I don’t like deadlines. They put a damper on the urge to digress. Shouldn’t we expect the unexpected? But the hospital block on the summit of Mill Hill is a real marker, generator of paranoid imaginings. I’m always uneasy when covert research, generously funded, starts to cosy up to subversive art. There’s something awkward about the relationship. To access the art manifestation (conceptual corridor, lunchtime lecture) you have to blag your way into the Pentagon, into Langley. Surveillance swipe, signature in book, electronic barrier, phone call to a higher authority.
I turned up, the first time, to see a show, ‘Cityscapes’, by the photographer Erne Paleologou. 10 February 1998. I love Effie’s work, her nightstalker’s liminal meditations. A young Greek woman, living in East London, she starts at the railway station, moving away, making the familiar unfamiliar, playing with scale and expectation, discovering the City as theatre: curtains, alcoves, trees sculpted with artificial light. Upper-deck revellers in red buses, the revel burnt out of them. Effie looks for risk (surreal anecdotes) but purges it from her prints, which are infinitely calm, balanced, resilient.
Effie’s show was described on the handout from the Medical Research Council (‘research undertaken in diverse fields, including neurophysiology, molecular structure, developmental biology and mycobacteriology’) as ‘the first manifestation’ of a visual arts programme. ‘Large format colour photographs depict nocturnal landscapes in which the ephemeral and fugitive is captured within the stark industrial shapes of the city… Selected photographs provoke a dialogue with the striking architecture of the Institute and play with the notional introduction of the city into the pastoral.’
I walked to Mill Hill from Hackney. A mild day, a pleasant tramp through Golders Green. At 12.50 p.m., I found myself with my nose pressed to the glass of the Villa Dei Fiori (‘Fully Air Conditioned’). One couple in the place. Slatted blinds and white linen (like a Californian hospital, face-lifts, tummy tucks, Mozart). Celebrity photographs with sprawling encomia: Ernie Wise, Christopher Lee.
I bought a chocolate-bar and an apple at the mini-mart. A notice fixed to the top shelf: SORRY NO READING. Hi-gloss, washable magazines. I thought that was the whole point of the transaction. Looking and simulating. Not reading.
Golders Green retains its identity as a civic centre. You can have a pee, buy a rich Viennese pastry, find an urn for your ashes. Near the station, the little barbershop offers showbiz trims. ‘To Tony Thanks For A Perfect Cut’. More celebrity snaps: David Janssen, Johnny Mathis, Kenny Lynch.
The suburbs begin with the Crematorium: ‘50 spaces & about 60 cars’. I search out Sigmund Freud’s plaque. I walk across a buttercup meadow to admire the prospect of this red brick, hill town monastery with its cloisters and towers. I moved on and out, stepping up the pace to navigate what seemed to be an exclusively Japanese enclave; safe streets, silence, JAPAN HOMES announced the estate agent. White houses, red roof tiles, net curtains. Avenues of pollarded trees. No shops, no dogs. Bankrupt, discredited Hackney can’t afford planning officers or planning restrictions; our borough is a building site. Dust is the taste. Noise is the norm: power-drills, chainsaws. Not a leaf can be moved in Kyoto-by-Finchley Road. Not a pebble can be revised. If you talk on the street you face banishment to Hendon or Palmers Green.
The whole, deeply suspect business of hiking through this complex labyrinth of crescents and circuses and dead ends is dreamlike. De Chirico without the squares and fountains. The Crematorium is the liveliest joint in town, folk gathering to chat in the car park, strollers among the colonnades, nicely kept gardens.
Once you cross the North Circular Road you enter a different territory. You’re greeted by an ecstatic sculpture, a strong woman, naked, with an upraised sword. La Déliverance by Emile Guillaume. This is a traffic stopper and even better if you’re on foot. A Health & Efficiency nude, tiptoe, on a stone beach ball, lifting Excalibur instead of a tennis racket.
Passing through Mill Hill viaduct, and starting to climb the hill itself, is dropping into mild-mannered English science fiction; the village that is too much a village, the big house set back from the road. Captured land. Barrack blocks (remember the Mill Hill bomb?). Cult centres. A heavily protected laboratory. WARNING GUARD DOGS ON PATROL. MOD PROPERTY PRIVATE NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. UNAUTHORISED ACCESS FORBIDDEN, KEEP OUT! Chainlink fence. Lights on poles.
Outside Mill Hill East station, I see a man, encountered earlier in the day near the North Circular Road. He was sweating hard, the sweat dried on him, in a suit. Glaswegian. Searching for London. Uncertain as to the direction in which to strike out. Now he was trying to blag his “way on to a train. ‘The staff don’t want to take you. The train will be held. Police have been sent for.’
