Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Gussie fits out his garden with York stone slabs from Clerkenwell. He collects one of those strange, ovenlike, igloo-block shelters that once stood on the old London Bridge. (These structures trace a psychogeographic progress across London, from Guy’s Hospital to Victoria Park in Hackney, to Myddleton House in Enfield. Memory nudges, displacements that weave across an indifferent landscape, as invisible as the New River.)

Bowles rescues the Enfield Market Cross and a diamond-shaped pillar known as ‘the Irishman’s shirt’. Cargo-cult plunder dresses his gardens: a portion of the New River, antiquarian oddities from London, exotic blooms from European plant-hunting expeditions. Myddleton House is a museum of false starts and wilfully perverse hints. Gussie lays out ‘The Lunatic Asylum’, an area of the garden that includes a contorted hazel known as ‘Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick’. Flora can be as zany as fauna. The grounds of Myddleton House are revealed as a microcosm of the Lea Valley/Enfield Chase Arcadia: captured river, a market cross, tulip terraces, beds of gold and white and silver; a reservation for the outpatients of the botanical world.

Beyond Bulls Cross, moving west along the hard shoulder of the M25, from Potters Bar towards Abbots Langley, we learn how the old estates were broken up and rebranded as asylums, retreats, drying-out clinics, holding pens for troublesome inner-city aliens. Looking at my map, before the walk began, I logged: Shenley, Harperbury, Napsbury, Leavesden and, a little to the south (North Circular rather than M25), Friern Barnet.

E.A. Bowles kept gas and electricity out of Myddleton House until 1954. As he got older little quirks of character were refined into fullblown eccentricity. He wore spectacles with a single lens (the left). He put his finger through the empty socket and twirled. He was a member of an all-male dining club, the Garden Society, that admitted only one woman, the Queen Mother (royals are hermaphrodite).

Garden books were produced, small controversies aired: Bowles wasn’t keen on the fad for rock gardens. (The estate of his greatest rival was acquired by a later millionaire gardener, George Harrison, the former Beatle.) Life centred on masculine Christianity, the Jesus Church at Enfield. Boys who attended the church were encouraged to spend weekends messing about in the grounds of Myddleton House, clearing the pond, or doing a bit of weeding. ‘For this they wore bathing costumes, Gussie’s being of Edwardian vintage with blue and white rings reaching down to his ankles,’ reports Bryan Hewitt. ‘A straw hat with his college ribbons completed the outfit (it was the same hat in which the boys picked strawberries).’

The boys were taken on excursions to Brighton. They were given the job of lifting and sorting crocuses. They enjoyed themselves, fishing and playing cricket on the lawns. There is a photograph, something like a Latigue, of a card school dressed in Edwardian bathing costumes. One boy, the nearest to the camera, has stuck out his tongue. Another favourite, Fred, did an impression of Gussie with a watering can. He fell into the river. ‘He squelched off to the house,’ Hewitt writes, ‘where Gussie gave him a bath and dry clothes. He reappeared dressed in a pair of Gussie’s flannel trousers, a Norfolk jacket and a trilby with the brim turned down and proceeded to shamble about giving a hilarious imitation of Gussie who joined in the fun.’

Bowles Boys served on the Western Front in the First War. Gussie wrote to them with news of the harvest and the ‘burning hot days in July’, he sent food parcels. Many were wounded, crippled, killed. The honoured dead of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, the Royal Field Artillery, the Middlesex Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers.

The residue of what Bowles attempted, a life given over to the creation of a garden, remains. It works in a way that Capel Manor, with its strategic planting, its demonstrations, never will. Capel Manor debates a Princess Diana memorial garden, the form it should take: a place of remembrance beside an orbital motorway. Myddleton House has a more direct royal connection. The foreword to Bryan Hewitt’s book is written by the grandson of E.A. Bowles’s brother. ‘I think of my Great Great Uncle Gussie often as I walk around our small Wiltshire garden,’ writes Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, OBE (horseman, courtier and former husband of the royal mistress, Camilla). ‘If, as I suspect, my uncle is looking back from “across the wide river” he will be amazed to discover that his name is still revered and his works much admired.’

Bill Drummond — green weatherproof, thick blue jersey, specs on string, spiky hair — eased himself out of his Aylesbury cab. I was waiting with Marc Atkins beside the (closed) doors of the Church of the Holy Cross and St Lawrence at Waltham Abbey.

Bill has the look of a man interrupted: he’s been thinking about another project, talking/not talking, skidding across a dark landscape, and now he’s expelled. Damp air. Another early start. A walk across Enfield Chase to the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. Why?

Dumb instinct — on my part. Which is always the best method. It’s a slight detour, in terms of our orbital circuit, but Waltham Abbey to Mill Hill, across the Chase, favours the lie of the land; the way the rivers go, the direction of the footpaths. I reckon we can knock this one off, through parks, woodland, farm roads, and arrive at the hospital in time for the lunchtime lecture. At 1.30 p.m., in the Fletcher Hall, German conceptualist Jochen Gerz (associate of Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck) is going to address the whitecoats on the subject of ‘Works in Public Spaces’.

I don’t like deadlines. They put a damper on the urge to digress. Shouldn’t we expect the unexpected? But the hospital block on the summit of Mill Hill is a real marker, generator of paranoid imaginings. I’m always uneasy when covert research, generously funded, starts to cosy up to subversive art. There’s something awkward about the relationship. To access the art manifestation (conceptual corridor, lunchtime lecture) you have to blag your way into the Pentagon, into Langley. Surveillance swipe, signature in book, electronic barrier, phone call to a higher authority.

I turned up, the first time, to see a show, ‘Cityscapes’, by the photographer Erne Paleologou. 10 February 1998. I love Effie’s work, her nightstalker’s liminal meditations. A young Greek woman, living in East London, she starts at the railway station, moving away, making the familiar unfamiliar, playing with scale and expectation, discovering the City as theatre: curtains, alcoves, trees sculpted with artificial light. Upper-deck revellers in red buses, the revel burnt out of them. Effie looks for risk (surreal anecdotes) but purges it from her prints, which are infinitely calm, balanced, resilient.

Effie’s show was described on the handout from the Medical Research Council (‘research undertaken in diverse fields, including neurophysiology, molecular structure, developmental biology and mycobacteriology’) as ‘the first manifestation’ of a visual arts programme. ‘Large format colour photographs depict nocturnal landscapes in which the ephemeral and fugitive is captured within the stark industrial shapes of the city… Selected photographs provoke a dialogue with the striking architecture of the Institute and play with the notional introduction of the city into the pastoral.’

I walked to Mill Hill from Hackney. A mild day, a pleasant tramp through Golders Green. At 12.50 p.m., I found myself with my nose pressed to the glass of the Villa Dei Fiori (‘Fully Air Conditioned’). One couple in the place. Slatted blinds and white linen (like a Californian hospital, face-lifts, tummy tucks, Mozart). Celebrity photographs with sprawling encomia: Ernie Wise, Christopher Lee.