I met Renchi at Epsom station on 5 August 1999. He was wearing a T-shirt of many colours, many signs and symbols: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. Not the best disguise for infiltrating what remained of the hospital colony.
Out of the station, past the newsagent (Epsom & Ewell Herald: POLICE DENY SOFT TOUCH WITH TRAVELLERS), We find the route. Our footsteps in other footsteps; the pavements are conveyor belts carrying out-of-towners away from the centre towards the hospitals. Another green way, screened from the business of the town. A prophylactic tunnel to the isolation zone: carports instead of front lawns, monkey-puzzles, cedars, yellow lines to deter opportunist parkers. The roads are deserted. The florist is boarded over with chipboard panels. The signpost – HORTON AND LONG GROVE HOSPITALS – is rusted. Some of the lettering has been chipped away, in an attempt to remove HORTON. Horton is rumoured to be the only active building in the whole development area. Active and therefore secret. Geography has been twisted by a Lewis Carroll logic: if somewhere is featured on a sign, it no longer exists. If it isn’t, it does.
In captured fields, close to the hospitals, the housing is institutional vernacular: grace and favour cottages, warders (for the use of). Clean, well-presented, lace curtained – with weed-less, lifeless gardens, grey-brown lawns like bad wigs. Only the military (or civilians under the rule of the Official Secrets Act) would tolerate the particular shade of tomato-rust favoured on this estate: two-tone, semi-detached boxes, ketchup-brown below and porcine pink above, with a hint of pebbledash.
Long Grove Road, the hospital approach, is thickly screened with mature chestnut and beech trees; a dull grey fence, assembled from concrete planks, is little more than six feet high. Graffiti are dispirited, painted over. Distance stretches, the walls are unforgiving, as you struggle towards the first checkpoint. Hopping up and down, I manage to see into the grounds. We’re at an angle to the semi-circular design, bulk and depth remain hidden. I’m struck by the tower on which is displayed what appears to be a non-flashing, neon Star of David.
Renchi, red bandanna, PEACE/LOVE–ONE WORLD–STOP ALL DE FUSSIN’ T–shirt, bright blue rucksack, leans on the barrier, trying to bond with the security operative in the red brick gatehouse. CCTV cameras swivel, monitors freak. The loonies are at the gates, begging for admittance.
DANGER, THIS IS A MULTI-HAZARD AREA. NO UNAUTHORISED ADMITTANCE. ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION. ALL VISITORS OR NON PASS HOLDERS PLEASE REPORT TO THE GATE-HOUSE.
Black-spike gates, voice-operated security barriers. Otherwise the site looks abandoned. The gatekeeper, brazenly crosseyed, is straight out of Macbeth. Except that he’s stone cold sober and won’t give up any information. We move on before he can make the call. Paranoia has erected its own exclusion zone, an invisible shock-stun fence. Knowing nothing, passing innocently down the road, you’d be immediately alerted to: fried air. Rubber tyres on a bonfire of petrol-soaked rags.
By chance, we have a notion of the real story: a friend of Renchi’s works here, counselling sex offenders. The other asylums – Long Grove, The Manor – have gone, given over to developers. Horton still contains, among its derelict blocks, a hard core of deviants, many of them clergymen. (The Church of England is one of the sponsors of the operation.) Development plans demand that, very soon, the unit will be closed down and relocated to somewhere remote, Scotland is suggested. This hasn’t worked for asylum seekers, who would rather live anywhere than Glasgow; but a rump of tabloid sex monsters, paedophiles, rapists, might, it is thought, be a negative factor when promoting ‘Quality New Homes’ for Epsom.
And so it proved. In the Bad News avalanche that followed 11 September, the possible relocation of Horton Hospital was leaked. Sex criminals, who had never, visibly, been there, were now presented as a threat. Several had ‘escaped’. For the continued safety and wellbeing of the citizens of Epsom, the lowlife would be removed to Knaphill in Surrey. No mention was made, in all this, of the housing development. No mention either of Knaphill’s proximity to Woking and the Martian invaders. Official spokespersons alluded to ‘a cage’, a secure pen. The Surrey suburbanites were having none of it. Some wilderness would have to be found, ex-MOD. An island, a rock. Nobody, as yet, floated the Millennium Dome option, the unwanted tent on Greenwich peninsula.
