Back at Leavesden Hospital in Abbots Langley, there were signs that the developers were moving in. We could still park undisturbed in the grounds, but that wouldn’t last. Since our last visit I’d read up on the history of this estate; I’d looked at maps and plans, drawings by the original architects John Giles and Biven of Craven Street, London – who produced the successful application in March 1868. Giles delivered a layout of separated (and segregated) units, an E tipped on its back, with a single extended building as its spine. The E is not only the code-breakers’ friend, the commonest letter in any document, it is also the most common element in the architecture of social containment. Around the motorway there are numerous E-shaped blocks, scoring madness. Sounding, when pronounced, like a cackle of mocking laughter: ‘E-e-e-e-e.’
Leavesden was set up to deal with rigorously enforced categories of incapacity: the mentally handicapped, imbeciles (who couldn’t look after themselves), and idiots who were deemed to be ‘deeply defective’. The hospital was organised around rules laid down in the 1845 Act ‘for the Regulation and Care and Treatment of Lunatics’.
Curved paths and tactful plantings disguise the nature and extent of the hospital colony. We are parked on the drive, near the entrance gates. Visitors would see a chapel, an administrative building with a clocktower, the darker blocks with their narrow ‘airing courts’ would be hidden.
London was divided, as if by a rope stretched from Poplar to Paddington. Those who lived south of that line, if they were thought to be in need of care and treatment, were removed to Caterham in Surrey, to St Lawrence’s Hospital. Those who lived to the north of the Poplar/Paddington line were dispatched to Leavesden.
The notions of the Victorian committee men who drew up the rules for the treatment of lunatics (and the designs for the hospitals that would hold them) were very much like the projections of present developers. Hospital estates should be ‘not less than twenty acres in extent’. Hospitals should be sited ‘within a radius of twenty miles of Charing Cross’. But twenty miles was often too far for friends and families of the Leavesden inmates. One visit a month was permitted, but rarely taken up.
The ‘quiet and harmless’ imbecile who could be trained to undertake simple tasks was the ideal. Women were put to the picking and coiling of hair. Their bed linen was made by patients at Colney Hatch (later Friern Barnet, later still another development site). Mats and baskets were woven by prisoners in Coldbath Fields, Clerkenwell. Clothing was coarse. It was taken away at night, locked in another room, to be re-sorted and claimed the next morning: a cumbersome proceeding that resulted in garments going missing or finishing on inmates of a different shape and size. Men slept in their work shirts. Women were given Turkish baths, to counter the ‘biliousness’ consequent upon poor diet, lack of exercise.
When there is only the Italianate water tower left, the coldness of the water, drawn up through chalk or clay or sand, seeps like a shadow across the tame lawns. Water was always a hinge for magicians, a means of switching modes of consciousness. Water was universal memory. The hospitals belonged to water, to underground reservoirs. Water for treatment. Water for hygiene. Water for sanitation. It wasn’t until the 1920s that patients at Leavesden were, if they earned the privilege, allowed to use toilet paper rather than cut-up squares of railway timetables.
Patients were watchers, never participants. They watched the staff play cricket. They moved about the grounds on lines of tolerance, keeping off the grass, forbidden to wander. They were rounded up for weekly dances. They attended film presentations in the early days of cinema – until the projector was banished as a fire risk. They witnessed films that were juddery snatches of reality; a train coming into a station, a hosepipe on a lawn. They saw frantic comedies that parodied their own convulsive movements. The films were silent. There was no musical accompaniment. They were marched into concert parties performed by the staff. That was the world of the hospital: warder and patient, subject and object, performer and milk-eyed witness. Patients were encouraged to achieve the Buddhist sense of clinging to nothing, disembodiment, no desires: strange ceremonies were put before them but they must react without excitement or hysteria. Their days were slow circuits of obedience, repetitive tasks, brief exposure to the weather. Leavesden was a monastery policed by non-initiates, uniformed citizens who must make their own entertainment – sport, music, theatre – like colonialists in a distant outpost of Empire.
