London Orbital by Iain Sinclair was the first book of his I read long before I knew anything else about him. The book is a journey around the M25, London’s orbital motorway, mixing psychogeography, history, and culture in the incomparable way Sinclair does. Published in 2002, the book chronicles the author’s attempt to walk the 120-mile loop of the M25, a road often derided as a boring necessity, Sinclair shows it as a lens for exploring the edges of London’s true identity, and most importantly to Sinclair its forgotten histories.

Sinclair’s prose is dense, poetic, and occasionally disorienting, weaving together observations of the landscape with digressions into local lore, literary references, and sharp social commentary. He visits derelict asylums, industrial wastelands, and those typically Sinclair moments of finding beauty in the overlooked and forgotten whilst all while reflecting on the motorway as a symbol of late-20th-century Britain—endless circulation, consumerism, and dislocation of modern life.

Sinclair’s psychogeographic approach, the notion that the spirit of place shapes our consciousness allows the M25 to become a vivid character with stories of madness, murder, and memory. From Druidic myths to Thather-era urban planning, Sinclair can often be hard to keep up with, like the motorway itself with loops and exit routes that are quickly upon us.

At its heart, London Orbital is a love letter to the margins, celebrating the strange beauty of the edgelands the road cuts through whilst questioning the future of those displaced and the makeup of modern Britain. It’s not a book for easy reading, it often requires patience and an understanding of Sinclair himself as a writer and London journeyman but to allow oneself to wander with him it reveals itself as a haunting, revelatory portrait of a city and its unseen shadow.

Further reading:

Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou

Ghost Milk

Hawksmoor