#10 Twenty-year Orbit, part 2A
#10 Twenty-year Orbit, part 2A
Moving on to look at Sinclair's and Petit's 2002 London Orbital film.
The English motorway system is beautiful and strange
It's been there forever, it's never going to change
It eliminates all diversions, it eliminates all emotions
All you’ve got to do to stay alive is drive
‘The English Motorway System’, Black Box Recorder1
Some readers of Some Private Diagonal may recall that my second piece on this Substack (free to read) concerned itself with Jean Baudrillard’s America, specifically with a phrase from that book, ‘the desertification of signs and men.’2 In that 1986 text, Baudrillard envisages a ‘desertified’ future, but needless to say, not in an ecological sense. What he sees ahead is a human world growing ever more barren and impoverished spiritually and metaphysically. Even though, as I explained in that early post, Baudrillard did not present this as a baleful eventuality, and instead seemed to accept it without a qualm, in a mode of serene indifference, in 1986 many readers may have felt it to be an unduly pessimistic prediction. The Eighties was an exciting decade (I do remember it, albeit vaguely) and there appeared to be at least as many reasons for optimism as for its opposite. Of course the intervening decades have schooled us on that score. Who now would seriously argue that Baudrillard’s vision of a desertified future was wide of the mark?
One can find striking echoes of Baudrillard’s disquieting prophecy in the fiction of J.G. Ballard. I might even say pre-echoes, as Ballard was writing stories set in the desert resort of Vermilion Sands—a playground for the jealous lovers and idle dreamers of an enervated and rich leisure society of the future—as early as the 1950s. In the introduction to a 1981 story collection, Ballard offered a gloss on the Vermilion Sands stories, of which he had written about nine by that point:
The chief characteristic of this desert resort, not abandoned but forever out of season, is that everything is over. Its past lies behind it, and nothing that can happen in the future will substantially change it again. It has come to terms with its past, and now lies there on its deck chair beside a drained swimming pool, somewhere in the middle of this endless afternoon. It’s against this background that chimeras stir, fancies take flight…3
Ballard is a strong presence in Iain Sinclair’s and Chris Petit’s London Orbital4, and not only because he actually appears in it5. The monotonous motorway landscape the film concerns itself with is precisely the terrain that Ballard managed to make his own, to put his indelible stamp on, over the course of his 50-year career. And Sinclair and Petit undoubtedly get Ballard, they understand his peculiar bent, his highly original philosophy: that approach to things in which utopianism and dystopianism seem to somehow fold into each other. Rather like that peculiar photo in which the dress was blue for some and gold for others, some readers find somber pessimism in his works, while others discover a strange, visionary optimism. Sinclair:
What I admire most about Ballard is his genial stoicism, his Buddha tenacity. A fixed point, a stalactite formed from sediments of road rage and air terminal frustration. Interrogate him, and he’ll give you precisely what you want: the riff, the loop, the famous Ballardian twist. Pro-suburb, anti-metropolis. The future is boring, the future is Shepperton, and the future is all used up.6
That barren future once again. If Ballard and Baudrillard were right, and the world we’re moving into is a spiritual desert, then the task at hand would seem to be to come up with survival strategies. How does one live in a desert? One seeks out water sources; ideally, oases. Now the M25 may not seem a promising candidate for an oasis, a refuge from the desert of the (un)culture. Especially to those who, in recent months, have found themselves spending much more time on the orbital motorway than they bargained for, thanks to Just Stop Oil protestors or Arctic blizzards. But according to London Orbital (the film), the M25 is more interesting than people let on. Even when it’s boring (and it can be extremely boring), it’s interesting: a paradox I will try to resolve below.
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The world’s biggest bypass
As is clear from Sinclair’s and Petit’s narration, work on the London Orbital film began after Sinclair had completed his orbital circuit on foot. He’d amassed a hefty amount of material, and some of this would find its way into the essay film. Petit’s less enviable job was to drive circuit after circuit of the motorway itself, as he explains :
I was left with little to do, except to find the split nature of our project by electing to drive, in pursuit of nothing, around the world’s biggest bypass. A failed bypass in any surgical sense, carried out far too late to sustain an ailing city.