In 1884 the Medical Superintendent, Dr Case, decreed that ‘the use of tobacco was absolutely necessary in the treatment of the insane’. Smoking was encouraged. Clay pipes were issued. After 1905, wooden pipes were permitted. Smoke soothed. The fiddly rituals of the smoker gave a shape to the day. Tobacco was a form of shamanic magic. The sweat lodge of the Turkish bath. Blue smoke curling upwards in the long wards. An interior fug that made them nostalgic for London’s autumnal peasoupers.
The hospital accurately reflected society. By 1913 new categories of infirmity were recognised as suitable grounds for certification. The ‘feeble-minded’ (any nuisance, drunk, women suffering post-natal depression) could be banished to Leavesden or Caterham. ‘Moral imbeciles’ were also rounded up in a programme of culling that would eugenically cleanse the national blood stock. Anti-social behaviour – inappropriate pregnancies, adultery, radicalism, riot – could see the offender put away, signed for by GP, magistrate, or their own disaffected relatives.
In time, libertarian theories were introduced. Patients worked on a farm – until that was sold for development. The piggery lasted until 1973, when it was deemed to be no longer commercial. ‘Harmless’ inmates were taken, in a long crocodile, for walks into the local countryside. They went to Bedmond by way of East Lane, past the home farm and the burial ground. East Lane was thought to be relatively free of traffic. There was one obvious drawback to the continuance of that walk. Leavesden and Bedmond are on different sides of the M25. East Lane tunnels under the motorway.
More enlightened attitudes prevailed. Inspections identified mismanagement, the cruelties that are always found in closed systems. Smaller units replaced the huge wards. Old people were given some dignity by exchanges with younger children, in which they became surrogate grandparents. Names replaced numbers on the dormitories. The sexes were allowed a measure of free association. The number of patients fell.
Leavesden, in the Thatcherite Eighties, had to be put on a proper business footing. Management consultants arrived. The NHS was under pressure to realise its principal asset, land. New Labour redefined Tory asset-stripping as a kind of mysterious life-enhancing policy that was too complex, too sensitive, to be revealed to the voters. Victorian hulks didn’t belong in the green belt. Best Value. There were skirmishes over planning permission at Napsbury, but the directive stood: sell to the highest bidder. A measure of heritage would be retained, water towers, cricket pitches. Turn expediency into a boast: we will set the last inmates free. If there is no society, how can there be any social inadequates? Let them take up residence in Watford hostels.
But the citizens of the motorway corridor don’t like that word, hostel. Hostel hisses. Hostel suggests hospital, hospice. Dying rooms, cancer clubs. Hostel speaks of charity, pilgrims. Asylum seekers. Benefit scroungers. Watford, with its street of hostels, could become another Margate, another King’s Cross. Junkies without proper medication. Thieves. Bandits. Tarts. Gyppos. Loonies.
Foucault understands very well how a place that ‘was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience’. The fugue, the search for a site of redemption, can very easily turn into a counter-pilgrimage. Madmen find themselves confined alongside the holy relics which they have travelled so far to honour. When the shrine is converted into a ward, the mad traveller (according to Foucault’s interpretation) will be classified as just another ‘ritual exile’. He doesn’t belong to city or countryside: that is his curse and his privilege, to be always moving, to be at home nowhere and everywhere.
The sky wa
s a miracle of pink, stippled over the early blue. Renchi was stocking-capped against the strong diagonals of the cloud streets. A placard on the hospital wall: DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY/FOR SALE/ALL ENQUIRIES/WEATHERALL/GREENE & SMITH.
Glints from bowed windows, net curtains. The occasional electric milk float. Nothing else moving around the streets of Abbots Langley, as we make our way towards the conjunction of the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal. River systems nudging out from Chiltern chalk towards the Thames.
There is a residual strangeness in these aborted villages; settlements are unsettled, restless, dozing alongside the muffled millrace of the motorway. The original layout of streets, around the manor house and the church of St Lawrence, has been warped to accommodate hospital colonies, their farms, the Leavesden Aerodrome. The North Orbital Road drags everything towards the hungry M-numbers, M25 and Ml. Watford is ballast to the south.
