In many ways this was the easiest ‘sell’ of the group. The book of the same title, written in parallel with the film, could be described in a single sentence: ‘A walk around London’s orbital motorway.’ London Orbital was the only one released (by Illuminations) as a DVD. It offered itself to academic usage and it fitted quite comfortably within the emerging discipline (or brand) of psychography. The narrative was about endless, the slow-cinema of pedestrianism, noticing everything, and the reverie and drift of driving without stopping. The only exits being into 19th-century fantasy and horror. The two Thames crossings, east and west, had their pull: Bram Stoker in Purfleet and JG Ballard in Shepperton. The DVD as a package had several advantages, as Chris Petit pointed out. One of the extra features covered the A13 exhibition at the Wapping Pumping Station – and exhibits that linked exploration of the Thames Estuary, its container dumps and landfill, with my great-grandfather’s surveys of an Amazonian tributary. It’s obvious now that my recent book, The Gold Machine, was germinating, like everything else, around the fringes of London. As I state in the book: “The jungle begins in London.”
Link to the video: https://vimeo.com/585718425/b59c042fd0