That last comment is classic Chris Petit: a strikingly original yet somehow still low-key observation, and one in which the man’s modernist sympathies shine through. Petit has confessed (though I forget where exactly) that he is ‘in love with the modern world’, and this enthusiasm is one he shares with Ballard, whom he (like Sinclair) refers to quite often—at greatest length in ‘The Last Modernist’, a tribute article published shortly after the elder novelist’s death in 2009. Petit is as much a writer as a filmmaker, having nine novels and fourteen films to his name (by Wikipedia’s reckoning).
Bram Stoker’s Dracula7 features prominently in the London Orbital book8 (see part 1 of this essay), on account of the M25 passing by Purfleet, close to the imaginary estate of Carfax, which the Count selected as his first rung on the English property ladder. Stoker’s most famous creation makes it into Sinclair’s and Petit’s collaboration too, being introduced with a strange remark from Petit near the beginning of the film: “Iain announced that the blood metaphor, and the lunatic asylum, were essential to an understanding of the M25.” The tone then goes beyond the mysterious into the comically portentous: “He warned that by driving it, I risked becoming one of Stoker’s undead.” With eerie ambient music underscoring the notion, this is to be taken (I think) as an example of Petit’s very deadpan humour (Sinclair’s is more manic). But the Dracula theme is about more than just laughs, becoming, in the end, one of the film’s most haunting aspects (more on this in part 2B).
While Sinclair walked within earshot of the M25, circling London to (so he claimed) exorcise the baleful influence of the Millennium Dome, but concerning himself only obliquely with the motorway itself, Petit’s quest is a more classically Ballardian or Kraftwerkian one: he sets off in pursuit of what we might call ‘the superhighway sublime’:
Like the Dome, the M25 is negative space, an energy drain. To enter it is to enter dead time, clockwise or anticlockwise. More than other motorways the M25 is designed to test thresholds of boredom. It eliminates any romantic notion of boredom, but for the addictive, it has its attractions. It is mainline boredom, it is true boredom, a quest for transcendental boredom, a state that offers nothing except itself, resisting any promise of breakthrough or story. The road becomes a tunneled landscape, a perfect kind of amnesia. The Hungarian transport minister said there was nothing wrong with the M25, except that it didn’t bypass Budapest.
In an interview with the two filmmakers that’s included on the DVD, Petit explains that, in 2000 when filming began, digital video cameras had recently become readily available, and this technology became key to the creation of the London Orbital film. Film stock, which was the medium Petit selected for 1979’s Radio On9, is expensive, and must be used selectively and sparingly. Digital video is completely different in this regard, with usage limited only by the available memory space and battery capacity. D.V. was thus perfect for endless driving, endless filming. Later, the repetitive and circular nature of the M25 could be evoked with judicious work in the editing suite. Ambient filmmaking. Non-linear. As Petit informs us (narrating in the film, not as interviewee), a sort of negative sublime is the result:
The fascination of senseless repetition becomes something else applied to the M25: a form of rear-view madness perhaps, where repetition results in anxiety and rage. Only psychosis can break the spell. My theory that viewing the overfamiliar as a form of alien landscape would transform it is undone by the pointlessness of endless orbiting, by the road’s history, by its resistance to nostalgia, and by its theology. Road is nightmare, road is purgatory, road is hell.
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A tribute to the insane
Among the more memorable episodes in Sinclair’s London Orbital book are the visits Sinclair and Renchi make to the various old mental hospitals—some abandoned completely, others in the process of being wound down by the first New Labour administration—that ring London, coincidentally at roughly the same distance from the metropolis as the M25. The madhouses and the fate of their patients constitute one of the book’s major themes but, wanting to keep the first part of this essay’s length down, I didn’t previously mention them. It’s a theme that’s touched upon in the film:
Renchi has been dosing me on Foucault. Madness and Civilisation. Asylums haunt the motorway like abandoned forts, the kind of defensive ring once found on the Thames, below Tilbury.
