A Mercedes with darkened windows slides out from behind spiked gates that close automatically as the car pulls away. The long drive, in a herringbone pattern of pale brick, stretches into a leafy distance, perspective flattered by lines of thin aspens. Terrace, fountain. Pausing to admire the potential photo-op, we are interrogated by a security patrol. A white Fiesta draws up. A guard, in mirrored sunglasses, leans out. Courteous. ‘Just checking, sir.’
Nothing has changed since the first car challenged us, ten minutes earlier. You are allowed to walk half a mile between security shakedowns. Slow-moving Fiestas are on constant patrol. CCTV cameras, panning restlessly, alert the monitor jockeys. Calls come in from nervous watchers at windows: ‘Walkers.’ Walkers without dogs. The public aspect of this private road, between the B374 and the B365, is being subtly erased. In the end, it’s less bother to go the long way around.
As we advance down the avenue, towards the eastern checkpoint, smaller, ruder vehicles begin to appear. Domestics checking in. The occasional limo, or Range Rover, carrying uniformed children to school. We encounter the only walkers the estate allows: young women struggling with pairs, even packs, of leashed dogs. Accredited canine accompanists. Peripatetic toilet attendants scooping the lush verges. Leather lead in one hand, silver shit-shovel in the other.
The map of St George’s Hill, near the entrance gate, is highly selective: the estate is creamy-white ground, no houses are marked, roads look like rivers. Two islands of greenery represent the only named zones: Tennis Club, Golf Club. The western entrance lets you into the golf club. The eastern entrance adjoins the tennis club. There is no other reason to be here. The notice – YOU ARE HERE – is ironic. You only see it on your way out. As the barrier closes behind you. And the guard ticks you off his list. Phones down the line with an all-points warning.
This second estate, Whiteley Village, on the west side of Seven Hills Road, makes a powerful impression on the map, on my Nicholson. In its benevolent aspect, the village (with its Home of Rest) is a Jungian mandala, circular paths contained in an outer square. We are about to enter a panopticon, all areas visible from the centre. Another ambivalent asylum of the suburbs.
The approach to the village is kinder than anything we encountered on St George’s Hill, the planting is shaggier – a path vanishing into a green tunnel (one of Samuel Palmer’s oval bowers). There are gates with heraldic shields: WHITELEY VILLAGE/PRIVATE/ELDERLY RESIDENTS/PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY. But the gates are open.
Renchi strolling, hands cupped to support his awkward rucksack, leads the way. The taller, shavenheaded Marc (in black T-shirt, dark glasses, white trainers) is the inappropriate figure. He might be security. Earlier that morning, he told us how he’d been in the music business. A roadie at the tail-end of Heavy Metal, the cusp of Punk. He almost fitted on the Hill; delivering substances, a sessions man down on his luck. Up there, Renchi screamed offence: eco-warrior, sans-culotte. Ambling through these red brick bungalows, this play village, he comes into his own. A helper with rolled-up sleeves, a sympathetic listener: suitably rough at the edges, fuzzy in outline.
As with all Surrey estates, there is nobody to be seen. It’s too early for the old folk. The bungalows are generously spread out, detached, with neat garden plots; wide, trim lawns. The design is uniform but not oppressively so. Low tiled roofs on public buildings, twisted licorice pillars. Whiteley Village plays like The Prisoner – but that’s our own perversity; we’ve been schooled to be suspicious of charity, of surveillance (where it doesn’t declare itself).
At the centre of the estate is a raised garden, a plinth; a near obelisk with a stone sculpture of the seated figure of ‘Industry’. Industry is female, wide-skirted; a beehive (covered with bees) is cradled under her left arm. Beneath her, in profile, is a memorial to William Whiteley (1831–1907). Whiteley died in the year that Brooklands was launched as a motor racing circuit. He was a businessman, shopkeeper and philanthropist. His department store in Queensway, Bayswater, was a Victorian and Edwardian institution. A virtual high street with all its retail variety enclosed in a single spacious building; a way of experiencing Knightsbridge or Regent Street in the inner suburbs. Like Arding and Hobbs in Clapham Junction or Jones Brothers in Holloway Road. It was possible to promenade, fit out a house, purchase groceries, reading matter, take tea. The vision lasted for much of the century, gradually declining into situation comedy and shabby grandeur – until Whiteley’s rebranded itself as a true mall, a shelter for: Ace of Cards, Tower Records, Elegant Nails, Poons Restaurant. Railway terminus opportunism.
