London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Special protection for the best agricultural land would be removed, while farmers would be encouraged to launch new kinds of businesses.’ What businesses? Barbecue pits? Landfill? Ski slopes (of carcasses) to rival Beckton? There must, said the report, be ‘a general presumption in favour of market forces’. A sweeping away of fussy restrictions. ‘A planning system more supportive of an enterprising countryside.’ The only way the countryside could become enterprising was to cease to be countryside: to become ‘off-highway’, a retail resort (like Bluewater), a weekend excursion that depended on a road that we were being advised to avoid. Tony Blair’s ‘Performance and Innovation Unit’ (a thirteen-strong team of academics and civil servants, ‘overseen’ by Andrew Smith, Chief Secretary to the Treasury) made the dissolution of the green belt a major element in an attempt at joined-up’ government.

  Metropolitans need this green fantasy, the forest on the horizon, the fields and farms that represent a picture book vision of a pre-Industrial Revolution past. We need the illusion of sap in the vein. We hanker after market gardens, allotments bedded out with the latest horticultural novelties. The M25 is tolerable because it moves through an extended parkland (Epping Forest, the Thames Crossing, North Downs). The green belt, futile as it is, turns London into one of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. Howard’s vision, originally published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, imagined a Utopian community, public buildings at the centre, surrounded by parks, houses with gardens, set within ‘an agricultural reservation’. Such reservations, check out Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City, don’t really work. It’s too swift an enactment of something that needs to evolve, through compromise and bodge, through centuries. Lay it out overnight and you get a Mormon dormitory or an unoccupied cemetery that looks great in the catalogue.

  But the green belt is on a grander scale, conceived in desperation. G.L. Pepler’s ‘Greater London’ (published in the RIB A Town Planning Conference – Transactions, 1911) proposed a parkway encircling London at a ten-mile radius from Charing Cross (from the monument that marked the last stage of the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I). The parkway would act as a ring road and as the basis for a necklace of garden suburbs.

  Arthur Crow, also writing in 1911, went further; he wanted to connect ten ‘Cities of Health’ (Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Dartford, Epping, Epsom, Romford, Uxbridge, Waltham, Watford). They would be joined by a ‘Great Ring Avenue’, a fantastic Egyptian or Mayan conceit, radiant settlements as outstations to a centre given over to public buildings, places of ceremony, commerce and worship. The avenue would be 500 feet wide and eighty-eight miles in circumference.

  By the time Londoners had seen their city bombed, riverside industries destroyed, they were ready to think of renewal, deportation to the end of the railway line, the jagged beginnings of farmland. Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan 1944 (published in 1945) still worked through concentric bands: the Inner Urban Ring (overcrowded, fire-damaged), the Suburban Ring (to which inner-city casualties would migrate), the green belt (ten miles beyond the edge of London), and the Outer Country Ring, which would extend to the boundary of the regional plan.

  Visionary maps, in muted Ben Nicholson colours, were produced. Lovely fold-out abstractions. Proposals in soft grey, pale green, blue-silver river systems. But always with the blood circuit of ring roads, the pastoral memory rind at the edge of things, at the limits of our toleration of noise and speed and grime. There must, said William Bull (in 1901), be ‘a green girdle around London’s Sphere… a circle of green sward and trees which would remain permanently inviolate’.

  Until now. The first usage of the term ‘Green Belt’, in a London County Council resolution of 1924, stressed the same terms: ‘an inviolable rural zone around London’.

  By the 1960s there was substantial ‘nibbling’ into that inviolable belt; Hertfordshire and Essex were targeted for housing schemes ‘because spare railway capacity existed’. Surrey and Kent could look after themselves. The Lea Valley with its disused greenhouses was approved as a residential area (for those opting to quit the increasingly ‘multicultural’ inner cities). A 400-acre green belt site was cleared for development in 1966.

  New Labour, masters of double-talk, gesture politics, non-consenting consensus, were reversing the old Tory sentimentality over Metroland and the suburbs (Edward Heath in Bexleyheath, Margaret Thatcher in Finchley, Michael Portillo in Southgate). Thatcherites hated the inner cities (Hackney, Lambeth). Their pitch was simple: turn proles into home-owning suburbanites, stakeholders, share-buyers. London would be ring-fenced into ghetto, city of surveillance, privately policed estate. New Labour went further, a two (two dozen in the case of Michael Meacher) home portfolio; town house and country house. Wilderness was abhorrent. Rough pasture must be rationalised into Best Value recreational zones, retirement homes for happy butterflies. Farm animals were dirty, smelly, unreconstructed: cull them. What was required was a vertical wedge through the landscape (the Lee Valley Regional Plan), a designated hierarchy (media, recreation, development). What was not required was an holistic vision, any talk of belts or girdles or circuits. What was lost was the old dream of paradise gardens.

  2

  Enfield Chase tucks neatly into the north-east corner, where the A10 (the Great Cambridge Road) meets the pale blue horizontal of the M25. My Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas is a well-travelled, one-and-a-half-kilo wad of overan-notated pulp. The white blank of Enfield Chase is dressed with parks, enclosures, gardens, woodland walks: Clay Hill, White Webbs Park, Forty Hill (Museum), Capel Manor, Trent Park. Greenness slips under the motorway, Rorschach blots mopping up the grey.

  On the eastern slope of the Lea Valley is Epping Forest; the people’s forest, festooned with burger cartons, silver cans, ghosts of prisoners, runaways, pastoral melancholies (cop killer Harry Roberts, poets John Clare, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Thomas). On the west is the old forest of Middlesex, Enfield Chase. The broad, marshy floodplain of the Lea is a natural boundary.

  The royal family were the first suburbanites, recognising that London was only tolerable if you could run second (third, fourth, fifth) homes in the country, in easy commuting distance. And, if that proved expensive, or you became bored by your own furnishings, you could always land on a neighbour and bankrupt him. The first circle around London, precursor to the orbital highway, was the property portfolio of royal palaces: Greenwich and Eltham in Kent, Havering in Essex, Hampton Court in Middlesex, Nonsuch, Richmond and Oatlands in Surrey. As with the M25 – the ‘missing’ service station on the west side – there was a gap in the chain. Theobalds Park, just north of Enfield Chase, was not in royal hands. It belonged to a servant of the crown, master of the Secret State: William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. His son Robert, Earl of Salisbury, handed the place over to James I (taking Hatfield House, twinned with Welwyn Garden City, in exchange).

  Green is seductive. There’s something unnatural about its chemistry. Nature, bent and abused, is grey. We’re happy with the grey variables: silver to sludge. Stand on a footbridge over the M25, anywhere between Junction 26 on the edge of Epping Forest and the Junction 25 exit for Enfield, and you’ll watch traffic through tattered sails of greenery, roadside plantings, overripe saplings fed on diesel. The context of the valley is revealed: mud paddocks bulldozed for future development, new systems of access roads, sour yellow Wimpey boxes for first-time buyers; low, wooded hills; the persistent chlorophyll of Enfield Chase and environs. Captured estates. Garden centres. Pubs that offer Thai, Chinese and Indian lunches, while hanging on to their fustian titles: The King and Tinker, The Pied Bull, The Volunteer, The Woodbine.

  We dream of a green paradise. The solution to Gimpo’s teasing riddle – ‘to find out where the M25 leads’ – is here. After the circuits of madness, pilgrims must claim their reward: the secret garden. Residual desire is articulated in street names. Paradise Road and Paradise Row are both located in Waltham Abbey.

  Going east from
Waltham Cross, a confederacy of country houses and secure estates straddles the motorway. Theobalds Park, to the north of the road, is modest about its royal pedigree. If you drive along its boundaries you will be scanned by surveillance cameras, quizzed by interrogators at unmanned checkpoints. Walkers are suspect. The site reveals nothing that might provoke unwelcome attention. History declines into romantic fiction.

  Philippa Gregory in her novel Earthly Joys (1998) nominates the gardener John Tradescant as her hero, a familiar generic trope. Tradescant is best known as a Lambeth figure, keeper of ‘Tradescant’s Ark’, a proto-museum and grand cabinet of curiosities, storehouse of plants, bones and anthropological swag. He is celebrated in the present Museum of Garden History in St Mary’s Church, alongside Lambeth Palace.

  But Gregory is more interested in the young man, the tanned, strong-shouldered son of the soil. Tradescant is the gardener at Theobalds Palace. The relationship with his patron, the hunchbacked, avian figure of Robert Cecil is composed as a straightfaced version of a Fast Show homoerotic playlet, enacted by Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse. ‘Any early vegetables?’ his lordship asked. ‘Asparagus? They say His Majesty loves asparagus.’

  Earthly Joys become earthy joys as Tradescant drops his breeches for the Duke of Buckingham. ‘The pain when it came to him was sharp like a pain of deep agonising desire, a pain that he welcomed, that he wanted to wash through him. And then it changed and became a deep pleasure and a terror to him, a feeling of submission and penetration and leaping desire and deep satisfaction. John thought he understood the passionate grief and lust of a woman who can take a man inside her.’

  Gregory’s romance limns the period when Theobalds Park passed from Cecil to James I. A property to complete the circuit of royal residences. Known variously as Cullynges, Tongs, Thebaudes, Tibbolds, the palace was built by Lord Burleigh in 1560. The attraction of the estate was its distance from London and the court, a single day’s ride; enclosed forest could be domesticated, organised into gardens, walks, rides, hierarchies of contemplation. Cecil’s son ceded the palace to the Scottish interloper, James I. James’s grandson Charles II gifted the estate to the turncoat General Monck, Duke of Albermarle. So Theobalds declined, always with a sense of favours conferred, male alliances, pay-offs to special friends. Heritage flashbacks were all that remained by the time the land was purchased by the Victorian brewer Sir Henry Meux, Bart.

  Cecil, according to a contemporary Life, ‘greatly delighted in making gardens’. Royal visits by Elizabeth cost him many thousands of pounds, but this retreat from the realpolitik of the state, the fabrication of conspiracies, justified paranoia, gave the civil servant scope to construct his paradise garden. On the forest fringe, posthumous fantasies could be played out, an Alhambra of scents, fountains, symmetries. A commissioned painting of Cecil (now in the National Portrait Gallery) places him, absurdly, on a mule: Don Quixote as Sancho Panza. Berobed, ringed, a raddled imago of power. ‘Riding in his garden and walks upon his little mule was his greatest disport.’

  James I, resting here at the end of his progress from Scotland, experienced a thrill of recognition. Like romantic novelist Philippa Gregory, he found the discretion of Enfield profoundly erotic. Theobalds Park, according to Gregory, ‘had been laid out by Sir Robert’s father in the bleak elegance of the period. Sharply defined geometric patterns of box hedging enclosed different coloured gravels and stones.’

  Tradescant plotted a New Age makeover. ‘He longed to take out the gravel from the enclosed shapes and plant the patterns with herbs, flowers and shrubs. He wanted to see the whole disciplined shape softened and changing every day with foliage and flowers which would bloom and wilt, grow freshly green, and then pale… Tradescant had a picture in his mind’s eye of plants spilling over the hedges, of the thick green of the box containing wildness, fertility, even colour. It was an image that drew on the hedgerow and roadside of the wild country of England and brought that richness into the garden and imposed order upon it.’

  The Earl of Salisbury entertained James I for four days at Theobalds, while the new king received the homage of the Lords of Council. Coming from the bleak north, James wanted to take possession of a house and grounds, elegantly planted, artfully laid out, on the side of London in which he was most comfortable. He commandeered Theobalds and a large portion of Enfield Chase, as a kind of dowry. A wall, ten miles in circumference, enclosed his estates.

  The circuit of the wall crosses the motorway and cuts through the grounds of Capel Manor, now an horticultural college, garden centre and display of show gardens. The pleasure of walking through the grounds derives from the change of pulse, slowing of breath, coming away from the road gives you. All the usual irritants with which great gardens protect themselves are blessings: they make access difficult. Persistence is rewarded. Capel Manor, like its neighbour Myddelton House, is open to visitors on certain days, at certain times – if those times don’t have to be revised, if there are no plagues or elections on the horizon.

  Capel is the first estate you notice, exiting the M25, making the tricky turn into Bullsmoor Lane. Follies, Gothic ruins, are glimpsed over the wall. Ivy-covered John Piper arches floating in sparse woodland. It’s only after you’ve bought your ticket and followed the signs that you recognise these stacks of tumbled masonry as customised fakes, commissioned from William Chambers. Rams and urns and centaur heads among pink rhododendrons. The small area of tolerated ‘wilderness’ is punted as a ‘garden feature’, introduced by William Robinson and other members of the ‘Natural’ school of the late nineteenth century. It doesn’t feel like woodland. A two-minute stroll loops you back to a prospect of the south lawn, the Liriodendron Tree, the famous Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia); the ha-ha which marked the division of the Theobalds and Capel Manor estates.

  On a mound that overlooks the motorway is another folly, an open-sided, open-roofed Temple of the Winds. Voices from the gardens are distorted. Children scampering around the maze. Water. Filtered traffic whooo-whooo-whoooing under Bulls Cross Ride.

