From
Waltham Abbey to
Shenley,
Abbots Langley to
Staines, Staines to
Epsom and Epsom to
Westerham before moving on to
Dartford, the river and Carfax and arriving back at Waltham Abbey. A journey in several stages around the
M25, a 117 mile (188 km) orbital motorway which encircles Greater London, made by the novelist, poet and "
psychogeographer"
Iain Sinclair, together with the painter
Renchi
Iain Sinclair
Bicknell, the film director
Chris Petit, the journalist
Kevin Jackson, the photographer
Marc Atkins and the writer
Bill Druomnd.
London Orbital by Ian Sinclair is the book that talks about this anti-clockwise walk around the M25, one of the busiest stretches of the British motorway network and, according to a poll, the worst of the "
seven horrors of Britain".
A tear in nobody's land where London ends, and the desolate space beyond this "tourniquet that chokes the vital breath of the metropolis" begins. A journey to discover an unknown territory: the one that lies bounded by the M25 outside of the city centre. Sinclair wanders through the London's boroughs and countryside in a land invaded by commercial centres, grey industrial estates and tidy homologated residential neighbourhoods.
Each chapter of the book is a leg of this one-year pilgrimage which has been described by the author as a "a ritual purpose: to exorcise the unthinking malignancy of the Dome, to celebrate the sprawl of London". A walk which becomes the excuse for sounding habits, aberrations, trends and absurdities of our contemporary culture: the alienation of the road traffic and the "asphalt-centric" trend of modern urbanization; the empting of the city centres in favour of more and more homologated neighbourhoods.
Here, where the commercial centres are the new cathedrals, where oil has replaced blood, you can witness the annulment and the distortion (made by spin doctors, politicians and estate agents) of the less pleasant part of neighbourhoods' history: madhouses, hospitals, weapon plants have been literally erased from our memory and replaced by valuable residential areas. London Orbital is an in-depth immersion into British culture: from Welles to Ballard, from Conrad, Stocker, Dickens to unknown and obscure and deliberately forgotten names of contemporary English poetry and literature: the portrait of a hidden England that nobody has had the courage to talk about.
As J. G. Ballard said in The Observer, London Orbital is «a brilliant voyage of discovery into the deeply unfashionable fringes of London. 'It isn't often that one reads a book and is convinced that it's an instant classic, but I'm sure that "London Orbital" will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness, that terrain of golf courses, retail parks and industrial estates which is Blair's Britain. It's a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose, and on another level a warning that the mythological England of village greens and cycling aunts has been buried under the rush of a million radial tyres».
