Do we take the time to visit Painshill Landscape Garden (aka Painshill Park)? We don’t know anything about the place, but here it is – and, on this rather dim section of the walk, we’re ready to access the unexpected. The A3 runs down the west side of the extensive grounds and the M25 carves around to the south: Painshill (supported by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, English Heritage, the Countryside Commission and Surrey County Council) is overendowed real estate. Like so much else that we’ve encountered, it is dedicated to customising the past as a way of making us feel good about ourselves: we come from somewhere, we have a lineage. That which is worth preserving has been preserved. We meditate, by walking specified and guided routes, on the lessons that history can teach us. The M25 is ringed with National Trust properties, mansions, estates, hills, towers. Runnymede through Hatch-lands Park to Box Hill. Brochures tell you what you should notice: ‘mammals such as the dormouse, plus a nationally important bat population’. Box Hill is doubly blessed: by ‘spectacular views towards the West Sussex Downs’ and by its association with the Jane Austen movie franchise. Surrey is divided between the bits where Merchant/Ivory exercise their Forster options (watch out for a naked Simon Callow plunging into a woodland pool) and hillocks where one of Austen’s headstrong young ladies can be beastly to her elders. For location caterers, it’s west to Hardy country (Polanski, Schlesinger) or east to India (David Lean).
The ascent of Box Hill, formerly a Cockney outing (deplored by mandarin essayists like Sir Sidney Colvin), is now pictured in the National Trust brochure as a procession of mountain bikes. ‘On the summit there is a visitor centre, shop with plant sales, servery and a fort (partly open to the public).’
My feeling is that anywhere with a ‘servery’, anywhere that is ‘partly open’, is to be avoided. Why let someone else nominate sites that are worth visiting? If you want a shop, you should find a shop. Sainsbury’s (Cobham) has a better servery than Box Hill. The space underneath Runnymede Bridge is more exciting than the National Trust recommended Runnymede Meadows (with ‘popular tea-room’). Don’t take my word for it, don’t bother with my list of alternative attractions – Junction 21 of the M25, the Siebel building in Egham, Hawksmoor’s gravestone in Shenley; discover your own. In the finding is the experience.
Painshill, unrecommended, unknown to us, was irresistible. Acquired, designed, planted by the Honourable Charles Hamilton (1704 – 86), the estate consists of several hundred acres of barren heathland converted into a gallery of views, framed landscapes, to rival Stourhead or Stowe. Hamilton almost bankrupted himself in the process. An enterprise undertaken to satisfy his vanity, and to astonish his friends, is now – after two hundred years of ‘seclusion’ – offered to the public, as a venue for ‘events’. Days are given over to Teddy Bear Trails, Santa in the Grotto and demonstrations of water wheels. The park, with its Augustan conceits, its Gothic fantasies, has been thoroughly democratised.
We’re conscious, from the start of our tour, from the moment we pick up the Painshill Park Trust leaflet (and map), that we are processing through an elaborately staged masque; graded effects. The aristocrat Hamilton, youngest son of the Earl of Abercorn, travelled widely. He was influenced by ‘poetic and literary sources’. Alexander Pope’s Grotto at Twickenham. The fashion for chinoiserie. The lake, created above the circumfluent River Mole, looks like a faded transfer on a willow pattern plate. The South Bank bridge has the spindly quality of something borrowed from an oriental romance: a landscape in quotation marks. Dank English reality shaped to provoke memories of unread books, almost-familiar illustrations. Catherine the Great commissioned a dinner service from Josiah Wedgwood, decorated with scenes from Painshill Park. If we followed the route suggested by the official guide, pausing to appreciate the Gothic Temple, the Ruined Abbey, the Temple of Bacchus, the Turkish Tent, we would be tramping through a vista of smashed crockery. A Julian Schnabel replay of William Gilpin’s watercolours, the generic views of Prosser and Wollett. Between the artifice of the Augustans and the passion of the Romantics, we were lost: day trippers in quest of easy revelations, shock effects, anything that could be satirised in a couple of sentences.
