London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  Examine the Victorian portraits in their silver-framed ovals. Crossland, bald and bearded, is a serious man with an expanding forehead. Holloway, on the other hand, is quiffed and teased; commas of luxuriant growth decorating his cheekbones. Crossland, the artist in stone, presents himself as a solid citizen. Holloway, peddling his patent remedies, ointments possessed of a ‘healing genius’, photographs like a male lead out of Dickens: Pip or the youthful David Copperfield. The magic medicine, when analysed, was found to consist of yellow beeswax, lanolin and olive oil. It made Holloway’s fortune, sponsored his civic benevolence: two colonies, red brick monsters, college and sanatorium. A theme park madhouse carved out of beeswax.

  The final cost of the collegiate fantasy in Virginia Water rose to Millennium Dome proportions; by the time the first brick was laid by Jane Holloway, her husband had become a melancholy recluse. He died in 1883.

  The architect Crossland’s last major commission was the Memorial Chapel to Holloway at Sunninghill. He died in a Camden Town boarding house in 1908, leaving an estate of £29.

  It took two or three attempts before we were allowed in. We chatted to security through iron gates. We were repulsed at manned lodges. But part of the remit at Virginia Park – the developers Octagon having received a contribution from English Heritage – is to allow students of architecture (and the vulgarly curious) a glimpse of this restored Victorian folly. Virginia Park had always been a high-risk development: lead had been stripped from the roof, decorated walls were damp-stained. English weather had devastated the property. But the Octagon operation wasn’t one of the asset stripping (burn and bury) efforts we’d encountered along the northern section of the M25. Memory was not trashed but tactfully restored, varnished: improved. Virginia Park would combine the gravitas of the Victoria and Albert Museum with five-star facilities, acceptable to multinational transients: gym, swimming pool, state of the art plumbing, landscape gardening.

  On the right day, at the right hour, cash in hand, visitors are allowed to pass through the security gates. An (achieved) asylum seeker, friendly, but nervous of writing a receipt, steps from his checkpoint-office to point out the route we should take.

  If you weren’t already an orthopedic waistcoat-wearer (laced like Lillie Langtry), the decor of the entrance hall at the Holloway Sanatorium would push you over the edge. If you suffered from nerves, if you were thyroid-twitchy, spots in front of the eyes, flinching from bright colours, here was shock therapy. Nothing in our approach had prepared us for this. The path was immaculate, as were the white sports clothes, white ankle-socks, trainers, baseball caps of the women who cruised the grounds: four-wheel drives, multi-geared mountain bikes (for the bowling-green flat trip to the gates). The investors in Octagon’s award-winning development are looking for convenient crash-pads, close to London Airport: maximum security, modest service charges, en suite exercise equipment, silence.

  ‘An enviable lifestyle on the grand scale,’ says the brochure. The very pitch that was made to wealthy Victorian families with flaky relatives. ‘Gracious four storey town houses.’ (If you can have town houses without a town.) The message, in the promotional photographs, is confused: Japanese minimalism (one blue and white vase), US hygiene fetishism, ersatz Regency drapes, Trusthouse Forte oil paintings.

  However meticulous the makeover, the back story always leaks, seeps through as an ineradicable miasma. Pain, displacement. The agony of knowing enough to know that something is wrong, a moment’s remission will be followed by a renewed attack. Consciousness misplaced in long corridors. Buildings slip and shift and refuse to settle on a single identity. They have been created through the madness of money, designed by a man harried by all the demons of the Gothic imagination.

  The entrance hall, restored by ‘artists and craftsmen’, is insane; a Turkish bath of wild candyfloss colours, synapse-destroying detail – Celtic, Moorish, Norse. Sultan’s Palace arches. Pillars dividing into lesser pillars. A bestiary of monsters: tongues, mouths, teeth, claws. If you were a tranquillised stoic, calm as a stone, you’d freak and tremble. ‘I’m not going near that scarlet carpet, that staircase.’ Imagery is hysterical. The eye can’t settle. The part of the brain that has to unscramble visual information spins like a fruit machine.

  The front door is still open, the stone floor is cool. The woman who does PR for Octagon is a helpful and reassuring presence. Knowing how we feel, she distracts us; leads the way to the hammerbeam-ceilinged dining hall.