The asylum colony at Epsom had inevitably been given over to the developers. Renchi gathered several hundred stones to represent the souls of the unrecorded dead of Longrove and Horton hospitals. In tunnels that ran beneath the downs he invented ceremonies of appeasement. At the tunnel entrance he broke the orbital circuit into shamanic dream lines.
Hospital colonies are black mandalas of madness. Circles set around a central axis, depictions of an unstable brain chemistry. Shenley is a hilltop encampment, Cadbury, or Maiden Castle; Napsbury is a winged creature. The fantastic sigils of the madhouse architects dominate the map, the docile northwest quadrant of our journey.
What’s left out of the film, but very much present in the book, is Sinclair’s anger at the Thatcher administration’s solution to the problem of the insane, the so-called ‘Care in the Community’ approach (aka ‘Community Care’ and ‘Domiciliary Care’), a cost-cutting revolution in mental health care which naturally was continued by the Major and Blair administrations, and indeed continues up to this day.10 Sinclair, as something of a Romantic, and a great admirer of William Blake, clearly sympathises with those society deems insane. In the early and middle-period books especially, he's not averse to admitting that what he's doing on his psychogeographical excursions might be mad. From 1997's Lights Out for the Territory:
The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking. To walk out from Hackney to Greenwich Hill, and back along the River Lea to Chingford Mount, recording and retrieving the messages on walls, lampposts, doorjambs: the spites and spasms of an increasingly deranged populace. (I had developed this curious conceit while working on my novel Radon Daughters: that the physical movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet.
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Easily into our stride, I’m explaining the whole insane concept to Marc: on the hoof. No time for maps and bearings. He handles these feverish speculations with practised ease. God knows what he really thinks. Or who he is. Not “Marc Atkins”, this much he will admit. Another volunteer orphan, a self-invented man with an interestingly labyrinthine personal life; postal systems that require a network of dead-letter drops. He’s a shavenheaded vegetarian giant, a near-Brummie.. ..Give him a camera to frame out the rest of the world and he’s happy. Promise him a free breakfast and the chance of running into a squall of long-legged black women and he’ll walk through fire.11
One of the books that evidently made an impression on Sinclair around the time of the London Orbital walks was Ian Hacking’s then-recently published Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses12. This book, which I read quite some years ago thanks to Sinclair's endorsement, concerns itself with people Sinclair has described as 'mad walkers' or 'fugueurs' (this latter term he seems to have picked up from Hacking). These are people, usually men, who undertake epic journeys on foot for no apparent reason. There was a mini-epidemic of such mad walking among the French labouring class in the later 19th century, when psychiatry, of course, was still in its infancy. The phenomenon perplexed the French medical establishment, and were there to be a repetition of it, probably would do so again today. Sinclair says that at one point in his orbital quest he felt like one of the cases in Mad Travelers, an institutionalised fugueur whose ‘obsessive conviction’ does indeed make him sound like a madder version of the Welsh psychogeographer (the lengthier treatment is in the book, from which the quote below is taken):
Ian Hacking writes about an unmarried shepherd who was committed to an asylum in 1857, suffering from severe seizures. ‘Before or after an attack he would compulsively pace up and down, or in circles, always clockwise. He had an obsessive conviction that he should put the whole world, and the heavens and angels, in his head, or in his heart.’ His autopsy revealed atrophy of the brain, especially of the right hemisphere. Leashed, he walked the pain, lacking balance, a tight circuit around nothing. His epic peregrination, the few yards of a hospital ward, is a doomed attempt to recover memory. Movement provokes memory. Photographs from a dozen journeys over the same ground refuse to cohere: the result is never that ‘perfectly harmonious landscape’. The result is: monuments without inscriptions, twisted signposts.13
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Going into orbit
Like Care in the Community, the M25 was an 80s revolution. In the year of the motorway’s opening in 1986, the Department of Transport published a document laying out the reasoning for the multi-billion-pound highway, which had taken 13 years to construct. This publication was unearthed by John Sergeant, a journalist Sinclair and Petit called in to research the orbital motorway’s history—in particular they’d hoped he’d discover precisely where the opening ceremony attended by Thatcher had taken place. Sergeant got close but failed to pin it down exactly. Tony Sangwine, a senior figure at The Highways Agency, helped out on that score, pointing out the exact spot: an emergency phone kiosk on the north side of a stretch of motorway between Potters Bar and Junction 21, close to the abandoned Napsbury Hospital.