But Painshill outmanoeuvred us. There is a triangulation between the paradise gardens of Enfield Chase, Painshill (and Wisley) on the south-west corner, and Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham (the Valley of Vision). A recrudescence of the pastoral in the teeth of all contrary indications. A triangle within the circle of the motorway: flashing like a hazard sign. Heaven and hell. Early visitors to Painshill referred to it as Elysium or Eden. A place to be enjoyed after death. Or through the myth of origin. A sanctuary in an unpeopled world. A doomed experiment by some remote and paternalistic deity. The Painshill leaflet stresses this theme: ‘Paradise, once lost, cannot be regained in a single day… We are recreating an inheritance – the magic and mystery of Hamilton’s garden.’
Seduced from the road, let into this estate, our duty is to record the eighteenth-century theme park experience. The decahedral temple is too white, wood as stone; the recreation of a fraud, the missing turret of a Disneyland castle. A cardboard crown from a touring production of Richard III. The temple is anti-Gothic, lacking creepers, dirt, dust, spiders, any trace of the North European spirit. The temple should have been located much closer to the M25, peeping out of a thicket of salt-resistant grass. It’s a hut, open on all sides, arched windows acting as doors. The design of the floor points inwards to a jagged circle made from hexagonal tiles. The white orbit contains a brown centre which contains the outline of a square. The floor, as we contemplate it, becomes a theoretical dome.
Hamilton’s architectural conceits, stressed by tame artists hired to make promotional sketches, demonstrate the proposition that there are always two viewpoints. The distant prospect of an exquisitely sited folly. And the view out, from that privileged position. Prosser, in his 1828 drawing (made at the Gothic Temple), highlights the lake, the Chinese bridge, two figures at the water’s edge. Further attractions – Turkish tent, Temple of Bacchus, Gothic tower – are distant features. The drawing teaches you how and where to look. Where to walk.
Contemplating the lake, we find ourselves alongside it. No digressions, no psychogeographic detours. Each view leads, directly, to the next feature. The ‘ruined abbey’ is insufficiently distressed, the fake of a fake. This sort of thing was, until very recently, known as ‘postmodern irony’, but architecturally contrived ruins don’t seem so ironic after the newsreel footage of 11 September at ‘ground zero’, New York; or photographs of collapsed tower blocks in Mexico City, crumpled flyovers, devastated cheap hotels. Hamilton’s abbey, incompletely complete, is cheesy and nibbled. The lakeside setting is picturesque; a potential swamp waiting on winter rain.
This homage to Monk Lewis and Horace Walpole was an afterthought, built in 1772. Brick plastered over to simulate stone. Atkins is interested in brick. The jagged finish, with rodent toothmarks, reminds him of abandoned jobs of his youth, when contractors went bust or upwardly mobile Brummies ran out of readies. Contemporary excavations explain the choice of location for this one-room abbey: vaults and ducting were found beneath the floor. The abbey was built to conceal Hamilton’s brick kilns. Within the illusionist scheme of Pains-hill, evidence of mechanical and mundane things had to be suppressed or disguised. Figures in recorded views of the estate are schematic, at ease, caught in reverie. No record of manual labour was left for posterity. Fakes faked themselves into oblivion.
The game is movement. Walkers undergo a form of aesthetic analysis as they travel from folly to folly, a strict examination of their responses to the freakish sets with which they are confronted. The interval between wonders is nicely calculated; just enough time to compose a poem of celebration. Here, on English heathland, is an eruption of weathered limestone, the aftermath of a volcanic catastrophe. The grotto is shaped from outcrops of tufa, razor-sharp stone you might find on a barren Mediterranean island. Tufa needs heat, sunlight. The sea.
The grott
o, after Pope, was the ultimate challenge for the landscape conceptualist: a retreat, a back reference, a geologically impossible shrine to the Muse. But it’s done as a gesture, a performance. You don’t mean it. Hamilton doesn’t really want to hide here. He isn’t soliciting trance or fugue. He invites his guests to admire the artifice. He wants their astonishment. He plays with the laws of physics. He constructs a fantasy cave with stalactites and crystals: in order to deliver an authentically metaphysical experience. By strolling out of sunlight into a dark place, where reflected crystals glitter beneath water, the excursionist is agreeably stunned, disorientated. Amazed.
Jennifer Potter (in her 1998 book, Secret Gardens) commends Painshill Park for featuring her favourite grotto:
The first part is easy: a chink of natural light ahead makes the tunnel seem longer than it is. The wall to your left opens into a shimmering view of the bridge; an oeil-de-boeuf admits light from above, heightening the tension between earth and air, black slag below, crystals above. The gardener, meanwhile, has galloped round the outside to switch on the taps so that when you finally stumble into the main chamber, blinded by sunbeams, you see the water gushing down the walls and the lake opens up to view beyond spangly stalactites.
