W.P. Frith (1819–1909) was no punter. On trips to Dorset, he was quite prepared to get into the saddle, but his one experience of the hunting field was a disaster. His mount bolted. Redcoats swore at him. He jolted over ditches, hurtled across rough country, boneshaken. He vowed that in future he’d stick to the queen’s highway. But the drama of Epsom Downs gave Frith his greatest triumph.
As a technician, an organiser of large human groups – Paddington Station, Ramsgate Sands – Frith was meticulous. Paintings were campaigns, crafted to whatever size or shape a patron was prepared to sponsor. He moved in society; he made money, knew everybody, wrote in a lively anecdotal style, and was popular with royalty. If Joseph Bell wanted him to produce ‘an important painting, five or six feet long’, the artist would oblige: for a fee of £1,500 (residuals from future engravings reserved). Frith operated in the manner of a film studio, an advertising agency. He was a materialist and a hardworking man of business.
Like his friend Dickens, he gave value for money: his canvases could be prosecuted for multiple occupation. They were picaresque slums. Even the largest compositions were claustrophobic. Aesthetic real estate. When Derby Day was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1858, a protective rail had to be put around the painting to keep the crowds back. Mobs stared at the mob. Frith reports one of the royal princes saying: ‘Oh, mamma, I never saw so many people together before!’
Compositions were events, researched, pre-planned, built up from disparate elements, enacted in the studio. Painterly accidents and epiphanies of light played no part in Frith’s disciplined practice. He went to Epsom for the first time in 1856. ‘My first Derby had no interest for me as a race, but as giving me the opportunity of studying life and character, it is ever to be gratefully remembered.’
The artist strolled the scene with his friend Augustus Egg: he was tempted by a find-the-pea scam run by a troop that included a bogus clergyman, a Quaker and a ‘fellow that thinks he looks like a farmer’. Frith didn’t sketch, he trained himself to make ‘mental notes’. His ability to structure epic compositions was a ‘knack’. Derby Day at Epsom saw London decanted: aristocracy, thieves, the ‘sporting element’ and the mob. Gypsies camped on the heath. Race week was a fair, a holiday, a spectacle: there were sideshows in tents, bareknuckle boxing matches, ‘nigger minstrels’, pickpockets, ‘carriages filled with pretty women’. Frith froze ‘kaleidoscopic’ chaos into a narrative that could be read as instantaneously as an advertising hoarding. By his skill in handling gradations of colour, he led the eye to a single defining episode: the acrobat and his son. In other words, Victorian sentiment. A story.
It isn’t easy to work the trick in a CinemaScope format. Fluttering flags demonstrate the prevailing winds, a busy June sky presses on the Downs. The crowd divides into a dark X; leaving, in the foreground, the ‘incident’, the splash of white that catches our attention: kneeling man, child with back turned, broad-skirted woman. Every major character was modelled from the life: Frith found the acrobats, Joseph Bell provided the women. They were all condemned to hours in the studio – even the jockeys were made to pose, up in the stirrups, on wooden horses. The conceit is architectural, literary: a mass of anecdotage, human types, dressing a small episode of the picturesque that anticipates Picasso’s Blue Period. It was an art for well-to-do English folk at a period when art was still respectable. The Prince Consort surprised Frith ‘by his intimate knowledge of… the conduct of a picture’. Frith took the proffered advice, made alterations and improved his painting ‘in every instance’.
While Frith laboured, his sitters talked. Derby Day is a madness of noise, competing voices. The achievement belongs in the register of mechanical feats, like Clifton Suspension Bridge or the Great Eastern. Sociable as the work pretends to be, its clutter isn’t far from the hyperactivity of patricidal Richard Dadd and the Bedlam hordes of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. (The two paintings hung side by side in the old Tate Gallery at Millbank.) But Frith’s narratives have died. Warped into rhetoric. They are a lecture on social history, a prompt for costume designers. The catalogue of accurate detail condemns them to a bell jar status: like wilting fox-masks and white ferns.
Degas, using photography for his racetrack scenes, exploited the camera’s capacity for roughing up an image, framing the action in an unexpected way. Humouring ‘accident’, he achieved a degree of formality that was far beyond Frith’s range. The photographs Frith commissioned were regarded as footnotes, less useful than the costumes he kept in his studio.
The viewpoint from which he composes his scene is the viewpoint of the photographer, the same sliced segment of the grandstand. But Frith stretches the composition – like a battlefield scene – to include necessary incidents from the theatre of Derby Day. The horizontal strip could be spun, effortlessly, into a cyclorama: primitive cinema.
The source photograph, to contemporary eyes, is more interesting than the epic painting. Documentary reality becomes surreal: men in polished top hats standing on carts and trestles. Other figures, dejected, formally dressed, sit on the ground. Massed tadpole-heads of the crowd in the grandstands. And nothing to be seen. No race. No parade. It’s over. The image defies explanation. The form is democratic: the crowd is a crowd, united. There are no discrete episodes – false lovers, ruined gamblers, rustics in smocks; there is no obligation to charm. Photography doesn’t, as yet, play to an audience. It’s a trade, not an art; it serves. It logs information. And, in so doing, it is making a dark trace of the world. The photographic plate exists in our present, while the contemporary/historical canvases of William Powell Frith belong in a cabinet of curiosities. They tell us about the painter, not the place. The day, the time. The taste of high air.
LOOK RIGHT HORSES TRAVELLING AT SPEED. A flashback to black and white newsreel, Frith’s famous print twitched into life: the suicide of a suffragette, Emily Davidson, throwing herself under the horses’ hooves in scratched and jerky archive footage. A tragic clip by which a political campaign is misremembered.
Striking south, across the Downs towards the motorway, we navigate by a distant church steeple; we walk old paths, climb stiles, exchange greetings with other walkers (an elderly man in a white cap, barechested, creased naval-issue shorts, white shoes, piloting a small craft, a six-wheel buggy in which an infant is shaded by an umbrella-sail).
We’re aiming for Walton-on-the-Hill. And there’s a reason for this: Renchi wants to locate his grandmother’s house. He remembers: the chauffeur, the drive out from London, a Surrey village and a classic Voysey/Jekyll house and garden, chosen for its proximity to a good golf course. There was a gatehouse. Granny kept, as well as the chauffeur, a nanny and a team of gardeners. The garden was what Renchi remembered most vividly: the scar on his chin, now disguised by a silvery beard, came from the Walton-on-the-Hill rockery. Long drives, pinned back against the yielding and over-padded upholstery of the car, left him queasy. A landscape too green to stomach.
By glaucous tunnels and sandy tracks, we emerge into another deserted English village. Through sun-shafted copses, Renchi has been spinning anecdotes from an episodic and unreachable past. Now, in Walton, he moves towards fullblown Proustian seizure. The past is shrivelled and chipped, but easy to map. Following faint Clarks sandal footprints, he walks the once-familiar village street. The major difference is the soundtrack: rolling motorway surf.
A Tudorbethan prefab offers: JAMES CAR HIRE, STATIONS AIRPORTS CITY AND WEST END. Nice to imagine this enterprise being run by the former chauffeur, remembered perhaps in the old lady’s will. Proust was fond of chauffeurs; caps, boots, gloves.
Renchi is on the trot; he’s found the gatehouse, the lane – and he’s marching up the drive towards the Surrey mansion. We’ve had a good run, no police cars, nobody has pulled us in since we escaped from St George’s Hill; but this is pushing it. Renchi, red T-shirt bandanna, ringing the bell of a stockbroker house in the burglary belt: less than half a mile from the M25. With bulging blue kn
apsack and cold-sweat partner.
I’m at his heels, poised for flight, camera hidden behind my back. The intensity with which Renchi has vanished into childhood – the drive from Central London, the moment of stepping from the car, the chauffeur holding the door – is palpable. Then is now. The bell chimes in the depths of the house. On one side of the button: a vaguely classical statuette, breast exposed, amphora cradled under arm. On the other, a large yellow and black notice: NO DOOR TO DOOR SALES PERSONS. WE DO NOT BUY AT THE DOOR.
Nobody at home. Good. Let’s get out of here. The door opens a crack. Renchi has convinced me, we’re in a warp, the dead grandmother is ever-present. On the loop.