  Dark wood – inset with Arts and Crafts panels. Stained glass. A Pre-Raphaelite hall. Illuminated by low-hanging glass bowls. The heat has us coughing. Hothouse moist. Comfort pushed, until it becomes a torment.

  We make admiring noises. This is a very striking set. But it is also a brain teaser. When you walk around Virginia Park you develop split-screen vision: the ceiling of the dining hall is just what you might expect in a Victorian public school, a university of the right vintage, but the body of the room has been utterly transformed. It is now a swimming pool. An attractive woman – I think of Ballard’s narcoleptic Mediparc communities – does her lazy laps. The acoustic memory-track of Holloway’s disturbed patients is absorbed in steady plashing, lost in tall space. Temperature has to be cranked up to preserve the fancy carpentry. The solitary swimmer, observed by the ruffians at the door, doesn’t break her stroke. She cultivates a method of moving through this speckled blue medium, excluding all fear of the tons of overwrought wood, the stalactite forest that hangs above the water.

  After the empty gym, the abandoned exercise bicycles, we are free to explore the development. The Grand Hall, once a rather intimidating library (not many books, portraits of worthies), now features a stage and a sheeted grand piano. The foot-pedals have been slipped into cosy white socks. The scale of the Hall would have agoraphobics cowering under the piano. It struck us, perambulating the acres of polished floor, that every phobia was humoured: you name it, we’ll give it to you. A white-knuckle ride for the mentally incapacitated, the morally enfeebled.

  We’d been loaned a swipe card which let us into the chapel. Octagon realised that their transients would never agree on a form of worship: there were Buddhists, Catholics, Greek Cypriots next to Turkish Cypriots, US fundamentalists, flag-worshippers and total abstainers. The chapel, once the focus (social and ethical) of the community, had been reconceptualised (and left out of Octagon’s brochure). Patterns of coloured light from stained-glass windows played on a brilliant parquet floor. The altarpiece was curtained off, but we had been given permission to look at it. Madonna, gilt. Niches, stone vines, elaborate iconography: symbols of discontinued superstition (that the developers were superstitious enough to preserve).

  A new cross-substitute had been erected in front of the altar: a basketball net (black tree, white halo panel, string bag). The floor had been polished for a purpose. The chapel was now a basketball court, divided into zones and quarters. The Jesus figure from the stained-glass window (scarlet loincloth) gazed down on the spectacle: an athlete sponsored by Nike. The saints and apostles were witnesses of a new cult: narcissism, conceptual exercise, the squeak of rubber soles on pale wood.

  Going for a double-header, we walked back to Egham, to visit Royal Holloway College. Renchi was keen to exorcise the theft of Queen Victoria’s hand.

  We stopped in a pub, an average English summer’s day (wickets were tumbling in the Test Match), then marched up the hill. The College was as strange as the Sanatorium: twin cloisters, an excess of windows, a history that overwhelms present occupants. Having entered one set of cloisters – panned around in amazement – we located the wrong statue. Victoria occupied the other court. Trying to figure out a way of getting close to the royal pedestal, without backtracking, we lost ourselves in subterranean passages, kitchens. An alarm sounded.

  Had we set it off? Intruders. It went on and on ringing. Students, unconcerned, ambled into the cloisters. Corridors, staircases, walkways were deserted. We had the place to ourselves. A fenced-off rectangle of g
rass, a statue; red brick on all sides. An overemphatic alarm.

  We found our way back out into the grounds, circled to where we hoped to discover the entrance to the second set of cloisters. By now, fire engines were arriving on the scene, bells jangling. A dementedly civilised episode: dons in ermine trim, students in black gowns, tame clergy, garden party females. Lovely dappled sunlight. Degree ceremony interrupted by this irritating bell, fire drills processed as per instruction. The whole mob have to stand, making conversation, under a tree, waiting for the all-clear – which no one in authority is prepared to sound.

  A lawn sprinkler shudders and jerks. Rainbows dazzle in the stream. The blackened statue of the queen is framed in an archway, behind dignitaries and students; behind the security men who are blocking our access. Through my long lens I can see that she suffers from no deformity. The hand, if it was ever missing, has been restored. The original, buried in a Hampshire garden, can stay where it is.