William Whiteley (of Westbourne Grove) made provision for his workers; after years behind the counter (floorwalking, packing, nodding and greeting in Bayswater), they qualified for a red brick bungalow in the Mole Valley. The memorial tablet alluded to a ‘munificent bequest’. Whiteley purchased the park and built cottages ‘for the comfort of old age and as an encouragement to others to do likewise’.
The verdigris stain made the plutocrat’s plinth look like a green fountain. Instead of being the eye of the panopticon, from which the inhabitants could be observed (and controlled), Industry and her beehive were the focal point. The spokes of the roads led attention in to the statue and its message: ‘Blessed be the man that provideth for the sick and needy.’ Charity being done, and well done, need not be inconspicuous. Retail veterans, their years of useful labour concluded, would meditate – with gratitude – on the benevolence of their patron. They would be encouraged to read his abbreviated biography, as it was carved in stone. ‘Apprenticed at the age of 16 to a drapery firm in Wakefield… went to London to see the Great Exhibition of 1851… the busy life of the Metropolis attracted him… ten years of thrift and constant study with a City firm… small business of his own at 63, Westbourne Grove… won himself the name of the universal provider… world wide reputation… pioneer of the great London retail stores of the 19th & 20th centuries… died in London…’
The memorial bench is a good place to spread our maps, assess their contradictions. St George’s Hill buffers the M25; we have lost touch with our orbital democrat, the conveyor belt of urban dreaming. We decide to follow Winstanley and the Diggers, in the direction of Cobham Heath, rather than pay any special attention to the ‘corner’, where the road begins to pull to the south-east. The Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley will have to be left for another day. It wasn’t, in any case, the gardens that pricked my interest, but the woodland car park (easy access to the motorway).
EVIL THAT LURKS AT THE GARDEN GATE: reported the Evening Standard, dressing a scare story with a photograph of cars and camper vans in a sylvan glade. The Wisley car park has become a meeting place for sex pests, weirdos, stalkers; a venue favoured by motorway prostitutes and gay cruisers. Six hundred and fifty thousand plant-fanciers visit the famous gardens every year without suspecting that the zone of car parks, each catering to a particular taste, is possessed by the Dionysiac frenzy articulated by J.G. Ballard in his 1973 novel, Crash. Adulterous couples favour one area of the woods, homosexuals another, transsexuals a third. Wisley Common, an undulating tract of heathland, Scots pine, birch and oak, is now a popular resort for sexual dalliance: the contemporary equivalent of the old riverside pleasure grounds, Vauxhall and Ranelagh.
The sixty-acre estate took shape as a garden in the 1870s, when it was purchased by George Wilson of Weybridge, a former Treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society. After Wilson’s death, the estate was acquired by Sir Thomas Hanbury, and given by him, in trust, to the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘for the purpose of an Experimental Garden and the Encouragement and Improvement of Scientific and Practical Horticulture in all its branches’. The pattern, seen in Enfield Chase, repeats itself. A paradise garden, owned by a brewer, confirms the relationship of inner and outer, city labyrinth and bucolic suburb. Hanbury, Quaker brewmaster (Truman, Hanbury and Buxton of Brick Lane), laid out a patch of ground where stressed workers could recover their vital energies by walking among beds of exotic
plants. The flavour of Wisley (as represented in the RHS booklet of 1969, picked up in one of Shepperton’s many charity shops) is resolutely outer-rim M25, Surrey hill station: bright gashes of colonial colour. Evergreen azaleas, ‘Temple Belle’ rhododendrons. Alpine rockeries that ‘Gussie’ Bowles of Myddelton House would have abhorred.
Heady drenches infect the woods. Martin and Vivi Gale (in their tea-stall) are ‘plagued by predatory homosexuals’. Squelchy paths are strewn with hardcore magazines. It’s too convenient: lay-bys on either side of the A3, resinous paths, filtered light; a rapid escape route to the M25 (the ribbon connecting nowhere with everywhere).
