But any attempt to walk the length of Myddelton’s New River is a forlorn exercise. Water: known but not seen. Dishonoured water. The muddy trickle of streams that no longer pay their way, edging in embarrassment through the dog-exercising pastures of Enfield Chase. Relics of Pymmes Brook, Salmons Brook, Turkey Brook.
The New River Head on the Penton Mound in Islington has been developed by Stirling Ackroyd. A spindly fountain playing in a shallow pool. A wink at those who have chased the brook from Hertfordshire. St James Homes promote: ‘a dynamic living environment’. There are still parties of intent walkers, greyheads in anoraks and trainers, straining to catch the guide’s patter above the noise of the traffic. Elderly street signs, white on blue, with their brighter replacements: Myddelton Square, Amwell Street, Chadwell Street, Sadler’s Wells, Merlin’s Cave. Just as the reprieved statues and arches of the old city migrate to the green belt, so the names of the source places, the springs, are planted in a townscape: pastoral aspirations. Lloyds Dairy in Amwell Street: a black and white chequerboard display for bottles of contour-banded yellow milk, heavy with cream. Simulations. Heritage nudges with a true heritage: Welsh cows, draymen and dairymen from the west. Thick-necked bottles are clotted to give the lie to Cockney rumours of Welshers (from Cardiganshire) watering their milk.
The Metropolitan Water Board (privatised, defunct) have left a sepulchral, marbled wreath behind them, a text nobody bothers to read: ERECTED BY THE METROPOLITAN WATER BOARD ON THE SITE OF THE NEW RIVER HEAD. On the corner of River Street is a peeling signboard: The Village Buttery. Cream, milk, butter, pseudo-apothecaries: the village within the city, the small green oasis of Wilmington Square Gardens.
Following the New River, north, up Colebrooke Row, brings you to the cottage Charles Lamb shared with his sister Mary. Restored, white-painted, plants on window sill. The cottage dates from 1760. The Lambs lived here from 1823 to 1826. The New River, already tired, drudges past the front of the house. My children, when they were told the story of Mary Lamb murdering her mother, preferred to walk on the other side of the road. What is curious is how the Lambs, taking up a rustic retreat in Enfield, followed the river out. Water remains, in my fancy, a messenger substance, linking reservoir with source; a dream hinge between city heat and Arcadian potentiality.
Lamb has been heritaged as one of the treasures of Enfield. Contemporary reports were ambiguous. ‘Charles Lamb quite delighted with his retirement. He does not fear the solitude of the situation, though he seems to be almost without an acquaintance, and dreads rather than seeks visitors.’
With Mary Lamb’s health deteriorating, brother and sister shifted from house to house, lodging to lodging: The Poplars in Chase Side to Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton. Lamb was buried in All Saints Church.
Enfield lacked culture. Enfield was not Islington. Food was dull. The chief bookseller, Lamb informed Mary Shelley, ‘deals in prose versions of the melodrama, with plates of ghosts and murders and other subterranean passages’. The fraudulent antiquarianism in which the Chase specialised: the plaster devils of Capel Manor.
Back on my New River trail, I tried to photograph the heritage plaque on Colebrooke Cottages. Two women brushed past. ‘He’s sharp as a pin. Got all his marbles, only he can’t talk.’
Myddelton is memorialised by a statue, facing south, at the sharp end of the little park that divides Upper Street and Essex Road, Islington. The water speculator on his high plinth is a carry-on conquistador, back turned to the lowlife scramblings of park bench, bushes. Palm trees surround the base. Myddelton has hacked his way through a Douanier Rousseau jungle, climbed a small hill to stare over unconquered lands; his eyeline will carry him to Cleopatra’s Needle and the Thames. Stone putti with pockmarked skins kneel in the shrubs, flanking a dish of rusty water. Myddelton’s right hand keeps his cloak clear of the muck; while his left hand clutches a map or charter.
Sir Hugh Myddelton, fortune secure, built himself a house and laid out gardens in the neighbourhood of Forty Hall, near Enfield. The New River flowed through the grounds. Forty Hall was later acquired by H.C. Bowles, described by James Thorne in his Handbook to the Environs of London as ‘the fortunate possessor of shares in the New River company’. Into these suburban reservations was gathered the cultural ballast of London: a portion of ballustrading from Christopher Wren’s church of St Benet (demolished in 1867), a Portland stone Grecian temple from the Duke of Chandos’s house in Edgware, twelve stone balls from the front of Burlington House, Piccadilly. Scattered throughout the Chase were jigsaw mementoes of a lost London.
Bowles, on a site adjoining Forty Hall, once known as Bowling Green, built Myddelton House. Here all the elements that defined Enfield Chase came together: accumulated wealth, green politics, architectural salvage from the City, royal courtiers working their connections, paradise gardens. Myddelton House, glorying in the name of the original water promoter, is presently the headquarters of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. On those days, and at those hours, when the grounds are open to the public, you can creep up to the high windows of this comfortable property and see computers, coffee machines, filing cabinets, the steel-grey trappings of bureaucracy. But, unless you have business with LVRPA, you can’t go in. You must shuffle across the gravel to wonder at the heritage of the notable botanist E. A. Bowles.
Philippa Gregory and her sorority got it right. The Bowles story and the story of the garden do play like an historical romance. It is a romance. At the Capel Manor garden centre, massed copies of Joan Hessayon’s Capel Bells are offered for sale. An Edwardian lady with parasol drifting across lawns. Beneath the heavy relief lettering of the author’s name, a tapestry of fuchsias, the eponymous ‘Capel Bells’. Prosperity on a stalk: ‘They look like petals, I grant you, but those of us in the know refer to them as sepals… Blooms increase on a mathematical progression. Damned clever little things.’
Capel Bells is a grand read, pre-optioned television: Cookson heroine battling to establish herself in society, knockabout subplot of Cockney chancers, horticulture, discovery of unknown father, sail off into sunset with the inheritor of this magical country house. It’s like finger-licking your way through a seed catalogue with racy bits, headset history on a guided tour of the grounds.
The gravity of Hessayon’s novel pulls towards the notion of Arcadia as an achievable condition, the contrary of urban struggle. ‘Charlotte had boarded the train at Liverpool Street station in the sooty air of the City, deafened by the cries of unhappy children, the whine of beggars, the scolding of irritated mothers and the bellows of station staff. Fifteen miles north of this cacophony, the outer reaches of Enfield were a paradise of leafy trees and empty roads. She had not seen a single motor car.’
Paradise. That word again. A.R. Hope-Moncrieff in his book on Essex calls up the spirit of William Morris. ‘Morris also played in a suburban garden, and was mainly brought up in the next parish, on the edge of Epping Forest, that was an Earthly Paradise for his youth.’ Paradise Road, Waltham Abbey. Paradise Wildlife Park, just north of Junction 25, on the orbital motorway.
‘Strangely, for a young woman known for her down-to-earth attitudes, she felt an almost mystical affinity with Capel Manor,’ writes Hessayon of her heroine, Charlotte Blair (a working girl who has the temerity to rent a substantial Essex property). ‘She had no idea what exactly she craved, but felt certain that a few months living in the old house in Enfield would solve the mystery and give her peace.’
The romance, bastard progeny of Malory and Spenser, is the proper form for describing this territory. The structure is formal, fixed rules that shock us into enlightenment: a still pool in a woodland glade, an artist who captures essence with a few swift brush strokes. The owner of Capel Manor goes into business with a Tokyo firm in anticipation of global capitalism. All the scams and development pitches of the Lea Valley are here in outline. Future shadows creep across rigorously managed lawns. ‘Of course we couldn’t live on a pound a week. What a thing to say! Popple will bu
y you a nursery… I believe the area is full of nurseries. The Lea Valley. That’s true, isn’t it?’
Of course it is. As true as the hero’s chum Buffy who comes up with a wizard scheme ‘to make a fortune by building homes in the suburbs’. The first paradise of the car. Nobody demands an orbital highway. The only routes follow the rivers, north/south, follow ancient trackways. Great estates are always one day’s ride from the centre. The suburbs wait on the railway. They swallow up dozy market towns, places of retreat: Enfield, Waltham Abbey, Chigwell, Edmonton. Then polyfill the bits in between.
In Joan Hessayon’s romance, characters represent the categories of invader who will come to occupy the fringes of the old forest. Essex man and woman in embryo. The Covent Garden entrepreneur. The flower girl with push. The ambitious Big House servant with an unhealthy passion for fuchsias. The bent solicitor with a nubile daughter. Jack-the-Lad from the Rookeries with an eye for horseflesh. Plants are currency. Gorgeous swathes of scent and colour. Bearded iris for toffs and auricula (‘gold-laced polyanthus’) for the working man.
‘I dare say people whose hobby is growing auriculas would not be received in the neighbourhood, although I doubt if that was the reason Lady Meux wasn’t received,’ remarks the catty Charlotte.
Hessayon’s romance doesn’t simply predict coming social trends, it inducts historic personages into the narrative. There is Lady Meux, Valerie, chatelaine of Theobalds Park – who is not (as a widow) received in Upper Lea Valley society. Her husband, the brewer, picked up the former royal palace and brought his much younger wife with him. Valerie had served behind the bar at Meux’s Horseshoe Tavern, on the site of the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road. Hessayon sketches her as a game widow who entertains unmarried men and makes very imaginative use of an indoor swimming pool.
But the dominant figure in this patchwork of country houses is E.A. ‘Gussie’ Bowles of Myddleton (sic) House. Bowles drops in at Capel Manor, accompanied by the formidable garden-planner and author Gertrude Jekyll (venturing north from her Surrey patch). Gussie, a confirmed bachelor, is rather sharp with women and amateur horticulturalists. Jekyll is one of the chaps.
E.A. Bowles was a gift to writers of fiction. The family were Huguenot (original name Garnault). They purchased a block of shares in the New River Company, enough to provide them with a controlling interest. In 1724, according to Bryan Hewitt (The Crocus King: E.A. Bowles of Myddelton House), Michael Garnault acquired ‘an estate with an Elizabethan house called Bowling Green House at Bulls Cross in north Enfield. By coincidence a loopway of the New River cut through the garden.’ This loopway had, it was said, been created to prevent the destruction of a Tudor yew hedge.
Henry Carrington Bowles married into the Garnault family in 1799. A swamp cypress was planted to celebrate the nuptials. When Anne Garnault, the last of the line, died, the Bulls Cross property passed to the Bowles family. A new house, white Suffolk brick, was built in 1818. And was eventually inherited by Henry Carrington Bowles Treacher, on condition that he assumed the Bowles surname and coat of arms. E.A. Bowles was Treacher’s fourth son.
The process of drift, centre to margin, is very evident at Myddleton House. Huguenots, frequently associated with Spitalfields, the streets around Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, remove themselves to an area of play country. They become more English than the English (aping the parodic squirearchy of the royals). A great chum of Gussie Bowles is Thomas Hanbury, one of the Quaker brewers of Brick Lane (hops to the city, profit to the suburbs). Bowles stays with Hanbury in his fourteenth-century palace (with terraced gardens) at La Mortola. Quaker wealth comes with responsibility: schools for the children of workers, grace and favour cottages. Gussie is also keen on good works, socialising with the lads of Enfield, ‘Bowles Boys’.
Gussie fits out his garden with York stone slabs from Clerkenwell. He collects one of those strange, ovenlike, igloo-block shelters that once stood on the old London Bridge. (These structures trace a psychogeographic progress across London, from Guy’s Hospital to Victoria Park in Hackney, to Myddleton House in Enfield. Memory nudges, displacements that weave across an indifferent landscape, as invisible as the New River.)
Bowles rescues the Enfield Market Cross and a diamond-shaped pillar known as ‘the Irishman’s shirt’. Cargo-cult plunder dresses his gardens: a portion of the New River, antiquarian oddities from London, exotic blooms from European plant-hunting expeditions. Myddleton House is a museum of false starts and wilfully perverse hints. Gussie lays out ‘The Lunatic Asylum’, an area of the garden that includes a contorted hazel known as ‘Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick’. Flora can be as zany as fauna. The grounds of Myddleton House are revealed as a microcosm of the Lea Valley/Enfield Chase Arcadia: captured river, a market cross, tulip terraces, beds of gold and white and silver; a reservation for the outpatients of the botanical world.
Beyond Bulls Cross, moving west along the hard shoulder of the M25, from Potters Bar towards Abbots Langley, we learn how the old estates were broken up and rebranded as asylums, retreats, drying-out clinics, holding pens for troublesome inner-city aliens. Looking at my map, before the walk began, I logged: Shenley, Harperbury, Napsbury, Leavesden and, a little to the south (North Circular rather than M25), Friern Barnet.
E.A. Bowles kept gas and electricity out of Myddleton House until 1954. As he got older little quirks of character were refined into fullblown eccentricity. He wore spectacles with a single lens (the left). He put his finger through the empty socket and twirled. He was a member of an all-male dining club, the Garden Society, that admitted only one woman, the Queen Mother (royals are hermaphrodite).
Garden books were produced, small controversies aired: Bowles wasn’t keen on the fad for rock gardens. (The estate of his greatest rival was acquired by a later millionaire gardener, George Harrison, the former Beatle.) Life centred on masculine Christianity, the Jesus Church at Enfield. Boys who attended the church were encouraged to spend weekends messing about in the grounds of Myddleton House, clearing the pond, or doing a bit of weeding. ‘For this they wore bathing costumes, Gussie’s being of Edwardian vintage with blue and white rings reaching down to his ankles,’ reports Bryan Hewitt. ‘A straw hat with his college ribbons completed the outfit (it was the same hat in which the boys picked strawberries).’
The boys were taken on excursions to Brighton. They were given the job of lifting and sorting crocuses. They enjoyed themselves, fishing and playing cricket on the lawns. There is a photograph, something like a Latigue, of a card school dressed in Edwardian bathing costumes. One boy, the nearest to the camera, has stuck out his tongue. Another favourite, Fred, did an impression of Gussie with a watering can. He fell into the river. ‘He squelched off to the house,’ Hewitt writes, ‘where Gussie gave him a bath and dry clothes. He reappeared dressed in a pair of Gussie’s flannel trousers, a Norfolk jacket and a trilby with the brim turned down and proceeded to shamble about giving a hilarious imitation of Gussie who joined in the fun.’
Bowles Boys served on the Western Front in the First War. Gussie wrote to them with news of the harvest and the ‘burning hot days in July’, he sent food parcels. Many were wounded, crippled, killed. The honoured dead of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, the Royal Field Artillery, the Middlesex Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers.
The residue of what Bowles attempted, a life given over to the creation of a garden, remains. It works in a way that Capel Manor, with its strategic planting, its demonstrations, never will. Capel Manor debates a Princess Diana memorial garden, the form it should take: a place of remembrance beside an orbital motorway. Myddleton House has a more direct royal connection. The foreword to Bryan Hewitt’s book is written by the grandson of E.A. Bowles’s brother. ‘I think of my Great Great Uncle Gussie often as I walk around our small Wiltshire garden,’ writes Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, OBE (horseman, courtier and former husband of the royal mistress, Camilla). ‘If, as I suspect, my uncle is looking back from “across the wide river” he will be amaze
d to discover that his name is still revered and his works much admired.’
3
Bill Drummond – green weatherproof, thick blue jersey, specs on string, spiky hair – eased himself out of his Aylesbury cab. I was waiting with Marc Atkins beside the (closed) doors of the Church of the Holy Cross and St Lawrence at Waltham Abbey.
Bill has the look of a man interrupted: he’s been thinking about another project, talking/not talking, skidding across a dark landscape, and now he’s expelled. Damp air. Another early start. A walk across Enfield Chase to the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. Why?
Dumb instinct – on my part. Which is always the best method. It’s a slight detour, in terms of our orbital circuit, but Waltham Abbey to Mill Hill, across the Chase, favours the lie of the land; the way the rivers go, the direction of the footpaths. I reckon we can knock this one off, through parks, woodland, farm roads, and arrive at the hospital in time for the lunchtime lecture. At 1.30 p.m., in the Fletcher Hall, German conceptualist Jochen Gerz (associate of Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck) is going to address the whitecoats on the subject of ‘Works in Public Spaces’.
London Orbital Page 10
