This Other London

by John Rogers

  I pass above the traffic on a footbridge and enter the gates of Gunnersbury Park. One possible derivation of the name ‘Gunnersbury’ is from Gunnhild or Gunyld’s Manor, the niece of King Cnut. The Danes held lands in the area up to the time of the Battle of Brentford in 1016, when they were defeated by Edmund Ironside – how could he ever lose a battle with a name like that? Well, he did later on, and ended up having to divide his kingdom with the Danish.

  From that point on the manor changed hands through various minor royals, merchants and bankers till it was finally handed back to the people in 1926, fittingly enough the year of the General Strike when the British establishment genuinely teetered on the brink of collapse. In the end it was the building of the Great West Road along the edge of the park that forced the aristocrats and bankers out of their city retreats, rather than a popular uprising.

  Neville Chamberlain, then Minister for Health, presided over the grand public opening of the house and its grounds just a week after the strike had ended and Parliamentarians had returned to harrumphing at each other across the Westminster benches as if nothing had happened. There’s twenty-eight seconds of silent Pathé newsreel that capture the dignitaries lined up on the veranda above a huge crowd – ‘Another Lung for London’ the title declares.

  When he was Prime Minister, Chamberlain passed through Gunnersbury again, on a more historically resonant occasion. In 1938 he flew from Heston Aerodrome, just a couple of miles away, to appease Hitler in Munich. Chamberlain pictured on the runway at Heston waving the treaty he’d signed with the Führer to a triumphant crowd is one of the enduring images of the 20th century, and it took place in a field that I’ll traverse later. As he made his way back into central London along the A4 did Chamberlain remember that May afternoon twelve years previously when he’d cut the ribbon at the house?

  The exterior of the house now shows signs of neglect and decay. The white paint on the walls and wooden window frames is chipped and peeling. Buddleia sprouts from cracks in the foundations and crevices around the guttering and spills out of the chimney pots. Weeds flourish in a Grecian urn.

  Gunnersbury Park House

  Through grimy windows I can see sparse rooms furnished with trestle tables and moulded-plastic school chairs. What were the guest rooms of the Rothschild dynasty now host education workshops and talks by local community arts groups. On the veranda that boasted one of the finest views across the south of London out to the Surrey hills the only other person is a forlorn-looking bloke sucking on a can of lager where once royalty took tea. The intensity of the birdsong adds to the feeling of abandonment. I’m heartened by this first impression of Gunnersbury; I wasn’t in the mood to pay my respects to the gentility of former times.

  The house now hosts the Ealing and Hounslow municipal museum. I drift about half-looking at the exhibits but mostly enjoying the current incarnation of this grand country residence as a council utility with its scuffed skirting boards and fire exit signs. In a room with gold-leaf trim around the ceiling and lit by a crystal chandelier there is an exhibition of children’s art mounted on free-standing boards that obscure the finery of the room. This could be the place where the antiquarian Horace Walpole was summoned to entertain Princess Amelia and commissioned to write verses for the Prince of Wales. There is little reverence for its former glories.

  It’s a brief glimpse of what Britain might have looked like if the more radical elements of the General Strike had been successful. We could be going to Buckingham Palace to make a housing benefit claim, or you might be residing in a council flat in the converted Windsor Castle.

  The revolution has yet to come, of course; we’re a nation still enthralled by monarchy, addicted to Downton Abbey and ruled by a government of privately educated millionaires. But there was something about this house that made me feel optimistic. Maybe it was the photocopied information sheets on sale in the gift shop for 20 pence each.

  According to conspiracy theorists, this would have been the nerve centre of the shadowy Illuminati whom they believe were established by the Rothschild banking family to control the world. Being unimaginably rich and Jewish, the Rothschilds have been a magnet for conspiracy nuts. My favourite bonkers Rothschild conspiracy theory is that, not content with owning the Bank of England, between them Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his son Lionel fathered most of Queen Victoria’s children. I’d have thought they’d have had their hands full containing the weeds in the huge garden.

  Lionel might not have cuckolded Prince Albert, but Victoria’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is believed to have asked him for a loan in the library of this house to buy shares in the Suez Canal. Disraeli had been the first Jewish MP, holding out for eleven years to take his seat in the House of Commons until the law had been changed to allow him to swear a modified non-Christian oath.

  The history hits you from all sides, but ultimately it is people who create the narratives. It’s the mundane day-to-day lives of the small army of domestic workers who churned the butter in the kitchens, lovingly tended the grounds and groomed the horses in the ruined stables propped up by scaffolding in a shady corner where I watched a robin redbreast sing from the aluminium security fencing.

  The 1881 Census records thirty-three servants residing at Gunnersbury, including George Bundy the head coachman, his wife and three children; William Cole the coachman from my home town of High Wycombe; Fanny South the domestic servant; Elizabeth Kilby the kitchen maid; and Emily D’Aranda, one of three nurses. I wonder what memories they had of Gunnersbury Park.

  The green space is huge, and littered with crumbling boathouses and stone follies. The remains of a Gothic building stand just over shoulder-high, ivy-draped with thick branches rising from the soil like the muscles of the Green Man himself, Pan reaching out to reclaim the structure for the earth and restore the natural order. Kids run around with ice cream-smeared faces. I hear the clatter of studs on a concrete path by the cricket pitch as a batsman makes his way from the squat pavilion out to the crease. You could easily spend the day here in what Maxwell calls ‘London’s Wonderland’, but I need to push on to reach Hounslow Heath by sunset.

  I emerge from Gunnersbury Park under the M4 flyover on the A4 Great West Road. Facing me are the Brompton Folding Bicycle Factory and the Sega Europe HQ. A huge image of Sonic the Hedgehog flies overhead like an avatar of the Sky God.

  The Great West Road rises in central London and scoots along Fleet Street, following the path of the Roman road that headed west from Newgate bound for the health resort at Aquae Sulis (Bath). It’s been suggested – in my imagination by a man with a beard wearing sandals – that this section of the road follows an ancient ley line and the Romans merely built along a pre-existing trackway. There could be something in this theory as the route takes you past the Neolithic sites of West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill, places that are over 5,000 years old. It’s an interesting revision of the idea of the Romans as great innovators into a new role as conservationists.

  The ancient trackways have been described as the ‘green roads of England’, but there’s nothing green about this particular passage of the A4 built in the 1920s. The new Great West Road horrified Gordon S. Maxwell, ‘This arterial horror sears the face of rural Middlesex,’ he declaimed. I have a vision of him in tweeds standing by the roadside angrily waving his walking stick at the vehicles trundling past in a futile protest at the onward march of the motor age.

  I’d read a letter in the Hounslow, Heston and Whitton Chronicle from a man who’d worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company on the Great West Road, manufacturing ‘highly secret components for the war effort’. Steel rings produced here ended up inside the Enigma code-breaking machines at Bletchley Park, ultimately hastening the end of the Second World War.

  This part of the road was known as the Golden Mile due to the concentration of big-name manufacturers. There were Smith’s crisps, Gillette razor blades, Beecham’s pharmaceuticals, Firestone tyres, Maclean’s toothpaste, Currys electrical go
ods and Coty cosmetics, illuminated by a ‘kinetic sculpture’ of a Lucozade bottle pouring neon orange liquid into a glass. It was like a Sunset Strip for factories.

  This was the centre of a new 20th-century consumerism. British companies seizing the era of mass production and advertising, and American corporations branching into the European market spearheaded their campaigns from this stretch of tarmac through Brentford.

  Art deco was the dominant architectural style that captured the mood of the moment, led by the practice of Wallis, Gilbert and Partners. Their crowning glory was the Hoover Building on the Western Avenue, now a branch of Tesco. They did for art deco in London what Banksy has done for graffiti. Commissioned to build factories they produced artworks that outlived the industries they were erected to house.

  I now approached another of their signature constructions, Wallis House, originally built for Simmonds Aerocessories, which sits at the centre of what Barratt Homes are calling the Great West Quarter or GWQ. The new-build elements of the development look as though they’ve been more inspired by post-war East German social housing than the art deco masterpiece that looms over the grey blocks named after the factories of the Golden Mile. Like much of East Germany, the place is deserted.

  From the moment I gazed through the window of the Sales and Marketing Suite at the scale model of the ‘premier development scheme in Brentford’, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be welcome inside. I go in anyway and half-consider posing as a potential buyer, but my current look as an out-of-work Status Quo roadie gives the game away before I can even start my spiel.

  ‘I’m writing a book …’ I say, thinking this must convey some sort of respectability, but don’t get much further.

  There is light jazz playing softly and a clean-cut corporate vibe is sucking up the oxygen. The immaculately dressed young man behind the desk repeats the word ‘book’ like someone mispronouncing the name of the aforementioned King Cnut. He’s on to me straight away and probably could have composed my previous paragraph for me in advance. I’ve got ‘long-term renter and ex-squatter’ written through me like a stick of rock and he probably works on commission.

  We silently acknowledge the gulf between our worlds and attempt to make small talk. He tells me all the flats are sold, but not much else. I wish him well and skulk off back towards the Great West Road with the Barratt Homes flags fluttering in the pollution like the standards of a conquering army. I spot the first signs of civilian life, a child circling the empty car park on a scooter; it reminds me of images of Midwestern trailer parks, isolated and forgotten.

  The large block next to the GWQ still awaits its Cinderella moment. The ivy has started to wind its way around the concrete and steel frame, the lower loading bay has flooded, possibly from the brook that gives Brook Lane running down one side its name. The New England Bar and Restaurant on the corner is boarded-up and fly-tipped. It reeks of the foul stench of decomposition.

  A scene from an early Sid James Ealing Comedy, The Rainbow Jacket, was shot in this street. For the filming, a prop-built post-box was placed on the street corner. Some residents mistook this for the Royal Mail acknowledging the long walk to the main post office and dropped off their letters. But at the end of the day the celluloid letterbox was loaded into a van and driven away, with the mail dispatched at the post office.

  I’ve been jungle trekking in Thailand and have explored the vast Niah Caves in Sarawak, but this walk along the A4 felt like the hardest slog yet. After sucking in car fumes for a couple of miles I crossed the River Brent and was sorely tempted to jump in. With my head starting to spin and the exhaust gases shimmering on the asphalt horizon, the scene started to resemble the classic Western movie moment when the cowboy is lost in the desert, vultures circling overhead, except in my case it’s jumbo jets coming in to land at Heathrow.

  Standing in the shadow of the boarded-up Gillette Building, which is preparing for a new life as a swanky hotel, I decide I can take no more of this road walking. I’ve tried to conjure up images of the Neolithic trackway, of Romans heading off on holiday, of stagecoaches and open fields, but all I see is a blur of high-performance automobiles. It’s incredible that anything manages to live here, but where soil has blown into gaps in the concrete and tarmac a diverse ecology of roadside plants flourishes. The organisms we brand as weeds soak up the toxins of the man-made world, even managing to sprout the odd flower to lure in pollinating insects. People somehow inhabit proud inter-war villas lining the kerbside of the type that George Orwell described as ‘rows and rows of prison cells’, their net curtains stained carbon-monoxide grey.

  This road has chalked up quite a death rate since it was opened, somewhere in excess of the Falklands War and the Afghanistan campaign combined – all in the pursuit of pushing London further westwards. Even in the 1940s the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Mr H. Alker Tripp, described road death rates in London as having reached ‘battle level’ – and he said that during the Second World War.

  Gordon S. Maxwell proposed his own radical solution – ‘Hang a motorist for murder!’ He justified this position by pointing out that within ten years of the opening of the new Great West Road, drivers had killed more people than the highwaymen had managed in over 200 years. At this stage I’m tempted to follow his line of reasoning. ‘A gibbet, duly loaded, by the side of the Great West Road to-day would be more effective, I think, in stopping these murderers than some quite inadequate fine.’ With the speeds of modern drivers they would barely register the dangling corpse of a White Van Man, or if they did it would cause another accident as they attempted to grab a picture of it on their iPhone.

  Gillette Corner marks the end of the Golden Mile and I feel like I’ve paid due homage to the fading art deco neon strip – the lights on the four faces of the Gillette clock tower would struggle to raise even a blink in their current state. The main function of Sir Banister Fletcher’s redbrick temple at present is to offer

  a meaningful challenge to intrepid urban explorers whilst a ‘development solution’ is sought.

  I cross Syon Lane, a name so laden with various ancient meanings I should have known opportunity was approaching. In Sanskrit syon means ‘followed by good luck’, and the turning for Wood Lane that followed presented itself to me at the ideal time. Despite winding off away from Hounslow Heath it would take me towards the village of Wyke Green snugly submerged in suburbia.

  Yards away from the A4 and the predominant sound is of birdsong, hedgerows bursting with anthems as if there were competing avian hordes of football fans in full voice. ‘Sing us your best song,’ the starlings taunt the thrushes, whilst the blackbirds know they’ve got it all sown up and launch into full-throttle renditions of the early-evening roosting chorus.

  A group of teenage lads play in the nets of Wycombe House Cricket Club. I played on this ground once when I was their age, when coming out here from the Buckinghamshire village where I grew up felt like a voyage into the city. What was urban to me then now possesses all the charms of a rural retreat away from the ‘blood and ugliness’ of the Great West Road.

  The sports ground sits on the site of the old manor house, which became part of a chain of private lunatic asylums spread across West London in the 19th century. Wyke House was at one point run by Reginald Hill, who pioneered the practice of non-restraint treatment of mental illness, the enlightened idea that the psychiatrically impaired didn’t need to be chained to a wall. At his asylums the patients dined together and lived a relatively civilized existence in the fields of Hanwell, Brentford and Isleworth.

  This was a time when ‘trading in lunacy’ was big business, a convenient way to dispense of a troublesome wife. You could buy a diagnosis of insanity for less than a divorce. The doctors were condemned as quacks and ‘nostrum mongers’. The Irish novelist Rosina Bulwer Lytton was confined to Wyke House by her husband, the politician and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is now best known through phrases he used that have become well-worn clichés. ‘The great un
washed’, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and the classic opening line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ all came from his feathered quill.

  You can judge which was the greater crime, but his serial infidelity that led to their separation, then denying his wife access to their children and finally having her committed to an asylum because she heckled him at a political meeting don’t look too good. Fortunately, a public outcry in support of Rosina, which even attracted the attention of Karl Marx, meant she was released from Wyke Green after a month.

  It is Edward Bulwer-Lytton who appears to have been the one with the troubled mind, seeking cures for various maladies, taking on leeches and potions and hydropathic treatments. His influential novel Zanoni drew on the Rosicrucian quest for the Elixir of Life and centred round a theme of divine madness.

  A later science fiction work, Vril or The Coming Race, published in 1871, describes a subterranean master-race that has access to a powerful source of universal energy known as vril. Occultists and conspiracists took Bulwer-Lytton’s writings as fact and various secret societies claimed him as their own. There is a persistent belief that a Vril Society existed in pre-war Berlin, whose members included SS head Heinrich Himmler, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Goering, and Party Chancellery head Martin Bormann. It’s alleged that the Vril Society urged the Nazis to embark on a global quest for ancient artefacts such as the Ark of the Covenant, which it believed could contain the key to the source of vril, and that the Society helped to design the Luftwaffe’s failed ‘flying saucer’ project under the guidance of extraterrestrials.