Rainham to Harold Wood: On Friday 8 October 2004 I put my Brompton folding bicycle on the train from Staines to Waterloo and then made my way to Rainham, the furthest station east my Travelcard would take me. I can’t now remember if I rode across the city to Fenchurch Street Station or took the slower but lazier route on the Jubilee Line to West Ham to transfer to the C2C train.
This was a ride inspired by Iain Sinclair’s book ‘London Orbital’, published in 2002, based on his walks around the M25. I’d been given the hardback as a Christmas present from my wife to add to his other works on our groaning bookshelves. In 2003 it came out as a paperback and secondhand copies of both this and the hardback are readily available online.
Of course, just as Sinclair couldn’t actually walk along the motorway, neither could I ride along it, but plotted a route that more or less followed it, crossing a couple of times from one side to another.
Sinclair’s book is still an interesting read – and having taken it down from the shelf I’ll probably read it again – or perhaps watch the film. It’s a book full of interesting stories, including of the gestation of London Heathrow where he writes about the way that the war cabinet were deceived into using emergency wartime powers “to establish, by a network of dubious commercial deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles from the centre of London.” A deception that we still suffer from and which our politicians now seem determined to expand despite its disastrous environmental consequences.
Sinclair’s walk passed within five minutes walk of where I live and contains some interesting insights on many places familiar from my own forty years of walking around London within the M25 which form the basis of most of the roughly 45,000 images in my Flickr albums. In 2025 The Observer included London Orbital as one of the best 25 books of the first 25 years of this century.
London Orbital is also a 2002 “visionary film” directed by Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair, according to IMDb starring another of my favourite London writers, J G Ballard, who lived a couple of miles away from me in Shepperton. The full video has been removed from Vimeo due to copyright issues but you can still view the trailer and apparently can buy or rent the film
I didn’t write much about the ride back in 2004, though the ten pictures on My London Diary have captions. Here is the complete main text:
Earlier in the month I’d taken the Brompton for a ride along the eastern edge of London from Rainham to Harold Wood, most of the time close to the M25. its very rural most of the way, quite unlike Staines which somehow got left out of London. My ride even included the only part of Greater London outside the M25, North Ockenden.
In 2004 I could find nothing about Geraldine Elizabeth Batt, but since then much more information has been posted online, in the reports of the Thurrock Local History Society, where on 5 May 2026 Phil Lobley gave a talk on her and other members of her family. Although it gives information on Geraldine and Margaret (and this an other talks are recorded on the page in fascinating detail), he concluded that nothing has been found as to why this inscription was used, but suggested it might be a reference to the help gave to the poor and criminal classes in her work with the mission of St. John the Evangelist in Red Lion Square in Holborn where she lived for many years and ran a Boy’s Club. Another sister married into a family connected with North Ockenden and that family was probably responsible for her burial there and for this memorial.
You can still see the small number of pictures I originally posted on My London Diary at Rainham to Harold Wood. Most on this post are pictures not included there.
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