‘Ya alus pick onna feckin homeless,’ he shouts, walking off, back to Scotland.
Deep inside the National Institute for Medical Research, Erne’s photographs dress a corridor. Nocturnal streets, White-chapel, Bethnal Green, franchising paradox. Novelties to be nodded at on the way to the buffet. Beyond her dimly lit arcade, fields and greenery are always visible. Land dropping away towards the South Herts Golf Course, Dollis Brook and the beginnings of Enfield Chase. Caught, as ever with Erne’s work, between sodium flare and green window, I listened to the dry morse of a table-tennis ball bouncing from a well-sprung table. The rattle of cups.
Tuesday 28 April 1998. Bill and I decide, independently, in one swoop, to touch the Harold stone at the back of the abbey. Marc is moaning about his swollen foot and his twisted hip, the aftermath of our tramp up the Lea Valley. But he’s got the energy to pitch Bill with plans for books, exhibitions, trips to Northern Ireland. Bill has strange tales of Jimmy Savile – always a good topic – in Aylesbury, at the hospital. An anchorite in a shellsuit. A life of conspicuous charity and public secrets, bolt-holes, cigars, self-mythologising.
I use a couple of photocopied pages from a comic strip as my guide, for the walk from Waltham Cross to Theobalds Park. The story I’m working with is the preamble to a text by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Michael Zulli: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. These days graphic novelists operate with expensive cameras (just like painters of the Hockney lineage). Before laying out a narrative, they will rehearse what they later draw: the envisioned version (dream), the enacted version (logged and recorded), the public version (smoothed, idealised).
I’d collaborated with one of the most respected artists in this field, Dave McKean, on books and films. Dave told me that he had taken part in the original Gaiman outing. He couldn’t remember exactly where they’d gone, somewhere north of the M25, by car. These boys, designer leather jackets and bright shoes, don’t do a lot of walking. They were looking for a gate, a gate to the City of London. It had gone missing from Fleet Street; hence, the connection with the mythic Sweeney Todd. Real heads, hacked off, were displayed on this gate: warning or trophy. The underlying story is occult. The barber, with his priapic pole, his ‘anything-for-the-weekend-sir?’, is an urban prankster. ‘Was your old man a barber?’ is a line of dialogue that reverberates through London pulps and chapbooks until it achieves definitive utterance in the Nicolas Roeg/Donald Cammell film, Performance.
Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, more than any of their peers, have exported contemporary deconstructions of the Gothic. The footnote, the scholarly apparatus of the graphic novel, is the only place where speculations derived from obscure poets, outer-rim science, antiquarian folklore, can frolic and interbreed. The great modernist push, the collage, the cut-up, finds a commercial outlet. Batman reworked. Mary Shelley revisited. Blake. De Quincey. Orwell. The world its own Xerox. Originality as quotation.
Gaiman’s story laid out the experience that anyone, following the trail from Waltham Cross, up Monarch’s Way to Theobalds Grove and Theobalds Lane, might enjoy: watercress beds, a park with a picturesque ruin, a flinty section of wall. ‘Ah!’ cry the unwary. ‘We’ve found it.’ The gate. A transported chunk of London real estate.
‘WE CAN ALWAYS T
AKE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ROAD,’ announces the Gaiman character, filling his bubble, ‘WE HEADED FOR JUNCTION 25 OF THE M25, SIXTEEN MILES NORTH OF THE CITY OF LONDON.’
I felt the presence of Gaiman, nosing about the Cedars Public Park, six years ahead of us, dowsing for bad memories. The folly in the park is a trap. Some excursionists go no further, believing that they’ve found the object of their quest, the Fleet Street gate. ‘MM. THAT WAS EASIER THAN I THOUGHT…’
But the phantom Gaiman has only achieved the periphery of the haunted wood, a triple-arched gateway to the mysteries. There are difficult decisions still to be taken. The graphic novelist delivers a snappy summary of the gate’s history, ‘IT WAS AT THE ENTRANCE TO FLEET STREET – PROBABLY ORIGINALLY ERECTED BY THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY… IT WAS REPAIRED FOR ANNE BOLEYN’S CORONATION… BUT ANYWAY, CHRISTOPHER WREN BUILT THIS INCARNATION IN THE EARLY 1670S…’
A convenient tea lady serves burgers and puts the seekers right, ‘TEMPLE BAR’S IN THEOBALD’S PARK, OVER THERE. NOT IN CEDAR PARK. OF COURSE THEY WAS ONCE THE SAME PLACE, BUT NOW THERE’S THE AIO IN THE MIDDLE.’
