The German Hospital, I hoped, would be Hackney’s answer to yage, the hallucinatory weed Burroughs chased through the Amazonian rainforests.
‘Yage is a unique narcotic,’ he told me, when I interviewed him in Lawrence, Kansas. ‘There is always a shift of viewpoint, an extension of consciousness beyond ordinary experience. It is used during initiations as an anaesthetic before painful ordeals. Medicine Men use it to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen objects. Or to name the perpetrator of a crime.’
‘What are you working on now?’ I asked, as he followed the curve of the winter sun, waiting for his young associate to pour the day’s first drink.
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘but I’m watching the property prices.’
The German Hospital
Records begin with the south‐facing gardens of a private house on an estate belonging to Robert Graham. The house becomes an Infant Orphan Asylum. Orphans are plentiful in Hackney. But so are Germans considerate of their fellow countrymen, the ones who sweat among the sugar‐boiling vats of Whitechapel. The asylum evolves into a hospital for the German community in London: before they are rounded up, in time of war, exiled to the Isle of Man. Florence Nightingale, so the books tell us, trained here. As a prelude to the butchery of the Crimean campaign, when surgeons’ tents were a shambles of unconnected limbs and nursing an adjunct to prostitution. Camp‐followers feed and succour brutalized men, stripping corpses.
CHRISTO IN AERGROTIS: a plaque above a stuccoed Tuscan doorway. Christ in Suffering. Human pain and its relief, death.
Hospitals are a recent intervention in the urban landscape; those who could afford it, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were treated at home. The lower orders took their chances in the street, with barbers and mountebanks: or were dragged indoors, to spit red on a dirty floor. Benevolence had a brief Victorian vogue, when the punishment of sickness was given over to military discipline. To the strict Lutheran deaconesses of the German Hospital. Their church in Ritson Road, a Gothic Revival spectacle, gargoyles hanging from the steeple like Barbary apes, is now The Faith Tabernacle Church of God: a black messiah. The last pastor, Schönberger, an ardent Nazi, returned home in 1939, leaving behind him a divided flock.
I meant to work up a few notes for my talk to the Boas Society on an ill‐advised expedition out of town, a literary festival in Brittany. But you know how it is, travel. A way of falling under suspicion, of carrying the wrong shape and size of luggage, sharing exhausted air in a glorified cigar tube that is burning up the earth’s resources. Removing your belt, exposing your socks. Treadmilling an enervated and overpriced shopping mall. Wired on coffee. The best of St‐Malo in summer, in pelting rain, winds that blew away the book tent, was the discovery of a Conrad celebration in a small cinema, tucked against the old walls. St‐Malo is a sea town, small yachts tacking recklessly through cross‐channel hovercraft, large yachts ready to confront the ocean. Public statuary in tribute to solo voyagers and pirate admirals.
The Conrad lecture stretched my French beyond its capacity, but the rhythms were soothing: like the sea, like waves taking your breath, knocking you down, letting you up again. The bonus was the film Victory, the 1995 Mark Peploe version. Not much in itself, but a prompt to search out a copy of the book. Conrad had driven to Canterbury, with Pinker, to view the silent‐screen production by Maurice Tourneur. He winced, ground his teeth, but remained enthusiastic, in his own fashion, about the deal with Lasky‐Famous Players, which netted him 20,000 dollars. Nostromo became The Silver Treasure and is now lost. Along with the 1927 attempt at Romance. Sunk without a trace. That, Conrad thought, was the great advantage of this new medium. It self‐destructed, nothing went up in flames like nitrate stock.
In Victory, the balding Swede, Heyst, hides from the shame of human contact on his circular island. As Conrad brooded and fumed in Stanford‐le‐Hope and a succession of rented and impossible Kentish farmhouses. The Peploe film, its colour, white suits, blue seas, lulled me: carried me away from misgivings about Hackney and the Boas Society. I wondered if Conrad’s attitude towards Germans was conditioned by the time he spent, at such a low ebb, in Dalston. In the German Hospital. Victory was published in 1915. He was free to vent his prejudices on the person of the bearded hotel‐keeper Schomberg (the name chiming, prophetically, with that of the Nazi pastor of the Lutheran church). It was a patriotic duty to expose the flaws in the Teutonic character; Schomberg is not merely a domestic tyrant, he is a self‐appointed lieutenant‐of‐the‐reserve.