Discretion and paranoia are bed-fellows. Hence the high level of security, the CCTV cameras. Pass holders only. A gulag that was once suitably remote and pastoral is now prime, off-highway development land. Decant the inner cities. Wipe memory. The familiar mantra. Say nothing. New Labour have become masters at having ‘nobody available’ for interview. They form committees, convene discussion groups, put out brochures of non-stick language. ‘Management strategy based upon full consultation… partnership… service quality… best value’.
The Epsom hospitals, close to healing springs, were a prevision of town planner Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities: quiet suburbs, independent of the metropolis, where ghetto hurt could be soothed. We are told (in such books as Cities for a Small Country by Richard Rogers and Anne Power) that four million extra houses will be required in the next twenty-five years, sixty per cent of them on brownfield sites.
The large red sign – PEDESTRIANS– isn’t a quiet blessing (like a cycle lane); it announces the segregation of an antiquated life form. A reluctantly ceded track across the minefield of development. Goodman Price Demolition Ltd have taken over the hospital where Rodinsky died. The gate-lodge with its sharply pointed gables is out of our reach, behind silver gates. Red brick buildings and fine old trees, like a minor public school, are visible beyond the temporary board-fence.
LAND SELECTED FOR QUALITY HOMES. BRYANT HOMES. TAYWOOD HOMES. ALFRED MCALPINE HOMES (RECOGNISED FOR QUALITY).
Trenches. Heavy mud. Red cones. ‘Moon boots,’ says Renchi, as we approach Long Grove Hospital. We’re dragging lead-soled footwear, claggy with yellow sludge.
‘It’s all going, nice job,’ an affable Welsh labourer in a blue hard-hat tells us. Should be in work for months, before moving on to the next toy town makeover. The new estates (Laing, Barratt, Fairview, Bryant) are like TV meddling on a huge scale: the gang of cheery bodgers who steam in with decking and water features (builder’s bum) to destroy a perfectly decent suburban garden. Development is an extension of the game show. Beat the clock. A golden key to the lucky winner.
Our man leans on his pick. The ditch runs for a mile or so, in a straight line, and he is the only visible worker. Yellow waistcoat (ALDERSBROOK CONST, LTD.) and battle honour tattoos. He tips us off about a hidden path into Long Grove, a link to the Country Park.
Within minutes we are in Deep England, a track meandering through old woodland, yellow-brown fields with Pony Club jumps and the occasional, solitary horse. ‘Great Wood,’ says the map. Great Wood it is. With an Italianate tower in every clearing. Hospital farms, rundown outbuildings.
Exploring these, we meet a young warden from the Country Park: David Seaman ponytail and Beckham (September 2001) beard. He’s sorting out the merchandise for the coming season; mugs with tree prints, booklets that tell you where you are. Car parks are being developed among the burning chimneys and boiler houses of the old hospital.
He’s interested in our quest and gives us a copy of Asylum, Hospital, Haven (A History of Horton Hospital) by Ruth Valentine. We sit at the roadside and skim this booty. Local histories, conceived, written and frequently published close to the area they describe, are labours of love: genuine enthusiasm, human sympathy, transmits itself to the outsider, the tourist passing through. Valentine, while doing a proper job in documenting Horton, finds room for anecdote, eccentric evidence, case history, abbreviated memoir. Nurses and patients are not excluded. The illustrations, formal and unpeopled or group-posed, are windows on lost time. Focus holds for an instant. The images are dignified, a contract between model and photographer. Nurses, starched till they creak, sit on the grass in a semicircle (an unconscious reference to the standard asylum design). Patients, strapped into the science-fiction devic
es of the electro-therapy unit, stare out with resigned acceptance.
Valentine’s narrative is a spirited apologia for the failure of benevolence, good intentions undone by institutional inertia, hierarchic regimens. Horton and the other hospitals of the Epsom gulag began as country estates and were downgraded into prisons for urban inadequates: cedars and oaks, woodland walks, Edwardian lawns that were supposed to heal and mend, were glimpsed in segments through barred windows.
