London Orbital

Iain Sinclair is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry non-fiction, including Lud Heat; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Downriver; Radon Daughters; Lights Out for the Territory; Rodinsky's Room, with Rachel Lichtenstein; Landor's Tower; London Orbital; Dining On Stones; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk; American Smoke and London Overground. Downriver won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award. He lives in Hackney, east London.

'It isn't often that one reads a book and is convinced that it's an instant classic, but I'm sure that LONDON ORBITAL will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness, that terrain of golf courses, retail parks and industrial estates which is Blair's Britain. It's a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose, and on another level a warning that the mythological England of village greens and cycling aunts has been buried under the rush of a million radial tyres' J. G. Ballard, Observer

• Prejudices declare; soothing the seething - up the Lea Valley with Bill Drummond (and the Unabomber); Paradise Gardens - Waltham Abbey to Shenley; Colne and Green Way - Abbots Langley to Stains; diggers and despots - cutting the corner, Staines to Epsom; salt to source - Epsom to Westerham, through the valley of vision to Dartford and the river; blood and oil - Carfax to Waltham Abbey; millennium eve.