The Gill project doesn’t help Renchi to decide how he’ll put together his own panels, a record of our journey which has to be both documentary and mythic. He sits in a pew, studying his Ordnance Survey map, plotting the best way out of here. As I click the camera, Marc (the Catholic boy) lifts his left forefinger in a parodic blessing, a mirror image of the Holman Hunt window.
Around Junction 9 the M25 is in spate. Heading north, over the motorway bridge, for our late-afternoon walk to Epsom, we pause to admire the eight lanes of moving traffic. There is no congestion, white vans and light-load heavy goods vehicles (returning to base) are snowflakes dissolving in a fast, grey stream. The central reservation is paved, without impact barriers or any form of planting; a few brave weeds push between the cracks. When the Highways Agency photograph a scene like this (for the brochure, Towards a Balance with Nature), they make sure that motor traffic is an out-of-focus blur; roadside flowers and grassy banks are pin sharp. Roads, the promoters suggest, are not about cars. Roads are landscape improvements, an architecture of ‘managed’ space. My snapshots, freezing the action, tell a different tale; a fast shutter pins each vehicle to the board. Safe distances are observed. Travellers, gunning for Gatwick, have no hold-ups to panic them, no jackknifed articulated lorries. The Leatherhead stretch, on this July evening, is leisured, a mini-autobahn, a military highway of the kind Margaret Thatcher fantasised when she cut the ribbon. The principal difference, so far as I can see, between the Thatcherite Vision of the Eighties and National Socialism in the Germany of the Thirties is that Thatcher couldn’t make the trains run on time. The M25 never was an invasion route down which the master race could roll, just a three-hour fairground ride with dull views.
But here, at Junction 9, the M25 almost succeeds in living up to its statement of intent; Box Hill directly to the south, the genteel Clacket Lane Service Station (the best on the road) up ahead; swathes of unoptioned greenery, a literal green belt, downs and commons and broadleaf woods. At Dorking there is a gap in the ring of hills which protect always-timorous London. We discuss that gap, recall fantasies of future war. George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) is generally acknowledged to have launched the genre: landscape paranoia (with an undertow of viral sex horror, the Home Counties ravished by cruel Huns). The Germans (Russians, Kosovans, Martians) were coming to Surrey. ‘The line of the great chalk-range was to be defended,’ wrote Chesney – who looked, resolutely, back to the future. Let the suburbs spread and before you know it brutish Prussians will be advancing on Epsom, occupying Thames Ditton.
The streets reached down to Croydon and Wimbledon, which my father could remember quite country places; and people used to say that Kingston and Reigate would soon be joined to London. We thought we could go on building and multiplying for ever.
Sir George Tomkyns Chesney was a military man, a lieutenant colonel, founder of the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College at Staines. Suburban complacency brought the risk, so Chesney thought, of a weakening in moral fibre. We were unprepared for the coming hordes: tunnel-rushing aliens. Premature Euro-scepticism was a popular fictional brand. Iain Duncan Smith ghosted by H.G. Wells.
When I look at my country as it is now – its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay – when I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live!
Box Hill was England. The recollection of childhood, picnics, walks. Literature. John Keats, at the Burford Bridge Inn, finishing ‘the last five hundred lines’ of Endymion. George Meredith at Flint Cottage, a solitary walker, visited by Robert Louis Stevenson – and later by Leslie Stephen and his ‘Sunday Tramps’. Meredith pronounced: ‘I am neither German nor French, nor, unless the nation is attacked, English. I am European and Cosmopolitan – for humanity.’
But ‘one of the most beautiful scenes in England’ (as Chesney called it) was also one of the most vulnerable.
The shoulder of this ridge overlooking the gap is called Box Hill, from the shrubbery with which it was covered… The weak point was the gap; the ground at the junction of the railways and the roads immediately at the entrance of the gap formed a little valley, dotted, as I said, with buildings and gardens.
