'A spindly shit coppice, with ghosts of plastic bags rustling in its branches.' This week's podcast, by artist Robin Bale, is an evocation of a windswept rubbish dump under the M11 motorway.  It starts with the sounds of moving through undergrowth, traffic in the background. A twig snaps. Abstract and slow percussion fades in.......

A burnt boot…crushed cans…ashes…binbag, spilling its guts…burnt plastic…soles detached…from shoes…ashes…roof tiles…single rubber glove…over the mounded and overgrown rubble…sparks of new, blue off-licence bags leap out against the leaves…the green and the brown…and the traffic on the road beyond flickers between the trees.

[sound of traffic and birdsong fades. Percussion continues then fades]

I wish to talk about spaces. It could be that as soon as the first building was built and the city was founded, that there came into being a margin or corner - the angle of two walls, the space just down there, just past where the bins are. Only existing in relation to that building, only coming into existence with it, this site was where things were left, forgotten, hidden; with the understanding that they were left or forgotten there and should be left alone, although not far away. Almost in plain sight. Children, strangers and fugitives would go there and it would nearly be in sight and earshot of that first structure; just outside the window, just against the wall.

[percussion returns quietly]

I wish to tell you about such a place, that I have named the Bike Cemetery.

The Bike Cemetery is a mere crumb of land, a piece of what I suppose could be called urban waste ground, an increasingly rare commodity in the city now, especially one less than a mile from the site of the 2012 Olympics - that place of victorious national becoming.

[sound of traffic fades in]

It is demarcated - you might say cut adrift - by a busy main road and a slip road and overpass for the M11. A spindly shit coppice, with ghosts of plastic bags rustling in its branches. The sort of place you might find yourself first light on a Monday morning, in the piss-thin drizzle, wondering how you got there and knowing that you were meant to be somewhere else and thinking "not again".

As far as I know it lacks a name, so I have called it the Bike Cemetery. When I first came across it early this century it was full of the stripped carcasses of bicycles that I assume were nicked somewhere nearby and cannibalised on the site.

[traffic and percussion, with bird song field recording from site]

I have called it an entrance to the underworld, at other times, the unacknowledged centre of the city or the centre of the state.

The Bike Cemetery also attracted a writer and bricoleur. The wall of the overpass was liberally graffitied. The texts, constructed from single words or short phrases, heavy on repetition and play, were not the usual -  not political slogans, football chants, sexual slander or biblical quotations.

[percussion fades leaving field recording, traffic and bird song]

There were portmanteau words, a stuttering repetition of syllables, an obsessive chant running through its centre: Wolf Vanish.

This was interspersed with collaged printed matter, predominantly magazine images of animals, fashion photographs from the late 1980s,  Monopoly money and food packaging; some porn, though not nearly as much as might be expected.  Judging from the dates on the magazine pages the work was done sometime around 1991. [percussion returns] Due to the handwriting of the graffiti and the thematic consistency of the whole thing, and that the same paint was used to write and stick the images to the wall, I'd say that the entire wall was the work of one person. It has remained there for almost a quarter of a century,