The reason Iain Sinclair chose the M25 as the motorway of choice to walk around in London Orbital is because it encompasses the sacred orbit of London. John Clare was exiled there, and the refuse of the city ends up circulating vertiginously around it. Sinclair’s psychogeographical project has led him to the gradual realisation that the whole city is dictated by invisible patterns of sacred geometry.
The M60 is the only actually orbital motorway in the UK. Like a planetary ring, it whirrs constantly around Manchester. As I begin my journey along its sacred orbit, I walk along Oldham Street, past the Chinese Arch, then endless developments, and a single hotel, The Sheridan. I walk past voluminous, unreadably discarded lager cans, which are more florid than dandelion leaves, and Central Park, a police station cosmeticised by its modernism.
I reach an abandoned church, which I decide to tour; the only point of entry is a door earmarked ‘toilet’. Instead of a toilet, flanked in stone are mysterious construction implements and plaster, an unfinished conversion into a bar or a nightclub. More probably, earmarked for demolition, but nobody can conjure the money to actually demolish it.
After a man informs me he’s had a call, I politely continue. There is an abandoned pub – The Weavers Arms – which taunts you with the allure of its preserved 80sness. I walk along Broadway, past the blackbird clarions and bogs of Moston Brook.
As I walk along Hollinwood Avenue, I begin to walk adjacent to the motorway. The sound of cars accelerates around my eardrums, and all I can smell is gasoline. The concrete is lined with bracken and birches. I remember I am on a prayer retreat and am supposed to do a contemplative prayer exercise now, so I perch beside a concrete pillar like a stylite. It is Ignatian visualisation. I begin but every sound is stolen by the parries of vans and lorries, and the Gospel is stolen by the morbid circularity:
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdom of the world, and the glory of them
All I can hear is some quality in the rhythm of my motorway-voice. I am on somewhat of a hill at the moment so I begin to imagine Jesus’ whole ministry conducted thus. I imagine Jesus being tried and crucified on the M60, drivers unable to look at him.
I navigate a truly tree-infested path, which I ought to have had a scimitar to clear. I am surprised to find old-fashioned paths, which have lost their necessity. I discover beautiful landscapes that will be mostly unexplored: moss upon concrete where forests must have been cleared. I see a dead finch, and become habituated to the thrum of the motorway. I think of plans to build motorway burial corridors and reflect that these would be a charming spot for them; the dead buried under uncleared glades and will-o-the-wisp dells. Clerics would be unable to hear the prayers they made for the dead, but would be attentive only to the rhythms.
I reach Hollinwood. I take a quick tour of the locality. It strikes me as a fairly deprived place. The Hollinwood Branch Canal was scrapped and the town has been struggling ever since. The complete fall of Oldham – the great luminary of the Industrial Revolution – does not help matters, and I assume that many Hollinwooders commute to Manchester for work. Oldham was nothing before the Industrial Revolution, and is now nothing again: a cycle. Unemployment and deprivation in Hollinwood is one of the highest in the UK, with 15% of Hollinwood claiming unemployment benefits in 2019.
I find that Hollinwood has an extremely quiet section, with mock-Tudor houses and a beautiful cemetery. I listen to the birdsong, my lungs and ears gradually recovering from the unfortunate shock-treatment.
Squidditas 