A lorry driver called David Smith picked up Amanda Walker, a known prostitute, in Paddington. He drove her to Wisley, where he ‘mummified’ her with cling-film, before raping her. While she was still alive, he stuffed her mouth with leaves. And then he stabbed her. Her naked body was recovered from a shallow grave, found within yards of the Royal Horticultural Society gardens.
Smith, who is thought to have used the motorway system to identify and secure women for ritualistic sexual practices, was a Wisley regular. He liked to see what other couples got up to in their cars. An enterprising white-van owner used to charge drifters for watching while he had sex with underage girls. And, being a favoured resort for cruising men, the park also attracted homophobe gangs.
A vicious attack on a couple in a parked car in a quiet Surrey lane (an Austin Princess with a brown top) launched the night of violence that resulted in the unsafe conviction of the men known as the ‘M25 Three’. One of the victims, Peter Hurburgh, kicked and beaten (by machete), drenched in petrol, died. The other, Alun Ely, survived: to offer a number of contradictory accounts of his ordeal.
The orbital motorway was still a novelty, operative for two years, when the assault, burglary and murder occurred in December 1988. The road solicited crime. The accused men lived in Sydenham, an easy-going culture of amateur drug dealing, car theft, fencing and serial fatherhood. It didn’t seem like crime, the life. It was what everybody did. Everybody lied, everybody informed. Everybody was fitted up. Short spells on the Isle of Sheppey got your head together.
The new motorway was a route into previously inaccessible territories; you could spin Surrey, explore Kent. The expedition for which the M25 Three went down began with the theft of a Triumph Sprite – abandoned when Alun Ely’s Austin Princess was commandeered. And so on, car for car, through Leatherhead and Oxted. When the police started to get heavy, the surviving motors were torched. None of the witnesses can remember their assailants: white becomes black, dreadlocks and long greasy hair are confused. Stories are subject to infinite revision, adjustments of time and place. The cars are never forgotten. A woman coming home late remarks the Union Flag logo on the Sprite. The pub musician at the White Hart, William ‘Budgie’ Robins, who vaguely noticed a gay man in white, paid far more attention to the motor in the car park. That yellow/brown combo, he reckoned, was ‘a bit special’.
With the advent of this bright new motorway, a support belt beneath South London’s sagging suburbs, criminal imagination was booted into a higher register. Street crims became upwardly mobile; they were soon thieving beyond their capacity to fence, dishing out grief where it was least appreciated. With substantial rewards from insurance companies and tabloids on the table, with the constabulary ready as ever to customise a fiction, the comfortable laissez-faire, live-and-let-live of the Sydenham, Catford, Croydon lowlife imploded.
Like a powerful magnetic field, the west/east pull of the M25 affected old alignments, the familiar runs towards Brighton and the coast. Narrative fractured. Verbals didn’t stand up. Confessions wouldn’t cohere. The motorway was loud with Chinese whispers. When dusk fell, villains took to their (borrowed-without-the-owner’s-consent) cars. On the cruise. Tooled up with hand guns, machetes, petrol cans, monkey wrenches.
Nothing in ‘The Case of the M25 Three’ makes sense. Alun Ely, who admitted in court to ‘careless handling of the truth’, drops off his girl friend and then drives aimlessly around Croydon for hours, down to a Fina petrol station on the Brighton road – before parking up for sex with Peter Hurburgh. A man walking a dog remembers the car but doesn’t know what day of the week it was. Girl friends of the accused men (Raphael Rowe, Michael Davis, Randolph Johnson) receive stolen jewellery and forget the donors. The grey sprawl of South London subtopia bleeds into Croydon: nothing is fixed, journeys overlap. Speed chilled with puff. None of the men packed into the stolen car wears a watch. Time is crosschecked by hallucinating a petrol tanker refuelling a set of red-and-green pumps in an oasis of yellow-white light, in the middle of nowhere.
Surrey declines to acknowledge these incursions. Surrey celebrates private estates, notable gardens, the E.M. Forster movie franchise. Bandits who motor through leafy lanes sussing properties, preying on deviants, wired to the eyeballs, don’t register. They are as invisible as scuttling things in the long grass of the central reservation. Landscape artists of the Highways Agency have made access tunnels for badgers, there is no human equivalent. Ratepayers see the M25 as a barrier to be defended, villains know it as a job opportunity.
