Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Joyce Green was a hospital, or series of hospitals, surrounded by farmland. The 1778 map in Hasted’s History of Kent shows four farms on the Dartford marshes. ‘Joyces’ stood beside a lane, leading to Long Reach, which was lost in the 1953 floods. Richard Joyce worked a gravel pit on land acquired by the hospital. His farm enjoyed fresh water from a loop of the Darent and gave good grazing, the soil was rich from regular inundations by the Thames.

Some 341 acres of farmland were purchased by the Metropolitan Asylums Board for £ 24,815: the Joyce Green Smallpox Hospital, opened in 1903, was the final element in the Dartford colony. Dartford, it had been decided, was the ideal distance from London for the treatment (or removal) of Lunatics and the Contaminated: madness and the pox. There were asylums and schools for imbecile children.

Cattle from Joyce Green farm returned from the marshes by a circuitous route that took them through the hospital grounds. Cows peered in at ward windows. Great, slow, curious beasts stared at convalescents in the airing courts. They grazed the hospital lawns where the grass was too tough for hand-mowers.

Dr Ricketts, a medical supervisor of fierce reputation, was granted a vivisection licence in 1904 to experiment on farm animals, to hack them about as part of his investigation into smallpox. The notion that cattle might be affected by East Enders taking their dose of pale sunlight is a nice reversal of Edward Jenner’s pioneering research. Jenner discovered that humans could be protected from smallpox by the use of fluid taken from vesicles found on the udders of infected cows.

In the Edward Jenner Museum, near Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, are a number of exhibits donated by Joyce Green Hospital. There is a stereoscopic viewer through which the visitor gazes, expecting some example of Victorian or Edwardian topography. Morally uplifting landscapes. Alpine scenery. A Scottish lake. A spa town. The effect is three-dimensional, nicotine-stained sepia. But the stereoscope defies expectation. Dr J.B. Byles, compiling material to illustrate a book by Dr Ricketts, photographed the action of poxes in intimate detail. Skin as a map, a meteorology of infection; flushed and angry (like those charts that divide London into zones of comparative poverty).

Dr Burne is proud of Joyce Green’s paradise gardens, contrived and planted against prevailing conditions, on the edge of a salt marsh. He rattles out the Latin names as he swerves through the estate, pointing with his stick, swooping on some previously unnoticed growth. Walnut trees. Juniper bushes thick with strange fruit, cigarette butts (flicked from the staff room window). There are memorials to surgeons and gate-keepers and a seat dedicated to the Joyce Green gardener, Harry Hopkins.

Hopkins carried through the arboretum conceived by the Medical Superintendent Dr A.F. Cameron. Between 1919 and 1935, he transformed rough, windswept grounds into ‘a little paradise’; the subject of a glowing testimony by Arthur Hellyer, one-time patient and gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. ‘A garden filled with as fine a collection of exotic trees and shrubs as you would be likely to find anywhere near London, except in the most renowned places or at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.’ A grove of eight Koelreuteria panicu lata. Sprays of small yellow flowers and the ‘curious bladder-like fruit’ that follow them. A young paulowinia. Magnolias by the score. A thicket of yuccas.

The three of us sit on Hopkins’s bench, a curve of wooden slats, sheltering in a V of weathered bricks. Someone has left wildflowers in a bottle. Beneath the bench, in heavy clusters, are cigarette stubs. It’s obvious, standing back, that Harry Hopkins’s memorial duplicates the winged design of the hospital. A cabbalistic conceit: outside as inside, a system of magical equivalents. Within this grove, the spirit of the old gardener (picture him in First War uniform, cap and moustache) is present: curated by Doc Burne who never goes anywhere without a pruning knife. If any part of this secret garden is to survive, it will be down to Burne, and whatever he can replant or graft in his own soil.

Time is not on his side. Burne’s expedition has to be conducted at a clip; out of the hospital grounds and down, by overgrown tramlines, to the vanished Long Reach Smallpox Hospital. The river-road where plague ships anchored.

A long green lane, straggly hedges; incongruous tarmac. The black skin is worn away, revealing the underlying pattern of bricks. We step over the first chalked graffito: BNP. Horses stick their heads through gaps in the hedge. ‘If they’ve got a blanket,’ Burne says, ‘riding school. If not, gypsy.’

Chalk signatures, territorial assertions, come at regular intervals. We are walking down what was once a private railway, linking the isolation units with Joyce Green. Long Reach had its own jetty, demolished in the Seventies. Smallpox ships, paddle-steamers such as the Atlas, would make regular voyages from Rotherhithe; there were beds for up to 250 patients. Scrubbed deck planks, a hiss of gas, the stink of sulphur. Whole streets, infected warrens and rookeries, could be evacuated. At first guilty housing was sealed like a ghetto, hung with plague flags. And then, with some degree of secrecy, the sick were shipped out.

‘She was a short fat town girl,’ Burne chuckled. ‘ Panorama sent her down. Heels and all.’ We were scrambling over rubble mounds, hacking through a thorn wood. ‘It was twilight by the time she got here. A terrible scream, an owl. I asked if she’d like to see the Long Reach mortuary cesspit. She ran. When the programme went out, they used one sentence.’

Bushes heavy with white blossom. We find the cesspit, now hidden, lost in the brambles like a holy well. Dr Burne, forging ahead, can only be distinguished from Renchi by the walking stick and the bright yellow gloves.

Bikers love riverside earthworks, the high banks that keep the Thames out. Burne doesn’t disapprove. A burnt-out car is a rusted antiquity, older than the stories the doctor tells. Older than the plague ghosts.

We stand at the river’s edge, taking in the whole broad sweep, Queen Elizabeth II Bridge to the oil storage tanks at Purfleet. Myths grew up around the Atlas , when she used to anchor off Greenhithe. Children of the time, now elderly patients in the hospital, were interviewed by Dr Burne. They remembered coffin ships which they confused with the Dickensian prison hulks.

In 1980 a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl wrote an essay based on stories told by her grandmother, Clara Couchman. ‘All Gran remembered was being carried at the dead of night in a red blanket by her parents through Greenhithe down to the water front. Then she was taken by rowing boat out to a big boat moored off Greenhithe Reach… It was dark and filthy. There were rats on board which you could hear scampering about in the night. It smelt of sulphur candles… People stayed on that ship for three weeks and if you were still alive a rowing boat was sent by relations out to the hulk. This ferryman was paid, and had to be paid well. He would call out your name for you.’

Nobody could visit Long Reach without passing through a regime of disinfection, carbolic baths. The system fell down, as always, on English notions of caste. Surgeons and doctors strolled around the checkpoints, unhindered. A gate-keeper who waved through Reuben Message, a Dartford meat vendor, lost his job. The delivery man developed smallpox.

Dr Burne fitted his narrative to the landscape we had struggled through in the dark and the rain. He led us around the hospital estate and out on to the marshes, showing how apparently random piles of stones, holes in the ground, bits of rail, broken gates, belonged to a living history.