2
Atkins and I waited for Bill Drummond on a bridge over the A102, alongside the Dome. When the site was no more than a few scratches in the ground, the writer Stewart Home stood here ranting about an omphalos, about Mandelson’s tent being a killing zone (exhaust fumes from the Blackwall Tunnel). The ritual sacrifice of Prince Charles. Underselling his pitch, as ever. It was the day when the news of Princess Diana’s death hit the headlines. Dome and crunched Mercedes were linked in popular consciousness. The route of the funeral procession, from Westminster Abbey to the Ml, in real-time television, proved that surveillance footage, shots of roads, could be sold to the public. The Kennedy assassination was film, home movies marketed by Time-Life. Diana’s funerary procession was drift, reverie, bouquets chucked on a glossy black bonnet. Families gathered in their living rooms, at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, to witness a solemn occasion; something that would never again happen in their lifetimes. Royalty doing the business, earning their corn, by taking part in durational theatre. Demigods who could die. Change the weather. Cure the sick. Bring the slaughtered flocks back to life.
Death was a spectacle, the Dome was invisible. It didn’t register. Standing right up against it, we couldn’t look at it. We looked across the water, at Canary Wharf, the ice-floe principality of Docklands. The original Tory scam would soon be realised: a temporary circus paid for by lottery funds, a lull (during which we were supposed to forget the shame), followed by property development. Well-connected investment cabals throwing up yet more riverside units.
Rumours were surfacing about the latest think-tank solution to the M25. After megalomaniac schemes for expansion into eight, twelve, twenty-four lanes, ABCD rings, there was only one way to deal with the problem of the orbital highway. Shut it down. Abandon it. Pretend, in classic New Labour fashion, that it wasn’t there. It never happened. Not our fault. Blame it on aeons of Tory misrule. Rebrand. Henceforth, the M25 would be a Green Way. With commissioned public sculpture. Antony Gormley, obviously. Psychogeographers and alignment freaks were already at work, proving that the Greenwich tent covered the same space as all kinds of mystically significant sites.
Drummond, hitting his final lap, had a vision. Piers Plowman in a hammock in the back of a jolting white van. ‘I dream a dream where Gimpo tells me that in the future the crusties, the ravers without hope, the feral underclasses, will live on the M25 in broken-down buses, discarded containers, packing cases and anything else that can be procured for nowt and provide shelter against the rains. The M25 will be taken over, clogged up, no longer used as a thoroughfare to nowhere. It will be like one of those forgotten canals behind backstreets in Brum, stagnant and dank, fit only for dead cats and stolen shopping trolleys, until it is ripe for future heritage culturalists to proclaim its worth as a site of special historic interest.’
As with most of the walks I’ve undertaken with Marc Atkins, ‘we’re setting out as close as we can to six a.m. Bill Drummond will be travelling from his farmhouse near Aylesbury. He’s not driving just now. One year on from the twenty-five laps of the M25, he’s lost his licence. He arrives in an out-of-town minicab, red, with see-through panel in the roof and JET 421212 pasted across the windscreen. Bill is sitting next to the driver, who wears a laminated identity card. The ex-millionaire is a strategic walker and a frequent cab user, Aylesbury to London. Station to farm. A tall man, he hoiks himself out, sniffs the sour air. Green thornproof jacket, stout cords, red rucksack. Glasses attached by a no-nonsense loop. He is immediately into the narrative, attention engaged, notebook at the ready.
Bill dresses like the best sort of schoolmaster, a twitcher with a dangerous laugh. Atkins is in a long black coat with felt collar (Martin Kemp as Reggie Kray); jeans, white trainers. He bleeps. He’s got a new toy, a mobile phone. His career is taking off. He’s published a book of London photographs and a booklet of nudes. He has to stay in touch with potential commissioners, picture editors, galleries. Most of the incoming calls, on this outing, seem to be domestic. Brief exchanges of pleasantries, mewings. Shopping lists for future meals.
Dreadnought Street. The name takes Drummond’s fancy. A nautical ghost logged in his notebook, before we double back to Greenwich, climb the hill, pay our respects to the brass rule, zero longitude marker. While I dabble with the notion of tracking the line to the M25, the true conceptualist (Bill Drummond) is determined to follow it to the ends of the earth. I’ll swing west at Waltham Abbey, after a mere eighteen miles. He’ll head south, France, Spain. He’ll probably swim across to Africa. The guy has an evil glint when an idea takes root. Already, I can feel our narratives pulling away from each other. Will his version, sharper than my own, published in 1998 as ‘Breakfast with the Unabomber’, disqualify my ponderous journal?
The work Marc Atkins does is complementary. He observes the observers; he keeps his own record of journeys that are not of his choosing. The narrative he assembles is fragmentary. It doesn’t have to be read in any particular order. Its intention is to freeze time; a deadpan gaze at some view, a building, a stretch of the river. Very often, I find these photographs more useful than my jottings or snapshots. In the best of Marc’s prints, spurned locations come to life. He treats the reproduction of brick courses as a form of portraiture.
He’ll go anywhere for a good shot. Or he would, in the past. He’s much busier now and has to be booked well in advance. Drummond, I felt, was more likely to ask the hard questions. Why the meridian line? Why stop at the M25? ‘Mean time.’ ‘Zero longitude.’ I liked those terms. They had an undefined, Enochian attraction: science coming to the rescue of the ley line enthusiasts who nominated Greenwich Hill as a site of occult significance. It had been possible once to imagine currents of energy running through the Queen’s House, between the twin domes of the Naval College and on to the tower of St Anne’s at Limehouse.
The Ordnance Survey brought out a series of maps with the prime meridian clearly marked, so that millennial cultists could locate themselves at points along the line, when time ‘changed’ on 31 December 1999. These maps are to the scale of 1:25,000. The line is printed in green. We don’t have a map. But it’s easy to see that longitude zero skims the Dome, cuts through Bow Creek near the Generating Station and follows the pylons up the Lea Valley. We’ll stay as close as we can and make our rendezvous with zero at Waltham Abbey.
What I didn’t know was that Drummond was carrying a copy of The Unabomber Manifesto, which he’d picked up the day before at a bookshop in Camden Town. He sympathised with the survivalist lifestyle, Thoreau hut, wild nature on the doorstep. He knew the names of the birds and the beasts. The Lea Valley, with its status as pretend countryside, butterfly sanctuary, deer reservation, dog track, waste disposal unit, munitions factory, wasn’t much use to him. He wanted the full-on metropolitan experience, secret histories; lunacy he could exploit. His underlying fear was that my outing would lead him to ‘the point where terrorism is the only option’. If you carry the book, Bill, be prepared to use it.
3
Best Value. Someone somewhere, well away from the action, decided that this banal phrase, implying its opposite, was sexy. Best Value, with the smack of Councillor Roberts’s corner-shop in Grantham, the abiding myth of Thatcherism, was dusted down and used in every public relations puff of the New Labour era. Best Value. Best buy. Making the best of it. Look on the bright side.