harp-shaped wings. A path that burrows under the road.
We pause, resting on the crash barrier, for the usual roadside photo session. Renchi abandons his sweater. Marc’s belly is rumbling; as a vegetarian he needs to graze at regular intervals. In several hours, hacking through estates, woodland, golf courses, roads and rivers, we haven’t seen anywhere to get a cup of tea. No cafés, no coffee stalls, not even a petrol station: a green desert. If we don’t find somewhere fast, Marc will keel over and posterity will be denied his Surrey pastoral portfolio.