London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  On another occasion, after filming with Petit, we found our-selves in a major traffic jam. In the South Minims car park. Gridlock. No question of reaching the road, the Al was at a standstill. It began here. Too many supplicants for motorway hospitality, too many tourist coaches. Too many admirers of the service station rock garden. North London devastated – because too many drivers were trying to get off the road at the same time.

  Returned to base in Hackney, I received a letter from the poet and visionary Aidan Andrew Dun (author of Vale Royal). ‘How far round are you on your orbital pilgrimage? You probably know this but when HMS Belfast was moored just up from Tower Bridge its monstrous gun-turret was trained on a service-station somewhere in the north-western sector of the M25, demonstrating a range of twenty-something miles. Dunno what this means. Perhaps some omen of war on the forecourt!’

  Worse than that, Aidan. Worse than the blockades and the motorway slowdowns. HMS Belfast was a crucial element in architect Theo Crosby’s attempt at rewiring the Celtic Christian alignments of London (as proposed by Elizabeth Gordon in her inspirational 1914 publication, Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles). Crosby, in a promotional booklet for his Battle of Britain monument (designed with Michael Sandle), worked everything from a point that seemed to have little significance in 1987. By whatever prophetic or occult arts, Crosby chose to launch the psychogeographic redefinition of London’s fields of force from the line of zero longitude (which he called the ‘Turner Axis’). His Speer-derived monument would be sited around Cuckold’s Point in Rotherhithe (the starting place for an historic pilgrimage to the Horn Fair in Charlton). It was, in fact, a precise equivalent (west for east) of the dead ground on which the Millennium Dome would be built (as an unconscious tribute to the spirit of Crosby).

  The Turner Axis, starting on Greenwich Hill, spurned the ancient ley (the Hawksmoor line through the domes of the Naval College to St Anne’s, Limehouse), and passed through Cuckold’s Point to HMS Belfast and St Paul’s Cathedral (where it met the ‘Canaletto Axis’). The guns of the battleship were trained on the only (at that time) service station on the orbital motorway. The arc of fire represents another of London’s invisible threads of influence. In that curvature, the fall of a shell, can be seen one span of a grander dome: river to margin.

  ‘The place is unimportant,’ writes Crosby. ‘So is the alignment and the orientation, the magic rules of the past that governed the disposal of buildings and particularly monuments. They are the cardinal points, the directions of the equinox, the midsummer sunrise, the turning of year, the evocation of growth, the stopping of time.’

  Before it was a service station, South Minims (Myms) was a hilltop village with church and notable funerary monument for the Austen family: a double plinth (the upper element decorated with a five-skull panel and crossed bones) topped by an inverted pear.

  ‘Pear. No, light-bulb. No, pear,’ says Renchi.

  The stone pear has a vestigial stem growing from its bulb. It sucks light from dim fields. It gives nothing out. A provocative sculpture shielded from the curiosity of the vulgar by a curtain of spindly, ivy-covered trees. The pear, according to J.C. Cooper’s An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, stood for ‘hope; good health’. To the Christian it represented ‘the love of Christ for mankind’. What then of the inverted pear? The pear with pedicel growing from rounded bottom, not slender neck?

  As we head across country in the direction of Shenley, navigating fields of winter cabbage, hopping brooks, appreciating the high, quilted clouds, seeing nobody, I try to explain my notion of our walk as a fugue. This improvisation would make more sense when I read Ian Hacking’s excellent account of epic, seemingly random pedestrian journeys undertaken by French labourers in the late nineteenth century. Mad Travelers (Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses) offered one perfectly reasonable ‘explanation’ of our orbital pilgrimage: an hysterical fugue – attended by the sort of minor epileptic seizures (electrical storms in the consciousness) Renchi suffered in Dublin.

  Albert Dadas, a gas fitter from Bordeaux, is the pivotal figure in Hacking’s narrative. An ambitious provincial doctor, Philippe Tissie, interested himself in Dadas and wrote up the case; thereby inducting the fugueur into a Conradian tale (weather, brooding topography, fatalism). Dadas, a compulsive masturbator, would simply walk out of his quotidian life; the domestic routines, the duties he performed to his employers’ satisfaction. There was no obvious motive, no trauma to be left behind. The journeys were a willed forgetting. They were like Aboriginal songlines, enacted dreamings: Bordeaux to Moscow, to Constantinople, Algiers.

