Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

We could search for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s grave in the little church of St Botolph. Apart from a beehive hut on the village green, with the inscription ‘Do well, be vigilant and fear not’, St Botolph’s is the only Shenley curiosity thought worthy of mention in The New Shell Guide to England. The church was on our route to the motorway.

The beehive hut recommended in the guide turned out to be a lock-up for miscreants, known locally as ‘The Cage’. Offenders were held overnight before being taken to Barnet to face the magistrate. There were, in fact, two inscriptions, placed over the windows. ‘Be sober, be vigilant’ and ‘Do well and fear naught’.

Emerging from the woods that surrounded Hawksmoor’s mansion, we hit Black Lion Hill. The road ran directly down towards the M25. Off to the east, just back from our path, was a site marked on my map as ‘Old Church (redundant)’.

The burial ground which stood above the church was accessible, weathered gravestones in a carpet of autumn leaves. There were monuments to the airmen of Shenley who had died during their training period. But there was no sign of a memorial to England’s greatest architect of the Baroque.

The church, flint with brick dressings, was of course closed. It wasn’t a church, but a set of private flats. The drive was a gravel crescent. Renchi rang the bell; using the voice box was like trying to contact the dead. I took a photograph. Renchi with his archaic headgear: the frontispiece to Blake’s Jerusalem. ‘Los as he Entered the Door of Death.’ Renchi with hand outstretched for the buzzer is a ringer for Blake’s pilgrim, as he approaches the door, the Gothic arch. Renchi with burden. Renchi with solar disk. ‘Los took his globe of fire to search the interiors of Albions’s/Bosom…’

Blake wrote to Hayley (23 October 1804): ‘I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door.’ Renchi as artist/seeker. Los, according to the catalogue of the millennial Blake exhibition at the Tate, is ‘artist-poet-architect, alter ego of Blake himself, in the guise of a London night-watchman’.

We made a circuit of the church grounds, stepping over children’s bicycles, fingering letters on tumbled tombs. At the back of the building, near a barbecue pit, we found it. A stone slab with a diagonal crack, a covering of yellow-gold beech leaves. A shallow earthenware dish filled with water. A circular mirror of clouds. The rectangular, slate-grey lid, which had been awkwardly set on a rim of bricks, was as unspectacular as a deepfreeze unit. A safe. A lead box. No pyramids, no decorative motifs, no Masonic symbols.

Three weeks before his death, Hawksmoor was busy with plans for Castle Howard: ‘I may be employed in Some Shape or other if I shall be alive in Building the Bridge.’ His own monument in the Shenley church is, as Kerry Downes writes, ‘characteristically erudite’.

PMSL. Piae memoriae sacer locus. ‘The formula appears to be unique.’ My remembered Latin was rough but we’re in the territory of sacred places and pious memories. St Botolph’s was certainly a sacred place. Hawksmoor’s grave, along with Temple Bar, were the beacons of our walk; heavily freighted memorials that had been allowed to pull away from the centre.

NICHOLAUS HAWKSMOOR, ARCHITECTUS. We waited. Behind us, the red tower on the hill. Across an open field, a few hundred yards to the north, the continuing rush and fret of the orbital motorway.

There is a set of twenty-four cards called Myriorama (or, Endless Landscape), based on a ‘novelty’ published in Leipzig in the 1830s. Lay out the cards in any order — one long straight line or 12×2, 4×6, 3×8 — and you achieve ‘a perfectly harmonious landscape’. A landscape of symbols: road, lake (or river), low hills, distant village, travellers on a highway. Time frozen at the edge of extinction. Something of Breughel, something of Christian Rosencreuz: hermetic-cabbalist hieroglyphs. The scale of these pocket-Polaroids induces vertigo. The black birds hanging above the rocks are too big. Why should eagles or vultures be found at the outskirts of a pretty German town? Why is the solitary horseman blowing a bugle? Everything tugs and tosses. Two youths cling, terrified, to a lifting kite. A decorated hot air balloon drifts in one direction; the sails of a three-master billow, as it surges, in the other. There is an obelisk like a war memorial with an unreadable inscription. Two walkers, rucksack-burdened, debate a signpost.

The thing you can’t do with the twenty-four cards is arrange them in a circle. The pattern fractures, the road breaks; the drawings are revealed as cigarette cards from a prophetic tarot pack to which the key has been lost. The trick that puzzles Renchi is: how to iron out the M25 circuit. How to convert the orbital motorway into a device made from straight lines, simple contraries: north/south, clay/gravel, water/tarmac.

We pore over maps; it doesn’t help. Renchi, in cap and red scarf, photographed on a traffic island in Shenley Lane, with a church (a copy of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge) behind him, on the far side of the motorway, is a contemporary transcription of a Leipzig card. The obvious solution is to take the direction the ink-drawn figure nominates, to strike west. We’re confused, crossing familiar ground without retracing our steps. The cardboard landscape is endless, the elements archetypal, but they shift, they change their story.

We sit at an outside table, a mill house pub beside the River Ver (closed for refurbishment), and drink the last of our plastic water; we scratch at the linings of our pockets, in search of that elusive Polo mint. Somebody has set fire to a bungalow. White plasterboard and asbestos panels on a wintry pyre.

Renchi has been reading Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A fitting complement to this stage of our walk. Asylums haunt the motorway like abandoned forts, the kind of defensive ring once found on the Thames below Tilbury. Hospital colonies are black mandalas of madness: circles set around a central axis, depictions of an unstable brain chemistry. Shenley is a hilltop encampment, Cadbury or Maiden Castle; Napsbury is a winged creature. The fantastic sigils of the madhouse architects dominate the map, the docile north-west quadrant of our journey.

The hospitals at Harperbury and Shenley are separated by a few fields; coming away from our inspection of the motorway fringe, we choose the long way around, by Harper Lane, NO A & E (white on blue). Motorway casualties must look elsewhere. Limbs hacked off by agricultural machinery will have to be left on ice. Foucault suits Harperbury; a Francophile poetic hits the spot.

There is a long straight avenue, pollarded limes, flanked by huts and severe brick blocks with windows set in mansard roofs. Light is declining, a pinkish glow in the grey membrane, trees like witches’ brooms. Go back into reverie, into black and white, and this is a film by Georges Franju, his first feature, La Tête contre les murs (1958). The critic Raymond Durgnat, summarising the plot, wrote of ‘a delinquent adolescent’ whose ‘sadism against his father has a visionary quality, and accordingly, he seems insane’. To avoid scandal the boy is placed in an asylum in which a doctor who punishes irrational behaviour is in conflict with a younger colleague who inclines towards a more progressive treatment of those given into his care. Charles Aznavour in his first substantial screen part plays an epileptic.

With hindsight, the film’s polemic (based on a novel published in 1934) can seem too naked, a simplistic argument between fashions in psychiatric practice. What survives is Franju’s sense of geometry, his ability to articulate the shapes and movements that define place. Sociology matters less than the layout of the buildings, the choice of location.