Conrad died in 1924. And was buried in Canterbury. The voice, by the end, was not the whole man. The difficulty of bringing out complex sentences was given over to dictation; paragraphs rattled off to a silent typist. Visitors commented on a tired author impersonation by a fading man. A performance piece against the finality of text: where nothing can be altered or excused.
I discovered that Conrad had carried his wife, Jessie, out of England for the first time, for her honeymoon. They took passage to St‐Malo. Marlow. The sonar echo is the ghost: a place becomes a man. Not the heretic playwright, Christopher Marlowe, stabbed through the eye in Deptford. Further downriver, Gravesend: Heart of Darkness. Marlow, the crusty narrator, is thought to be Conrad’s alter ego: a familiar spirit, a whispering daemon.
And Jessie’s surrogate, Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent, after she has butchered her double‐dealing pornographer husband, where is she fleeing? By night train. By boat to St‐Malo. A voyage she will not complete, going over the side. Marriage annulled. The short story that emerged from the original Brittany honeymoon is one of Conrad’s most savage efforts: ‘The Idiots’. A tale of degeneracy and sexual coercion: inspired, as Jessie recalled, by the sight of retarded siblings on the road from Lannion to Ile Grande.
I had expected to be going into the main building of the Graham Road hospital, which had been laid out on the pavilion principle by Thomas Leverton Donaldson and Edward Augustus Grüning. ‘Diaper’ pattern bricks: diamond shapes threaded into the regular courses. A blend of smooth curves and sharp angles, stepped gables and rounded gables. A place that wore its authority lightly, its manufactured identity as a refuge for respectable German gentle‐folk and for Jewish workers from the sugar factories of Whitechapel. But no, I was instructed to take the entrance off Fassett Square.
I looked, first, at how the old hospital had adapted to its new identity: as private flats. Children raced around an ornamental flower bed. The house for the young doctors was conveniently close to that of the nurses. The care with which the design had been carried out lent the present development a certain dignity. There was none of the reflex fakery of cod‐Dutch estates along the eastern rim of the Isle of Dogs. Or recent yellow‐brick assemblages gifted on Hackney, squares and grids with no purpose beyond social control. And speed of construction.
The once‐popular miasma theory, around which the German Hospital had been built, insisted on separation between units. Foul breath from syphilitics must not be allowed into corridors patrolled by Lutheran nurses, deaconesses trained at the Kaiserwerth Institute. Windows were kept open. Floors were scrubbed. A nest of discrete modules protected from the general malaise of Dalston. Nurses in lesser institutions were hired from the streets, unwashed, having limited acquaintance with Teutonic notions of hygiene. They serviced the dying. Young medical men accepted their favours as a rite of passage. Consultants, living away from the hospital, never acknowledged their presence. Sexual congress was part of the equation, pleasant but unimportant.
They told me, the Boas Society people, how informal and delightfully democratic their meetings were. ‘Go down Graham Road to the Marie Lloyd blue plaque and turn sharp left.’
But you can’t get out of Fassett Square, it’s a closed system, end‐stopped by the North London Line – unlike its notorious imitator, Albert Square in EastEnders. The real Fassett Square houses a community of bookish newcomers prepared to keep the gardens up to the mark, to honour their history (hospital, borough), and
to flog bijou residences that retain ‘a wealth of charming original features’. For around £695,000. Freehold.
It was the factory, or what I’d always taken for a stranded industrial block to the east of the German Hospital, that’s where the Society met: on the flat roof. How had I missed this prime example of 1936 modernism? A Bauhaus‐influenced design by Burnet, Tait and Lorne.
‘Coffee?’ said Alice Oller. Who was waiting for me at the front entrance: cherry‐varnish hair and shoes, with period‐aspirational geometric earrings and a splotchy black‐and‐white shift, cut against the bias. ‘Would you like to see our flat before you go up?’
