Fold-out maps, in the 1964 reissue of Maltwood’s influential book, show star-creatures. Cloud shadows drifting over a circular bowclass="underline" ‘The Circle of Giant Effigies.’ Why not read the M25 orbit as another such circle — and let Mary Caine’s tightly packed frontispiece act as our guide to the south-west corner? Maltwood’s circle is sparsely inhabited, forms swim free; Caine’s zodiac is an exotic slum, an outstation of Thorpe Park. An orgy of symbols: interspecies collisions. The Lion of Chessington mounting the Doggy of Chobham Common. Rams, bulls, griffins, they’re all at it.
‘Kingston’s Cerberus rears his head at Egham, where Holloway Sanatorium’s tower on his nose is a landmark for miles,’ reads Renchi. Thereby alerting our shaven-headed neighbour. There’s a pair of them; one in a down-stuffed gilet, the other in flowerpot hat and blood-red spectacles. The speaker, the crop-head with scimitar sideburns, has a trace of the rent boy about him (if you were casting a drama for Channel 4). Delicate/tough and pushing it hard, to come on as a wit in Staines station café. He interrogates us, his mate does the local history. ‘Payroll boys’ with time on their hands.
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘We walk.’
‘Walk? They’re fucking tramps,’ shouts the old boy, barnacled to the corner.
It has to be explained: walks, photographs — then, at some future date, a book. Kevin, who is force-feeding his notebook, breaks off to dig out a mound of my back titles from his rucksack. He travels with a portable library. He is approaching this walk (and the rest of life) as a tutorial for which he is inadequately prepared. Keep talking, reminiscing, improvising. Don’t let the buggers stray anywhere near the ostensible subject.
The payroll boys are appeased: we’re nutters with a project, some remote chance of a distant pay day. We need their services. The old man snorts, returns to his Sun.
‘Bloody drug addicts!’
One breakfast under the belt, second teas and more toast on order, the lads are in good humour. A fine bright day. A light breeze from the river. The cosmological fruit machine doesn’t pay out very often, carpe diem.
Mary Caine for the spirit, the payroll boys for the nitty-gritty: our man talks of tunnels, bunkers, mysteries. This is the list. A village, Thorpe, with the longest village green in England. Brooklands racetrack with underground workings and a ghost. St George’s Hill. ‘That’s where Cliff Richard lives. Squatters took over a mansion where Tom Jones used to…’ John Lennon with his white pianos and customised Rollers. St George’s Hill is definitely on the agenda, the place where Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers launched their experiment in rustic tribalism. But we won’t make it, not this time, unless we get going.
Much of Staines is steel — shuttered, MADHOUSE UK: green lettering above an undisclosed business venture. Kevin has film in his camera (no reserve stock) and is blazing away. Renchi, more circumspect, continues his quiet logging: prompts for future paintings. We cross the bridge, pick up the Thames path, move out in the direction of the M25.
Shadows from overhanging greenery infect the river. The walk is shady, agreeable. Dappled sunlight. Kevin’s dark glasses aren’t strictly necessary. Runnymede Bridge, with its shallow span, emerges from the tree tops. It looks too slender to carry motorway traffic. My sense, when I’m driving, is that the river makes no impact on the road. Unless you know it’s there, you’ll miss it.
It would be better to swim. These are sacred places, where road meets river. Staines and Dartford, very different Thames crossings, are the highlights of any motorway circuit. On the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, road dominates. The tidal Thames is unwalkable, unswimmable; impossible. Literally suspending disbelief, to drive over the broad span of water, as it opens (storage tanks and container ships) to the World Ocean, marks you. You die into what you see. You purchase vision at the expense of mortality. You relish the play of cables as they flick against riverlight. You feel younger, stronger, elevated by a section of motorway that isn’t motorway: the only point in the circuit where imagination overrides the M25’s compulsive reductionism.
Coming on Runnymede Bridge, white stone, is less dramatic: water shimmers, plays with sound. Here is the cathedral of the motorway: an open-sided temple of transformation. Perch on one of the broad ribs, tight under the road, and watch curved concrete sail on green water like a crescent moon. A single arch, mirrored in the dark river, becomes a cave. Light dances on the rough underlay of the M25. Passing craft set up surges that turn the reflections on the far bank into spirals of smoke. You could treat these spaces beneath the motorway as cubicles of incubation; cold bunks in which to dream of fantastic journeys.
This structure, set across the Thames, is discussed in terms of Egypt or Babylon. A water shrine in which to acknowledge and record the passage of the sun. Steps down to the river. Slopes leading up to the road. The bridge is actually two bridges, one for each carriageway of the M25. Arriving from Staines, you see a plain, functional structure, something like Waterloo Bridge; walking east from Runnymede, back towards London, you notice the decorative features, stone balusters that belong in a country park.
The harmonious linking of disparate elements, a symbolic marriage of river and road, has a simple history: in terms of civil engineering. The 1961 bridge, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, was incorporated into ‘a graceful concrete structure’ by Arup Associates and the consultant engineers, Ove Arup and Partners. Genteel Surrey rustification. The Lutyens bridge would carry the northbound traffic of the M25 and the A30; the Arup bridge the southbound carriageways of both. The new bridge was 138 metres long. The tender price was £6.4 million. And the contractor was Bovis Fairclough.
Walking from bright sunlight into this cool darkness — reflections, brilliant bars moving across ruffled water — is always exhilarating. Excursion parties break up: somebody will climb on to the arch, somebody will lounge against a pillar. Renchi, this time, puts himself in the split between the southbound carriageway and the supporting arch. Graffiti (tagged by Blade ’98) is minimalist: a name becomes a labyrinth, with arrows and hearts. Tribes are invited to advance on Stonehenge for the summer solstice.
Kevin, still armoured in his heavy jacket, takes photographs. He thinks he might approach Marc Atkins, make him the subject of a dissertation. He accesses a John Boorman reference; the director mentioning the fact, in an interview, that he used to swim in the Thames near Runnymede Bridge. A Wordsworthian encounter with a shadow on the water, the Green Man.
He remembers a friend, Dr Dylan Francis. ‘We were like Little and Large,’ he says. Kevin is always generous, reaching for books that might help other writers. Thick fingers drum on his head as he tries to fix the wording of the pertinent quotation. Right books into right hands and the world is reconfigured. He sent me a copy of Dylan Francis’s posthumous collection, The Risk of Being Alive (Writings on Medicine, Poetry and Landscape) — for which he had done the introduction. He highlighted: the ‘incomparable conversation’ of his friend, ‘the swift workings of his mind’.
Francis, I discovered, was a scholar with a Double First in English from Cambridge; a philosopher, a poet, a doctor of medicine who worked in neurology and cardiology. He was connected with St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield. He read voraciously and aggressively, was interested in Robert Fludd and William Harvey. He took off, whenever he could, into the Lake District or the Welsh borders; he walked his demons down: ‘[J.H.] Prynne under one arm & Gray’s Anatomy under the other’. A Romantic sensibility, scrupulous in address, compares and contrasts landscape in terms of his own emotions, with relevant literary asides. Like all Romantics, he pushes it, language; wanting nature to behave with more sensitivity, more intelligence. The responsibility of poetic tone threatens to undo him: