Porters, as an estate, dates from the thirteenth century. Farms were added, plantings undertaken. Royal courtiers, self-made men of business, politicians, naval officers: the usual mix of exploiters and improvers acquired house and land. Sir Richard Coxe. John Mason (distiller of Greenwich and Deptford). Viscount Howe, First Lord of the Admiralty and victor of the Battle of Brest. Howe was known to his men, so the pamphlet claims, as ‘Black Dick’. ‘Solid as a rock and just as silent.’
And so on, from the Marchioness of Sligo to Luke White, to Colonel Henry White, Samuel Clarke Jervoise, William Joseph Myers, James Harris Sanders. Sanders met his wife Mary in New Orleans. She undertook good works for orphans and the poor of the village, she improved the garden. The author Ann Bridge was one of eight children. Portrait of My Mother is set at Porters.
After the gardening Mrs Sanders came Michael Paul Grace. It is rumoured that W.G. Grace laid out the cricket square. The ground is still there, we visited it, just beyond the walled garden. A green sanctuary. Cecil Frank Raphael, who bought the estate in 1902, built the pavilion. His son John captained Surrey – and died in the First World War in 1917.
During the war, part of the estate was used as an airfield. It was known, to avoid confusion with the field at Kenley (to the north), as London Colney Aerodrome. The sheds and huts on the east of Black Lion Hill were the base for 56 and 54 Squadrons. Temporary hangars known as ‘Besseneau’, wooden frames and canvas covers, were still in use in the Forties. In this empty landscape, the floodplain of the M25, with its scattered villages, hospital colonies, sewage plants and rescued mansions, there are always characteristic features: war debris and immaculately tended cricket squares. Bunkers, concrete ziggurats: overgrown, bird-occupied, or converted into piggeries.
Many of the young men at the London Colney base didn’t survive the training period. They are buried in the graveyard of the small roadside church of St Botolph’s. The last of the Royal Flying Corps sheds, known as ‘The Hangar’, were incorporated into one of the local asylums, Harperbury Hospital.
In 1924 Raphael sold Porters Park to the Middlesex County Council, who used the site to build Shenley Hospital. Patients arrived, sectioned, drugged, or by their own volition, from Harrow, Wembley, Acton, Willesden. The hospital, at its peak, housed 2,000 of them. It’s hard, seeing the photographs of the place in its Thirties pomp, not to think of other experiments in social engineering, eugenics. This is a camp, a colony, a plant to process non-conformity, to tidy away girls who got into trouble, drinkers, ranters; those who gave too vivid an expression to the overwhelming melancholy of urban life. Shenley, with its blocks, its wards, didn’t belong on the outskirts of London. To achieve its benevolent aims, the colony needed alps and forests, not ‘pleasant undulating countryside’. Shenley mixed (Rudolf) Steinerist notions of garden cures, plant magic, sympathetic colours, with the flipside: control, mind-experiments, coercion.
The site was chosen for its location, near the Middlesex border, a short drive (or march) from Radlett station. Madhouses belonged on the periphery. Instability might infect healthy working people. Out here, in the clean air, the virus was contained. The plan, according to the Middlesex County Council, was ‘to build a new mental hospital and a Colony for Mental Defectives’. In other words, transportation. Far Pavilions. A Tasmania established at the rim of London. The contract for the building work was given to John Laing. A firm that would, in the future, be one of the major motorway contractors; responsible for the Dartford to Swanley section of the M25 (1974–7). Laing would also develop significant off-highway estates. (Laings had a discreet colony of their own, not far from here, with a number of fine cricket pitches.)
Another Laing, Ronnie, the charismatic Glaswegian anti-psychiatrist, was to make his mark on Shenley. The ‘Villa’ system, taking patients away from huge wards (and a recreation hall that seated 1,000 people) to ‘family’ units of between twenty and forty-five members, fitted nicely with the Laingian ethic. The grounded ocean liner of the Thirties, with its rigid hierarchies, became a flotilla of pirate craft, ships of fools with crazed or inspired captains.
Clancy Sigal, a successful screenwriter and novelist, an American exile in Sixties London, became a patient of Laing and left a fictional account of those years. His novel Zone of the Interior was suppressed in England. The Sigal character is in awe of Last, a lightly disguised version of Laing.
My thirty-odd years of ignorance and spiritual flabbiness, he said, had been the Tao’s way of preparing me for the final, self-healing Voyage.
‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘Schizophrenia,’ he replied.
Sigal sees the asylum for what it is: ‘a rural caesura… a gateway’. He knows that it can only be reached by a transit through the ‘semi-industrial suburbs of Ealing, Southall and Hayes’. The cure begins with a drive ‘past Heathrow airport, tiny streams and beacons in the scrub fields… to golf courses, cows and stockbroker villas… small meadows, citified villages, the outer spokes of London’s huge wheel’.
The original design of Shenley was constructed around a central axis, male and female accommodation were separated; patients were not allowed to stray beyond their ‘airing courts’. By the time R.D. Laing and David Cooper arrived, patients were being encouraged to work on the construction of new buildings. They helped in the gardens. Staff and patients came together for dances and coach trips to ‘places of interest’.
Sigal’s novel suggests that beneath these liberal gestures nothing had changed. The intake was still made up of ‘post-Edwardian spinsters banished from their families for an unmarried pregnancy; the deaf and the dumb; undetected autistics and mild subnormals; alcoholics and homosexuals – or simply homeless men and women who lost their kin and had nowhere else to go’.
A battle was being fought between opposed concepts of architecture: the grid and the skin hutch, the rational colony with its avenues and the yurt of the shaman. Sigal draws up a plan for ‘an all-male community on the edge of London’ and presents it to Last (Laing). ‘Laid out like a medieval town, it was governed by a nuclear core of Perfectii, or Brothers, who studied and prayed in a shedlike temple far apart from the un-Elect (women, children, cats and dogs). Girding this inner sanctum was a ring of mobile prefab huts inhabited by the mad and broken down – i.e., patients who might also be any of us. Unlike the wives and families of the Perfectii, who were segregated in an Outer Zone where they contentedly raised chickens and bees to make the community self-sufficient, the mad always had free access to the Nuclear Brothers.’
The psychedelic Sixties were awash with such plans, derived from misreadings of Buckminster Fuller, mythical accounts of life at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (under the rectorship of Charles Olson), libertarian communes in San Francisco. Sigal shifts between the asylum, with its forcing-chambers, its concentric geometry, its gardens, and the city (the generator). The hut of derangement can only be constructed at the heart of the labyrinth.
I prepared my launching pad: a London version of a Siberian shaman’s hutch… At each of the tent’s corners, to signify the Zodiac elements, I deposited a jar of Thames River water, a box of Swan matches, a plastic bag of earth from St. James Park and a toy balloon I had to keep inflating. After a brief purifying ceremony, I invited Willie Last, who took one look and said quietly, ‘That’s pretty mad, Sid.’ With this blessing, I knew I was in business.
Renchi, when he completed his circuit of the M25, hoped to devise similar ceremonies: sand paintings in the chalk tunnels under Epsom Downs, songlines drawn on flyovers, cave art inscribed in earth colours on the grooved walls of underpasses. Reasserted alignments.
But there are significant differences between the two men. Sigal, the New Yorker, the hip Jewish screenwriter, has a weakness for one-liners. Socialism and comedy, that’s his schtick. The magic of the city is something he recognises, but it is always absurd: the visionary is a beggar and a clown. Whatever strange rituals he is prompted to undertake, they will always come out li
ke a quotation from a Thirties B-movie.
In the small dark hours of the night, when the others were too stoned or sleepy to notice, I crept out of the manor to lope the quiet empty streets of south London. From Crystal Palace to New Cross, from Catford to Woolwich, I heel-and-toed it to escape the thing that was chewing me up. All night and into the next morning, up to twenty miles a day, I tramped, a 1960s Werewolf of London dreading only the bright sunlight.
Another fugue. Another mad traveller. We were discovering a useful genealogy: gas fitters, painters, novelists. Through the suburbs at night, the motorway verges by day, we were there; heel-and-toeing it, sucking water from a plastic bottle, trying to find some way to unravel the syntax of London.
A stroll around the paths and levels of the estate at Shenley (aka Watling Chase Community Forest) restores us. The autumn colours of an English fashion shoot by Lord Litchfield. A stout wooden bench facing an orchard of pruned apple trees. Among the ninety-odd varieties of apples grown here is the Seabrook Pearl, which is unique to Shenley.
We find the estate office and are given permission to explore the walled garden. The estate is in that limbo between memories of privilege (forelock-touching gardeners) and community art (in its remedial aspect). I take a photograph of Renchi stretched out beneath a set of sculpted steps on which is printed: NO/REST/FOR THE/WICKED.
Catching an obliging volunteer in the estate office, we are given permission to photocopy some of the old maps of Porters Park. The house was at one time occupied by an architect far better known than W.T. Curtis (who was responsible for the design of the Italianate water tower and hospital). The volunteer couldn’t remember the name. He rummaged among his papers until he found the relevant passage. Nicholas Hawksmoor. Had we heard of him?
Porters Park, mansion and grounds, had once been in the keeping of Hawksmoor. I knew I’d read somewhere that Hawksmoor had taken a house, out from London, a day’s ride to the north. But it came as a shock to stumble across it on the second day of our orbital walk. I couldn’t disassociate the man from his chain of East London churches, from city and river. Hawksmoor kept houses in Greenwich and Westminster, but this was his retreat; symbol of achievement and status.
At the end of his career, after Christ Church, Spitalfields, St Anne’s, Limehouse, and St Mary Woolnoth, Hawksmoor came to Shenley. He gave advice on the planning of restoration work at St Albans Abbey. There is a Hawksmoor drawing of the north face. He corresponded with the Bishop of London: ‘By the help of the magic of Archdeacon Stubbs I have erected the Ancient Temple of St. Albans in brass, which heretofore was only in stone… I have put into the landscape the famed site of Verulam, destroyed by Boudicea, there is also the lake and the situation of the new town which has arisen… We can but support this vulnerable pile from being martyred by the neglect of a slothful generation.’
Succeeding Wren as Surveyor of Works at Westminster Abbey, Hawksmoor moved from Greenwich in 1730, but retained his country manor. He died at Westminster, aged seventy-five, but expressed the wish to have his body returned to Shenley. For a number of years, the precise whereabouts of the grave was forgotten. The architect’s reputation drifted into obscurity. His riverine churches were locked, dark. Then, according to the notes our informant was reading, the burial place was rediscovered in 1830.
We could search for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s grave in the little church of St Botolph. Apart from a beehive hut on the village green, with the inscription ‘Do well, be vigilant and fear not’, St Botolph’s is the only Shenley curiosity thought worthy of mention in The New Shell Guide to England. The church was on our route to the motorway.
The beehive hut recommended in the guide turned out to be a lock-up for miscreants, known locally as ‘The Cage’. Offenders were held overnight before being taken to Barnet to face the magistrate. There were, in fact, two inscriptions, placed over the windows. ‘Be sober, be vigilant’ and ‘Do well and fear naught’.
Emerging from the woods that surrounded Hawksmoor’s mansion, we hit Black Lion Hill. The road ran directly down towards the M25. Off to the east, just back from our path, was a site marked on my map as ‘Old Church (redundant)’.
The burial ground which stood above the church was accessible, weathered gravestones in a carpet of autumn leaves. There were monuments to the airmen of Shenley who had died during their training period. But there was no sign of a memorial to England’s greatest architect of the Baroque.
The church, flint with brick dressings, was of course closed. It wasn’t a church, but a set of private flats. The drive was a gravel crescent. Renchi rang the bell; using the voice box was like trying to contact the dead. I took a photograph. Renchi with his archaic headgear: the frontispiece to Blake’s Jerusalem. ‘Los as he Entered the Door of Death.’ Renchi with hand outstretched for the buzzer is a ringer for Blake’s pilgrim, as he approaches the door, the Gothic arch. Renchi with burden. Renchi with solar disk. ‘Los took his globe of fire to search the interiors of Albions’s/Bosom…’
Blake wrote to Hayley (23 October 1804): ‘I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door.’ Renchi as artist/seeker. Los, according to the catalogue of the millennial Blake exhibition at the Tate, is ‘artist-poet-architect, alter ego of Blake himself, in the guise of a London night-watchman’.
We made a circuit of the church grounds, stepping over children’s bicycles, fingering letters on tumbled tombs. At the back of the building, near a barbecue pit, we found it. A stone slab with a diagonal crack, a covering of yellow-gold beech leaves. A shallow earthenware dish filled with water. A circular mirror of clouds. The rectangular, slate-grey lid, which had been awkwardly set on a rim of bricks, was as unspectacular as a deepfreeze unit. A safe. A lead box. No pyramids, no decorative motifs, no Masonic symbols.
Three weeks before his death, Hawksmoor was busy with plans for Castle Howard: ‘I may be employed in Some Shape or other if I shall be alive in Building the Bridge.’ His own monument in the Shenley church is, as Kerry Downes writes, ‘characteristically erudite’.
PMSL. Piae memoriae sacer locus. ‘The formula appears to be unique.’ My remembered Latin was rough but we’re in the territory of sacred places and pious memories. St Botolph’s was certainly a sacred place. Hawksmoor’s grave, along with Temple Bar, were the beacons of our walk; heavily freighted memorials that had been allowed to pull away from the centre.
NICHOLAUS HAWKSMOOR, ARCHITECTUS. We waited. Behind us, the red tower on the hill. Across an open field, a few hundred yards to the north, the continuing rush and fret of the orbital motorway.
7
There is a set of twenty-four cards called Myriorama (or, Endless Landscape), based on a ‘novelty’ published in Leipzig in the 1830s. Lay out the cards in any order – one long straight line or 12×2, 4×6, 3×8 – and you achieve ‘a perfectly harmonious landscape’. A landscape of symbols: road, lake (or river), low hills, distant village, travellers on a highway. Time frozen at the edge of extinction. Something of Breughel, something of Christian Rosencreuz: hermetic-cabbalist hieroglyphs. The scale of these pocket-Polaroids induces vertigo. The black birds hanging above the rocks are too big. Why should eagles or vultures be found at the outskirts of a pretty German town? Why is the solitary horseman blowing a bugle? Everything tugs and tosses. Two youths cling, terrified, to a lifting kite. A decorated hot air balloon drifts in one direction; the sails of a three-master billow, as it surges, in the other. There is an obelisk like a war memorial with an unreadable inscription. Two walkers, rucksack-burdened, debate a signpost.
The thing you can’t do with the twenty-four cards is arrange them in a circle. The pattern fractures, the road breaks; the drawings are revealed as cigarette cards from a prophetic tarot pack to which the key has been lost. The trick that puzzles Renchi is: how to iron out the M25 circuit. How to convert the orbital motorway into a device made from straight lines, simple contraries: north/south, clay/gravel, water/t
armac.
We pore over maps; it doesn’t help. Renchi, in cap and red scarf, photographed on a traffic island in Shenley Lane, with a church (a copy of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge) behind him, on the far side of the motorway, is a contemporary transcription of a Leipzig card. The obvious solution is to take the direction the ink-drawn figure nominates, to strike west. We’re confused, crossing familiar ground without retracing our steps. The cardboard landscape is endless, the elements archetypal, but they shift, they change their story.
We sit at an outside table, a mill house pub beside the River Ver (closed for refurbishment), and drink the last of our plastic water; we scratch at the linings of our pockets, in search of that elusive Polo mint. Somebody has set fire to a bungalow. White plasterboard and asbestos panels on a wintry pyre.
Renchi has been reading Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A fitting complement to this stage of our walk. Asylums haunt the motorway like abandoned forts, the kind of defensive ring once found on the Thames below Tilbury. Hospital colonies are black mandalas of madness: circles set around a central axis, depictions of an unstable brain chemistry. Shenley is a hilltop encampment, Cadbury or Maiden Castle; Napsbury is a winged creature. The fantastic sigils of the madhouse architects dominate the map, the docile north-west quadrant of our journey.
The hospitals at Harperbury and Shenley are separated by a few fields; coming away from our inspection of the motorway fringe, we choose the long way around, by Harper Lane, NO A & E (white on blue). Motorway casualties must look elsewhere. Limbs hacked off by agricultural machinery will have to be left on ice. Foucault suits Harperbury; a Francophile poetic hits the spot.
There is a long straight avenue, pollarded limes, flanked by huts and severe brick blocks with windows set in mansard roofs. Light is declining, a pinkish glow in the grey membrane, trees like witches’ brooms. Go back into reverie, into black and white, and this is a film by Georges Franju, his first feature, La Tête contre les murs (1958). The critic Raymond Durgnat, summarising the plot, wrote of ‘a delinquent adolescent’ whose ‘sadism against his father has a visionary quality, and accordingly, he seems insane’. To avoid scandal the boy is placed in an asylum in which a doctor who punishes irrational behaviour is in conflict with a younger colleague who inclines towards a more progressive treatment of those given into his care. Charles Aznavour in his first substantial screen part plays an epileptic.
London Orbital Page 16
