The Road to Little Dribbling (10 page)

“You’ll like it,” my wife promised.

She would know, for her father came from Wraysbury. He grew up in a small, dark, decrepit cottage with his poor widowed mother and elder sister at the end of a quiet, wooded lane a quarter of a mile or so from the village center. The cottage had no electricity or running water. The toilet was a privy at the bottom of the garden. My father-in-law used to tell us stories of how he would walk seven miles to Staines and back on a Saturday evening to buy a bag of stale buns for their supper, for that was all they could afford. It was a different world.

My wife had told me where the cottage was, and I found my way there now—or at least I found my way to where it had once been, for the cottage itself is long gone. It was blown to smithereens by a German bomb in 1943. Wraysbury offered nothing in the way of targets, so the bomber was either lost or perhaps just emptying out his bomb bay before turning for home. In any case, his tumbling bomb scored a direct, obliterating hit on my father-in-law’s house. Luckily, no one was in at the time, so no one was injured, but the family lost everything and had to be rehoused. Thanks to his changed circumstances my father-in-law met a girl whom he would not otherwise have met, and in the fullness of time they married and produced two children, one of whom grew up and married me. So the direction of my life, not to mention the very existence of my children and grandchildren and whoever else follows, is directly consequent upon a German bomb that fell randomly on Wraysbury on a summer’s evening long ago. I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences, but it did seem fairly extraordinary to me, as I stood looking at the site of a long-vanished cottage, to think that if that bomb had fallen a hundred yards to either side or where the Germans had intended it to go, then my wife would never have existed and I wouldn’t be in Wraysbury now. It further occurred to me that every bomb that fell in the war, on both sides of the Channel, must have changed lives in that way.

And with that considerable thought to chew upon, I turned and set off for the forgotten site of Motopia.

Had Motopia been built, everyone would know Wraysbury today. Motopia was a proposed model community based on the uniquely unexpected idea of banishing cars. It was the dream of a visionary named Geoffrey Jellicoe, who wasn’t a town planner at all. He was a landscape architect, which doubtless explains why he gave cars a low priority. (No one seems to have noticed that Motopia was an odd name for a place that was designed to be essentially car-free.) Jellicoe’s singular idea was to put the community’s roads on rooftops, five stories up. Motopia was essentially to be a single giant building, built around a network of courtyards and standing in an eden of lakes and parkland. The lakes were to be fashioned out of the old gravel pits, which itself was quite an original notion. So Jellicoe had two big ideas that were radically out of step with the period—finding new uses for old industrial infrastructure and banishing cars from the daily landscape. Nobody thought like this then.

Altogether Motopia was to provide housing, shopping, offices, libraries, schools, and recreational space for a population of thirty thousand. Jellicoe envisioned people getting from place to place on moving sidewalks or in taxi boats along lakes and a small network of canals. He called his rooftop roads “motorways in the sky,” which was more than a little absurd because the whole town was only about ten blocks across, the roads were narrow, and there were roundabouts every thirty or forty yards, so there was hardly scope for expressway-style acceleration, but his heart clearly was in the right place. The whole proposal was treated seriously enough that a site was chosen for it at Wraysbury and detailed plans were drawn up. It would have been lovely, if a little impractical. It certainly would have been worth trying. People would have come from all over the world to see it, so I was curious myself to see now this thing that never was.

Much of the proposed site for Motopia now lies under the M25 motorway and the neighboring Wraysbury Reservoir, built in 1967, but a good chunk of it remains undeveloped on Staines Moor, to the east of the village. It was an unexpectedly lovely walk down a green lane, with large, well-tended homes on one side and a broad, restored gravel pit, dotted with boats and sailboards, on the other. At length I came to a metal gate and an information board put up by the local council inviting me to follow a muddy track to Staines Moor. The track led to a footbridge over railroad tracks and thence to an underpass beneath the busy Staines bypass.