Geological trauma: the break in the ‘great chalk-range which extends from beyond Aldershot in the east to the Medway’. We found in the course of our orbital circuit that the fear of invasion was still an active concern; horticulturalists were employed to screen numerous MOD properties. The M25 was London’s perimeter fence. The outer suburbs were infested with bunkers, deep-shelters, airfields, tunnels, tank traps, concrete pillboxes, radar beacons, telecommunications dishes. The architecture of paranoia mushroomed around London. Private researchers, hearing about my walk, deluged me with local evidence: maps, photos, sketches, copies of letters. The main defensive rings – established in the 1890s – started about fifteen miles out from Charing Cross. I visited the once secret Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey and one of the government’s nuclear bunkers (disguised as a farmhouse) at Kelvedon Hatch, Essex. How many more ‘conversions’ were there? How much more unmapped territory?
Junction 9 and its complimentary system of baffle-boards, pedestrian overpasses, had its own architectural style: pastoral/schizo. Our old green path was back (not quite wide enough for two men to pass without touching), but it ran between high fences. If Renchi stood on Marc’s shoulders, he still wouldn’t see over the top. On one side, the road (audible behind clean timber boards); on the other, impenetrable chain-link. Scrubby, sandy soil. No detours, no way out. Graffito with literary pretensions: YOUR SHAPE, MY EYES, THE FAN TASTICAL, PHASES – MY HEART IS A TOOL, A DEVICE, A TOOL/A SAVIOUR.
Walking this narrow path is like patrolling forbidden ground: we don’t know what we’re guarding. We’ve lost all sense of direction. Sound is doctored. We trudge on towards a distant circle of light, the end of the green tunnel. Noise is managed. Noise is subject to ‘reduction technology’. Tyres kiss sympathetic surfaces. Curtains of aspen swallow engine shrieks. Acoustic ‘footsteps’ are plotted by Highways Agency snoops; spectral footfalls in country lanes; posthumous whispers down secret paths that shadow the motorway.
At Ashtead we cross the railway line. Two young lads (one Arsenal, one Spurs) are the only human figures in the landscape. They’re tugging a bright red trolley which contains a yellow plastic sack. Newspapers, GUARDIAN. Are all the inhabitants of Ashtead liberal-leftists? And why do they get their papers at night? The news a day ahead of itself.
Renchi has information, somewhere at the bottom of his rucksack, on the well at Epsom. We can’t go home until we’ve found it. The railway bridge, unlike the user-friendly span over the M25, is from another era; it bristles with spikes – if you’re determined to throw yourself off, you are going to be punctured on the way.
Ashtead Common (‘Camp: Remains Of’) has an excess of paths, decisions to be made. We tack, north/south, east/west, until our enthusiasm flags. It’s been a long day. Marc and I would be happy to hold the well over for the start of the next walk. But Renchi is hot on wells (friend of Glastonbury). Magnesium sulphate constipation remedies (taken in pints from a stone beaker) I can leave alone. I did ten years in Cheltenham. I have something of an allergy to spa towns (twinned, as in Cheltenham’s case, with post-colonial residues and Secret State listening posts, high frequency huts).
Even here, deep in the woods, Renchi locates someone to interrogate, a ranger in a green jeep. We’re realigned. We head off towards the snail-shell spiral of ‘The Wells’, sited on what’s left of Epsom Common. On the map, this is a maze: take the wrong road and you’ll circle aimlessly for hours. The area has ambitions to be suburban-sprawl. ‘The Crescent’, boasts a streetsign. ‘The Greenway’.
The well on the Common was Epsom’s original, the beginning of England’s fashion for spas. Salts and sediments were plen
tiful (hence the brand name, the universal white tin, Epsom Salts) – but the water supply was mean. At the height of Epsom’s popularity (end of the sixteenth century, beginning of the seventeenth), rumours of sharp practice abounded: the well drunk dry by mid-morning was surreptitiously topped up with buckets from elsewhere.
Everybody sampled the waters, once; Pepys, Defoe, John Aubrey. Thomas Shadwell had a hit with his theatrical romp, Epsom Wells. The combination of bodily purging with amorous adventure, gaming houses, gluttony, was perfectly suited to the English love of ‘Carry On’ humour. Farts, gropes, excursions.
