Something completely different today.
Earlier in the year, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced that London’s ‘Hopper’ bus fare - allowing a second journey that starts within 60 minutes of the first, for no extra money - would be extended during weekends in July and August to allow unlimited travel on London buses and trams for a single fare (£1.75 for adults).
I was wondering, how far could you travel for that single fare? And that led me to thinking about the Superloop bus services, which have recently been “completed” with the addition of SL4 going under the river through Silvertown tunnel. A plan started to come together for a kind of circumnavigation of London via TfL buses, one Saturday in August.
I worked out a route that involved ten hours of travel time, knowing it would likely be at least twelve hours of real time, allowing for missed connections and diversions. Casting along my bookshelves for reading material for the day, I saw a copy of Iain Sinclair’s magnum opus London Orbital, which just felt perfect. Sinclair was walking close to the M25, so further out than I would be; but still navigating a loop around London. I bought the book in a second-hand shop in Greenwich last year and it’s been on the tbr pile since then.
Not long after, there was a thread on here about books which people have abandoned.
I had by this time got the idea that the Sinclair book was actually called Orbital; I was surprised to see people mentioning DNFing Orbital “despite this being such a short book” - London Orbital is 552 pages, which tipped me off to what was going on here. People on the thread were of course talking about Orbital by Samantha Harvey, about a single day on board the International Space Station. I ordered a copy from the library.
Finally the day rolled around and I found myself leaving home at a ludicrously early hour, reaching North Woolwich just after first light waiting for the free ferry to cross to the south bank of the Thames to begin the circle. I was wondering how I would feel twelve hours later, standing at the same place, and whether this would be a wasted day?
To the north, I could see (and hear!) planes taking off from London City Airport. Most of their passengers (if not the crew) were on non-circular journeys, and any who were back at that airport later that day were almost certainly “out and back” travellers. Meanwhile, I was waiting for the SL11 bus to Abbey Wood to begin my own giant circle.
I think that circular routes are much more satisfying than travelling in a straight line, turning around and then doubling back on yourself. When you turn around and start back the way you came, it’s almost like you are erasing the outward journey. Each step of a return walk ‘undoes’ a step of the original walk, until you are literally back where you started, at some point in the future. Circular journeys, however, even when you end up exactly where you started, retain their whole selves; there’s a curious kind of singularity to the journey as an experience. There’s no point to the journey: you aren’t going anywhere for the sake of getting there, only to pass through; and you are not passing through to get somewhere else, but only back to your origin. Curious.
Sinclair describes London’s orbital motorway, the M25, in much the same terms. Truly, it’s a road to nowhere: keep going long enough, and you’ll eventually end up back in the same place. Thankfully the book isn’t only, or in fact even mostly, about the motorway. Rather, it’s about the edges of London that the M25 still for the moment demarcates, and the people who live there. Sinclair starts psychologically at the Dome, then begins in earnest at the river, in the east - the Dartford crossing and tunnels - and travels anticlockwise, the opposite way to me. Through Essex first and some pretty rough country to be fair.
I meanwhile was travelling on the SL3 and SL5, through much of what I still think of as North Kent, through to Croydon and a short section that had to be done on foot, through the Whitgift shopping centre. Even on a journey like this, in London you’re never far from a retail opportunity. Then on to the longest single segment of the whole day, over two hours from West Croydon bus station to my second airport of the day and Heathrow bus station. In the area around Heathrow there were by now many planes coming and going, more people breaking out of London, while I attempted to encompass it.
Sinclair meanwhile is proving very prescient about the state of our nation. I mostly read older books, much older fiction and somewhat older non-fiction and of course, in hindsight, this fag-end of the 20th century tale has all the hints you could want about the next stages of capitalism that were soon to be upon us. Blair’s PFI, dodgy deals being quietly buried under the cover of 9/11, the gradual but relentlessly accelerating hollowing out of our society for the ultimate profit of venture capital. It’s all here, sadly. And of course this process hasn’t stopped: in years to come, there’s a good chance this section of the journey, twisting through Heathrow to the central bus terminal, will look very different. If the airport is expanded according to the current plans, it won’t be only the bus station that moves: the M25 itself will be re-routed to make way for a new runway.
After Heathrow, back north of the river and the bus journey took on the feel of the homeward leg. SL9 to Harrow, SL10 to Finchley - the north west of London is a giant unknown to me. SL1 to Walthamstow, back into the east and where I feel more comfortable, then the SL2 to North Woolwich and the journey’s ground zero. The other thing about circular journeys is the tantalising idea that you could just carry on, do lap two, and keep adding kilometres. In fact, I did cross the river on the ferry again, for other reasons, so I had begun a second go around. Handy that the free ferry is genuinely free, since it didn’t impact the total fare for the day.
Sinclair has to travel through Surrey, and back into the south east of the city, leaving only the question: will he make it the entire way around before his self-imposed deadline of the (some said) end of the millennium? I split off from the route in Woolwich and headed home. For those wondering, I travelled for 13.5 hours and covered 183km for the £1.75 summer Hopper fee.
A few days later, Orbital was available in the library. I picked it up and read it while walking twice around Millwall dock, another orbit on a much smaller scale. On the map the dark waters of the dock, contained within the stark red line, matching the cover of London Orbital, look like a zero, a nothing. Deep, mysterious waters. The occupants of the ISS are on their own seemingly endless series of orbits - fifteen or sixteen orbits, fifteen or sixteen sunsets and sunrises a day. They are on one of the most technically complex machines ever built, one that has travelled millions of kilometres, and yet in one sense has travelled nowhere at all. The ISS is a means of occupation, not exploration. The astronauts, earlier this year, were thinking of the Artemis II Moon mission, and how that spacecraft would be breaking free of the orbit the ISS is confined in: just like the planes leaving London behind earlier. Perhaps one day the Moon too will become another site of occupation, while the explorers continue outwards.
I loved the book and the reflections on what the astronauts meditate on during their constantly changing, but somehow always basically the same, views of the Earth below. It is a short book, and that feels appropriate, but an interesting one nonetheless.
I took one last look through my pictures from the bus odyssey, and came across one which I had missed first time around. The last picture of the day, taken from the river at Woolwich, with - what else? - Anish Kapoor’s sculpture ArcelorMittal Orbit peeking over the skyline, seems like an appropriate place to end.