London Orbital

By: Iain Sinclair

Narrated by: Iain Sinclair

London Orbital is Iain Sinclair's voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city.

Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop - keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' - he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before.

©2003 Iain Sinclair (P)2021 Audible, Ltd

True Psychogeography

Sinclair’s free range musings around the M25 may seem prosaic to just-add-water-and-stir hipsters of the “smart” city era, collecting Wiki knowledge like so many badges, but this is true psychogeography from one of the great practitioners of the elusive art, covering the unloved peripheral motorway terrain of a living organism: Greater London. It’s a treat to hear the writer read his own quietly impassioned work. London Orbital is a must for any urban/cultural liminalist, and - I add this for my fellow insomniac Audible listeners - a pleasant cure for insomnia, as the emerging text reads like a dreamscape.

Incoherent

This book was not described as 22 hours of stream-of-consciousness prose. It is the literary equivalent of that guy who decorates his entire lawn with brightly colored junk, and believes that keen passersby will understand and appreciate its artistic merits.

Before I returned it, I sampled chapters throughout the book in case it eventually developed a coherent narrative form, but it never did.

If there is artistic merit in this form of literature, 22 hours of it would still be unlistenable.