The Whiteley Village golf course, unlike the striped sward on St George’s Hill, is in use. Early. Old chaps greet us with a wave. They’re happy to debate a path to carry us over the Mole, the A3, and into Cobham. THIS SPACE COULD BE PROMOTING YOUR COMPANY LOGO: IS the message on a green hydrant.
The Mole is reedy, nettles and willowherb and field pansies in profusion; there’s no way we can wade across, we hear traffic on the far side. A Pre-Raphaelite stream and a functional dual-carriageway running in parallel. A neat bridge with harp-shaped wings. A path that burrows under the road.
We pause, resting on the crash barrier, for the usual roadside photo session. Renchi abandons his sweater. Marc’s belly is rumbling; as a vegetarian he needs to graze at regular intervals. In several hours, hacking through estates, woodland, golf courses, roads and rivers, we haven’t seen anywhere to get a cup of tea. No cafés, no coffee stalls, not even a petrol station: a green desert. If we don’t find somewhere fast, Marc will keel over and posterity will be denied his Surrey pastoral portfolio.
6
The effect of the road, the A3 and its Cobham junction (with spiral-shaped cochlea and semicircular canals, a diagram of the inner ear), is to deafen pedestrians. The underpass sucks out country sounds and replaces them with traffic-stream percussion; blimps and creaks and soft bombs. Then, hitting sunlight, there is no sound. We’re in it, in the band – adjusting to speed, torn air, sticking fingers in our ears; we march, single file, through an unresolved, town-edge landscape. Development is on hold. We feel the volume displacement of power drills and JCBs, even when they’re not operative. Avenues of red cones, red-and-white detour boards, make walking difficult.
SAINSBURY’S THIS WAY.
The others aren’t convinced but I have a notion that you can eat in these places. We follow the arrow down a white fence that is just tall enough to mask the new estate (sand-coloured housing units with red tile roofs). Naked trees. CCTV masts. The superstore, demographics run through the computer, anticipates the coming, off-road expansion. The map is decorated with heaths and commons that aren’t common: pony-exercising paths, discretion suitable for American Community Schools. You walk these areas under sufferance, under observation.
Our breakfast is excellent and modestly priced, on a par with a transport caff. This is what Sainsbury’s has become: a place to which you can drive, to which you must drive. A warehouse in which to bulk buy (card-and-carry) foodstuffs that haven’t quite gone off. In Surrey, the picture-window superstore is also an all-day breakfast facility. They give you a numbered flag to place on your table, so that the eating area, when it’s busy, looks like a pitch-and-putt course. Nobody else has walked here, or come just for the breakfast. Fast food is a loss leader. Hugging the A3, this branch of Salisbury’s could outperform the Little Chef; a motorway pit stop attached to a large
r than average impulse-shop. If you aren’t shopping, if you don’t have to do the consumerist assault course, the Cobham Sainsbury’s is an oasis of quiet conversation, unemphatic service, managed light. English hash-jocks have never been able to work the corporate grin of retail fundamentalism. ‘Have a nice day’, in their shipwrecked mouths, sounds like a threat. Employment, with its funny uniforms and patronising name badges, is a form of probation; a way of demonstrating that another small town, another strip of countryside, has been captured.
If you have the model town of Sainsbury’s, with its busy avenues, young mothers, kids, arguing couples, flirting singles, cruisers, slow-moving oldies (walking frames on awkward wheels), you don’t need Cobham. Sainsbury’s is universal (like America). In supermarket heaven, you’re at home everywhere. The name sounds like Salisbury. You might bump into Edward Heath, V.S. Naipaul, Cecil Beaton. Or find John Constable sketching meadows of lettuce. The retail landscape supplies all the ingredients for a day out: butcher, baker, fishmonger, deli, confectioner, video store, florist. The acoustic environment keeps trippers in a trance state. Lulled by the scent of lilies, tulips, carnations, weary excursionists rest on the bars of their trolleys. Dazzled by cosmetic colours, the eye-damage of too-red strawberries, tomatoes, peppers as green as the deep Atlantic, sleepwalkers call up mildly erotic reveries. Their hands keep moving, making guided choices, filling the basket. Supermarkets are the last pleasure gardens, brothels of the senses.
London Orbital Page 31
