Grand tours: The new badlands

Writers' adventures in literature: Iain Sinclair finds poetry, of sorts, in east London's industrial landscape

If any modern writer can throw an unflinching gaze on our capital city's wastelands it is Iain Sinclair, author of 'Lights Out for the Territory' and 'Rodinsky's Room'. His latest offering, 'London Orbital, A Walk Around the M25', is a pilgrimage through the uncharted tracts bounded by the ring road. In this extract he drives the A13 with Bill Drummond, pop impresario, and Marc Atkins, a photographer.

East India Dock Road, with its evocative name, has a secondary identity as the A13, my favourite early-morning drive. The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; flyovers like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for their transporters. The A13 drains east London's wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated. The wild nature graveyard in Newham. Inflatable, corn-yellow chips wobbling in their monster bucket outside McDonald's in Dagenham. River fret over Rainham Marshes.

Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks.

Where a road goes informs every inch of it and there is an irritability about the section we have to cross. Why are we heading north and not swinging east, following the hint spelt out by juggernauts? The ramps that lift you on to the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge are decorated with burnt-out motors – as if joyriders from Barking and Hornchurch knew they'd reached the end of the line. Fire the evidence. Leave the orbital motorway to major league crims.

The A13 shuffle through east London is like the credits sequence of the Mafia soap The Sopranos; side-of-the-eye perspective, bridges, illegitimate businesses about to be overwhelmed by the big combos. Black smoke and blue smoke. Waste disposal. A well-chewed cigar. The motorway, when you reach it, has been infected by this shoddy progress; the drivers are up for it, hard men, warriors. Hear the screech of tyres as they carve across three lanes to hit the Sandy Lane ramp without losing momentum.

To drift through low cloud, through the harp strings of the suspension bridge, is to become a quotation; to see yourself from outside. From the Thames river path. Or the forecourt of the Ibis Hotel. A chunk of metal rattling over a concrete bandage. The toll booths on the far shore legitimise this transit. You need the ceremony of release. The motorway proper begins with mathematical nomenclature, junction 1a, 1b.

But reach the M25 through the Surrey suburbs and it's a different programme, another era. The motorway is perceived as a rude beast (germs from the east, asylum seekers, infected meat, rogue cargo) ...

The promoters, the strategists of the Lea Navigation Path, hope that one day that path will carry walkers right to the Thames. They're acquiring patches of land, potential sanctuaries. But, for now, we beat against the counter-currents of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, snarled, south-flowing traffic (one lane in the tunnel before 9.30), fraught incomers heading north. Drummond remarks on the pompous splendour of an extinguished library, white stone and weeds. The kind of building that Atkins might once have photographed (rescued), but now doesn't. I can hear his stomach grumbling. And I know it falls on me to find them a decent breakfast.

'London Orbital' (£25, hardback) is available to 'IoS' readers for £22.50 (inc p&p within UK). To order call Granta (0500 004033) and quote 'Independent on Sunday'. Offer ends 31 October 2002.

Follow in the footsteps of Iain Sinclair

Orbital hell

When Margaret Thatcher opened the final section of the M25 on 29 October 1986, after 11 years of construction, she proclaimed the 117-mile ring road as one of the world's great highways. Within a minute the first breakdown occurred. Since then the busiest highway in Europe, carrying 700,000 vehicles daily, has been almost continually backed up.

In the early 1980s research showed that increasing motorway capacity in order to reduce traffic in city centres only results in more vehicles driven by people who wouldn't have driven otherwise. Ultimately, you end up with both a congested motorway and a slower journey.

Light rail experience

For a first-hand look at the A13 corridor, the Docklands Light Railway is an excellent way to get around. Board at either Bank or Tower Gateway DLR station and get off at Limehouse. Walk along Commercial Road (part of the A13) and on to the Lea Navigation Path, which is clearly signposted. Head north on the towpath via Limehouse Cut to Bromley-by-Bow, then turn south and follow the River Lea (sometimes Lee) and Bow Creek, crossing the A13 again below Canning Town flyover. Close by is Canning Town station, where you can get back on the DLR. See www.londontransport.co.uk/dlr/network for maps.

By Gerson Nason