An off-highway day, sky like porridge. My colour shots, Drummond slouching, hands in pockets, are soft: grey road, grey sky. The graphic novella of our walk towards Theobalds Park contrasts with Michael Zulli’s monochrome panels (in cinemascope or church window format). His couple also keep their hands buried deep in their jeans, but they have hair, shoulder-length. Dark glasses for the Gaiman figure. Who smokes. They drive across the AIO. We stand on the verge, waiting for a gap in the morning traffic.
They miss the signs at the edge of the wood.TESCO COUNTRY CLUB. THEOBALDS PARK, ABBEY NATIONAL CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE. The royal palace, the hunting lodge, the gardens laid out by John Tradescant, having passed through the hands of the brewer, Meux, are now in the keeping of a supermarket chain (the source of Lady Shirley Porter’s wealth) and a building society. The gate is spiked. Drummond examines the sign and roars with laughter. Through another set of padlocked gates we can see the New River, heading towards London. NO SWIMMING.
Atkins has his camera out faster than the lads in the comic strip, FALLING MASONRY: an alien structure banged down across the full double-page spread. A turn in the track, the entrance to Lady Meux’s estate (furnished with gate-keepers in Joan Hessayon’s romance), and here is Temple Bar. Christopher Wren’s Fleet Street gate, slightly distressed, rescued and reassembled, lifted beyond the pull of the M25. The brewer Meux made various improvements, extensions, rooms in which to entertain his guests.
It’s still impressive, this Essex captive. There has been talk recently of finding a couple of million quid to knock it down, carry it back to dress a portion of river frontage, around St Paul’s. Much better to extend it, stretch it, slap it over the M25. You can hear the wind, the traffic sirocco, howling through the gap, rattling the corrugated sheets. Temple Bar is reinstated as an energy gate, a switch, a consciousness junction.
Marc scoots around the masonry, finding ways to circumvent the fence, keep it out of shot. Surveillance cameras swivel, not much interested in his antics. From the woods, bird noises that Drummond can identify, if you ask him: garden warbler, blackcap, lesser spotted woodpecker.
A certain unease, ‘IT’S SITTING HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE LIKE AN UNEXPLODED BOMB’, thinks the Gaiman character. His pal, Mike, goes over the fence. As does Marc, factoring images, cramming his camera with potential light-sculptures to be brought back to his London studio. History leaks.
Wren rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 designs a triumphal arch for Fleet Street: Temple Bar (completed 1672). Fire and water (Fleet River) are both invoked by this structure. A gate through which the traffic of the city will flow. A gate aligned with other gates, with Lud Gate, with the effigies of King Lud and his sons.
John Collet’s painting (c. 1760) presents the western prospect of Temple Bar. Narrower and taller in aspect. Lacking the wings that Meux used to unbalance the original design, lacking the stone balustrades. Lacking royal figures in the alcoves on either side of the window above the gate. Perspective is worked, so that Fleet Street gives Temple Bar its wings. There is meaning in this placement. It harks back to the Roman model, the imperium. It’s fated to become a traffic hazard, an absurdity in such a narrow thoroughfare. Displaced, fenced in, misaligned, it has become a provocation, Gothic furniture. The unwieldy backdrop for a Sweeney Todd musical. ‘History out of context,’ as Gaiman has it.
The best we can do is turn it over to Marc, in the expectation that his tunnel vision, his gift for excluding the unnecessary, will release the arch, or place it in his catalogue of archetypes. With the collection of obelisks, doorways, church towers, graveyard statuary. Temple Bar, removed from its location, is also removed from time. Its energies are released.
A quick hit of the M25 from Bulls Cross Bridge; the confirmation that the metal river still flows. A photo opportunity at the dogs’ home. Drummond caressing a black, plaster bulldog: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO STROKE DOGS. Surveillance cameras on poles. Severed heads. A cacophony of yelps and snarls, pooch to German shepherd, as we slouch along the edge of the Whitewebbs Lane rat run. A country track has been overwhelmed by shorthaul motorway users. Pedestrians, heading for Enfield Chase, are squeezed between a mesh fence and a screen of thorns.
It’s damp, it’s green and it’s English. And Drummond, the displaced Scot, cackles over it. This obstacle course of negatives: DO NOT ATTEMPT… NO SWIMMING… NO HORSE RIDING… NO STOPPING… KEEP OFF… KEEP OUT. Drummond is upbeat. He recommends ornithological textbooks as tools for the replenishment of language. ‘Yaffle’ is a recent favourite: the sound of the green woodpecker. We yaffle. We do the I-Spy country walk. We eye-swipe bluebell carpets, ex-squirrels. Bill holds a dead shrew in his hand, so that Atkins can photograph it (looking like a moustache that has just fallen off).
