London Orbital posted on Vimeo.

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.”