For a split second I was convinced that the powers of fate had colluded to engineer a car crash at the end of J.G. Ballard’s road, thereby definitively validating my solo expedition in tribute to his legacy.
A car teased its snout forward from a T-junction into the path of another snarling vehicle, which managed to halt inches from collision, amidst a crescendo of horn blaring and tyre squawking. Not that I willed an achieved impact between these two cars; I just couldn’t help rejoicing in the almost beautiful sense of poetic justice at play given the purpose of my excursion to Shepperton. This was principally to pay homage to the late J.G. Ballard, who ever since reading his notorious ‘Crash’ (a book exploring the themes of auto-erotic death), has been of the foremost importance in my own creative fermentation.
The plan for my pilgrimage hike was to get the train to Shepperton, the leafy London suburb where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death and where he wrote all his fiction. From there, I would walk the 6 miles north to the Heathrow Hilton, a place Ballard called his ‘spiritual home’ and one of his favourite buildings in the world.
I was aware of the subversive nature of ‘Crash’ before I read it, aged 19, and in so many ways it exploded all my preconceived ideas of what literature should be about, its possibilities, its raison d’etre. Ballard’s own summation of the book that he was ‘trying to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror’, was a succinct one, and after several re-reads over the last few years, it has lost none of its raw power, shockingly transgressive edge and often sublimely imaginative imagery.
I vividly remember putting the book down after reading the first page and experiencing a cocktail of deflation and euphoria. The former, because I knew that here was someone who was mining precisely the same literary pit that I naively had it in mind to, albeit substantially superior. The latter, because I knew I had found a writer whose entire bibliography I would revel in and extract the utmost inspiration and stimulation, and this has been borne out over the last few years of reading my way through his work. Never before had I experienced such a profound connection with a writer, never before had I desired such an urge to reach out and make a connection. Therefore, the selfish disappointment I felt when hearing of his death from cancer just a few weeks later was undeniably palpable.
Arriving at Shepperton station I took a few minutes to stroll up and down the High Street, taking in the ‘small town’ aesthetic; the quaint bakery, the community centre that was trying to muster enthusiasm for some fundraiser or other, the Budgens supermarket. From here I started walking up Old Charlton Road, the sense of anticipation mounting as I neared his former home. I had read, on various fan websites, plans that had been mooted after his death about turning his ramshackle semi-detached house into a museum of some kind, although sadly this came to nothing (despite being an example of the kind of navel-gazing nostalgia he himself had always been opposed to).
I was thrilled to find that it was still the shabbiest property on the entire road; Ballard described himself as living ‘like a refugee’ in his home, allowing the place to gradually deteriorate around him. As I paused to take photographs, I could detect movement of a new occupant within, and felt slightly abashed. However, as much as I believe people obviously have a right to privacy in their own home, I don’t think they can rightfully take umbrage at a prevailing interest due to a former inhabitant; instead they should accept it in good grace and feel a sense of pride that their house holds a certain resonance for some people, or else don’t buy it in the first place.
I followed the road until it merged with a country lane and a thin picturesque river that threaded its way through long grass in an ethereal way that reminded me of Tarkovsky’s close-up shots in ‘Solaris’.
Emerging from the woodland thicket, a concrete walkway circled round in a helix leading up to a walkbridge across the M4 motorway. It was hard not to get carried away with the Ballardian imagery encapsulated by such a sight, my discovery of this Neolithic concrete structure abandoned by an outdated society, fossilised through the ages and left for nature to reclaim.
Walking to the centre of the bridge span was a strangely jarring sensation; the sleepy suburban environs being impaled by this raging river of high-speed transit. I could feel myself starting to occupy the same spiritual headspace as Ballard would have when surveying the scene – the cars racing by in pursuit of their own private destinations, whilst in the distance planes one-by-one approached Heathrow airport, in a stately descent as though an invisible lasso was reeling them in to the ground.
I decided to divert slightly from my course and walk to the famous film studios, that Ballard claimed had a psychological leak effect in terms of their imprint on the unconscious imaginations of the town’s inhabitants who viewed their sedate surroundings with an almost filmic rendering, as though the studio productions of captured fiction had spilled over into their everyday lives. Finding little more than a security fence and some rather shabby backlot barns, looking for all the world as if they were relics of a medium whose scene had long since departed, I turned back to regain my plotted course.
My route took me round the perimeter of the vast Queen Mary reservoir; its steep banks lending Shepperton the impression of being below the natural water line, flowing direct from the pages of Ballard’s early natural disaster novels, particularly of course ‘The Drowned World’. I sat on the benches outside the sailing clubhouse and surveyed the landscape; this colossal man-made aquamarine feature striking such a contrast with the main roads and tightly-clenched residential streets that surround it. Indeed it struck me as almost a surrealist landscape (Ballard often repeated the fact that his own creative influences were less literary figures and more surrealist painters such as Dali, Magritte and Ernst), this marine expanse positioned on a topographically higher level than the surrounding suburbs.
