Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Mad walking has its key image: Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888). (Along with Francis Bacon’s obsessive reworking of this vanished painting.) Van Gogh’s original was burnt in the Second World War when the Kaiser Friedrich Museum at Magdeburg was destroyed.

A straw-hatted man, burdened with the implements of his trade, spins around to face the viewer. The artist as a version of Bunyan’s pilgrim. ‘A rough sketch I made of myself,’ Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, ‘laden with boxes, props, and canvas on the sunny road.’ The road shimmers. He is tracked by a distorted shadow. This is precisely the spirit of the fugueur. Dadas met Tissie for the first time in 1886.

Another group of Van Gogh walkers is closer to our project: Prisoners Exercising (After Gustave Doré). Completed in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in February 1890. Stooped convicts (or madmen) process in a slow circle, a chain that mimes our penitential motorway orbit. No end and no beginning. Humans dwarfed by high brick walls. A reworking of Doré’s London, flooded with colour. The prisoner who turns towards the viewer, showing his face, is Van Gogh.

Contemporary medical opinion associated epilepsy with marathon expeditions, French workmen on their motiveless walkabouts. Numerous doctoral theses (Birnbaum, Evensen, Leroy, Doiteau, etc.) diagnosed Van Gogh as an epileptic. Other authorities (Jaspers, Westerman Holsttijn, Riese, Prinzhorn) preferred schizophrenia. Notions such as ‘episodic twilight states’ were floated. Stertz wrote of ‘phasic hallucinatory psychosis’. Delirium, sun-seizures, fits of melancholy that couldn’t be walked out or worked out. Leading inevitably to the ‘Maison de Santé’, the asylum. Voluntary confinement.

In the advertisement, the prospectus for the madhouse at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, is a drawing of the hospital and its grounds. From the viewpoint of the Alpilles at the foot of Mont Gaussier, you can see an Italianate tower with surrounding low-level buildings, sharp hill. And this is very much the prospect that confronts us as we advance on Shenley. The asylum as a retreat, in the countryside, a few miles out of town. The tower on the hill was one of the features Renchi pointed out on our drive from Abbots Langley. On Nicholson’s map, checked over breakfast in South Mimms, Shenley Hospital is revealed as a substantial estate, a colony of the disturbed, black blocks, a church and a social club. We recall Chris Oakley, once an associate of R.D. Laing and David Cooper, telling us at the time of Renchi’s exhibition in Selborne that Cooper had run an experimental unit at Shenley. The psychiatrists, if we had the right place, joining the inmates on their hallucinogenic voyages.

In twentieth-century representations of the fugue, the walker disappears from the walk. Landscape artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton erase the trauma, along with the figure of the troubled pedestrian. Minor interventions are tactfully recorded; a few stones rearranged, twigs bent. The walker becomes a control freak, compulsively logging distances, directions, treading abstractions into the Ordnance Survey map. Scripting minimalist asides, copywriting haikus.

Renchi’s recent paintings merge walker and landscape. Chorographic overviews, diaries. In earlier times, the brushstrokes were looser, the paint thicker. Walks were shorter, paintings fiercer. As the fugues extended — London to Swansea, Hopton-on-Sea to St Michael’s Mount — the records were calmer; there was more of a narrative element, transit across landscape remembered in chalk, flint, granite, slate. Canvases, left behind in Ireland, mouldered in damp outhouses.

Shenley Hall, a pompous white property, with fountain and porch and pedigree, has made the usual transition from seat of landed gentry to hangout for corporate man. The house has become the image, the emblem in the brochure, WELCOME TO SHENLEY HALL. ROADRUNNER, ROAD TECH COMPUTER SYSTEMS. Perfect! Motors lined up on gravel like some house party or shooting weekend from the Edwardian era. The panoply of autogeddon on parade: four-wheel drive, off-road (M25 to B5378), executive Rover, rep-saloon, white van. If the company expands — and they’re operating in the right area — they’ll have to acquire a couple of home farms as parking spaces.

While I stop to photograph a stone eagle on the gatepost (‘victory; pride; authority; solar power; omniscience’), Renchi falls into conversation with two villagers: a ruddy-faced military gentleman in a plaid cap and good tweed jacket (pens in pocket) and his partner, a lady in green anorak, headscarf, woollen gloves. Being walkers themselves, they are interested in our outing. They don’t much like what’s happening to Shenley, but they are realists. Things change. The daily circuit of the territory takes more out of them, but they’ll go on making it.

Shenley Manor, it appears, once belonged to the wealthy Raphael family. One brother kept the stud farm and bred a Derby winner. The other brother owned the land on which the hospital was built. The asylum was an investment, nothing more than that. A way of maximising return on holdings, keeping the house and the life that went with it. The old couple put us on the right track, the hospital is on Black Lion Hill.

At the crossroads with Radlett Lane, Renchi stops (as if taking part in some boundary marking ceremony) to piss against the bark of a magnificent pine tree. The water tower of Shenley hospital is our guide, its grey roof a pyramid, above triple windows and an absurd balcony. These towers, the compass needles of our walk, survive (thanks to preservation orders) when all the other buildings are gutted and built over.

Shenley Hospital is one of a number of isolated developments (asylums, pumping stations) in the Vale of St Albans which were granted green belt status. Reservoirs of madness. The village of Shenley is green belt, South Mimms is not.

Green belt or not, Shenley Hospital, active until a couple of months before our arrival, has vanished, replaced by a housing development, the bright new units of a Crest Homes estate. The back story of the asylum has been totally erased, apart from the baleful presence of the water tower. How do they explain that monster to first-time buyers? They’ve started by fixing a working clock on its side, so that the brick stack can be renamed: The Shenley Crest Clocktower.

We are stunned by this disappearing act. We’ve seen the old photographs, Shenley was like a benign concentration camp. Thirties architecture, industrial/pastoral units: a processing plant for mental hygiene. The scale was epic. Vast dormitories. Kitchens. Bath-houses. Estates within estates, radiating out from that water tower. Asylums have their hierarchies, their degrees of compliance. They have their dark places and their gardens. Within a few months, Shenley had been eradicated.

Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas was promoting another fiction, a detailed plan of something that wasn’t there. The Shenley vanishing act counterbalanced the recovery of the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey: history heritaged for anyone with the price of a ticket. You could buy the book, the souvenir pencil. At Shenley there was only the estate office. The JCBs. The screech of earth-moving machinery.

CREST HOMES. The Pavilions, Shenley. A glossy brochure with a mendacious cover illustration: yellow-brick units. ‘Photograph depicts a completed Crest development in Camberley Surrey.’ Military personnel, junior officer class: regulation issue. Nice title, ‘The Pavilions’, with its suggestion of John Major’s reworking of Orwell, the England of warm beer, bicycling spinsters, the sound of willow thwacking leather. The Far Pavilions. A retreat to the hills. A mock Surrey, Guildford or Dorking, Abinger Hammer, with lawns and trees and cricket squares. An escape from the heat and dirt of the city. Eight hundred yards from the M25.