Sinclair - London Orbital

PENGUIN BOOKS

LONDON ORBITAL

A book of great passion and energy about the M25 from one of the masters of the English sentence John Lanchester, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

Sinclairs prose is exquisite, his approach is a distinctively English take on the whole strange business of psychogeography. The walk around the M25 which is the basis for the book is no mere trope, but a way of penetrating to the very jam of the London doughnut, by excavating the dough within which it is encased Will Self, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

A fascinating account of his heroic walk around the M25, a journey through a new Britain of retail parks and industrial estates JG Ballard, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

An instant classic: part social history of the unsung lands that lie beside the M25, and part cultural analysis of this endless terrain of science parks, golf courses, hypermarkets and speculative housing that makes up the New Britain of 2002. A feast for admirers of Sinclairs rich and quirky style JG Ballard, Guardian, Books of the Year

Rambling, self-indulgent, brilliant. Partly a diary, partly a ferociously learned, literate and curious exploration of the plight of the nation Sunday Telegraph

An absolute joy. Sinclairs England is horribly recognizable, a land of retail parks and jerry-built housing he uncovers a rich history The Times

Sharp, astute, at the top of his singular game Sinclair is a London visionary and a crackling prose writer, he sees and maps esoteric connections Daily Telegraph

Very readable. Its a hoot Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

His writing is so good its invisible. Nothing escapes Sinclairs eye, and the mass of piled-up detail accumulates to convey the atmosphere of Londons outskirts, sometimes pine-scented, sometimes considerably gamier Time

Dazzling word-wizardry, unsettling and illuminating a pleasure to read. He proves that he is so accomplished a stylist that he can (and indeed frequently does) write his way out of a lay-by. Classic Sinclair territory Independent on Sunday

The truest, most knowledgeable living writer on London. London Orbital is a late, retrospective addition to the genre of millennial literature, but also the most enlightening and observant Evening Standard

Wonderful, remarkable, ambitious. A great, strange book giddy with information, by turns gritty and lyrical. London Orbital is a glory; keep a copy in the glove compartment Sunday Times

Full of satire, intelligence and a contrariness that will come back and taunt you from the verge next time youre stuck in a tailback Big Issue

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landors Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinskys Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; and London Orbital. He lives in Hackney, East London.

A Walk around the M25

IAIN SINCLAIR

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Granta Books 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2003

Copyright Iain Sinclair, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193601-7

For Renchi, and for Kevin Jackson,
shadows on the road

for tho eclipses of thought are to me a living inhumement and equal to the dread throes of suffocation, turning the valley of vision into a fen of scorpions and stripes and agonies, yet I protest, and glory in it for the sake of its evidence, of the strength of spirit that when inspird for art I am quite insensible to cold, hunger and bodily fatigue

Samuel Palmer (letter to George Richmond)

K. Hodges (London, W8): What was your worst moment on TV?

Jeremy Paxman: Interviewing a man under the impression that he was a schizophrenic in care in the community when in fact he was an engineer whod come on to talk about the M25.

Independent (29 September 1999)

It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsbys Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.

I have to admit: I was developing an unhealthy obsession with the M25, Londons orbital motorway. The dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape. Was this grim necklace, opened by Margaret Thatcher on 29 October 1986, the true perimeter fence? Did this conceptual ha-ha mark the boundary of whatever could be called London? Or was it a tourniquet, sponsored by the Department of Transport and the Highways Agency, to choke the living breath from the metropolis?

Thatcher, who never grasped the concept of dressing down, her range going from airfixed-in-pressurised-dimethyl-ether (with solvent abuse warning on can) to carved-out-of-funerary-basalt, decided that day, or had it put to her by style consultants, that she should treat this gig as an outside broadcast, a chat from the paddock at Cheltenham, not the full Ascot furbelow. A suit, semi-formal (like Westminster Cathedral), in a sort of Aquascutum beige.

Autumn. No hat. A war footing: mufti-awkward. Argie bashing, ranting. Cromwell-fierce, hormonally stoked, she wields her small scythe, dismissing the unseen enemy, stalkers in the bushes, eco-bandits, twitchers, pennypinchers, lilylivered Liberal fifth-columnists, bedwetters, nay-sayers.

I cant stand those who carp and criticise when they ought to be congratulating Britain on a magnificent achievement and beating the drum for Britain all over the world. Rejoice. The military/industrial two-step. That old standard. Mrs Thatcher went on to rave over the Sainsburys effect, the introduction of US mall-viruses, landscape consumerism, retail landfill.

YES was the word. Thatcher filtered in a perpetual green glow, like a Hammer Films spook. Bride of Dracula. Green meant GO . This business with ring roads had been floating around the ministries since the Thirties, since theyd noticed that cars were taking over the planet. At first, the idea had been: car as servant, parkways, elevated heaven ramps (Michael Powells