Pulling away from the too rapid succession of Hamilton’s conceits, we zigzag through the plantation at the western extremity of the estate. Conifer avenues remind me of South Wales, the densely planted darkness of pit prop forests good for nothing except rally driving and hunting foxes with shotguns. Painshill has been invaded with pylons. One of them has the impertinence to place itself directly in front of the red brick Gothic tower.
From the woods, as we climb towards it, the four-storey stump is a Romantic allusion, a nod to Samuel Palmer’s etching The Lonely Tower. Palmer, by the time he completed this work in 1879, was living in Furze Hill House, Reigate. His property stood 400 feet above sea level. The Palmer scholar Raymond Lister said that the South Downs and Kentish hills could be seen in the distance and, ‘on a clear day’, Chanctonbury Ring. Hamilton’s tower, seven or so miles from Furze Hill House, was well within range. Palmer had the habit of jotting lines of verse on to labels which he pasted to the frames of his canvases. Two years after The Lonely Tower, at a period when he blended remembered elements of Shoreham (foreground) with Italian hills (background), he quoted Milton’s ‘L’ Allegro’ as a form of dedication for his watercolour The Prospect.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the landscape round it measures…
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom’d high on tufted trees.
The memory of stars and owls and lounging shepherds dissolves into a busy road. The A3, hurtling towards Junction 10 of the M25, is the graphic margin in our western view, a rude invader. The democracy of speed, pod culture, ensures that Hamilton’s hillside prospect is ignored. Motorists are trained to read signs, watch for hidden cameras, to ready themselves for disaster: the jam, the shunt, the swerve into a service station. They ignore landscape. It happens, but it is as featureless as television; no better, no worse. Narcoleptic resignation, postponed pleasure.
By a fortunate chance, we’re given access to the tower. It’s not the right day, but an official happens to be around and says that, if we’re quick, we can climb the circular stairs to the roof. From the castellated summit we gaze out over three counties – and, better yet, two motorways. The riptide where the roads merge.
Looking down on the pylon, the path between close-packed trees, we understand why Hamilton’s paid hermit felt the need to escape. The hermitage, on the escarpment, was a rustic hut with a thatched roof. I was reminded of Jack Kerouac, fire-watching on Desolation Peak. Too much transcendence gluts the soul. Grand views, elevating prospects, shrivel the human spirit. Kerouac was reduced to writing haikus about winter flies in a medicine cabinet. Hamilton’s salaried loner lasted a fortnight, his existence a spectacle, before he took off to town in search of ale.
The gate in the tree line, indicated on the map, was a chimera. Traffic on the A3 flashed between gaps in the forest screen. The road was a torrent to which we could find no access. From the battlements of the high tower, the motorway was a steel rule in an expanse of woodland, broken by a few small red patches of settlement. Shrubs and new plantings on the gradient of the roadside verge, the soft estate, struggled to disguise a sliproad. We were forced to trek back the way we had come, revisiting every highlight in Hamilton’s portfolio.
Beyond the Ice House, blind children were being led down the long avenue by sighted companions. They worked in pairs. An educational game. Supervisors with clipboards lurked, benevolently attentive, checking the blindfolds. This condition of blindness was temporary, induced. There must be no cheating. Tiny guides, in sports clothes and baseball caps, grinned. Both hands cupped around the leading hand of their unsighted friend. They leant forward, tugging – as if they had a sheep on a lead. The blind ones stretched back, arms flung wide, to ward off obstacles. Progress was slow. Between them, explainer and unseeing audience, they came to understand the ambivalence of Painshill Park.
There’s no help for it, we have to endure a section of road walking; Indian file, facing the oncoming traffic, pressing our body-prints into spiky hedges. A three-mile plod down the A245, through Cobham Tilt and Stoke D’Abernon (like routed Diggers). Vernacular architecture, Surrey brick (headers, stretchers, English Rose, Contra Dutch) proselytised by Marc, are quietly extinguished as we advance on the motorway.