  Renchi almost made it, the arrival of the train at Alton; we were standing with the young artist, an awkward group, in front of the phone-in sandwich bar, as his car pulled up. Then, three or four simultaneous conversations interrupting engine noise, we were off, moving through soft countryside.

  Being driven, being a guest – and then a guest of a guest – was disconcerting. The house, in the village on the edge of Salisbury Plain, was an accumulation of other houses, red brick extensions, converted stables, potting sheds with conservatory flourishes. The selling point was the mill stream. With lawns, vegetable gardens, clouds of white blossom.

  The house was deserted.

  The doors were open, we wandered through, and out into the grounds. Nobody challenged us, nobody was seen. Renchi, naked head wrapped in blue bandanna, was in shorts, sandals. A LEARN-SWAHILI T-shirt. He squatted on a plank bridge, a black dog beside him, hoping for a walk. Green water, reeds. Country time ebbed around us, as we sat, strolled, waited.

  The day was warm. The mill stream, the moist greenery, made it bearable. Would it be possible to live in pastoral suspension – no traffic noise, no military helicopters (just then), free-flowing water, dropsical bees? Would it be feasible to paint, to produce work at the stupendous rate Sara H achieved? Why not let it all go, feet in stream, dogs sleeping in shade? A little light gardening, raspberry picking, when the sun went down.

  Out of this trance came the call to lunch. Odd chairs, indoor chairs (walnut, oak, rosewood) brought outside: all shapes and sizes, around a long table. A selection of used hats are offered: shapeless fishing things with flies, broadbrim stockman, baseball, battered Panama, Van Gogh straw. The Chinese/Vietnamese sculptor, a neat person, sun specs nestled in hair, is astonished by this ritual. She declines, flinching from the notion of communal headgear. Most of the others go for it, something to keep off the midday sun.

  An empty house, grounds given over to large black dogs, and then out of nowhere a mob around a long table. Who are they? We’re too English to find out or to make proper introductions. It seems that an elderly male occupies the main house and that others, daughters, ex-partners, future partners, friends, associates, camp somewhere on the property. Sara paints in a cupboard.

  A pike has been caught in the mill stream by a man everyone says should be a TV gardener. The mythic monster was brought ashore in a net improvised from chicken wire. The flavour is ancient, almost meaty. It’s a subversive act to taste this flesh, cool, ivory-green, rare; afterbreath of decay disguised in a creamy mayonnaise ointment. Bowls of brown potatoes from the garden. Jugs of fruit juice.

  Sara is quiet. We know that the meal, however welcome and well managed, can’t be allowed to stretch too far into the afternoon. It is the hospitable preliminary to the move indoors, the viewing of the paintings.

  Processing through the dark cool house, Sara’s early paintings are pointed out – lemons, dogs, prize cockerels. ‘Red is always good. Red sells,’ a lady with smoked glasses and rings (who hopes to promote Sara’s new visionary series) tells me.

  Stairs creak. Family plunder, more than a single household can store, takes up all the available space. Houses lived in for generations become museums of the familiar. There is always an attic, a space under the roof where the reserve collection, unattributed cargo, can be hidden away: universal memories, the dream-sludge of lost childhoods. One section of the Wiltshire attic bows under the freight of Sara’s dictated paintings. Her audience sit, or squat, in an outer chamber, as she carries her work through, painting by painting, several hundred of them, and each with its own narrative.

  We’re in the old nursery. White cupboards. Stolen light. The managed effluvia of banishment, frustration. Rest hours that spanned the eternity of a summer afternoon. We can’t move. We’re trapped in children’s chairs, wedged. If I stand up, the chair comes with me.

  The spirit guide, who arrived at a time of personal crisis for Sara, let it be known that her task was to produce twelve sequences, each sequence consisting of a hundred or more linked canvases. The room we are sitting in is too small for this news. As an audience, we shrivel: our reception of the descriptions Sara offers – precise, slightly robotic – shifts from shared excitement to indifferently disguised boredom. Claustrophobia.

