An Interview with the M25 Motorway
What might the the M25 motorway have to say about itself after thirty-five years?
Q – So, you were opened in October 1986, how does it feel to be thirty-five years old?
M25 – As you may have seen, I’ve got wider in parts – do you think it’s ‘middle-age spread’ already? And I could do with some foundation cream to fill in my pot-holes, and Botox treatment for the cracks in my surface …
Q – The author Roy Phippen says that you have no beginning, no end, and you do not go anywhere but back, eventually, to where you were?
M25– But my opening ceremony performed by Margaret Thatcher in October 1986 was at the emergency phone kiosk by the northern hard shoulder at Junction 21 near the River Colne. So, I start in Hertfordshire, actually!
Q – Are you proud that authors have written whole books about you?
M25 – Yes! After making numerous journeys to Gatwick and Heathrow, and being constantly questioned by his passengers about the things they saw through the window, cab-driver Roy Phippen decided to research me and to discover how fascinating I am!
Q – So what would be specially interesting about the Bromley and Croydon bits of you?
M25 – Well, I get my name from the A25 roadway that passes through that territory. And it’s the only bit of me that is technically a slip road: motorists have to go several miles south to pass between Sevenoaks and Bromley because the snooty people in Sevenoaks didn’t want me.
Q – Let’s face it: you’re not very popular? Another author Iain Sinclair has called you ‘a dull silvertop - a tourniquet that chokes the living breath from the metropolis.’
M25 – That’s unfair! Think of the westward glance that you can take when approaching my Junction 4 (A21). Chevening Church nestles there. It’s a beauty spot: an unspoilt rural landscape that could easily pass for Thomas Gray’s elegiac country churchyard of the 1700s.
Q – Ah, but who put the lights out at night?
M25 – Yes, I know, where Surrey crosses into Kent, suddenly, the street lamps disappear! I complained to Kent about their penny-pinching, but they said I should be applauding them for energy conservation!
Q – Iain Sinclair walked anti-clockwise round you for the New Millennium in 2000. When he got to Croydon he called it ‘a subtopian city state, constantly reaching out to devour the lesser hilltop developments of South London’. He said that Croydon has trams and transplanted Docklands towers, too.
M25 – Walked all the way round me? He must have been tired: I’m 117 miles long.
Q – Maybe that’s why he said you are ‘a grim necklace’?
M25 – Be careful: after all these insults I am hearing from you, I may burst into tears. It’s a good job that near the A25 there is one of several lagoons built to catch surface water that runs off me! – the trouble is that I get polluted by the traffic and I mustn’t get mingled with the local groundwater.
Q – So what do you reckon about your next thirty-five years?
M25 – oh, I’ll be AROUND!
Interview by Jerry Dowlen reprinted and updated from Bromley Life and Croydon Life magazines, 2011.
‘Travelling Clockwise’
Roy Phippen
Pallas Athene, 2005
‘London Orbital’
Iain Sinclair
Granta, 2002
What might the the M25 motorway have to say about itself after thirty-five years?
Q – So, you were opened in October 1986, how does it feel to be thirty-five years old?
M25 – As you may have seen, I’ve got wider in parts – do you think it’s ‘middle-age spread’ already? And I could do with some foundation cream to fill in my pot-holes, and Botox treatment for the cracks in my surface …
Q – The author Roy Phippen says that you have no beginning, no end, and you do not go anywhere but back, eventually, to where you were?
M25– But my opening ceremony performed by Margaret Thatcher in October 1986 was at the emergency phone kiosk by the northern hard shoulder at Junction 21 near the River Colne. So, I start in Hertfordshire, actually!
Q – Are you proud that authors have written whole books about you?
M25 – Yes! After making numerous journeys to Gatwick and Heathrow, and being constantly questioned by his passengers about the things they saw through the window, cab-driver Roy Phippen decided to research me and to discover how fascinating I am!
Q – So what would be specially interesting about the Bromley and Croydon bits of you?
M25 – Well, I get my name from the A25 roadway that passes through that territory. And it’s the only bit of me that is technically a slip road: motorists have to go several miles south to pass between Sevenoaks and Bromley because the snooty people in Sevenoaks didn’t want me.
Q – Let’s face it: you’re not very popular? Another author Iain Sinclair has called you ‘a dull silvertop - a tourniquet that chokes the living breath from the metropolis.’
M25 – That’s unfair! Think of the westward glance that you can take when approaching my Junction 4 (A21). Chevening Church nestles there. It’s a beauty spot: an unspoilt rural landscape that could easily pass for Thomas Gray’s elegiac country churchyard of the 1700s.
Q – Ah, but who put the lights out at night?
M25 – Yes, I know, where Surrey crosses into Kent, suddenly, the street lamps disappear! I complained to Kent about their penny-pinching, but they said I should be applauding them for energy conservation!
Q – Iain Sinclair walked anti-clockwise round you for the New Millennium in 2000. When he got to Croydon he called it ‘a subtopian city state, constantly reaching out to devour the lesser hilltop developments of South London’. He said that Croydon has trams and transplanted Docklands towers, too.
M25 – Walked all the way round me? He must have been tired: I’m 117 miles long.
Q – Maybe that’s why he said you are ‘a grim necklace’?
M25 – Be careful: after all these insults I am hearing from you, I may burst into tears. It’s a good job that near the A25 there is one of several lagoons built to catch surface water that runs off me! – the trouble is that I get polluted by the traffic and I mustn’t get mingled with the local groundwater.
Q – So what do you reckon about your next thirty-five years?
M25 – oh, I’ll be AROUND!
Interview by Jerry Dowlen reprinted and updated from Bromley Life and Croydon Life magazines, 2011.
‘Travelling Clockwise’
Roy Phippen
Pallas Athene, 2005
‘London Orbital’
Iain Sinclair
Granta, 2002