  Capel Manor, promoted under the slogan ‘Where the City meets the Countryside’, has downgraded the paradise theme to a series of botanical rooms, conservatories with the lid lifted off. There is a garden for ‘Physically Challenged People’ and a garden for ‘Visually Impaired People’. There is a Yellow Garden and a Blue Garden (with flowers blessed by the M25 ribbon-cutter). ‘Now this is my type of garden,’ said Margaret Thatcher at a photo-opportunity in 1989. Wisteria sinensis, Brunnera macrophylla, Lirioe muscari and Cynara cardunculus. ‘Blue is one of the “cold” colours, providing a calm and restful feel.’

  There’s a lake, of course. But it’s notable, in this area of springs and rivulets, riverine speculations, that Capel Manor has chosen to market non-liquid water, fake water. This season’s idea is the virtual water garden (a drought fancy which only succeeded in predicting the continual rain that would raise London’s water table and float off anything that wasn’t firmly anchored). The concept of designers Angela Grant and Nigel Jackson was to stimulate those parts of the brain that ‘think water’ – without actually involving that precious resource in the exchange. Diuretic gardening: as sponsored by a ‘cooperative venture’ (Anglian Water, West Water, Yorkshire, Thames Water, Severn Trent). Nifty arrangements of broken slate and silver paper (gallery quality) make up the ‘water conscious’ garden (i.e. the garden that makes us conscious of the absence of water). A notion that is about as much use as handing a dehydrated marathon runner a photograph of a high-energy drink. Or playing a video loop of Ullswater-at-dawn on a Tunisian sand dune.

  Princess Elizabeth, the future Virgin Queen, was brought from Hatfield House to Enfield Chase by her ‘keeper’, Sir Thomas Pope. She travelled, according to Nicholas Norden’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, with ‘a retinue of twelve ladies in white satin, on ambling palfreys, and twenty yeomen in green on horseback, that her grace might hunt the hart’.

  The forest was a site of enchantment for a
green belt monarchy; a theatre for role reversals, sexual travesty, debating schools. ‘The Queen came from Theobalds to Enfield House to dinner, and she had toils set up in the park to shoot at the buck.’ The court stood for wild nature, ecology, the preservation of animals so that they could be killed for sport. The forest, when it is enclosed and exploited, is royalist. Republican sentiment cuts down trees. The major deforestation took place under Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The diarist John Evelyn described the Chase as ‘a solitary desert with 3,000 deer’.

  Royal physicians were rewarded with Enfield estates. Trent Park was given by George III to his favourite quack. Elizabeth I presented White Webbs House to her physician, Dr Hucks (or Huicks). Huicks – and the house he occupied – came under grave suspicion in the time of Elizabeth’s successor, James. Guido Vaux (aka Guy Fawkes) was a frequent visitor. Heretics (Catholics) were always shunted out to the fringes, rural and riverside suburbs, while nonconforming fundamentalists clung to the city, plain chapels and places of assembly. Recent aristocrats, royal servants, cash-rich bureaucrats bought into the green girdle, leaving the inner suburbs, Hackney and Hoxton, to argumentative mechanics and tradesmen.

  Vaux took White Webbs House and furnished it at his own expense. Garnet the Jesuit stayed with him. The house was reported, by government agents, to be filled with ‘Popish books and relics’; a fiendish warren of ‘trapdoors and passages’. What is now White Webbs Lane was once known as Rome Lane. Terror and counter-terror lived in close proximity: the spymaster on one side of the fence and the heretical assassin on the other.

  Walking through Enfield Chase, estate to estate, you notice small streams, channels cut for Sir Hugh Myddelton’s New River. Myddelton was a speculator, water was a resource. By the late Elizabethan period, medieval wells and conduits could not adequately supply the needs of the City. Edmund Colthurst looked to the Hertfordshire springs at Amwell and Chadwell, near Ware. The goldsmith Myddelton exploited Colthurst’s initiative. Born in Wales in 1560, he was MP for Denbigh and jeweller to James I. The dull silver of the River Lea was converted, by labour and promotion, to gold, a personal fortune. Adventurer shares were issued and Colthurst was appointed as overseer of the work, the digging and cutting; the New River would travel forty miles in making the twenty-mile journey to London. It hugged the 100-foot contour line, falling eighteen feet in the course of its travels. It opened at Christmas in 1613. Myddelton was knighted, made a baronet. He prospered. He died in 1631, leaving versions of his name scattered through the suburbs, tracings that can still be followed into town.