We drive back to Denham, another station, deeper countryside. DENHAM TWINNED WITH SHARK BAY WESTERN AUSTRALIA. In 1939 J. Arthur Rank (the Yorkshire Methodist who leased his name as a rhyming slang term for the act of self-pleasuring) bought Denham Studios, the largest in Britain, from Alexander Korda, after Korda failed to duplicate the international success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The Prudential Assurance Company had lent him the money to build Denham Studios. A none too prudent investment. Korda folded.
Rank (dim product, sharp management) developed a production and distribution base. They went global, acquiring a quarter share in the US company Universal, which gave them the distribution rights to glitzy Hollywood product. They purchased off-highway real estate, Pinewood, Denham. They took over the Odeon chain of suburban cinemas and the Gaumont British circuit (which included, as part of the package, Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios). Rank, a late flowering of the Dissenter tradition that had once flourished in the Chiltern and Hertfordshire villages, was also a forerunner of coming multinational capitalism. The old tracks and paths that, for a few years during and after the English Civil War, allowed tinkers, visionary herdsmen, disaffected mechanics to roam, preach, discuss, debate became the super highways of petrol/burger culture.
In the Denham bun shop, Renchi can hardly keep his eyes open, far less make a decision on what kind of cake or biscuit to munch. He was working until eleven o’clock on the previous evening, drinking too much coffee, plotting the day’s walk. The bun shop has a kind of Christmas shrine to the Death of Cinema; red paper spotted with snow, green plastic garlands, framed photos of Patrick Mower and ‘the girl who used to do high kicks on The Generation Game’. White suits. Pink flesh burnt by the shock of flash photography at some long forgotten premiere. Teeth for the camera. Twinned with Shark Bay. ‘I’m still me. I’m still here.’ The immortality of non-recognition on the wall of an early-morning bakery near a suburban railway station.
We follow the Colne to Uxbridge. Renchi has borrowed a pocket recorder. We’ve talked a lot about sound but never cracked it. Long, rambling conversations about how to keep a useful record of what was said. ‘Um, ah, like, you know, yeah, like… right.’ There would be interrogations of persons met on the road. But no walkers are out and about, no dogs. It’s early and the light is so recessive that my colour prints look like sepia. Steam from the flat roofs of narrow boats. A weak sun caught in a thatch of spindly trees. Lakes, islands. It’s easy to imagine ourselves on Mark Twain’s ‘river road’; we drop to our knees, use that heavy sky to conjure up the Mississippi. (Think: Robert Frank. Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.)
Sound is elusive. No slap of tide, no river romance of clicks and creaks. Our own muted footfalls on worn turf, on trampled mud, splashing through spring puddles.
South. Under the arch of a brick bridge: REPUBLIC NOW. There is no way of accurately recalling Renchi’s monologue (even from notes taken at the time). The recorder of course is unused. Cameras can log, sketch, record graffiti, make clumsy portraits. Sound is an element. Like the canal, the motorway. We don’t have the skill, the eavesdropping genius of composer/guitarist Bruce Gilbert (once of Wire). Bruce skulks in pub corners, on station platforms, at obscure locations, sampling; gathering material to construct a sound field. He is an X-ray of Gene Hackman in Coppola’s The Conversation. From units of sound you can make a world, re-edit the past. Put it on a loop. Bruce long ago cracked the thing we were still struggling with: he learnt how to ‘play the gaps’.
Renchi’s riverbank monologue moves ahead of him, like one of those men with red flags who preceded the first cars: ‘Father’s library… Stukeley, arcane researches… Heathrow as a kind of Avebury… keep the pattern in our heads as we enter that territory.’ In 1723 the antiquary William Stukeley investigated the earthwork known as Shasbury, or Schapsbury or Fern Hill, and pronounced it ‘Caesar’s Camp’. A ditch, earth ramparts. An enclosure, sixty feet square, with points of access at north and south. A diagonal path running through it, to other access points in east and west. Figures, perhaps surveyors, in the foreground. Holding chains. A coach pulled by six horses.
The canal’s a soporific. Pylons, lagoons. We push closer to the M25. The strip of tolerated country between road and water is scruffier, fewer estates, more poultry farms. By the time we pass West Drayton, hippies and freebooters are disputing the right to scavenge with travellers, scrap-metal pirates, unlicensed Irishmen. You have to tread carefully when you walk these lanes with a camera in your hands. In every off-road junk yard, somebody is watching. Big dogs on small chains.
We see distant Western Avenue, the A40, as a target, a beacon of hope. At Uxbridge we climb up to the road: a taster, a sighting. Electricity Sub-Station: DANGER OF DEATH KEEP Out. Western Avenue sounds better than it plays; a sluggish trawl of family saloons, company cars, white vans, middleweight haulage shaking itself free of London. Ribbon-development dystopia: before the motorway, Iver Heath, the woods of Langley Park and the descent into Slough.
Uxbridge (aka Wixebrug, Uxebregg) exploits its position, where the Colne and the Grand Union Canal meet Western Avenue. Victorian trade routes. The smoke-coughing trucks that took over from the narrow boats are themselves doomed to oblivion, breakers’ yards between river and motorway embankment. Uxbridge has cornered the market in liminal architecture. (It’s here and not here. Visible, but you don’t see it.) The Battle of Britain was directed from Uxbridge, so the guidebook says, by the late Air Marshal Lord Dowding. ‘The town is perhaps noteworthy for its selection of modern and futuristic buildings in a variety of competing styles.’
The buildings along Western Avenue don’t want to be there; they’d prefer Satellite City. Or Las Vegas. Phoenix, Arizona, with Scunthorpe weather. They’d like to be closer to Heathrow’s lingua franca. Mediterranean green glass. Low level units with a certain lazy elegance. Super-Cannes functionalism interspersed with Fifties grot. The heritaged emblems of an old riverside pub, The Swan & Bottle, have been banished by their corporate operators, Chef & Brewer, to the top of a wooden pole. That stares insolently at the slick shoebox of: X (The Document Company XEROX). The Xerox building is designed to look like office machinery, a shredder or printer. The windows are an enigmatic blue-green. Like chlorine. Xerox, Western Avenue, is a swimming pool on its side; from which, by some miracle of gravity, water doesn’t spill. That’s the concept: intelligent water. X marks the spot. Uxbridge is made from Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with barbed wire.
The Xerox building duplicates itself; come back tomorrow and there’ll be another one, and another. And another. X started out as a narrow four-storey column, then multiplied in the night. Horizontal ‘lanes’ of aqueous green glass play with notions of flow and drift, the river captured and tamed. The front elevation, serene as it is, gives me the bends: it’s like looking down from the high board on to an Olympic swimming pool. Sun-sparkling lanes and dividing ropes which, in this case, convert into metaphors of a clean white road. Motorway and canal system seamlessly linked.
Traffic is at a standstill. The bridge over the river, with its red brick parapet, is a sad relic. Workers and drones, in thrall to the glass beehives, plod down Slough Road, towards the UXBRIDGE sign. They have their own, end-of-the-Metropolitan Line style; viz., baggy blousons or black puffa jackets worn over lightweight grey suits, brightly polished shoes. They are bareheaded, ballasted by oversize silver attaché cases. That is, male and female. Trouser suits, short hair. The women carry a second bag, slung from the shoulder, for personal effects. The attaché cases are the kind that turn up on the TV news, left in cabs by Secret State bagmen. ‘Just popped into Blockbusters to pick up a video and it was gone.’ The invasion plans. The list of informers.