Petit quotes from the Department of Transport’s 1986 document:
Instead of battling their way slowly through congested high streets in London and neighbouring towns and villages, drivers of cars and goods vehicles alike can ‘go into orbit’ for part of their journey on a fast six- or eight-lane motorway.
John Sergeant also notes other actual M25s: the M25 is, variously, a videogame, a library system, a welding gun, an inflatable sofa and a lightbulb. The M25 is also a star 800 light years from Earth. M25 was also a brand of ecstacy.
Petit recounts, not without humour, the journalist’s murky, itinerant quest for M25 lore:
John Sergeant increasingly saw the motorway as river, saw himself as its lost navigator, a Donald Crowhurst at sea in the fast lane. He was coming to regard all information as suspect. He found himself driving the conspiracy loop, looking for the connection that would join everything up once and for all, after which he could retire permanently to Thurrock Service Station. He reported that contaminated waste was being converted into carcinogenic breezeblocks and road tarmac, with dioxins ten times more powerful than Agent Orange, the defoliant used by the United States in Vietnam. He whispered of official, high level involvement in underworld slayings, SAS, police, MI5. He had heard deepthroat rumours of a government department so secret that nobody knew of its existence. Beyond MI5 and MI6, they were the men from the M25. The M25, Sergeant informed me solemnly, was not a motorway, it was a department, it was control, it was the closing of the circle.
In part 2B of Twenty-year Orbit I’ll discuss Sergeant’s ‘whisperings’, focusing (as the film does) on the one thing mentioned in that sentence that was definitely real.
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An aesthete’s vision
In a late chapter of the London Orbital book, Petit joined Sinclair for an excursion to the vast (by British standards) Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, which is serviced by the M25:
Chris Petit, a longtime stockpiler of business park and off-highway imagery, is persuaded from his bunker by the promise of a run to Bluewater. (He will then accompany Renchi and I on our pedestrian journey to the north bank of the Thames – however that is to be managed).
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From above, Bluewater looks fine: sunlight glancing off pastiched oast houses. Petit doesn’t risk a smile, he uncreases his Jesuitical frown. There is purpose to his expedition, he wants to buy a pair of Y-fronts; but this is no simple commercial transaction, he has roamed half the country, from Cribbs Causeway (outside Bristol) to Asda (Eastbourne), to Lakeside (Thurrock). No joy. The man is a perfectionist. One day, so he believes, he will discover the M&S grail: right weight, style, fit. The Look. The correct gear for the proverbial road accident: no shameful moment on the trolley, if he finds himself taken into Darent Valley Hospital.
The faintly mocking (but affectionate) tone continues:
A Tate Modern gallery of male underwear fails to satisfy Petit; a mournful shrug and he’s away through the revolving doors. It’s a great cultural event, melancholy as Wim Wenders, watching Petit work a retail outlet. Shopper as aesthete. He tracks, he drifts; he won’t stoop to examine a label or a price tag. The nostrils flare. The stern eyebrows twitch. Some hideous vulgarity, in terms of colour or texture, has been enacted. Behind the mask of disdain, this man is supremely alert, sunk into a trance of mesmeric concentration. Indifference as the ultimate accolade. Bluewater fails, Bluewater must be consigned – like some wretched film or novel – to silence, scorn: the heartrending sigh of a seeker who has reached out and grasped disappointment. A spoonful of volcanic dust. Petit quits the quarry like a vampire hunter promised wolves and fly-eating maniacs, then fobbed off with a drip of born-again vegans.
