Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Another Laing, Ronnie, the charismatic Glaswegian anti-psychiatrist, was to make his mark on Shenley. The ‘Villa’ system, taking patients away from huge wards (and a recreation hall that seated 1,000 people) to ‘family’ units of between twenty and forty-five members, fitted nicely with the Laingian ethic. The grounded ocean liner of the Thirties, with its rigid hierarchies, became a flotilla of pirate craft, ships of fools with crazed or inspired captains.

Clancy Sigal, a successful screenwriter and novelist, an American exile in Sixties London, became a patient of Laing and left a fictional account of those years. His novel Zone of the Interior was suppressed in England. The Sigal character is in awe of Last, a lightly disguised version of Laing.

My thirty-odd years of ignorance and spiritual flabbiness, he said, had been the Tao’s way of preparing me for the final, self-healing Voyage.

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘Schizophrenia,’ he replied.

Sigal sees the asylum for what it is: ‘a rural caesura… a gateway’. He knows that it can only be reached by a transit through the ‘semi-industrial suburbs of Ealing, Southall and Hayes’. The cure begins with a drive ‘past Heathrow airport, tiny streams and beacons in the scrub fields… to golf courses, cows and stockbroker villas… small meadows, citified villages, the outer spokes of London’s huge wheel’.

The original design of Shenley was constructed around a central axis, male and female accommodation were separated; patients were not allowed to stray beyond their ‘airing courts’. By the time R.D. Laing and David Cooper arrived, patients were being encouraged to work on the construction of new buildings. They helped in the gardens. Staff and patients came together for dances and coach trips to ‘places of interest’.

Sigal’s novel suggests that beneath these liberal gestures nothing had changed. The intake was still made up of ‘post-Edwardian spinsters banished from their families for an unmarried pregnancy; the deaf and the dumb; undetected autistics and mild subnormals; alcoholics and homosexuals — or simply homeless men and women who lost their kin and had nowhere else to go’.

A battle was being fought between opposed concepts of architecture: the grid and the skin hutch, the rational colony with its avenues and the yurt of the shaman. Sigal draws up a plan for ‘an all-male community on the edge of London’ and presents it to Last (Laing). ‘Laid out like a medieval town, it was governed by a nuclear core of Perfectii, or Brothers, who studied and prayed in a shedlike temple far apart from the un-Elect (women, children, cats and dogs). Girding this inner sanctum was a ring of mobile prefab huts inhabited by the mad and broken down — i.e., patients who might also be any of us. Unlike the wives and families of the Perfectii, who were segregated in an Outer Zone where they contentedly raised chickens and bees to make the community self-sufficient, the mad always had free access to the Nuclear Brothers.’

The psychedelic Sixties were awash with such plans, derived from misreadings of Buckminster Fuller, mythical accounts of life at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (under the rectorship of Charles Olson), libertarian communes in San Francisco. Sigal shifts between the asylum, with its forcing-chambers, its concentric geometry, its gardens, and the city (the generator). The hut of derangement can only be constructed at the heart of the labyrinth.

I prepared my launching pad: a London version of a Siberian shaman’s hutch… At each of the tent’s corners, to signify the Zodiac elements, I deposited a jar of Thames River water, a box of Swan matches, a plastic bag of earth from St. James Park and a toy balloon I had to keep inflating. After a brief purifying ceremony, I invited Willie Last, who took one look and said quietly, ‘That’s pretty mad, Sid.’ With this blessing, I knew I was in business.

Renchi, when he completed his circuit of the M25, hoped to devise similar ceremonies: sand paintings in the chalk tunnels under Epsom Downs, songlines drawn on flyovers, cave art inscribed in earth colours on the grooved walls of underpasses. Reasserted alignments.

But there are significant differences between the two men. Sigal, the New Yorker, the hip Jewish screenwriter, has a weakness for one-liners. Socialism and comedy, that’s his schtick. The magic of the city is something he recognises, but it is always absurd: the visionary is a beggar and a clown. Whatever strange rituals he is prompted to undertake, they will always come out like a quotation from a Thirties B-movie.

In the small dark hours of the night, when the others were too stoned or sleepy to notice, I crept out of the manor to lope the quiet empty streets of south London. From Crystal Palace to New Cross, from Catford to Woolwich, I heel-and-toed it to escape the thing that was chewing me up. All night and into the next morning, up to twenty miles a day, I tramped, a 1960s Werewolf of London dreading only the bright sunlight.

Another fugue. Another mad traveller. We were discovering a useful genealogy: gas fitters, painters, novelists. Through the suburbs at night, the motorway verges by day, we were there; heel-and-toeing it, sucking water from a plastic bottle, trying to find some way to unravel the syntax of London.

A stroll around the paths and levels of the estate at Shenley (aka Watling Chase Community Forest) restores us. The autumn colours of an English fashion shoot by Lord Litchfield. A stout wooden bench facing an orchard of pruned apple trees. Among the ninety-odd varieties of apples grown here is the Seabrook Pearl, which is unique to Shenley.

We find the estate office and are given permission to explore the walled garden. The estate is in that limbo between memories of privilege (forelock-touching gardeners) and community art (in its remedial aspect). I take a photograph of Renchi stretched out beneath a set of sculpted steps on which is printed: NO/REST/FOR THE/WICKED.

Catching an obliging volunteer in the estate office, we are given permission to photocopy some of the old maps of Porters Park. The house was at one time occupied by an architect far better known than W.T. Curtis (who was responsible for the design of the Italianate water tower and hospital). The volunteer couldn’t remember the name. He rummaged among his papers until he found the relevant passage. Nicholas Hawksmoor. Had we heard of him?

Porters Park, mansion and grounds, had once been in the keeping of Hawksmoor. I knew I’d read somewhere that Hawksmoor had taken a house, out from London, a day’s ride to the north. But it came as a shock to stumble across it on the second day of our orbital walk. I couldn’t disassociate the man from his chain of East London churches, from city and river. Hawksmoor kept houses in Greenwich and Westminster, but this was his retreat; symbol of achievement and status.

At the end of his career, after Christ Church, Spitalfields, St Anne’s, Limehouse, and St Mary Woolnoth, Hawksmoor came to Shenley. He gave advice on the planning of restoration work at St Albans Abbey. There is a Hawksmoor drawing of the north face. He corresponded with the Bishop of London: ‘By the help of the magic of Archdeacon Stubbs I have erected the Ancient Temple of St. Albans in brass, which heretofore was only in stone… I have put into the landscape the famed site of Verulam, destroyed by Boudicea, there is also the lake and the situation of the new town which has arisen… We can but support this vulnerable pile from being martyred by the neglect of a slothful generation.’

Succeeding Wren as Surveyor of Works at Westminster Abbey, Hawksmoor moved from Greenwich in 1730, but retained his country manor. He died at Westminster, aged seventy-five, but expressed the wish to have his body returned to Shenley. For a number of years, the precise whereabouts of the grave was forgotten. The architect’s reputation drifted into obscurity. His riverine churches were locked, dark. Then, according to the notes our informant was reading, the burial place was rediscovered in 1830.