Many of the earliest visitors walked from London. Successful men set themselves up with country estates. John Aubrey, who wrote the first known history of Surrey in the 1670s (published 1718), carried out experiments to analyse Epsom Water. His property, Woodcote Park, was visited by Pepys in 1667. Voluntary rustification was all very well, Pepys thought, but a day trip was as much country living as he could tolerate. His diary account of an excursion to Epsom is still a model for M25 Man: arrive early, try the waters, gossip about Lord Buckhurst and Nell Gwynn, pub lunch, siesta, buy souvenir bottles, back to the pub for dinner, home. Better to invest in a coach than a burdensome house, miles from the City. Provincial novelty is all very well, but the journey is the best of it.
In 1662 a Dutch artist, William Schellinks, walked from Kingston to Epsom Common with the son of a shipping magnate he was shepherding around England. The drawing of the Old Wells that Schellinks made on 5 June reveals the true nature of the scam: a turf-roofed hut of the kind you usually encounter at the edge of Indian territory in an Anthony Mann western, a blasted heath. Coin paid, visitors were encouraged to swallow ten or fifteen pints of murky water; after which, segregated by sex, they trotted up and down until their bowels loosened. The canny employed youths to reserve a bush, warn off intruders. The tumbleweed of the Common shook with bad wind, episodes of projectile vomiting.
None of this dubious history deters Renchi. It’s obvious from the Ordnance Survey map of 1866 that the well, on Oldwells Farm, is at the heart of a cosmic maze, a slice of brain coral. Well Way, if we hit it, will carry us directly to the sacred spot. And so, plodding through what seems like a translation of the less exciting areas of Hampstead Garden Suburb, it proves.
The ‘new’ Old Well, designed by pupils from Epsom High School, dedicated in June 1989, has a touch of the fishing leprechaun about it. Brick steps leading to a circular well – which is topped with a glass light-globe supported by four metal pillars. A grille prevents you getting at the doubtful water. Lepers and tremblers, the spleen-sick, need no longer apply. The Old Well is lost heritage. Aubrey boiled gallons of the stuff to provide himself with a tobacco-box of grey sediment that nobody wanted. We twist through painful contortions, floor to wall, trying to contrive a reasonable visual record of this place. Then we leg it for the station.
Salt to Source
Epsom to Westerham.
Through the Valley of Vision,
to Dartford & the River
1
Just beyond the Common, to the north, the map revealed a phalanx of hospitals aimed at London. The narrator of The War of the Worlds speaks of making ‘a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead’ (where his wife had taken shelter from the Martian invasion). The plan was: Newhaven and out, reverse asylum seekers. But Wells’s narrative carries the traumatised Surrey suburbanite back along the route Renchi and I adopted, on a late walk (from the Siebel Building and Brooklands) in the direction of Weybridge and Shepperton. At the ferry (still operative), close to where the Wey flows into the Thames, the Martians crossed into Middlesex, devastating the riverbank with their heat-ray tripods (future estate agents’ cameras).
The Epsom hospital colony, serrated semi-circular outlines masked by complacent greenery, looks like a set of schematic plans for interplanetary robots. Transformer toys. Something very black and sharp lies in wait along Horton Lane – with brain-burning lasers and hot wires, knives, masks, drugs, instruments of restraint. To deal with London’s damaged citizens. The hospitals become a second ghetto, wards from White-chapel, excited aliens punished for their difference. Tidied away by misplaced benevolence.
The dissolve from spa town to prison colony was realised by the construction of the hospitals at the beginning of the twentieth century. And now, in the late summer of 1999, conversion is in full swing; the Epsom legend is being rapidly revised. Where once patients were encouraged, as therapy, to summon up and confront painful images from their past, memory is wilfully erased. Or doctored. New names, new roads and roundabouts. Smarter uniforms for the warders (aka security).
Filmmaker John Sergeant, researching a project on the M25, interviewed Dr Sidney Crown, a consultant psychotherapist – who explained how the apparent endlessness of the orbital motorway induced rage and states of trance. The road is a midden of competing archetypes. Driving is a meditational device, summoning future memories: driving is prophecy.