  Tissie’s account of the Dadas phenomenon launched a fashion, the roads of Europe were cluttered with amnesiac pilgrims, temporary vagrants. The fugue would pass. The middle classes, metropolitans, took up the craze. Long-distance walking spread like a virus. You didn’t walk to forget, you walked to forget the walk. You carried on, often for months, years, until it was appropriate to return to your previous life.

  I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word, a bloody-minded Tommy muttering over his tobacco tin in the Flanders trenches. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. The increasing lunacy of city life (in my case) and country life (in Renchi’s) forced us to take to the road. The joy of these days out lay in the heightened experience of present tense actuality, the way that we bypassed, for a brief space of time, the illusionism of the spin doctors, media operators and salaried liars. The fugue is both drift and fracture. The story of the trip can only be recovered by some form of hypnosis, the memory prompt of the journal or the photo-album. Documentary evidence of things that may never have happened. The fugue is a psychic commando course – Albert Dadas, bloody-footed, stomped seventy kilometres a day – that makes the parallel life, as gas fitter, hospital carer, or literary hack, endurable.

  Mad walking has its key image: Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888). (Along with Francis Bacon’s obsessive reworking of this vanished painting.) Van Gogh’s original was burnt in the Second World War when the Kaiser Friedrich Museum at Magdeburg was destroyed.

  A straw-hatted man, burdened with the implements of his trade, spins around to face the viewer. The artist as a version of Bunyan’s pilgrim. ‘A rough sketch I made of myself,’ Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, ‘laden with boxes, props, and canvas on the sunny road.’ The road shimmers. He is tracked by a distorted shadow. This is precisely the spirit of the fugueur. Dadas met Tissie for the first time in 1886.

  Another group of Van Gogh walkers is closer to our project: Prisoners Exercising (After Gustave Doré). Completed in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in February 1890. Stooped convicts (or madmen) process in a slow circle, a chain that mimes our penitential motorway orbit. No end and no beginning. Humans dwarfed by high brick walls. A reworking of Doré’s London, flooded with colour. The prisoner who turns towards the viewer, showing his face, is Van Gogh.

  Contemporary medical opinion associated epilepsy with marathon expeditions, French workmen on their motiveless walkabouts. Numerous doctoral theses (Birnbaum, Evensen, Leroy, Doiteau, etc.) diagnosed Van Gogh as an epileptic. Other authorities (Jaspers, Westerman Holsttijn, Riese, Prinzhorn) preferred schizophrenia. Notions such as ‘episodic twilight states’ were floated. Stertz wrote of ‘phasic hallucinatory psychosis’. Delirium, sun-seizures, fits of melancholy that couldn’t be walked out or worked out. Leading inevitably to the ‘Maison de Santé’, the asylum. Voluntary confinement.

  In the advertisement, the prospectus for the madhouse at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, is a drawing of the hospital and its grounds. From the viewpoint of the Alpilles at the foot of Mont Gaussier, you can see an Italianate tower with surrounding low-level buildings, sharp hill. And this is very much the prospect that confronts us as we advance on Shenley. The asylum as a retreat, in the cou
ntryside, a few miles out of town. The tower on the hill was one of the features Renchi pointed out on our drive from Abbots Langley. On Nicholson’s map, checked over breakfast in South Mimms, Shenley Hospital is revealed as a substantial estate, a colony of the disturbed, black blocks, a church and a social club. We recall Chris Oakley, once an associate of R.D. Laing and David Cooper, telling us at the time of Renchi’s exhibition in Selborne that Cooper had run an experimental unit at Shenley. The psychiatrists, if we had the right place, joining the inmates on their hallucinogenic voyages.

  In twentieth-century representations of the fugue, the walker disappears from the walk. Landscape artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton erase the trauma, along with the figure of the troubled pedestrian. Minor interventions are tactfully recorded; a few stones rearranged, twigs bent. The walker becomes a control freak, compulsively logging distances, directions, treading abstractions into the Ordnance Survey map. Scripting minimalist asides, copywriting haikus.