Out of the gloomy hall, framed in the slit, catching reflected light from frosted glass panels, is a grinning leopard. A Saki beast. Above its glistening snout, a silver-haired woman. Renchi’s long-buried granny. Who else would wear a Save-the-Leopard T-shirt in a Voysey house?
The old lady is a charmer. Renchi explains the case, his family’s stake in this property, his freight of memories. She shouldn’t do it. Slip the chain. Step outside. But she is perfectly happy to let us wander through the garden, explore the grounds.
The past shatters. The house has been split in two. The garden is a remnant of what it once was. From the woods, we can hear traffic hammering down the motorway. The views to the south, towards Box Hill, Reigate and the North Downs, have been eliminated by tactful M25 soft estates, gentle gradients with incipient forestry.
There is a touch of Sunset Boulevard about the swimming pool: Ganges-green sludge, loose bricks heaped in the shallow end. Abandoned garden furniture. Moulded plaster nudes posed against a high box hedge. Nothing belongs in this pool – except perhaps a crocodile. Or a human floater. A posthumous tale-teller condemned to repeat the legend of a lost life. The pool is finished. It’s about to be filled in.
Before we get back on the road, the old lady invites us inside for a cup of coffee (revised, on closer examination of our dusty appearance, to lime juice). Madness! I want to tell her: ‘You shouldn’t do this.’ Sitting in the kitchen, I feel an overwhelming urge to confess to all the crimes and insults enacted by London on suburbia. The rapes, thefts, murders. Renchi, no longer a city dweller, has no such qualms. He crunches through a plate of biscuits.
They came, the lady and her husband, from Epsom; retreating to the green fringe when demolition contractors started to cut down the trees around the hospital colony. Dances, croquet, tennis parties: the asylums were so much a part of her social life. The town, she felt, had lost its soul.
Our soul, as ever, is the M25; to which at last we have returned. There’s a convenient bridge, coming out of the woods; then, sparkling beneath us like silver river-sand, the eight lanes of the motorway. Planting, at this point (between Walton Heath and Buckland Hills), is dense; a deep green gorge with nothing, so far as motorists are concerned, beyond it.
One man (with his dog, an Alsatian) leans on the parapet, chin resting on cupped hand. Tracksuit trousers, sports shirt, trainers. He pats the dog’s head. This view is all he desires. The motorway has replaced the riverbank he might once have made his destination. Standing where he always stands, cars glint in the shallows, lorries cruise like pike. Lighting poles stretch into the distance: angling rods. Speed-trap cameras hook the unwary. We are those fleeting figures glimpsed by cruising motorists; lesser life forms, bridge-hugging gawpers.
Going outside the M25 is a large undertaking: we’ve already noted the Walton Oaks laboratories, the Hermitage and the ‘Experimental Farm’. Walking won’t be easy. The idea is: stay on the bank, the verge, follow the North Downs path to Merstham. And then take a train for London.
LAING. MCGEE. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. That’s better. We’re back with the script. Radiant tarmac flattering the Pilgrims Way, heading east in the general direction of Canterbury. Property held in some undeclared public/private partnership. Big construction firms. Crop modifiers. Chainlink fences topped with backward-leaning barbed wire strands. This is what we’re used to, this is what we like. Something ugly enough to be worth photographing.
With a machete and a pouch of coca leaves, we could probably hack a passage through the roadside jungle. Highways Agency horticulturalists always plant to keep pedestrians out (for their own safety); thorn thickets, whiplash branches that slash at neck and eyes. We love it, hearing the race of the road, as we advance at one mile an hour. High on diesel fumes and plastic-tasting water.
Given this abandoned farm, the new drive (with ramps for lorries), screen of Scots pine and clipped yew, we’re duty bound to stick our noses in, investigate. A bungalow gate-lodge with tile roof, a barrier and a surveillance camera on a tall pole. The set is now easily recognisable: it’s called ‘The Future’. It’s what happens to liminal land, between motorway and heritage countryside, PFIZER/WALTON OAKS.