Alice lived with her boyfriend, a practising sound‐poet/dub‐technician, in what had once been the nurses’ quarters. Fresh air, light, space: the architect’s ideals were in sympathy with the whims and desires of the newcomers, the retro‐aesthetic colonists of Dalston. This was a boat building, a landlocked liner: curved metal rails, balustrades, wide decks. The tall windows with their bevelled hinges were original. ‘Cantilevered,’ the boyfriend said, ‘steel frames like Crittall windows.’ He pointed out the maternity wing: its sunroom bellied out from the north wall.
Cream corridors broad enough to push two gurneys in opposite directions, a Mondrian grid of window‐panel reflections. And everywhere, at every turn as you climbed the stairs: views. The warm redbrick of the older hospital blocks, curtains of greenery. The townscape of Hackney kept at a polite distance: a playful backdrop, not a threatening reality.
When we paused to admire circular balconies and sun decks, gardens below, I found myself staring back into the much smaller windows of the Flemish blocks with their scarlet shutters: what memory‐traces were imprinted on glass? This model of what a hospital should be, roomy, clean, uncluttered, gave itself up, without a struggle, to development by Anne Currell, our hotshot estate agent and re‐imaginer. The one who puts personalized letters through the door.
This letter is not in any way intended to be a pitch for business. Please find a copy of the article as it appeared in last Sunday’s Observer. No one can second‐guess what may happen over the next few months, I suspect there may be a softening of the market due to a combination of unsustainable increases and interest free rises. There is no doubt that we have seen increases in property prices particularly in selected areas of Hackney which are unrealistic and it is my belief that this rate will not continue.
The Observer piece featured Albion Drive residents crowing about their good fortune in living in such a paradise of social democracy and soaring property values. Estate agents were the alchemists of progress. Once, they tracked artists and squatters into the badlands; now the new technocracy (curators, website designers, TV comics gravid with novels) followed them, grateful for the opportunity to get a foothold in something as significant as a former hospital or seductively gothic asylum.
Emerging on to the flat roof, I was dazzled by the verdant spread of Hackney, its railways and churches. One of the Boas people told me how unhappy they had been with the soap opera EastEnders when it first appeared. Researchers questioned old‐established residents of Fassett Square at great length. And then used the stories, the hurt of their lives, uncredited and without payment. They enjoyed chatting to sympathetic young women, never imagining that half‐forgotten intimacies would become the scandal of the nation. Noticing my pocket‐recorder (carried in the hope of coming across Swanny, the renegade surgeon), they said that they would be wary now of talking to any writer. Contract first, cash down. Then gossip.
I gave the Boas folk, lounging around the roof deck, a standard riff: how every disappearance clears a space on the map, a hole in the perimeter fence through which the future can be glimpsed. I tried to make the talk relevant, by responding to this place, the hospital. To Conrad in Hackney, when he lodged with William Ward at 6 Dynevor Road, Stoke Newington. And how, recovering from the horrors of the Congo, he discovered that there was as much darkness in shuttered Graham Road rooms where those who were too ill to work starved to death. The world, I concluded, was constructed from two warring but interdependent elements, poetry and politics. A statement designed to provoke the missionary chairperson, William Taylor.
I have to admit to a certain edge, in defence of my position as editor of City of Disappearances. All true London books, I believed, were collaborations, anthologies of alternate witness. Taylor, in advance of the meeting, emailed members of the Boas Society, inviting them to question whether ‘recovering lost stories of the past has any importance in the light of our current engagement with the Griffin?’ His conclusion? ‘All this endless narrating and re‐narrating is a little bit of a luxury, when there is a job of work to be done.’
My sense of inadequacy was compounded when John, a leading figure from the Manor Garden allotments, came over, drink in hand, to say hello. I felt a complete fraud, pontificating on local history I’d picked up from pamphlets and sepia photographs in pubs, when this man, always smiling, had lived in the area all his life. As a working gardener, he knew every blade of grass: by experience. He had cycled down every street in the borough, fulfilling Roland Camberston’s instructions, noticing every shop, every pub, between parties and jobs and family visits: and not as a neurotic cultural duty. John had no idea where Swanny was to be found, though he did introduce me to another doctor; a grave, quietly spoken man with experience of many Hackney hospitals. Dr Peter Bruggen, in his retirement, had developed a fascination for exploring and researching the territory where he had operated for so many years. He had been too busy, in his early life, to notice what lay around him. He said that he would be happy to give me an interview.
