London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  With hindsight, the film’s polemic (based on a novel published in 1934) can seem too naked, a simplistic argument between fashions in psychiatric practice. What survives is Franju’s sense of geometry, his ability to articulate the shapes and movements that define place. Sociology matters less than the layout of the buildings, the choice of location.

  Durgnat quotes Franju: ‘I shot La Tête in the Psychiatric Hospital of Dury, with a quite unbelievable courtyard. Dead in the centre was a phallic tree with four benches grouped around it… We lived as a community in their community. We hardly emerged from it… If we’d slept in the asylum, we’d still be there.’

  In the courtyard inmates describe small circles, heads against the wall; the plodding, eyes-on-gravel prisoners of Van Gogh. Ian Hacking writes about an unmarried shepherd who was committed to an asylum in 1857, suffering from severe seizures. ‘Before or after an attack he would compulsively pace up and down, or in circles, always clockwise. He had an obsessive conviction that he should put the whole world, and the heavens and angels, in his head, or in his heart.’ His autopsy revealed atrophy of the brain, especially of the right hemisphere. Leashed, he walked the pain, lacking balance, a tight circuit around nothing. His epic peregrination, the few yards of a hospital ward, is a doomed attempt to recover memory. Movement provokes memory. Photographs from a dozen journeys over the same ground refuse to cohere: the result is never that ‘perfectly harmonious landscape’. The result is: monuments without inscriptions, twisted signposts.

  Durgnat correctly interpreted Franju’s film as a pitiless equation: ‘The pattern has the finality of an Euclidean Q.E.D., its rigid reversal and angularity evokes helplessness, despair, a stiffening fear, a tightrope-walk over the abyss of madness-by-contagion… Poetry and geometry meet amidst these landscapes whose greyness is as charged and nuanced as the sky before thunder. In shot after shot, the white walls of the asylum enclose windows and open doors, or other apertures, through which black-branched trees and skies seem, not just a glimpse of freedom, but themselves subjected to the enclosing architecture.’

  Harperbury has sunk into the half-life of discontinued surveillance, decanted buildings, bored curation. The developers haven’t yet moved in, although the patients have leaked away. Nobody questions us. Nobody takes any interest in our ramble through their property. We find an office with a blow-heater, a woman drinking tea. Some account of the hospital’s history has been published, but it isn’t available. We give our names and addresses and receive a promise that information will be sent to us in due course. But we understand this will never happen. The energy has gone from the place. The hut that once belonged to the Shenley airfield has infected the other buildings; they’re demob happy. The war’s over and’the future hasn’t begun.

  It’s getting dark as we walk down Smug Oak Lane towards the complex symmetry of the junction that marries the surging streams of the M25 and the M1. A site of magical resonance: triangular field, wood, torrential traffic-rush. The layering of access roads, tributaries, slipstreams, fires memory sensors, provokes narrative. We feel as though we are eavesdropping on a thousand private conversations, sharing monologues and weary daydreams.

  Renchi explains how Foucault tracks the asylum back to the pesthouse, the hospital for lepers which had to be built outside the gates of the city. ‘In 1348,’ Foucault wrote, ‘the great leprosarium of Saint Albans contained only three patients; the hospital of Romenal in Kent was abandoned twenty-four years later, for lack of lepers.’

  Perhaps we were misreading the transition from closed communities of the hurt and drug-damaged (lepers of the cosmetic city) to Barratt estates designed as novelties: protected enclaves with no memory. Perhaps there now existed a shortfall in derangement. Madness, visionary seizure, nonconformist rage belonged in another era – with the cinema of romantic individualism, bad boys, naughty girls provoked by the dull-minded orthodoxies of life under the nuclear umbrella. Jean Seberg sleepwalking through Robert Rossen’s Lilith. Jack Nicholson collecting an Oscar for deploying the most sinister grin (this side of Tony Blair) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Madness as performance. It was over.

