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Interview [published October 2002]
Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle
Iain Sinclair walked the length of the M25 motorway to research his book
London Orbital. Chris Hall hears why
Listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme recently
voted London’s M25 the worst of the Seven Horrors of
Britain in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their
experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done
what the novelist, poet and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain
Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have
thought differently. For this was his unique project – to
walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas
that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the
huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded
by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so,
comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce
in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible
landscape disappear.
Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millennial
year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people
would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating
the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting?
“Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly
exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what
you were going to find. Getting up really early in this
weird landscape. You might as well have been in some
BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and
totally remote country.”
It is the disconnection between our apprehension of
London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes
about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in
London, they live in the tube map of London). London
Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore
the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island
Village, described as “an exciting new village community”,
of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t
new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new.
What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the
social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is
suddenly ‘stylish’.”
So what does he think about the housing forecasts for
the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task
Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield
renewal that is necessary in and around the capital?
“These seem to be projections made from a very privileged
metropolitan standpoint about something that’s
going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge
of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion
of decanting swathes of the populace into these amor-
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