Dr Crown, provoked, remembered Epsom. As a very young doctor, he walked where we were walking, from the station (by paths and green ways, metal signposts) to Long Grove Road. His suitcase a dead weight. Long Grove, Horton and The Manor were dumps, Victorian asylums near the bottom of an overburdened system. The medical staff weren’t ambitious or enlightened. They lived like colonial administrators; priding themselves, as Crown recalled, on the quality of their cellar, the excellence of the kitchen. The natives might be restless, there was little hope of a better posting, but the evening meal was an event: crisp linen, sparkling glass, heavy silverware, four or five courses, decent wines, brandy and cigars. The asylums were country houses in an era of revolution. Old-timers in the town deplore the wanton destruction of trees, removed to make way for the new estate roads. Horton and Long Grove, at their peak, between the wars, were a focus for Epsom society: tea dances, tennis parties.
Themes that flickered like St Elmo’s fire along the northern stretch of the M25, between Waltham Abbey and Abbots Langley, found resolution here. Epsom was the pivot in our story. I felt that this was the halfway point in the walk; after Epsom, we would be heading for home. I had worked on a book with a young Jewish woman, Rachel Lichtenstein; an artist and archivist. Rachel solved one of the great mysteries of Whitechapel: the disappearance of David Rodinsky. Rodinsky lived above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street. One day, in the Sixties, he vanished. The room was sealed like a shrine. When it was broken into, years later, the scattered debris of a life – books, clothes, diaries, food, records, maps – were exposed to investigation, public gaze, incontinent theorising. The man was absorbed by the set which had contained him. Films and vulgar speculation followed. Rachel was the first person to treat Rodinsky as a human being, a man with a biography and a finite lifespan.
Rachel found Rodinsky’s death certificate:
Name and Surname: David Rodinsky, no.391, DX 421235.
When and Where: 4th of March 1969. The Grove, Horton Lane, Epsom.
Sex: male. Age: 44 yrs. Occupation: none.
Address: 19 Princelet Street, El.
Cause of death: broncho-pneumonia, II epilepsy with paranoid features.
She drove to Epsom. ‘Epilepsy’ was the convenient clinical formulation arrived at to explain (or justify) nineteenth-century fugue walkers, long-distance amnesiacs. It meant: restlessness, mysterious expeditions such as those Rodinsky plotted on his London A–Z.
Rachel, a good detective, hot on the trail, fluctuated between rage and fugue. Anger and inspiration. Arriving in Epsom, she met with indifference, hints at conspiracy, perimeter fences and guard dogs. The Grove was off-limits. Long Grove Road, in all its sinister beauty, concrete-slab walls, curtains of evergreens, rebuffed her.
In a pub, keeping to the generic rules of crime fiction, she fell into conversation with a ‘large balding man, dressed in grey overalls’. They were the only customers in the place. He was a driver; for years he had delivered medical equipment to the hospitals in Horton Lane. ‘H
e moved closer and told me in whispers that the Long Grove had mysteriously burned down, along with its records, five years previously… He lowered his eyebrows and told of strange goings-on, unexplained fires, weird disappearances.’ When Rachel produced her notebook, the man backed off, retreated to the fruit machine. ‘More than my job’s worth,’ he muttered.
Our early-morning ramble down Horton Lane confirms the atmosphere of elective paranoia that infects much of orbital fringe London. Something is happening but nobody will take responsibility for it: any formal announcement will let the cat out of the bag. Boredom has been synthesised into threat. PRIVATE PROPERTY/TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED/TEL. SURREY HEALTH AUTHORITIES ON 0126 445 876 FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.
Being Rachel, she pushes it; face against fence – until the dog, the slavering German shepherd, leaps at her. Being Rachel, she makes the call to the Surrey Health Authorities. ‘A curt secretary answered: all records had been destroyed in the fire, she could not help.’
Without Lichtenstein’s possessed pursuit, the story of Rodinsky’s death would blacken in a convenient bonfire. The medical records of his sister and many of the other displaced and disturbed patients from East London, kept at Claybury (now Repton Park), were burnt in a builders’ skip. Heritaged history is the new TV pornography, the ratings winner. Henry VIII’s wives, Elizabeth II’s suitors. The Normans, the Romans, the Vikings. Ghetto history is unrequired: we want to know about the planting of the estate, the notable figures who lived in the great house. Developers peddle an anodyne future of managed ecology, fitness regimes, security. The Long Grove ward where Rodinsky died was described to Rachel as a babble of arguing Hasids, displaced cabbalists, a city hive. Even now, when the walls are coming down, the noise won’t go away.
London Orbital Page 33
