Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Sir Hugh Myddelton, fortune secure, built himself a house and laid out gardens in the neighbourhood of Forty Hall, near Enfield. The New River flowed through the grounds. Forty Hall was later acquired by H.C. Bowles, described by James Thorne in his Handbook to the Environs of London as ‘the fortunate possessor of shares in the New River company’. Into these suburban reservations was gathered the cultural ballast of London: a portion of ballustrading from Christopher Wren’s church of St Benet (demolished in 1867), a Portland stone Grecian temple from the Duke of Chandos’s house in Edgware, twelve stone balls from the front of Burlington House, Piccadilly. Scattered throughout the Chase were jigsaw mementoes of a lost London.

Bowles, on a site adjoining Forty Hall, once known as Bowling Green, built Myddelton House. Here all the elements that defined Enfield Chase came together: accumulated wealth, green politics, architectural salvage from the City, royal courtiers working their connections, paradise gardens. Myddelton House, glorying in the name of the original water promoter, is presently the headquarters of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. On those days, and at those hours, when the grounds are open to the public, you can creep up to the high windows of this comfortable property and see computers, coffee machines, filing cabinets, the steel-grey trappings of bureaucracy. But, unless you have business with LVRPA, you can’t go in. You must shuffle across the gravel to wonder at the heritage of the notable botanist E. A. Bowles.

Philippa Gregory and her sorority got it right. The Bowles story and the story of the garden do play like an historical romance. It is a romance. At the Capel Manor garden centre, massed copies of Joan Hessayon’s Capel Bells are offered for sale. An Edwardian lady with parasol drifting across lawns. Beneath the heavy relief lettering of the author’s name, a tapestry of fuchsias, the eponymous ‘Capel Bells’. Prosperity on a stalk: ‘They look like petals, I grant you, but those of us in the know refer to them as sepals… Blooms increase on a mathematical progression. Damned clever little things.’

Capel Bells is a grand read, pre-optioned television: Cookson heroine battling to establish herself in society, knockabout subplot of Cockney chancers, horticulture, discovery of unknown father, sail off into sunset with the inheritor of this magical country house. It’s like finger-licking your way through a seed catalogue with racy bits, headset history on a guided tour of the grounds.

The gravity of Hessayon’s novel pulls towards the notion of Arcadia as an achievable condition, the contrary of urban struggle. ‘Charlotte had boarded the train at Liverpool Street station in the sooty air of the City, deafened by the cries of unhappy children, the whine of beggars, the scolding of irritated mothers and the bellows of station staff. Fifteen miles north of this cacophony, the outer reaches of Enfield were a paradise of leafy trees and empty roads. She had not seen a single motor car.’

Paradise. That word again. A.R. Hope-Moncrieff in his book on Essex calls up the spirit of William Morris. ‘Morris also played in a suburban garden, and was mainly brought up in the next parish, on the edge of Epping Forest, that was an Earthly Paradise for his youth.’ Paradise Road, Waltham Abbey. Paradise Wildlife Park, just north of Junction 25, on the orbital motorway.

‘Strangely, for a young woman known for her down-to-earth attitudes, she felt an almost mystical affinity with Capel Manor,’ writes Hessayon of her heroine, Charlotte Blair (a working girl who has the temerity to rent a substantial Essex property). ‘She had no idea what exactly she craved, but felt certain that a few months living in the old house in Enfield would solve the mystery and give her peace.’

The romance, bastard progeny of Malory and Spenser, is the proper form for describing this territory. The structure is formal, fixed rules that shock us into enlightenment: a still pool in a woodland glade, an artist who captures essence with a few swift brush strokes. The owner of Capel Manor goes into business with a Tokyo firm in anticipation of global capitalism. All the scams and development pitches of the Lea Valley are here in outline. Future shadows creep across rigorously managed lawns. ‘Of course we couldn’t live on a pound a week. What a thing to say! Popple will buy you a nursery… I believe the area is full of nurseries. The Lea Valley. That’s true, isn’t it?’

Of course it is. As true as the hero’s chum Buffy who comes up with a wizard scheme ‘to make a fortune by building homes in the suburbs’. The first paradise of the car. Nobody demands an orbital highway. The only routes follow the rivers, north/south, follow ancient trackways. Great estates are always one day’s ride from the centre. The suburbs wait on the railway. They swallow up dozy market towns, places of retreat: Enfield, Waltham Abbey, Chigwell, Edmonton. Then polyfill the bits in between.

In Joan Hessayon’s romance, characters represent the categories of invader who will come to occupy the fringes of the old forest. Essex man and woman in embryo. The Covent Garden entrepreneur. The flower girl with push. The ambitious Big House servant with an unhealthy passion for fuchsias. The bent solicitor with a nubile daughter. Jack-the-Lad from the Rookeries with an eye for horseflesh. Plants are currency. Gorgeous swathes of scent and colour. Bearded iris for toffs and auricula (‘gold-laced polyanthus’) for the working man.

‘I dare say people whose hobby is growing auriculas would not be received in the neighbourhood, although I doubt if that was the reason Lady Meux wasn’t received,’ remarks the catty Charlotte.

Hessayon’s romance doesn’t simply predict coming social trends, it inducts historic personages into the narrative. There is Lady Meux, Valerie, chatelaine of Theobalds Park — who is not (as a widow) received in Upper Lea Valley society. Her husband, the brewer, picked up the former royal palace and brought his much younger wife with him. Valerie had served behind the bar at Meux’s Horseshoe Tavern, on the site of the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road. Hessayon sketches her as a game widow who entertains unmarried men and makes very imaginative use of an indoor swimming pool.

But the dominant figure in this patchwork of country houses is E.A. ‘Gussie’ Bowles of Myddleton (sic) House. Bowles drops in at Capel Manor, accompanied by the formidable garden-planner and author Gertrude Jekyll (venturing north from her Surrey patch). Gussie, a confirmed bachelor, is rather sharp with women and amateur horticulturalists. Jekyll is one of the chaps.

E.A. Bowles was a gift to writers of fiction. The family were Huguenot (original name Garnault). They purchased a block of shares in the New River Company, enough to provide them with a controlling interest. In 1724, according to Bryan Hewitt ( The Crocus King: E.A. Bowles of Myddelton House ), Michael Garnault acquired ‘an estate with an Elizabethan house called Bowling Green House at Bulls Cross in north Enfield. By coincidence a loopway of the New River cut through the garden.’ This loopway had, it was said, been created to prevent the destruction of a Tudor yew hedge.

Henry Carrington Bowles married into the Garnault family in 1799. A swamp cypress was planted to celebrate the nuptials. When Anne Garnault, the last of the line, died, the Bulls Cross property passed to the Bowles family. A new house, white Suffolk brick, was built in 1818. And was eventually inherited by Henry Carrington Bowles Treacher, on condition that he assumed the Bowles surname and coat of arms. E.A. Bowles was Treacher’s fourth son.

The process of drift, centre to margin, is very evident at Myddleton House. Huguenots, frequently associated with Spitalfields, the streets around Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, remove themselves to an area of play country. They become more English than the English (aping the parodic squirearchy of the royals). A great chum of Gussie Bowles is Thomas Hanbury, one of the Quaker brewers of Brick Lane (hops to the city, profit to the suburbs). Bowles stays with Hanbury in his fourteenth-century palace (with terraced gardens) at La Mortola. Quaker wealth comes with responsibility: schools for the children of workers, grace and favour cottages. Gussie is also keen on good works, socialising with the lads of Enfield, ‘Bowles Boys’.