  Sets were being struck. Foucault’s leper houses, part of (or in close proximity to) monastic institutions, became hospitals, prisons, prophylactic domes; isolation bred cruelty, until cruelty gave way to dialogue, the sanctioned shaman who interpreted dreams. Ships of Fools, sailing the rivers, putting out to sea, take on the guise of a fleet of Eddie Stobart lorries floating above the Dartford Bridge on a misty spring morning. Shenley, Harperbury and Napsbury were islands of the damned. From which the damned had vanished.

  ‘In the margins of the community,’ Foucault wrote, ‘at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and uninhabitable.’ We were moving through just such a zone. The mad had departed, leaving the hospitals functionless, inert. The remaining clerks and doctors were depressed. Central government had no interest in these sites. They were statistics to be manipulated, real estate to be turned to profit. Sweetheart deals with developers saw the great Victorian parks, with their dark histories, their infamous architecture, pillaged, revamped, repackaged in a matter of months. With little or no public debate, no accountability.

  ‘Celebrities flock to Chigwell,’ screamed the property pages. This was the Chigwell ‘made famous by the BBC’s hit comedy Birds of a Feather’. Repton Park, ‘with its Georgian-style villas and uniformed concierge service’, is wowing ‘snooker players and actors from EastEnders’, who are attracted by ‘the right combination of prestige and seclusion’. Crest Homes are the developers (note the tell-tale water tower in the illustration of this former asylum).

  What Crest have done is lose the name and history of Claybury Mental Hospital. So much of the East End, so many real East Enders, were decanted into this hilltop settlement. The sister of the Whitechapel hermit David Rodinsky died in Claybury. The water tower is an aid to navigation seen by motorists coming into London on the M11, by orbital traffickers on the North Circular. Claybury was a city in exile, forcible re-immigration. If they spoke in these long wards they spoke in tongues.

  When I was undertaking a series of walks that traced markings on Rodinsky’s battered copy of the London A-Z, I arrived at Claybury on the day when bulldozers were moving in. Georgian wasn’t the word I’d have used to describe the blocks I could see through the iron gate. But developers believe that a strategic change of name will wipe the slate: from Claybury Hospital to Repton Park. Claybury was once a manor house, a hall. That story fades and the name of the great English landscape-gardener, Humphry Repton, is invoked. Repton Park. Flashed into brochures and websites as a subconscious prompt: instant aristocracy. The improving of estates was Humphry’s scam; nothing could be more picturesque than an old madhouse. Repton Park is Crest Nicholson’s Northanger Abbey, pastiche Gothic: spooks, incestuous bondings, mad monks, secret passages recalibrated as pretty parkland. Prestige and seclusion. In skips outside the gates of Claybury, men in yellow hard hats were burning the hospital records.

  Repton kept his own work notes in ‘red books’, which always featured watercolour sketches showing the estates he had redesigned in ‘before’ and ‘after’ condition. Crest Nicholson favour the tactful dissolve: the tower remains, minatory blocks morph into detached villas, lawns and cricket squares are tidied up.

  Crest Nicholson are working their way around the loop on a ‘35 minutes from Liverpool Street’ arc. Claybury, Warley Hospital in Brentwood (aka Clements Park), Shenley. What they like is the floating colony, the space station landscaped by Humphry Repton or Lancelot Brown. A stylish no-place that is everyplace. No attachment to the local, an easy commute to the centre. The ideal Crest Homes estate defies history and computer-enhances geography.

  ‘It is not on the way to anywhere and is a real enclave,’ said Sarah Jones, sales and marketing director. ‘You drive off the main road and down a spine road before reaching the entrance gates.
There is a real sense of arrival.’ A sense not shared, not in that way, by the displaced of Whitechapel. Without a trace of irony, property journalist David Spittles puffs Repton Park as ‘one of the most sought-after addresses in the South-East’.

  As for the ecosystem, developer and hospital planner have much in common. Crest’s ‘masterplan’ is to create ‘a total living environment’. An independent community with chapel, recreation hall, gymnasium, swimming pool, park – alongside ‘the original Victorian water tower and cricket pitch’. The only difference is the quality of the silence: by day, the Crest Homes estate is deserted (no sign of children); you feel the eyes tracking you, the soft hum of surveillance cameras. The silence of the asylum was the silence of repression. Language interdicted. To speak was to confess.