It was mostly wasteland and didn’t look at all promising. I might well have turned back, but I saw that the underpass had a mural painted on it and out of politeness I went to inspect it. It depicted the animals to be found on the moor beyond and was lovingly done by an artist with real talent, who clearly felt some passion for this unknown piece of land. Intrigued, I walked to the end of the tunnel and stepped out into an astonishing sight—a sweep of green and golden countryside, a meadowland of trees and water, leading away to low green hills (which in actuality were the slopes of the surrounding reservoirs). It was as if someone had taken a square mile or so of the best Suffolk countryside and dropped it into the space between the motorway and bypass. Just before me the little River Colne broadened into a kind of marshy pond. A heron eyed me with undisguised loathing and with a few lazy flaps of wing departed to a spot a hundred yards away. In the middle distance planes took off from Heathrow, their noise a low grumble. The roar of traffic was reduced to a tolerable hum by the acres of waving grass.

Only gradually did I remember that I was standing in what would have been the heart of Motopia, and I suddenly realized that it would have been a tragedy if they had sacrificed this forgotten moor to build a town here. For the twenty thousand people of Staines, this was the only patch of accessible countryside for miles, but it was much more than that. An information board beside the pond informed me that this land had not changed in a thousand years. One hundred and thirty species of birds and three hundred species of plants had been recorded here.

I came upon a guy with a thousand tattoos walking a vicious-looking dog, but he said hello in a friendly manner.

“It’s gorgeous here,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Shame if they build on it.”

“Is it under threat?” I asked in sincere alarm.

“They wanna put a runway here, mate.”

“Here?” Heathrow seemed miles away—way beyond anything that could be reasonably considered contiguous.

He nodded. “You might be dodging jumbo jets next time you come here,” he said and pleased himself with that.

Later I looked up Heathrow’s proposals and he was right. Staines Moor is the site of what is known as the South West Option for a third Heathrow runway. Under the proposal, Staines Moor would vanish completely. The new runway would extend Heathrow a mile to the south and a mile to the west, taking the airport to the very edge of Wraysbury. All the lovely homes I had lately walked past, as well as the lake beside them, would vanish. So would half of Wraysbury Reservoir. People in Wraysbury would be so close to the end of the runway that passing planes would all but blow their hats off their heads. The noise would surely be unbearable. Staines Moor would cease to exist at all.

—

The no-man’s-land clinging to the edges of the Staines bypass and M25 is not a world built for pedestrians. It exists for the benefit of motorists and for people who need to get rid of large numbers of tires, old mattresses, and the remnants of demolished kitchens. Eventually amid puddles and detritus I came unexpectedly upon a footpath sign pointing the way toward Egham via a bridge over the Thames. This consisted of a path that ran exactly alongside, but about twenty-five feet below, the M25. It was surprisingly peaceful and rather lovely. The noise of traffic passed straight overhead, audible but strangely distant. I was in a calm world of greenery—a little tunnel through woodland. Butterflies flitted between stalks of wild buddleia. Swarms of tiny insects shone in the sunlight. After about half a mile the path sloped upward and abruptly emerged right beside the motorway at a bridge, where both roadway and path crossed the river together, divided by a waist-high barrier. I walked onto the bridge and into a most remarkable experience. On my left-hand side was a roar of speeding traffic of almost painful intensity on a road ten lanes across. This is the busiest stretch of road in the whole of Europe. But on my right was a scene of utter serenity—a Thames tableau caught in a moment of summery perfection. In front of me, about a hundred yards away, was a lock and pretty weir. A motorboat was in the lock, its owners doing things with ropes and cranks. Beside the lock was a hotel with a terrace where people were sitting having lunch in the sun. On the opposite bank were some attractive cottages and moored boats. If you were standing at a rack of postcards, this is the view you would select. Yet behind me, near enough to make my jacket flap, was the ceaseless flight of traffic. I was on the boundary between two worlds yards apart but wholly unaware of each other. It was surreal.