  Renchi’s recent paintings merge walker and landscape. Chorographic overviews, diaries. In earlier times, the brushstrokes were looser, the paint thicker. Walks were shorter, paintings fiercer. As the fugues extended – London to Swansea, Hopton-on-Sea to St Michael’s Mount – the records were calmer; there was more of a narrative element, transit across landscape remembered in chalk, flint, granite, slate. Canvases, left behind in Ireland, mouldered in damp outhouses.

  Shenley Hall, a pompous white property, with fountain and porch and pedigree, has made the usual transition from seat of landed gentry to hangout for corporate man. The house has become the image, the emblem in the brochure, WELCOME TO SHENLEY HALL. ROADRUNNER, ROAD TECH COMPUTER SYSTEMS. Perfect! Motors lined up on gravel like some house party or shooting weekend from the Edwardian era. The panoply of autogeddon on parade: four-wheel drive, off-road (M25 to B5378), executive Rover, rep-saloon, white van. If the company expands – and they’re operating in the right area – they’ll have to acquire a couple of home farms as parking spaces.

  While I stop to photograph a stone eagle on the gatepost (‘victory; pride; authority; solar power; omniscience’), Renchi falls into conversation with two villagers: a ruddy-faced military gentleman in a plaid cap and good tweed jacket (pens in pocket) and his partner, a lady in green anorak, headscarf, woollen gloves. Being walkers themselves, they are interested in our outing. They don’t much like what’s happening to Shenley, but they are realists. Things change. The daily circuit of the territory takes more out of them, but they’ll go on making it.

  Shenley Manor, it appears, once belonged to the wealthy Raphael family. One brother kept the stud farm and bred a Derby winner. The other brother owned the land on which the hospital was built. The asylum was an investment, nothing more than that. A way of maximising return on holdings, keeping the house and the life that went with it. The old couple put us on the right track, the hospital is on Black Lion Hill.

  At the crossroads with Radlett Lane, Renchi stops (as if taking part in some boundary marking ceremony) to piss against the bark of a magnificent pine tree. The water tower of Shenley hospital is our guide, its grey roof a pyramid, above triple windows and an absurd balcony. These towers, the compass needles of our walk, survive (thanks to preservation orders) when all the other buildings are gutted and built over.

  Shenley Hospital is one of a number of isolated developments (asylums, pumping stations) in the Vale of St Albans which were granted green belt status. Reservoirs of madness. The village of Shenley is green belt, South Mimms is not.

  Green belt or not, Shenley Hospital, active until a couple of months before our arrival, has vanished, replaced by a housing development, the bright new units of a Crest Homes estate. The back story of the asylum has been totally erased, apart from the baleful presence of the water tower. How do they explain that monster to first-time buyers? They’ve started by fixing a working clock on its side, so that the brick stack can be renamed: The Shenley Crest Clocktower.

  We are stunned by this disappearing act. We’ve seen the old photographs, Shenley was like a benign concentration camp. Thirties architecture, industrial/pastoral units: a processing plant for mental hygiene. The scale was epic. Vast dormitories. Kitchens. Bath-houses. Estates within estates, radiating out from that water tower. Asylums have their hierarchies, their degrees of compliance. They have their dark places and their gardens. Within a few months, Shenley had been eradicated.

  Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas was promoting another fiction, a detailed plan of something that wasn’t there. The Shenley vanishing act counterbalanced the recovery of the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey: history heritaged for anyone with the price of a ticket. You could buy the book, the souvenir pencil. At Shenley there was only the estate office. The JCBs. The screech of earth-moving machinery.

  CREST HOMES. The Pavilions, Shenley. A glossy brochure with a mendacious cover illustration: yellow-brick units. ‘Photograph depicts a completed Crest development in Camberley Surrey.’ Military personnel, junior officer class: regulation issue. Nice title, ‘The Pavilions’, with its suggestion of John Major’s reworking of Orwell, the England of warm beer, bicycling spinsters, the sound of willow thwacking leather. The Far Pavilions. A retreat to the hills. A mock Surrey, Guildford or Dorking, Abinger Hammer, with lawns and trees and cricket squares. An escape from the heat and dirt of the city. Eight hundred yards from the M25.