I couldn’t help but wonder how the nearby residents incorporated this reservoir into their psyches, whether their dreams were irrigated by this apocalyptic body of water contained at so proximate a distance, and their sense of personal fallibility in relation to its intrinsic destructive power.
As I continued on my way, following the Clockhouse Lane, the dreary monotony of the surroundings began to seep through. The blandness of the roads, with the occasional smattering of shops and pubs, recalled to mind all the homogeneous landscapes of business parks, airport terminals and shopping malls; Marc Auge's 'non-places', which Ballard infused in his writing.
In terms of his masterwork, many point to the mainstream quasi-autobiography ‘Empire of the Sun’, but personally I would elevate ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ to that prestigious accolade. Aside from his novels, Ballard was an incredible architect of the short story, and indeed it could be argued that these are the true gems unearthed from his imaginative quarry.
Reading these stories from collections such as ‘Myths of the Near Future’ or ‘Vermillion Sands’, one cannot help but rejoice in the sheer prophetic power Ballard seemed able to conjure at will. A story like ‘Billennium’ echoes with a terrifying clarity on the issue of contemporary city overcrowding and space shortage; ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ explores the potentially violent consequences of a life dominated by a pre-empted version of social media; ruminations of the post-Space Age malaise that afflicted the mass collective psyche in ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’; and explorations of a wholesale personal rejection of modern life and its discontents in ‘The Enormous Space’, to hint at just a handful.
As I began my approach to Heathrow, truly a city in and of itself, the roadways thickened and the environs gradually grew colder and evermore artificial. I was reminded of a common experience of mine whilst endlessly hiking around Los Angeles (as well as other US cities), of feeling utterly subservient to the tyranny of the infrastructure. As a pedestrian, your right of way is almost entirely eroded in favour of soul-crushingly extended routes as vehicular transit invariably assumes predominance.
Sitting on a grassy hillock at the Heathrow perimeter, I could stare straight at the gigantic Hilton hotel that stood as my destination, but I was at a loss as to how exactly to reach it on foot, seen as how it was seemingly entangled by teeming roads as a castle is by a defensive moat. It was only by taking a prolonged detour doubling back on myself along an arterial sliproad that I was able to complete the walk. In such inhospitable pedestrian terrain you are almost reprimanded with the logical conclusion of the futility of walking, its alien concept as a mode of traversing these largely automated landscapes. Here on the hinterlands of Heathrow, I felt I was far more immersed in a Ballardian wilderness than in Shepperton; the featureless and bland expanse of carriageways, flyovers and aircraft hangers bound together to exert an equisitely dehumanising impression, without any recourse to geographic or cultural identity.
Trudging along grassy verges of carriageways, and kerb edges of long-stay car parks, you really get a definite sense that merely by the act of walking, you are somehow subverting the well-defined order of things. You can almost taste the bitter ridicule from speeding cars and airport shuttle buses that pass you by in your apparently pointless and lonely endeavour. Here on the airport fringes, the role of the pedestrian has not been factored into the infrastructural matrix, the terrain exists as an annexed zone into which amblers venture entirely at their own volition.
When finally I found my way to the Heathrow Hilton, I was instantly struck by the monolithic vacuity of the structure, the brilliant transluency and anonymity that the building engendered. I sat drinking an over-priced beer on a plush leather seat amongst the mostly lone people, islanded on separate tables as though they were survivors of a shipwreck floating on improvised life rafts.
The imagination conjures up images of space hangers or way-stations for futuristic travellers; the double-ended transparent elevations adding to the impression of some incredible mechanised filtration system. Ballard called this place his ‘spiritual home’ and said in a 2003 interview that:
‘[it’s] a white cathedral, almost a place of worship, the closest to a religious building that you can find in an airport. Sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to.’
The great success of the Hilton is its reflecting and instilling, with bland featureless décor and expansive atrium of open space, the ephemera of presence, the transient nature of all who pass through en route to some extraneous global destination. An environment of ghosts that flitter through without staying long enough to even register the structure on its own terms. It is a building not meant to be noticed, not meant to distract attention, or infringe on mental space in any tangible way.
I felt validated therefore, that my hike should find as its end point a place of functional transience in which only the person who has reached it as a final destination in its own right can objectively decipher its inherent logic. With my walk complete I felt that I had paid apt homage to the great Sage of Shepperton. More importantly, I felt I had achieved, in a psychical sense at least, through feeding vicariously from the imaginative landscape he cultivated, some semblance of that longed-for connection.
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