  Mad, isn’t it? The blue paint costs £20 a tube. The guide says that the next series will require larger canvases. Sara is rapidly depleting her financial reserves, rapidly filling the nursery with paintings that look like maps, dreamings, motorway junctions. You can’t make aesthetic judgements, that one canvas is better or more achieved than another; they are produced so quickly – and wheeled into the room where we’re sitting with no break in the monologue. Sometimes there is an anecdote, sometimes we’re told that an area of the painting refers to a pre-birth memory, pain cluster, the resolution of a psychic drama. What appears to the casual eye as abstraction is known to the artist as the record of movement through time, a journey. Technically the paintings are difficult to transact, certain lines in certain colours have to be laid down first. The guide is firm on that point. The background is painted last – without muddying outlines already set in place. The whole process sounds agonising. But Sara doesn’t complain. She answers our questions – which are hesitant. Nobody knows quite how far they can go with these revelations – sympathy, awe, bemusement? Other artists are invoked – Klee, Kandin-sky, Bernard Cohen – but the comparisons aren’t helpful. Sara isn’t refining a style; she’s a technician, a willing stenographer of the unconscious. Notions of Aboriginal art, songlines, Navaho sand paintings, are more appropriate. If Renchi is looking for a way, through his walk around the M25, to find a topography sympathetic to his romantic sensibility (part documentary record, part vision), Sara seems to have accessed that chaos map. Renchi’s task is finite, 150 miles of liminal wanderings and the circuit will break down into columns: salt, sand, chalk, dirt. Accepted symbols. The white canvases of Sara, with their weavings, dark loops, are infinite. No way out: the impulse to create won’t be appeased, there is no evidence for the landscapes her maps describe.

  Sara’s titles, delivered by her guide, are wild. She takes dictation from the dead, the disembodied. I thought she was talking about ‘bent lions’, before her finger pointed out a bend in the line. Her colours could be aphasic, vile: neon-greens, lurid oranges she would have spurned in her former life as pet portraitist. Even now she finds herself apologising for the aesthetic shortcomings of her inflexible master.

  The attic is about dispersal. Moments of inspiration become, through repetition, de-energising. An hour is as much as the audience can take. Sara, brown and fit, long skirt and sandals, must tell the whole story: to the last canvas. I fixate on her mouth, the voice, the strong white teeth. She is a psychic trumpet to a performance that belongs outside our motorway orbit, far from London. Sara has been told to varnish a number of the paintings and send them to the Royal Academy.

  Afternoon light thins. Our concentration makes the attic room feel cold. There is a requirement to respond, to do something with
this work. I try to persuade Anna that it would make a book, the trajectory from English animals, Wiltshire garden, to the never-ending and unresolvable project. But she’s too canny. She knows how easy it would be to disappear into the tale, the obsession. We’re starting to struggle for breath. A soft white dove, said to be ‘stupid’, bangs against the window. The apparition is taken for a sign. There are trains to catch. We express, inadequately, our gratitude to Sara, and we’re back on the road.

  London, by early evening, is under siege. Public transport isn’t operating and the cab rank at Waterloo is attended by travellers moving at the wrong speed – as if they’ve arrived, unprepared, from a distant country. The city is muggy, close, airless.

  Getting into somebody else’s vehicle, abdicating responsibility, giving out an address, is usually a relief. You might pay for it – punitive damages on the clock, unprovoked monologue – but, weary from train-hours, the events of a long day, the indulgence is justified. Not advancing, being overtaken by pedestrians with Zimmer frames, is the norm. The taxi heart thumps, adding its fumes to the stickiness that glues the city streets. We pull all the usual cab stunts, U-turns, lane jumps, window-to-window exchanges with other initiates; it doesn’t signify. We could run west as far as Mortlake, creep east in the direction of the Blackwall Tunnel, we would never cross the river.

  The protesters have succeeded in closing the bridges. Cabbies have the best take on congestion, traffic flow: they take it personally. All other life forms (mini-cab bandits, asylum seekers, politicians, cyclists, pedestrians) have it in for honest, self-employed, home-owning, golf-whenever-possible, Hertfordshire fringe, knowledge-achieved British taxi man. Cabbies don’t swear (even at the illegitimate ‘thems’ and ‘thoses’ that make their lives a misery). They’ve been schooled in rage management. They don’t want you to smoke. They keep a clean vehicle. They take some exercise. They are married, divorced, married again. They are buying in Spain. Only to discover that everything they’ve grafted for is threatened by state-sponsored anarchists.