Out on the road a forensic vocabulary is brought into play. Highway patrols talk of ‘foxtrot fatals’. Planners mourn ‘severed communities’, ‘undrained cohesion’. ‘Bypass’ is a term common to both sets of initiates. Artery, flow, circuit. Cardiac teams deal with the heart as a malfunctioning machine. Drivers, enduring the grind between Junctions 10 and 17 of the M25, slide through layers of anaesthesia: from panic to yawning detachment, from waking dreams and hallucinations to blackout. Helicopters that ferry roadkill hearts, urgent meat, are now being proposed as the only solution to motorway jams. A rapid response unit will move in on any ‘blockage’, freeing circulation, bringing respite to coronary candidates in their sweating pods.
Ben Hopkins wrote the script for Thomas Katz in Essex, ‘over a long, hot weekend, in a rather strange mood of delirium’. He saw the M25 as ‘a doughnut’, a cholesterol hoop; the jammy outside of nothing. A sugar tunnel. A caul between motorist and the external (always moving) world.
Looked at from above, traced in red (to represent the paths we have walked), the M25 defines London as a hammered and misshapen heart. Atria and ventricles. The four compartments, divided by the journey from Dome to Waltham Abbey (completed), and Dome to Clacket Lane (still to come). And by the River Thames. The contractions of the city squeeze the muscle, drive the blood on its circuit.
The city is only inhabitable if it exploits (as part of its placement on earth) the notion of circuits, orbits, spirals. The early visions of Utopians called up rational designs, the circle within the circle. ‘One symbol of original perfection is the circle,’ wrote Eric Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness. ‘Allied to it are the sphere, the egg and the rotundum — the “round” of alchemy… Circle, sphere, and round are all aspects of the self-contained, which is without beginning and end, in its preworldly perfection it is prior to any process, eternal, for in its roundness there is no before and no after, no time, and there is no above and no below, no space.’
It was easy, given the talk of hearts, the labyrinthine wanderings through Harefield Park, to elevate our sweaty stroll into a Blakean pilgrimage: the twisting Mount Pleasant road, from river valley to park, became Blake’s envisioning of Dante, The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory. Studying Blake’s drawings in the big Tate Britain exhibition (in November 2000), I couldn’t help reading the Dante spirals as models for a celestial M25. Dante and Virgil, in the second circle of Hell, on a cliff (or motorway bridge), watch the tumbled bodies of the Lustful as they swim, nose-to-tail, up a gridlocked whirlwind.
The problem is that our heart/road metaphors are clogging up: language overload. Blake’s vortex of steroidal sinners (sunlight glinting on a never-ending procession) is a depiction of word-jam, logorrhea; nothing is, everything is a simile. A psychotic condition. Impossible to transcribe: how all the London visionaries insisted on the necessity of a system of concentric circles.
Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) published an extraordinary essay, ‘The Future in London’, in 1909. Ford recognised that roads were ‘the chief feature of a city’s life’. Without its roads, London was a dry sponge. ‘If I can walk along roads that I like I am happy, alert, energetic, and as much of a man as I can be.’ The wellbeing of the man and the wellbeing of the city were linked, freedom of movement, walks were the key to the good life. Ford looked back to a period when it was not unusual to stroll from Fleet Street to Hampstead, Westminster to Richmond; for dinner, conversation, a moonlit return. Victorian clerks, as Dickens frequently demonstrated, hiked to the City from Camden, Holloway or Walworth.
Ford isn’t another sentimental antiquarian (he is, but only as a convenient pose), he has a take on London that pre-empts Abercrombie and trounces the feeble private/public ditherings of New Labour with its clapped-out, expensive and dangerous transport systems. Ford, the huffing, puffing Edwardian, has a radical solution to deliver:
I should make travelling free, smooth, and luxurious. Along the railways I should set motor-ways, and, between hedges, moving platforms for pedestrians and those who need exercise. I should clean out the Thames and set upon it huge, swift, and fine express launches. Who would put up with this bottom of a basin that London is if, being as near their work and their pleasant pleasures, they could inhabit a residential London that crowned the hill tops and scattered along the beaches of the sea?
Not content with reviving the river, building motorways over tired railways, turning footpaths into open-air gymnasia, Ford lays out the first great vision of the M25: as a single sweep in a series of ever-expanding circles.
Let us consider now my outer ring of the Future… With one leg of my compasses set in Threadneedle Street, with the other I describe a great circle, the pencil starting at Oxford. (Roughly speaking, Oxford is sixty miles from London, and in my non-stop, monorail expresses, this should be a matter of half-an-hour, about as long as it takes you now to go from Hammersmith to the City.) It takes in, this circle, Winchester, the delightful country round Petersfield, Chichester, all the coast to Brighton, Hastings, Dover, all Essex, and round again by way of Cambridge and Oxford. Think of the cathedrals, the castles, the woods, the chases, the downs, and the headlands! You would not sleep in Kensington if you might as well at Lewes…
It is on the road, this change. It has got to come. All south-eastern England is just London.
Walking the South Downs, Ford remembered Holland Park; marooned in town, he dreamt of drowsy Wealden villages. Abercrombie echoed Ford. The County of London Plan of 1943 spoke of an ‘age of mobility’, avenues and radials linking parkways, eroding the distinction between town and country. ‘Also included is a parkway leading from the centre of London to Crystal Palace and its nearby hills, and thence, by existing and proposed roads, to the Downs and the coast.’
The visionaries of the inner city thought in terms of circuits, contour lines. Bernard Kops, poet and playwright, grew up in Stepney Green. The natural transit for him was White-chapel to Soho (labyrinth to labyrinth), immigrant household to the liberties of Bohemia. Divided loyalties, a hand to mouth existence as jobbing writer (bookdealing, junk), left Kops in Belmont Hospital (a bus trip from the end of the Northern Line). ‘I thought,’ he wrote, ‘neurotics were the first prophets of true sanity. “After all, if you reject the world of today you must be sane. Draw a circle anywhere in London and you’ll have a cross section as neurotic as us.’ ”
By the late Sixties, many of the orthodox Jews of White-chapel — their behaviour interpreted as eccentric — were tidied away to hospitals in what is now the southern arc of the M25. Kops in Belmont. David Rodinsky in Long Grove Hospital, Epsom. Wards like meeting rooms, soup-kitchens; like the wide pavements of Whitechapel Road and Mile End.
Kops appreciated his pastoral retreat, the slowing of city time. ‘I wrote constantly and wandered the grounds. The prolonged contact with earth helped me. But beyond the gates was London. The great filthy disease called a city.’
He had to return. He accepted the help of a fellow patient who gave him the fare to Oxford Circus.
I stood there not knowing what to do. I wanted to run but was embarrassed, so I stood buffeted by the lifeless mass of people screaming my head off inside, with my hand over my eyes unable to move. Hell! There was a band tightening around my head. Oxford Circus was a narrow ledge in endlessness. On either side was a deep abyss. I walked as if on a tightrope, thinking that the traffic would chase me up the walls or that the people would come at me with knives, tear me to ribbons.