As you’d expect, that perfectionism that he brings to underwear shopping Petit also brings to filmmaking and to the writing of fiction. Sinclair’s chosen epithet, ‘aesthete’, though that passage is obviously pretty tongue-in-cheek, does seem a very apt descriptor for Chris Petit. Petit also strikes me as something of a technophile, at least when it comes to new filmmaking equipment: for 2009's Content, another film produced for Channel 4 which is something of a spiritual sequel to both Radio On and London Orbital, Petit made hypnotically effective use of the latest GoPro cameras. The film also benefited from a state-of-the-art electronic soundtrack, which is by turns playful and upbeat, by turns unsettling and eerie. I may write more about Content, another contemplative and non-linear road movie and even more of an ‘ambient’ film than Orbital.
From the aesthetic point of view, the most striking thing about London Orbital is the very frequent use of split screen, with two video ‘windows’ appearing side-by-side. The logic of these juxtapositions may or may not be obvious. The aesthetic is echoed on the DVD cover, and interestingly, a not dissimilar idea was employed for the Granta Books covers of two of Petit’s novels, Robinson (his 1993 debut), and 2001’s The Hard Shoulder. For the books, what appear to be Polaroid photographs were used, and I think these may be Petit’s own personal snaps, since some of them resurface in Content (with the juxtaposition effect again employed).
When multiple images are placed side by side in this way, one is made conscious (on some level) of the temporal dimension of the images: here fleeting moments of life have been captured, frozen for posterity. There’s also an impression, or at least a suggestion, of simultaneity—moments of time, of a life, reimagined as happening all at once. Conveyed to us is thus a sense of rushing time, the sheer speed of life14. In the overall effect there is something melancholic. And there is also, for me at least, something mysterious. If there’s something our desertified culture is especially bad at it is tapping into the mysteries of life. This is one reason—and a very important one—that the work of Sinclair and Petit, not to mention that of Ballard, continues to be of such interest. It’s also why I have yet more to say about the London Orbital film and its creators in part 2B, which concludes Twenty-year Orbit.
From the band’s sophomore LP, The Facts of Life, Nude Records, 2000.
Baudrillard, Jean, originally published as Amérique by Bernard Grasset, Paris 1986. This translated quote comes from America, Verso, 1988, p.63.
Introduction, First Voyages, 1981.
Channel 4 Television, 2002.
In part 2B of this essay I’ll discuss in detail Ballard’s interview in the film, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the thinking of 21st century JGB.
I’ve not found the film available to view online, but there is a DVD, which has a few nice extras. It was released by a company called Illuminations in 2004, and is sold by Amazon.
Rereading London Orbital last year prompted me to give Stoker’s novel a try for the first time. I wrote a little about the experience in #9 Read Against the Machine, my round-up of my favourite reads of 2022.
Sinclair, Iain, London Orbital, originally published by Granta Books, 2002. The version I’ve used for these essays is the 2003 Penguin reprint edition.
A British / West German co-production, for which Wim Wenders was an associate producer. This poetic black and white film clues the viewer in to Petit’s European (as opposed to purely British) sensibility—highly unusual for an English filmmaker. Petit, an army brat, spent much of his childhood in West Germany.
See Wikipedia, Care in the Community.
Sinclair, Iain, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the secret history of London, Granta Books, 1997.
University of Virginia Press, 1998.
Sinclair, Iain, London Orbital, Granta Books, 2002, p. 164.
I have in the works a piece about Bowie—how he can be viewed as an exemplar of Baudelaire’s dandy, updated for the late 20th century. The self-inventing dandy being, for the poet, the quintessential modern figure.