Tackier properties, shacks with bits of farm machinery, chicken coops, have handpainted notices (white gloss on hard-board): BEWARE BAD DOG. They can’t afford the animal. They’re saving up for a pit bull recording. Ironwork gates, all curls and commas, are deceptive. Slow down and the dogs, which usually operate in pairs, will have you. Lean-ribbed black ones with slavering fangs. If their tails haven’t been docked, they wag.
Detached houses on the edge of the motorway are a shopping mall for thieves with wheels. A nice run out from Dalston or Canning Town, straight up the M11. Hoist a bit of garden statuary, an urn, carry it back to its place of origin.
Once we achieve the path through White Webbs Park, skirting the golf course, heading south-west, it gets easier. We don’t bother with the map. Green patch leads to green patch. Clay Hill to Trent Park. Drummond identifies an Aylesbury duck by its orange beak.
Permitted pedestrianism is still a source of pleasure, old woodland, meadows, brooks. The obelisk in Trent Park is a memorial to the Duke of Kent. Royalty continues to leave markers on the outer suburbs, WATCH OUT THERE’S A PLANT THIEF ABOUT.
What I love about this ‘empty’ quarter of London (if it is London) is the way that, out of nowhere, supervised parkland, suburban clutter, you suddenly find yourself on a long, straight stretch of country road. It’s dreamlike: telegraph poles, hedges, a red farmhouse tucked under a line of low hills. You’re still carrying the weight of the city, the density of talk and noise and interference, quick-twitch nerves that keep you from being run down; but you let it go, bleed away. Momentary transcendence. Soft warm air. Birdsong. And, in the distance, over the horizon, the mortality whisper of the orbital motorway.
In this hallucinatory half-country, we come across a building that is difficult to interpret, easy to admire: a white cube, its windows blinded with hardboard. The boards have been cut to fit their apertures. The shadow of a downward pointing security light throws an elongated cone across the white wall. The building, an assembly of smooth, chalky blocks, reminds me of Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost. Lacking discernible narrative, this structure is an unrequired art work. In a gallery
it would solicit cultural comparisons, validation. Out here we can do nothing, beyond registering its presence, the displacement it achieves. The way it offers itself as a memory-flash, between the Trent Park obelisk and the hospital on the hill.
By now, we’re beginning to look at our watches. We stride out. I can’t remember if the Jochen Gerz lecture is at one or at one-thirty. But that doesn’t stop us logging the drift. Twin urns on a gatepost, TRENT PARK CEMETERY, ANOTHER SERVICE PROVIDED BY ISLINGTON COUNCIL. A stretch-limo, selfconsciously mirror polished, outside II Vesuvio Trattoria Italiana. Nothing like playing up to racial stereotypes.
Cockfosters. New Barnet. Cherry blossom hamlets. Drummond gives a sympathetic nod to Barnet FC, a team who will soon be appearing on his beloved Non-League circuit. (I picked up a nice piece of football/motorway ephemera. A booklet entitled Inside the M25: The Football Programmes. A road map linking future nowheres, dormitories, slumped industrial huddles, by the colours of their football programmes: Becken-ham Town, Chingford, Boreham Wood, Erith & Belvedere, Rainham Town, Ford United. Glories of the Delphian, Spartan, Aeolian, Corinthian Leagues. Dagenham linked with deepest Surrey. Harrow with hop fields. Dockside with Dorking.) Bill Drummond’s green anorak comes into his own as he waxes lyrical on the Aylesbury FC experience, the windy terraces, the pies, the purity of kick and rush, the yarning of the mob.
The steep green roof of the National Institute for Medical Research, a fearsome complex (known to its inmates as ‘the benzene ring’), catches the midday sun. It dominates the summit of Mill Hill. Coming on it, from the north, the Folly Farm side, we experience the difficulties that made the planners hesitate when they decided to move the Institute (as an out-station) from the Hampstead Laboratories in 1937.
The ground was boggy, the gradient severe. But Mill Hill was obscure, sensitive research could be conducted without attracting unwelcome attention. Government scientists would enjoy the benefits of country life – tennis, cricket, bracing walks – while staying within an easy commute (underground, mainline, Great North Road) of civilisation. The Hampstead Labs were known for their experiments on animals.
London Orbital Page 11