London Orbital

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It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.

I have to admit: I was developing an unhealthy obsession with the M25, London’s orbital motorway. The dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape. Was this grim necklace, opened by Margaret Thatcher on 29 October 1986, the true perimeter fence? Did this conceptual ha-ha mark the boundary of whatever could be called London? Or was it a tourniquet, sponsored by the Department of Transport and the Highways Agency, to choke the living breath from the metropolis?

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