Alice’s partner leant on the rail, smoking contemplatively, reading the Hackney landscape and speculating on its confusing perspectives: how Mare Street appeared so far away. Clots of green swallowed up tight terraces and sharply angled roofs. The young man knew nothing about Labyrinth, the demolished theatre, but he did know somebody, a friend of Alice, who boasted of being a regular at the height of the rave era. He would give her a call, see if she was in: Anya Gris, the architect. The one who had a show recently at the Pumping House in Wapping. She wanted to meet me. She had an Olympic project to discuss, a way of retaining the Lower Lea Valley as a virtual‐world wilderness, by folding estates and stadiums back into the earth before they emerged. Allowing the whole frantic business to happen in the head, as an hallucination of choice, while the actual ground remained inviolate.
‘Anya found the tunnels,’ the dub‐poet said, ‘running from Fassett Square to the Junction, connecting to the rail system. Something nuclear, she thinks.’
Not one building Anya designed had been built. Construction was never the point, she provoked debate. No structure that can be commissioned, she asserted, was worth making. The aim of human existence was to do absolutely nothing: gracefully. Any intervention was doomed to make things worse. Architects must learn modesty, how to explain and celebrate what was already there. Adapt, revive, invigorate. Putting in a tender was the simplest way of testing your integrity. If you win, tear up the plans. Start again. Fail better.
She knew Rachel Lichtenstein and shared elements of her background. She had been sufficiently inspired by Rachel’s account of the unfortunate David Rodinsky to conceive, in computer‐generated form, a dream‐hospital; a place of pilgrimage, a structure that wrapped itself around a motorway junction, beneath the hill where the Claybury Asylum once stood. Moving into the German Hospital was as close as she could come to realizing her vision. Those who slept within this wing, she suggested, altered the nature of the building with their fantasies. Especially sexual fantasies. Like Ian Askead, with whom she was acquainted, Anya was a Reichian. All the tenants of this block, she said, were voluntary patients, architects by proxy. They loved and respected the tiled terraces, austere masculine geometries that played against the feminine sweep of handrails, the bent and androgynous rods on which sunblinds could be draped.
Anya’s flat opened directly on to t
he roof terrace, a bicycle was parked outside. She brewed a pot of coffee and I settled myself to record her account of lost weekends at the Labyrinth.
You have to go right back to the 1970s. I couldn’t tell you where it was exactly. Near Dalston Lane? I was squatting with a boyfriend in a Victorian terraced house with a big garden. The rooms were painted in rainbow colours. There was no electricity or water. There was a drug dealer on the premises who lived in the bath. There were huge amounts of comings and goings. It was all quite friendly. I had a placement with an architect in West London, Theo Crosby, and was finding it rather hard: the travel. I didn’t buy into memorial sculpture and Crosby’s notion of the epic. After a couple of months, and the odd disagreement, he let me go.
I didn’t get involved with the political element, some of the others were going to meetings in pubs. There were Dutch provos and Germans around, a women’s group who gave me a hard time. People went off on marches every weekend. The SWP sold their papers outside the station, up Kingsland Road. It was a really hot summer. We rigged a canopy and a slung a hammock between two willow trees.
The house, basically, was falling down. We used it as a place to sleep. You could hear the trains going from Dalston Junction to Broad Street. It was quite soothing to think of the workaday world carrying on without me. Hackney was still a garden suburb and I felt weirdly at home. I’d grown up in Totteridge. My family were all high achievers. My sister worked in Blair’s office, for fuck’s sake.
It must have been a few years later that I started going to the Four Aces, a black club. There was a big gap, I was travelling, New Zealand, Crete. Before I came back and finished my training at the Architectural Association. Where I got into a thing with one of the lecturers. As you do.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 13