I don’t think anyone ever crosses this bridge on foot. Ahead of me, the path was so overgrown as to be obliterated. I pushed through lush sprays of lacy flowers and nodding daisies. Wildflowers of purple and yellow and the most delicate pale blue sprouted everywhere. This was a garden growing on concrete. That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places—on railway sidings and waste ground where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower. This is in complete contrast to America, where nature is wild and raw. You need flamethrowers to keep the weeds in check where I come from. Here it is just miles of accidental loveliness. It is really quite splendid.

At the bottom of the slope, I stepped out of this little wilderness onto the other side of the Thames and was confronted with one of my favorite views—the grassy, unspoiled flatness of Runnymede meadow, site of the signing of the Magna Carta, running up to the bottle-green majesty of Cooper’s Hill, the most prominent eminence in this part of Surrey. I have known this area for years, but had never approached it from this angle or crossed Runnymede on foot, and was pleased to do so now. It is just a great empty field, now maintained by the National Trust, but it is ineffably glorious, particularly on a fine day such as I had now. At the top of Cooper’s Hill is one of the country’s great little-known shrines, the Air Forces Memorial, where beautifully inscribed in stone are the names of 20,456 airmen who died in the Second World War but have no grave. It is serenely beautiful and moving—I can’t recommend it too highly—but it is at the top of a long, steep hill and was too distant for me to reach on this day. I headed instead across the field to the Magna Carta memorial, a little open-air rotunda erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association and memorable today as the only decent thing ever done by lawyers. It commemorates, of course, the signing of the Magna Carta somewhere in the vicinity. (No one knows exactly where. It was a long time ago.) I had it all to myself, as I expect any visitor would on most days.

Beyond, and of more particular interest to me, was the Kennedy Memorial, erected in memory of JFK shortly after his assassination. You reach it by going up a steepish path through the woods. The designer, I was delighted to discover, was none other than our old friend Geoffrey Jellicoe.

Jellicoe didn’t have a huge budget or much time—the memorial was thrown up in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death—but he made the most of what he had. The path is made from sixty thousand small granite blocks, joined together to make steps, and it meanders up the hill in a pleasingly sinuous fashion. At the top is a large block of granite, cracked in places and showing obvious signs of repair here and there, inscribed with part of Kennedy’s inauguration speech. Beside it was a bench and a hawthorn tree. I felt like I was the first person in years to go there.

At the bottom of the hill I met two slightly plumpish young women who were peering up the shrubby slope as if they thought there might be bears up there. They both wore outfits of khaki shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. Each carried a little knapsack.

“Have you just come from the memorial?” one asked me.

“No, I was having a dump in the bushes,” I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. “Yes I have,” I said. Her accent was American, so I tried to sound American, too. “It’s pretty neat,” I said. It was the first time I had said “neat” since seventh grade, and I quite enjoyed it.

“Is it very far?”

“Not very. But there are steps.”

A slight look of panic. “How many?”

“I don’t know—maybe fifty or sixty.”

They had a conference. One decided to retire to the nearby tearoom; the other more bravely elected to go for it and set off up the hill. Within a few steps, she was making the sort of grunts female tennis players make at Wimbledon when serving for an important point. I listened to her progress for a few moments, then turned to bid farewell to her companion, but she had already dismissed me, and was wholly preoccupied with the challenge of getting across five hundred feet of open ground before she could enjoy the relief of a chair and a soft drink. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the soft drink would almost certainly be small and served more or less at room temperature.

Runnymede, incidentally, is another British treasure that nearly didn’t survive. In 1918 plans were unveiled to cover the meadow with houses. Urban Broughton, a Briton who had made a fortune in America, bought it from its potential developer to save it. When Broughton died, his widow, an American, gave it to the nation. So one of Britain’s most historic sites remains pristine today because of the generosity of an American lady.

And with that patriotic thought in mind, I adjusted my pack and headed to Windsor.