Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Durgnat quotes Franju: ‘I shot La Tête in the Psychiatric Hospital of Dury, with a quite unbelievable courtyard. Dead in the centre was a phallic tree with four benches grouped around it… We lived as a community in their community. We hardly emerged from it… If we’d slept in the asylum, we’d still be there.’

In the courtyard inmates describe small circles, heads against the wall; the plodding, eyes-on-gravel prisoners of Van Gogh. Ian Hacking writes about an unmarried shepherd who was committed to an asylum in 1857, suffering from severe seizures. ‘Before or after an attack he would compulsively pace up and down, or in circles, always clockwise. He had an obsessive conviction that he should put the whole world, and the heavens and angels, in his head, or in his heart.’ His autopsy revealed atrophy of the brain, especially of the right hemisphere. Leashed, he walked the pain, lacking balance, a tight circuit around nothing. His epic peregrination, the few yards of a hospital ward, is a doomed attempt to recover memory. Movement provokes memory. Photographs from a dozen journeys over the same ground refuse to cohere: the result is never that ‘perfectly harmonious landscape’. The result is: monuments without inscriptions, twisted signposts.

Durgnat correctly interpreted Franju’s film as a pitiless equation: ‘The pattern has the finality of an Euclidean Q.E.D., its rigid reversal and angularity evokes helplessness, despair, a stiffening fear, a tightrope-walk over the abyss of madness-by-contagion… Poetry and geometry meet amidst these landscapes whose greyness is as charged and nuanced as the sky before thunder. In shot after shot, the white walls of the asylum enclose windows and open doors, or other apertures, through which black-branched trees and skies seem, not just a glimpse of freedom, but themselves subjected to the enclosing architecture.’

Harperbury has sunk into the half-life of discontinued surveillance, decanted buildings, bored curation. The developers haven’t yet moved in, although the patients have leaked away. Nobody questions us. Nobody takes any interest in our ramble through their property. We find an office with a blow-heater, a woman drinking tea. Some account of the hospital’s history has been published, but it isn’t available. We give our names and addresses and receive a promise that information will be sent to us in due course. But we understand this will never happen. The energy has gone from the place. The hut that once belonged to the Shenley airfield has infected the other buildings; they’re demob happy. The war’s over and’the future hasn’t begun.

It’s getting dark as we walk down Smug Oak Lane towards the complex symmetry of the junction that marries the surging streams of the M25 and the M1. A site of magical resonance: triangular field, wood, torrential traffic-rush. The layering of access roads, tributaries, slipstreams, fires memory sensors, provokes narrative. We feel as though we are eavesdropping on a thousand private conversations, sharing monologues and weary daydreams.

Renchi explains how Foucault tracks the asylum back to the pesthouse, the hospital for lepers which had to be built outside the gates of the city. ‘In 1348,’ Foucault wrote, ‘the great leprosarium of Saint Albans contained only three patients; the hospital of Romenal in Kent was abandoned twenty-four years later, for lack of lepers.’

Perhaps we were misreading the transition from closed communities of the hurt and drug-damaged (lepers of the cosmetic city) to Barratt estates designed as novelties: protected enclaves with no memory. Perhaps there now existed a shortfall in derangement. Madness, visionary seizure, nonconformist rage belonged in another era — with the cinema of romantic individualism, bad boys, naughty girls provoked by the dull-minded orthodoxies of life under the nuclear umbrella. Jean Seberg sleepwalking through Robert Rossen’s Lilith. Jack Nicholson collecting an Oscar for deploying the most sinister grin (this side of Tony Blair) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Madness as performance. It was over.

Sets were being struck. Foucault’s leper houses, part of (or in close proximity to) monastic institutions, became hospitals, prisons, prophylactic domes; isolation bred cruelty, until cruelty gave way to dialogue, the sanctioned shaman who interpreted dreams. Ships of Fools, sailing the rivers, putting out to sea, take on the guise of a fleet of Eddie Stobart lorries floating above the Dartford Bridge on a misty spring morning. Shenley, Harperbury and Napsbury were islands of the damned. From which the damned had vanished.

‘In the margins of the community,’ Foucault wrote, ‘at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and uninhabitable.’ We were moving through just such a zone. The mad had departed, leaving the hospitals functionless, inert. The remaining clerks and doctors were depressed. Central government had no interest in these sites. They were statistics to be manipulated, real estate to be turned to profit. Sweetheart deals with developers saw the great Victorian parks, with their dark histories, their infamous architecture, pillaged, revamped, repackaged in a matter of months. With little or no public debate, no accountability.

‘Celebrities flock to Chigwell,’ screamed the property pages. This was the Chigwell ‘made famous by the BBC’s hit comedy Birds of a Feather ’. Repton Park, ‘with its Georgian-style villas and uniformed concierge service’, is wowing ‘snooker players and actors from EastEnders ’, who are attracted by ‘the right combination of prestige and seclusion’. Crest Homes are the developers (note the tell-tale water tower in the illustration of this former asylum).

What Crest have done is lose the name and history of Claybury Mental Hospital. So much of the East End, so many real East Enders, were decanted into this hilltop settlement. The sister of the Whitechapel hermit David Rodinsky died in Claybury. The water tower is an aid to navigation seen by motorists coming into London on the M11, by orbital traffickers on the North Circular. Claybury was a city in exile, forcible re-immigration. If they spoke in these long wards they spoke in tongues.

When I was undertaking a series of walks that traced markings on Rodinsky’s battered copy of the London A-Z , I arrived at Claybury on the day when bulldozers were moving in. Georgian wasn’t the word I’d have used to describe the blocks I could see through the iron gate. But developers believe that a strategic change of name will wipe the slate: from Claybury Hospital to Repton Park. Claybury was once a manor house, a hall. That story fades and the name of the great English landscape-gardener, Humphry Repton, is invoked. Repton Park. Flashed into brochures and websites as a subconscious prompt: instant aristocracy. The improving of estates was Humphry’s scam; nothing could be more picturesque than an old madhouse. Repton Park is Crest Nicholson’s Northanger Abbey, pastiche Gothic: spooks, incestuous bondings, mad monks, secret passages recalibrated as pretty parkland. Prestige and seclusion. In skips outside the gates of Claybury, men in yellow hard hats were burning the hospital records.

Repton kept his own work notes in ‘red books’, which always featured watercolour sketches showing the estates he had redesigned in ‘before’ and ‘after’ condition. Crest Nicholson favour the tactful dissolve: the tower remains, minatory blocks morph into detached villas, lawns and cricket squares are tidied up.

Crest Nicholson are working their way around the loop on a ‘35 minutes from Liverpool Street’ arc. Claybury, Warley Hospital in Brentwood (aka Clements Park), Shenley. What they like is the floating colony, the space station landscaped by Humphry Repton or Lancelot Brown. A stylish no-place that is everyplace. No attachment to the local, an easy commute to the centre. The ideal Crest Homes estate defies history and computer-enhances geography.