The London County Council acquired the estate in 1896. The name of the vendor, on the original document, was Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Buxton, from a family of Whitechapel brewers and philanthropists, was an ancestor (on his mother’s side) of the cultural historian Patrick Wright. In A Journey Through Ruins (1991), Wright honours an earlier Thomas Fowell Buxton, abolitionist, opponent of capital punishment. ‘Buxton the Liberator’ was the nephew of Samuel Hanbury, who had him appointed a director of the Brick Lane brewery. On 26 November 1816, Buxton made a speech at the Mansion House in which he drew the attention of the wealthy to the plight of the ‘naked and hungry’ of Spitalfields. His namesake, at the end of the century, cashed in land, moved to Australia: so that the wretched of the inner cities could receive a custodial sentence to sample estate life. There were no voluntary patients, no patients from the middle classes. These were members of the urban underclass brought before a magistrate and certified. The population of asylums rose as the century withered. The plan was to build twelve hospitals for twelve thousand inmates: a town with exactly the population of Epsom.
Horton Asylum opened in 1902. Only five of the proposed twelve hospitals were actually built. The architect who always seemed to pick up these gigs (after suspicious mutterings from less successful rivals) was George Thomas Hine. Hine had a standard design: he used it at Claybury. School, prison, barracks: European detail on a Soviet scale. Local, sour mustard, London-stock brick. And lots of it. A gigantic semicircular corridor – like half a cyclotron, a particle-accelerator chamber. A geometry that allowed those early forms of twentieth-century spiritual malaise – melancholia, dementia, mania – to spread like a contagion. Morphic resonance. Patients grew into the disease descriptions that were offered to them; they defined themselves in poses captured by photographers looking for genealogies of defect.
The ghosts of Victorian fiction, working-class women in white, were put away for offering visible proof of their sexuality, conceiving a child out of wedlock. Middle-class women could also be banished for trivial acts of ‘rebellion’. Valentine recalls the case of Anna Wickham, sent by her husband to a private asylum in Epping (shades of John Clare) for having the audacity to attempt the publication of a volume of poetry. Females dominated the asylum population as black males were to do in the post-war years. Horton was a reservation, remote (a long and expensive journey from Central London), well-intentioned. ‘Kindness, fresh air, country views, sweet reason,’ wrote Valentine. These aspirations, it’s true, were available: on the other side of the glass. Beyond the iron bars.
Walks were not walks. The citizens of the spa town – busy market, pubs waiting to welcome race crowds – didn’t approve. There were petitions. Lord Rosebery, owner of the Derby winners of 1894, 1895, 1905, and (in his spare time) Prime Minister, attended a protest meeting, called in 1908, to oppose the building of further asylums. ‘I represent a constituency of the sane,’ Rosebery proclaimed.
The local press – our friends on the Epsom and Ewell Herald – agreed with his lordship: ‘LUNATICS AT LARGE’. Gangs of the insane roamed their streets, frightening the horses. Wealthy Londoners who kept ‘Derby houses’ took their stables to Newmarket – where the racing programme was expanding while Epsom’s was curtailed. A naked madman escaped from one of the walking parties and terrified respectable ladies.
Processions from the hospital, shuttling from estate to town centre, hand-in-hand like something out of Breughel, were embargoed. Inmates were denied walking therapy; they were kept to ‘airing courts’, grim circuits of an enclosed yard. The system was more convenient, it could be fitted to a military time-table. These circuits became the treadmills that drive the Blakean geometry of London; spiral visions that find their deranged resolution in Margaret Thatcher’s orbital motorway.
Fantasies of escape were uncommon. Most of the patients seemed resigned to their rural limbo, the food was better than at home. They worked, if they were able, and were paid in coin. But there were occasional attempts to breach security. A woman called Lydia Johnson had been committed for no good reason, so her sisters said, by a spiteful husband. The sisters smuggled in a dress. Lydia changed out of her asylum uniform and set off down the long avenue. Walkers were suspect. She was caught. Her sisters were banned from making future visits. One sister, Louisa, applied to have Lydia discharged into her care. The application was refused. Dr Lord told the subcommittee that Louisa must herself be insane to make such a request.