Pfizer is good. The name fizzes in the mouth like an effervescent hangover cure. Various conspiracy buffs (Chris Petit, John Sergeant) are convinced that there’s a relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the motorway corridor: convenient for Heathrow and Gatwick. Petit reckons that the more extreme forms of animal (and probably human) testing for pharmaceutical products take place in Turkey. Much less red tape. An unholy congruence of asylum seekers (finding themselves on involuntary round-trips; returned from Budapest), Swiss banks, construction firms with sweetheart contracts, poisons the off-highway biosphere. New commodities are in play. New targets. Global cigarette manufacturers, with dumped politicians as ambassadors, are targeting the Third World. Outdated medicines are repackaged in Tijuana.
*
The gate-keepers of the Pfizer estate are happy to point us in the right direction: swallowed footpaths, a hack through Bushfield Wood, a vermin-tunnel on the very edge of the motorway. Here and there, we come across hints of the Pilgrims Way; civil engineers have stuck with the flow of ancient footpaths. Sometimes we disappear into chest-high corn and have to navigate by occasional glimpses of lighting poles on the M25. The afternoon sky is as blue as the end of the world, cumulus continents broken into puff balls.
For an hour or two, we enjoy the kind of walking: The London Loop, The Green London Way, Country Walks Around London, The Shell Book of British Walks. The Shell Book of British Walks? That sounds a bit odd, hikes sponsored by a Dutch oil company. ‘At a time when life for most of us has become more complex than ever before and more filled with possessions, it is no coincidence that so many people are turning to the simplest of all pastimes: walking.’ Available at all good service stations.
The editor of The Shell Book that guidebooks promote of British Walks lets us know that ‘a few hundred yards from the room where I am writing, there is a delightful footpath winding through woodlands and over a favourite hillside where I can see from the Surrey down-land across to the Kentish hills’. We are on this fortunate man’s heels, passing his garden gate, alerted to ‘huge notices warning that the land off the path is private’.
I’m fond of these books with their selective maps, line drawings that try to look like woodcuts, topographic views. The walking they promote is benign: it begins at a car park, saunters, by way of a quaint church and some ‘typical high downland scenery’, to ‘the highest point in south-east England’. Hikers are discreet, eyes averted from contemporary horrors, tutting from time to time at the excesses of developers or upwardly mobile vulgarians. These are strolls for the visually impaired, guided tours with checklists of flora, fauna, archaeological remains. The walk is an interlude of ‘somewhere between an hour-and-a-half and three hours’. It’s good for you. And it brings you back to the point from which you set out. To the car.
Following a commentary we have to imagine, we climb – by easy increments – on to the North Downs. The landscape drops away into a pattern of small fields, copses, hillocks, a lush bowl unimpeded by visible roads or settlements, with the South Downs as the distant, blue rim. The Weald of Kent, Box Hill. Renchi can piece it together, fit each location to
a chapter of autobiography.
Above Reigate, couples are lounging on sun-bleached grass. There’s no better place to ‘sky’, as the meteorologist Luke Howard called it; to watch clouds mass and break, adopt the shapes he named and categorised. The Pilgrims Way has become a paradise path. Walking is drifting and we’re not quite easy about it; Surrey is too soft. We must be missing something.
The folds of the land are unreadable: to an East Londoner, clogged with blight. No script. No graffiti. No prohibitions. Planes do not circle continuously overhead. The only celestial markers are miles away: sky scratches, contrails, that fix Gatwick Airport.
My sense of unreality is confirmed by coming, out of nowhere, on to a small Grecian temple. Gifted to the hillside in 1909. So that pedestrians from Reigate might offer up a prayer, they are the blessed of the earth. This is a generic temple, circular, colonnaded – without content. No walls, no Vestal virgins. (Hawksmoor’s mausoleum at Castle Howard – without the gravitas, the morbid stone.) The altar, at the centre of this temple, is a device – highly polished – with which travellers can align themselves: distances to notable destinations. The table becomes a pool, reflecting trees and clouds – and Renchi (as he leans in to make his readings). On the ceiling is a golden sun, bright as an egg dropped in a pan.
A uniquely ordinary English evening, warm, calm, finds us on the high ridge, moving east: water tanks, tall masts barnacled with boosters for mobile phones. The route, in its day, was a green road, favouring the lie of the land, hill forts, camps. It’s not much used; the more a path receives official designation, the more it is written up in guidebooks, the more the surrounding country withdraws, protects its ‘territorial security’. As a public park from which the public have been excluded.
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