The M25 is an old friend, a vagrant travelling with a special visa, under instruction to keep moving, keep its eyes to itself. The earth-sculpting and planting of the soft estates around Leatherhead Common and Junction 9 is majestic; Tony Sangwine of the Highways Agency can be proud of this one. Leaning on a five-bar gate, among golden fields of corn, to view the low hills and darkening sky, we wouldn’t know the motorway was there – if it wasn’t for the gently humped bridge, the hum of traffic. The road is a painless intervention in a complacent landscape.
We’re in a twilight mood. Emerging from the final clump of settlement, another deserted common planted with lines of dwarf trees, we recognise the sign – ELDERLY PEOPLE– as an appropriate message. There aren’t any on the street. They must have taken the warning to heart and stayed indoors. If there were humans in this part of Surrey, they would certainly be elderly. The road is elderly. Its energies have diminished to the point where it can do nothing but trickle into the brash sweep of the M25, spin on to Chartwell, Tunbridge Wells and the coast, or risk an outing to the Bluewater shopping experience.
There’s a three-mile stretch, pretty straight, between Great Bookham Common and the Leatherhead Junction; a chance to go for it, pedal to the floor. Tony Sangwine’s modulated landscape planting doesn’t register with these high-speed dolts. What do they care about interestingly crinkled trees chosen for their ability to peep over fences? They’ll never see, as we do, the hidden spaces, the rampant ecology, weeds, wild flowers; hawthorn, dogwood, hedge-parsley, willowherb, tormentil.
A detour into Leatherhead is debated; briefly. Epsom is still the target, but there’s a church I want to visit. Renchi is always up for a church, any church. He’s soon bounding across roads, confronting citizens, women with bags of shopping. The Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Peter? There is a reason for my interest. The church has a series of panels carved by Eric Gill, the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Gill features in a novel I’m trying to write, as the paterfamilias of the small community at Capel-y-ffin in the Ewyas Valley on the Welsh borders.
As we draw towards the end of the day’s business, Marc’s mobile starts to trill; friends and potential commissioners activate his signature tune. ‘I’m out on the M25, somewhere in Surrey. Don’t know when we’ll finish.’ Sounds implausible but, this time, it’s true.
A slightly disgruntled priest – Father Paddy – gives us a key. He’s pissed off with a sale sign outside the presbytery. There should be enough elderly people
to keep the church afloat, even in Leatherhead – but, in a period of economic instability, realisable assets have to be cashed in.
The church was built in 1923. Father Redway, ‘remembered principally as a man of holiness and poverty’, secured the patronage of Sir Edward Hulton, the Leatherhead-domiciled newspaper magnate. Hulton agreed to guarantee the costs of the church’s construction. He also, having viewed the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, commissioned the Gill panels.
Gill was responsible for more stations than British Rail. They came off a production line: Westminster Cathedral, St Alban’s (Oxford), St Cuthbert’s (Bradford), the Church of Our Lady and St Peter (Leatherhead). The panels for Leatherhead were cut in Gill’s Ditchling studio and fixed in groups of two or three. The last panel was finished in April 1925. Hulton died a month later. The car, taking his body to London for burial, paused at the church gates for a blessing.
None of us, tracking around the Stations of the Cross, is inspired by them. Maybe that’s the point: Gill didn’t want the church to be a gallery showcasing his genius. The panels were there to do a job, provide illustration, mark out the route for a series of devotional exercises. These low reliefs, produced in the Twenties, long after Cubism, Vorticism, Suprematism, seem perverse in their customised antiquity. Innocence of vision is hard to fake. Primitivism, smoothed and stroked, looks coy. It’s an art for believers – many of whom, astonished by the eccentricity of the stone carver, didn’t want it. More accurately, it was an art for patrons. In paying for a work that demonstrated their taste, their selfless generosity, they bought a short-term immortality.
It worked. We had come here for Gill’s panels: to see how an orbital journey could be mapped as an album of stone cartoons. The Passion of Christ as a graphic novel, a storyboard. Gill modelled (in the tenth panel at Westminster Cathedral) for the figure of Christ – by standing naked in front of a mirror. In the submissive curves of these low reliefs, the thrusts of staves and crosses, is a masochistic eroticism; in the gilded detail, a tinsel coarseness. The antiquarianism hasn’t lasted. It doesn’t offend, it’s all of a piece with Paul Woodroffe’s stained glass windows, his version of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World.
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