  Where were the former citizens of Shenley, the inmates? Turned loose into the countryside? Tipped into the hedgerows? Or abandoned to ‘care in the community’ when there were no communities left? Shenley had been a retreat, a zone of healing, as well as a place to tidy away the casualties of urban life.

  History is being revised on a daily basis, through the northern quadrant of the motorway, by copywriters employed by the developers. ‘The historic village of Shenley combines excellent local interest with outstanding travel convenience.’ Much is made of the ‘pleasant undulating countryside’ and the ‘fine views northward over the historic city of St Albans’. To qualify as ‘historic’ you need green belt development permissions, new estates across a bowling-green from an old church. History is an extra zero on your property prices.

  The story of the historic village can be outlined in a paragraph: ‘ideal for those who love the “great outdoors”… pleasant walks… a traditional walled garden dating back to the 17th century; tennis courts… and, of course, the Shenley Cricket Centre, the origins of which lie with the great cricketer WG Grace… four golf courses within easy driving distance and both Borehamwood and St Albans offering a choice of indoor sports centres and health clubs.’

  Pleasant. Traditional. Convenient. Those are the terms to hammer home. The convenience of the golf course was the reason why Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman took a house here while they underwent the Stanley Kubrick endurance test, making Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley himself, being chauffeured at a steady forty mph, from his St Albans hideaway, around the loop to the studio. Pinewood, Elstree, Borehamwood, Denham: image factories and their green belt backlots, shadowing the motorway, shadowing the chain of mental hospitals.

  We find it difficult to escape the Crest Homes development; the units are red brick, rather than the muted yellow of the Camberley illustration. The homes, for the most part, are unoccupied; ghosts press on every window. The surviving components of the hospital – water tower, church – have a niggling poignancy. In time they will adapt, be seen as ‘historic’, but for the moment they are too much themselves. The church with its low tower, narrow windows, red, pantiled roof is Bavarian. There’s a path, hidden between slanting earth banks that runs into the basement, a secret door. It’s easy to imagine all kinds of unpleasant compromises between obedience, stern care and obligatory ritual.

  We left the Crest colony (which replaced the previous colony of the mad with a grid of nicely finished units, pressing too close against each other), and moved on to the mansion, once known as Shenley Manor. The mansion commands fine views of Watling Cha
se, Coombe Wood, Swanley Park. It looks like one of those hotels to which politicians or jaded executives go for strategy sessions (the strategy being to lig as much booze-sauna-TV porn-golf as can be packed into a hoggish weekend). Swanley Manor is ready to take on the Hamiltons, Jonathan Aitken and a bunch of Saudi money men with their massage parlour-maids. It’s white, discreet, lawned, planted. Bowed, pillared, balconied. There are heraldic shields, verdigris domes, weather vanes. Behind dark yew hedges there is a maze that isn’t a maze, a hidden meadow with erased patterns in the grass; disguised exits that shift as we attempt to locate them. Swanley Manor cries out for Peter Greenaway.

  No plutocrat is in residence. No megalomaniac or software czar lives here. No Branson or Maxwell. If they did, we’d never have got up the drive. Renchi, with his silver beard, red scarf and ear-flapped, cross-country ski cap, might be a Russian commando on a recce. The first of the Mongol horde to reach the gates. A fleeing Chechen.

  Grace Avenue climbs, padded in leaf-fall from a spreading oak, towards the house on the hill, PRIVATE ROAD, RESIDENTS ONLY (white on blue), SHENLEY MANOR (gold on green). ‘Restored Late Georgian Houses’, Town & Country (green on cream), ALL SOLD (white on red).

  This house, before it was parcelled up into executive apartments, was known as Porters Mansion. Yes, we’ve picked up another leaflet. ‘For centuries this house and its surrounding estate were a dominant feature of the local landscape and witness to many changes not least its encirclement by Shenley Hospital in the 1930’s… The Mansion has had a fascinating history.’ Has had. Present perfect. History, once again, put in its place. The future used up.