Even the speculative builders are confused. Should they run up identical units, pebbledash kennels that grow in the night like serpents’ teeth? Or should they go for that post-Voysey, Arts and Crafts look? Gabled, mock-beamed, doors decorated with stained glass sunsets? Hedges, shrubs, evergreens. These avenues don’t smell like Hackney. Without the shops, fast food outlets, cigarette packets chucked out of can, cartons and wrappings and newspapers, claim forms and parking tickets, final demands and chewing gum, paving slabs are free of the soft, bright mulch of the city. They don’t rock when you put your weight on them. No sparkling puddles of glass punched out of bus stops, crystals from trashed windscreens. No vomit skids, no steaming canine excreta. Out here cars sit serenely on wide pavements, each in its own space – within meticulously observed demarcation lines. Gallows Hill Lane is like a funeral procession held at traffic lights that will never change.
One car is obviously a collector’s piece. It’s white, but nothing like the white of Renchi’s well-used vehicle. The white of aspiration, of burnt-out film frames. It would never make it around the tight spirals of a Watford multi-storey car park. It’s long and low and lean, with fins and exoskeletal ribs; fat, white-wall tyres, girder-sized bumpers, tinted windows, banks of rear lights like a Spielberg spaceship. Lefthand drive. The lightning-flash trim is supposed to suggest that, even parked on a pavement in a deadbeat suburb, this mother is flying. A gas-guzzling, highway-devouring passion wagon. Head-on, the blunt bonnet with its sharks’ fin decorations, chrome-nipples, pseudo propellers on front bumpers, predatory radiator grille, is pure bombast. The Detroit recipe: carved fat, metal on steroids. But this is nothing more than a trophy, going nowhere, wheels sunk into grooves on the pavement. An anachronistic art work with its nose pointing at a motorway it will never ride.
Access to the canal is easy, we’re on a footpath that will take us south, back to Denham; we’re walking a line that’s parallel with the M25 – but we’re separated by the soft tissue of golf courses, woods and fields. We might have been tempted, later in the day, to make a detour for Merlin’s Wood and Merlin’s Spring, but we prefer just now to push on, in the general direction of Watford and breakfast.
The canal path is perfectly pleasant, still water reflecting a brightening sky; a shaggy rim of winter trees, smoke climbing straight from the thin chimneys of moored narrow boats. The walk becomes a stroll. We’re never entirely comfortable about travelling through territory that is happy to have our company. (Blairite motto: Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.)
The Grand Union Canal is no longer a commercial artery, working water. It’s deeper into its transformation than the Lee Valley Navigation. The spectre of quango-approved recreation, leisure lakes, hangs over us. We can smell bacon fizzing in the pan. A crisp morning with a taste of snow in the air.
The Gade ox-bows with the canal; if we’re given a choice, we take the river. In its day, the Grand Union was a wonder, eight canals connected in a network that linked Birmingham with Nottingham, Oxford and London. Wide locks were built to take seventy-ton barges.
The bridges are a feature. They’re numbered. We’re at 162 and climbing. The Earl of Essex, who graciously allowed the Grand Junction Canal Company to cut a navigation through his park, commissioned an ornamental stone bridge to ameliorate the vulgarity of the venture. By designing an elegantly minimalist structure, with stone balustrades, heraldic capstone, symmetrical foot tunnels, he turned the canal into a pond, Palladian whimsy, a Chatsworth or Stowe of the (future) motorway fringe.
Before we reach this minor architectural feature, there are lesser spans to negotiate, bridges that have been customised to come into line with the prevailing post-hippie ethos of the narrow boats. Woodsmoke and the herb. Bright flowers in painted mugs. Bicycles. They haven’t cycled off to fetch the milk, but they’ve fired the day’s first spliff. These psychedelic barges are Notting Hill squats, batik-draped tents, Hendrix hutches of thirty years ago, now migrated (in my cultural tectonic plate theory) ten or twelves miles along the canal to the west. The stretch of water, from Watford to Uxbridge, is a floating Ladbroke Grove, a flooded Westbourne Park Road. They leave their boots out on deck. They have cats and books and guitars. They turn the arches of the nearest bridge into a Westway; extravagant murals of crows, purple seas and a black ship of fools, I LIVE HERE scrawled in chalk over a scarlet beach.