  Evening in Harperbury is a sombre business. The status of the hospital is unresolved. It feels very much as if those who have been released from their confinement are about to make a down-payment on a more sophisticated version of the very thing from which they have taken hundreds of years to escape. Now there will be a public/private partnership: they must pay for their own prison. The only healing passage is the motorway fugue, the journey between this nowhere and the place of business. The road is the relieving dream.

  Walking under the M1 and on to Chequers Lane carried us east towards Abbots Langley. And Renchi’s car. Somehow, even though it looked simple when scrutinising the map under a light-pole, we became disorientated. The virus was getting to us; worse than the ulcers and terminal sniffles of foot-and-mouth, the memory haemorrhages of the Shenley Ridge hospital trail. We avoided footpaths and stuck to the road, dazzled by headlights.

  We were spinning, blindfolded, around a Foucault wasteland, a bell jar of ill-defined territory caught between the north/south pull of the M1 and the curve of the M25, as it turned towards Heathrow and the Thames. We felt the presence of water, the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal (ahead of us), and the Colne (which we had left behind). We were entering the gravitation field of Watford. That might have been the source of our directional difficulties: I couldn’t convince myself that Watford belonged inside the M25. It was too exotic for that: the family-friendly football club with the Italian millionaire manager, the multimillionaire figurehead, sparkly pub pianist Elton John (the former Reg Dwight). Watford was the testing ground for the multi-storey car park. In fact, Watford was to car parks what Chartres was to cathedrals. Watford’s automobile stacking experiments had an advocate as obsessed with their strange beauty as Monet had been with the light-filled windows of the great French cathedral.

  J.G. Ballard came to Watford to make a television documentary called Crash! which preceded his notorious auto(mobile)-erotic novel by two years. ‘There are an enormous number of multi-storey car parks in Watford,’ he told me when I interviewed him for a book on the Cronenberg film of his 1973 novel. ‘It’s the Mecca of the multi-storey car park. And they’re quite ornate, some of them. They played a special role in The Atrocity Exhibition. They were iconic structures. I was interested in the gauge of the psychoarchitectonics. The multi-storey car park and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.’

  Picturing Ballard’s haunted concrete temples, I brooded on why they made me uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter how high you climb, how many tight bends you sweat around, how narrowly you avoid leaving paintwork on a pillar, the trip to the top deck of a multi-storey car park is a voyage underground. Space-time is reversed. There’s no sound like the trapped screech of anxiously cornering tyres. They reverberate even when there is no vehicle on the ramp. The secret interiors of these post-human fortresses solicit conspiracy, acts of sexual transgression. Illicit exchanges between dealers. Movement fuzzes on the monitor, drivers swim from their vehicles.

  I used to meet a publishers’ rep in a car park in Watford, when he wanted to sell proof copies and other promotional gimmicks that would never reach the bookshops. Watford was the perfect location; obscure but not quite inconvenient for London or the garden city satellites. I drove there often, with-out really knowing where it was. The route wasn’t worth committing to memory. Ballard, describing a multi-storey car park in The Atrocity Exhibition, enthused over ‘inclined floors… forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle’.

  That’s what was throwing us, we weren’t in a car. Watford only made sense if you drove. The rest of the ground, captured in a bell jar, was being squeezed of air. We couldn’t take decisions, so our best option was to walk faster. In the twilight, by full-beam headlights, you couldn’t tell a Theological College from a Rehabilitation Centre. From a terminated asylum.

  The novelists of the early Sixties got it right with their titles. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, published in 1963, activates a metaphor that describes not only the airlessness of the ‘queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’, but also the landscape in which an asylum should be located.

  ‘The air of the bell jar wadded around me and I couldn’t stir.’ Wadded is spot-on for the top left corner of the M25 circuit; punchdrunk, throat choked with feathers. The neurosis is in the weather, alternately speedy and sluggish microclimates. Fast roads, slow rivers; traffic grudging to a halt. Fingers drumming on wheels. Harassed women who light up the first cigarette of the day, before checking their lipstick. The comfort-dummy of the cellphone.

  Plath’s novel, originally published under the pseudonym ‘Victoria Lucas’, was reissued by Faber in 1966, with a spiral cover illustration that looked as if it had been lifted by Bridget Riley from the credits of Hitchcock’s Spellbound. The intended effect, I presume, was to gaze into or out of (according to temperament) a bell jar. Concentric black lines refocusing, forming hallucinatory Maltese cross patterns, left the viewer nauseous and shaky.

  A fiction that in many ways anticipated The Bell Jar – sensitive, high-achieving young woman cracking up, retreating to an institution that is of course more eccentric, more difficult than the outside – world – appeared in 1961. And again the title could be interpreted as referring to territory on the fold of the map: Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha. Dawson’s metaphor of the moat or ditch (to keep out animals or imprison inmates) was expressed in heritaged, country house language. Archaic (if charming) terminology for the corner into which we were digging ourselves.

  A turn in the road, a gateway, a set of buildings, an arrangement of trees that seemed almost familiar: morning impressions compared with the evening return. The discovery of an arranged meeting place, early in the day, coming in from the motorway, is a very different thing to our arrival after a day’s walk. In walking, Potters Bar connects with Abbots Langley (lost apostrophes, both); we have followed a preordained narrative and not skipped from first sentence to conclusion.

  Without Renchi’s white car (I only do cars by their colour), I wouldn’t have known that this was the hospital where we had parked. The buildings have an uncomfortable Victorian look – grass you can’t walk, regimented flower beds, gymnasium that doubles as chapel: uniform design for hospital, barracks, Borstal, public school.

  At Leavesden Hospital, unauthored depression vectors the clammy ground. Abbots Langley (bestowed by Edward the Confessor upon the abbot of St Albans) was always sequestered territory: the pastoral care of the church devolving to apparently enlightened provisions of the state. By removing incapacitated and antisocial elements from the city and exposing them (in ‘airing courts’) to country breezes, it was fondly supposed that troubled memories would fade, useful skills could be acquired.

  ‘The country, by the gentleness and variety of its landscapes,’ Foucault wrote, ‘wins melancholies from their single obsession “by taking them away from the places that might revive the memory of their sufferings”.’ The country, or this remnant of it, was therefore a kind of amnesia, and the asylum a place of forgetting. Urban loci – chur
ches, pubs, markets – were always provokers of pain. The narrative burden of the generations was overwhelming. Out here on the motorway rim there were no memories. Nothing had happened. All accounts of incarceration, all voyages towards recovery, begin with that journey: the cart, the ambulance, the distance between home and the walled nowhere.

  Colne & Green Way

  Abbots Langley to Staines

  1

  8 February 1999. Meeting at the railway station at Denham (Renchi has vague memories of having edited a film here, the beginning and end of his career in art house cinema), we ticket one car and drive the other back; a short, liberating burst of M25 motorway. To Abbots Langley. And the Leavesden Hospital.

  It’s early enough to experience the sense of motoring-as-freedom, the open road, that Abercrombie and the other visionaries of the County of London Plan espoused. They saw: city centres with monumental civic buildings surrounded by rubble; then suburbs, garden satellites, to be reached by an interlinked series of parkland drives. We were skimming around the lip of a dish, climbing through lightly wooded countryside, sleepy villages, the fantasy England of J. Arthur Rank and his film studios. This excessively domesticated landscape had never recovered from its exploitation in hundreds of undistinguished films. It sulked about its status as generic woodland: highwaymen, beauty-spot ladies with scooped necklines, farcical campers, middle-aged medical students whooping it up. Dirk Bogarde, Leslie Phillips, Diana Dors, Joan Collins, Kenneth More, the Mills family, Virginia McKenna, Dickie Attenborough.