A later sibling escape plot was more successful. It wasn’t just the remnants of Jewish immigration who were being tidied away in the Sixties. Other anachronistic elements of the East End were incarcerated in Long Grove: exile as punishment. Ronnie Kray, a paranoid schizophrenic gangster, a fury from the ghetto, was certified insane. Which was about as useful a procedure as sticking a ‘Police Aware’ notice on the burnt-out shell of a stolen vehicle on Rainham Marshes. Ronnie wasn’t insane, he was insanity: a psychotic elemental, a whirlwind of malignancy. A crazy comedian with a cutlass and a court of celebrity sycophants.
Early in his career, Ronnie was banged up in Long Grove. In the psychiatric wing of Winchester Prison, he had received news from his twin of the death of their favourite aunt, Rose. They had to put him in a strait-jacket and bus him to Epsom. All the material London didn’t want – aliens, slum bandits, ranters, poets – was dispersed in a southerly direction. To the colony, the walled estate.
‘All the discretion and forsythia in the world will never alter the outline of the old lunatic asylums built to an identical pattern round London at the turn of the century,’ wrote John Pearson (in the least-contaminated biography of the Kray Twins, The Profession of Violence). ‘Ronnie was driven here from Winchester Prison on 20 February 1958. He was never to forget the terror of those first days.’
Kray made a radiator his best friend and thought the man in the opposite bed was a dog. ‘If I got his name right he’d come and jump in my lap.’ Medical reports disclosed signs of ‘verbigeration and marked thought blocking’. (Verbigeration is the constant and obsessive repetition of meaningless words or phrases.) It took an old school journalist as thorough as Pearson, and a self-recorder as voracious as Ronnie Kray, to rescue medical records from the Long Grove fire. David Rodinsky was unrecorded, without papers or documents – until Rachel Lichtenstein moved away from the cluttered Princelet Street garret, that museum of false trails. No photograph of Rodinsky has ever been published. The Krays, by contrast, had every scrap of memorabilia logged and filed. Fat albums of gangland nostalgia are offered for sale. The distribution of Kray-approved relics (sanctioned by Reg from his cell in Maidstone) is one of Bethnal Green’s most successful industries.
The Long Grove medics dosed Ronnie on Stematol and assigned him to Napier Ward. Sunday visiting, as Pearson pictures it, with the tribes arriving from the East End, was like Derby Day. Wards loud with argument, contraband food, kisses and rucks. Two cars, gas-guzzlers, made the trip from Vallance Road: an electric-blue Lincoln and a black Ford. Squeezed inside were men in square-shouldered suits, black shoes gleaming like their creosote hair.
Ronnie put on his twin’s camelhair coat and strolled out, like a bookie coming back from Brighton. Reg stayed in the ward. When the nurse sounded the alarm bell, it was too late. Ronnie was on his way to London. The motorised Krays succeeded where the pedestrian Johnson sisters, with their long walk to the station, failed. Ronnie had the wrong kind of craziness for Epsom.
The pharmaceutical industry is fond of the urban fringes, nice clean estates, discreet grants, none t
oo scrupulously supervised research. The green belt propagates science fiction: from Wells’s robotic invaders to the chemical controls of Aldous Huxley. When J.G. Ballard, at the start of his career, depicted drowned worlds and Devonian jungles erupting around Shepperton, he was reactivating deep-images derived from Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells. The red Martian weed which proliferates in the Thames Valley (from The War of the Worlds) prefigures anxieties about genetically modified crops – and George Monbiot marching on St George’s Hill.
Long Grove, Horton, The Manor, St Ebba’s, West Park – linked reefs in a green sea – became, with the tacit blessing of the supervisory authorities, a testing ground for experimental procedures: The Island of Dr Moreau. Much was cruel, much fantastic. A captive populace inducted into a science fiction narrative. Within George Hine’s crab-shaped buildings, long wards looking out on the pastoral scene, drugs known as ‘liquid coshes’ were developed. Before the early Fifties, only one chemical form of sedation was available: paraldehyde – which, Ruth Valentine says, ‘was addictive, smelt terrible’ and ‘rotted your teeth’.
Chlorpromazine (Largactil) followed, introducing the range of pharmaceutical mind-benders that feature in all the ghosted memoirs by East End hardmen. At first they were dished out like Smarties at a children’s party, side-effects were never considered. A tame, blank-eyed population made the smooth running of the asylum colony possible.
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