The canal is an interloper in what was once a landscape of private parks, perched on a synclinal basin of chalk strata. The evidence of country mansions, captured and downgraded, is visible on all sides. Pheasant woods and copses with their well-tended roads, their gates and surveillance systems. The Grand Union Canal was a Faustian contract, which allowed ruffians into the garden. Locks for road tolls, riverside pubs for service stations. Industrial cargoes on the move, without much noise, without devastating fossil fuel reserves. Between the Midlands and London. Cassiobury Park on the outskirts of Watford, with its golf course, bowling green, paddling pool and watercress beds, was once part of the Earl of Essex’s estate.
The Navigation was a conduit for runaways, disappearances, the adoption of new identities. Alongside one of the bridges, a notice in a plastic envelope has been pinned to the wall: MISSING. We’re used to pet solicitation, pen portraits of dogs and cats. Snapshots taped to trees in parks and suburbs. Rewards offered. This is different. ‘Man aged 57, silver-grey short wavy hair, slightly built 5ft 5in tall, last seen in Gadebridge (Hemel Hempstead) 9:30 am Tues 26th January 1999.’
The head of the man, smiling, has been cut from another photograph and enlarged. White, open-neck shirt. A segment of striped sofa, a wallpaper border of roses. The smile is hesitant. What’s the occasion? Who took the photograph? Who kept it? Is this a working man or a member of the middle classes relaxing at the weekend? He’s clean-shaven. The hair is short, carelessly chopped. The visible right ear is a flesh oyster, a boxer’s ear. The jaw’s firm, there are no teeth on show. The nose might once have been broken. But somebody is still looking for this unnamed man who was last seen in Gadebridge.
Canals, creeping out of town by the dimmest and dirtiest ways, brought harm into the countryside. Canals were places of suicide. They were convenient for the disposal of bodies. The literary trajectory runs from Dickens to Alex Trocchi and the Northern working-class novelists of the Sixties – who favoured the urban Gothic of dying industries and wild nature, abandoned paths and gloomy basins. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens uses the canal system as a clogged drain, silted with recrimination, self-lacerating guilt and fantasies of revenge. Walkers hustle beside dark water, pursued by ghosts and whispering demons.
Bradley walked out of the Lock-house. Catching up from the table a piece of bread, and taking his Bargeman’s bundle under his arm, Riderhood immediately followed him. Bradley turned towards London. Riderhood caught him up, and walked at his side. The two men trudged on, side by side, in silence, full three miles. Suddenly, Bradley turned to retrace his course. Instantly Riderhood turned likewise, and they went back side by side.
And so on.
After an hour or more, Bradley abrup
tly got up again, and again went out, but this time turned the other way. Riderhood was close after him, caught him up in a few paces, and walked at his side.
The bitter schoolteacher, Bradley Headstone, and the bounty-hunting riverman, the fisher of bodies, who doubles as a Lock-keeper. They walk their fugues: stop, turn, retreat, begin again. Until they plunge together into the weir, Riderhood gripped by Headstone: ‘girdled still with Bradley’s iron ring, and the rivets of the iron ring held tight’.
Watford, though I’ve never thought of it that way, is a place of water, the River Colne closing on the Gade, the sweep of the Grand Union Canal; there are basins and barges and docks that facilitate waterborne traffic. Road signs direct us towards the promise of a necklace of ‘Springs’. Watford is Hertfordshire’s biggest town, a hilltop settlement known for its breweries and printing works. Or that’s what the brochure would have you believe. Our impressions, coming in on foot, are less focused.
There are no shops, no cafés. A Tesco megastore dominates the canal, exploiting water as a picturesque backdrop, rather than a way of transporting potential customers. A spray-bandit has revised the British Waterways sign that forbids swimming (‘danger of contracting waterborne disease’): ANGER for DANGER. A Nottingham narrow boat offering TAROT readings is moored alongside the railway bridge.
We decide that it is time to come away from the canal, to head into Watford in search of breakfast. We tramp, obediently, towards the ‘centre’ of a town that has no centre, just a collision of random bits and pieces representing different eras, abandoned speculations. Renchi returned a few weeks later to a house in a quiet Watford street. He attended a Hindu fire-ceremony. Fire and water. Music. Candles and food. A welcome for this stranger.
London Orbital Page 18