Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

We’re excited about finding a hospital that is still in business. After struggling through the Thatcher and neo-Thatcher (Blair Which ) years, Harefield is under pressure to ‘utilise’ its potential by selling off land acquired at the time of the Great War from an Australian benefactor, Charles Arthur Moresby Billyard-Leake.

History, at this altitude, plays as a sequence of rapid dissolves. Ivy-covered Edwardian country house with French shutters (billowing canopies, rose garden). Wooden huts filled with Aussie soldiers, the casualties of Gallipoli. Futurist operating theatres in which body parts can be swapped or customised.

ROYAL BROMPTON & HAREFIELD: NHS TRUST. We wander, unchallenged, through the grounds. It is no easy task to rescue the Harefield narrative from the present assembly of buildings. Vehicles in the ‘Spaces Reserved For Permit Holders’ are not as flashy as the showroom specimens in the IT manors of the motorway fringe. Those cars are part of an employment — and-benefits package, status toys in silver and grey. Silvergrey. A new coinage. There is, at the turn of the Millennium, a colour which is not a colour; a varnish that simulates light — shock. That modifies shape (curve, comma): until the sprayed vehicle becomes an energy parenthesis, a crisply outlined bracket around… nothing.

Harefield cars — red, blue, white, GB stickers — belong with the brick frontage; metal-framed, Fifties windows, exposed drainpipes, tight entrance hall. The reception area speaks of benign bureaucracy, the Welfare State. This building would be comfortable anywhere in the western corridor, Western Avenue to Ruislip, Hatfield to Welwyn Garden City. It says: laboratory as office, office as ward. It says: hierarchies of command, paperwork, chitties, storerooms. It says: white coats and brown coats. It says: numbered parking bays, employment for life, team spirit, works outings, cricket. Harefield looks like a film studio from the industrial era, everything on site. A British studio working on cobwebby Gothic (Frankenstein transplants, graverobbers with stage Irish accents, Byronic doctors distinguished by their height).

That’s the only choice for British cinema: hospital as low comedy, farts and gropes, or hospital as base for sinister experiments. In Harefield these tendencies came together. Cardiology units were sponsored by TV comics who had themselves suffered heart attacks. They were also utilised as sets by surviving production companies. The patronage of Sir John Mills and Eric Morecambe was enhanced by facility fees earned by the hospital’s appearance in Carry On films, BBC documentaries; and by Russell Grant ‘reliving his childhood’ for Down Your Way .

‘One never knew,’ according to a Harefield surgeon, ‘when a team of actors, cameras and technicians would invade… On one occasion caravans were parked all around the roundabout outside the front door and even the switchboard was moved and signs changed.’ Carry On nurses in ‘the highest heels imaginable’ were confused with real workers going about their duties.

The hospital/studio is a very British fantasy. Authority figures, naughty nurses. Blood fears: contamination, infection by aliens. Farce and horror. Everything contained within a closed set: tame countryside, autumn woods fringing the motorway. Our paranoia over the machinations of the Secret State (silent complicity) can be burlesqued in Avengers television. The journeymen of British cinema can earn a crust by playing out simplistic ethical dilemmas on authentic stages, found within a few minutes’ drive of the studios. Not for Rank the dark poetics of Franju; the asylum that is itself the metaphor. Rank peddled post-Shavian paradox. They wrote (rewrote) scripts that were like business plans. Then identified a suitable (and economic) location in which to photograph exteriors that would validate their fiction.

Director Basil Dearden came to Harefield to make Life for Ruth in 1962. A blood story: the father who won’t, on religious grounds, permit a transfusion for his dying daughter. Patrick ( The Prisoner ) McGoohan is the doctor and Michael Craig the fundamentalist father. Otto Heller, who shot The Ipcress File , was DP. Secondhand blood, given up or sold as a Third World commodity, is the coming theme. Deeper fears surface only when Harefield followed the Gothic visionaries of Bray and started to exchange hearts, to use captive animals for quick-fit spare parts.

Later Harefield ‘co-productions’ would include Bryan Forbes’s The Raging Moon , in which his wife, Nanette Newman, and the endemically malign Malcolm McDowell ‘give rousing performances in a moving tale of love in a home for the handicapped’. Sentimental fables authenticated by a realistic backdrop gave way to dramatised documentaries. Harefield as itself. In 1974 the BBC filmed Cross Your Heart and Hope to Live .

Taped to the window of the next building we approach is a handwritten note: DEAR DONORS WE HAVE CLOSED. THANK YOU. Closed? Like a Mare Street kebab house, where Euro-approximate spelling turns ‘doner’ into ‘donor’. The notice conjures up grotesque images: Carry On clowns — Bernard Bresslaw, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, Jack Douglas — standing in line, lumps of dripping meat in their hands, hearts, lights, liver. I saw a performance of ghost dancers, white nudes, male and female figures plastered in kaolin, walking through the exhibits in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I fantasised the statues of Harefield, white gods and goddesses painted like a butcher’s chart, searching for someone to accept their posthumous donations. Hearts beating in closed fists.

Our tour of the grounds discloses a mansion, stable blocks, gardens that would once have belonged to leisured gentry; huts, sheds, bungalows that could have been transported from an outback cattle station. A heliport. A Buckminster Fuller structure, a pyramid, mysteriously known as the ‘Playdrome’. Another colony has grown up in the grounds of a private park, committee-inspired geometry imposed on a lazy English landscape. Thanks to its history, the direct transition from family home to wartime hospital, Harefield escaped the Italianate water tower. Because there is nothing to preserve under the heritage label, the enterprise might survive.

There is a building known as ‘The Mansion’; it replaced an older house called Rythes (or Ryes). In 1704 the property which stood in 170 acres of land was sold by John Stanyon to John Cooke, who bought it as part of a marriage settlement for his son George. George Cooke, a lawyer, Knight of the Inner Temple, became Chief Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas and Lord of the Manor of Hayes.

It was Cooke who demolished and replaced the old house. The usual programme of improvements, extensions, was initiated: a square building with thirty rooms, a cast-lead roof, columned portico and many, many windows. There was as much glass as plaster, whiteness muted by a veil of creepers. White is a memory colour, the colour of the dead, black’s negative. The Mansion passed through the influence of its various patrons, each one revising and amending, until it was bought by the Australian Arthur Billyard-Leake.

The relation of road to estate to village doesn’t change. Nineteenth-century maps present the same village green, two pubs (King’s Arms and Cricketers), parish church. But Harefield Park changes dramatically; once mansion, stables, coach house were surrounded by woods, farms. There were lakes, streams, mature trees (oak, horse chestnut, a great cedar of Lebanon). Then, decade by decade, trees were felled, parkland was lost to hospital, nurses’ home, occupational therapy, laundry, record office. The Mediparc is a J.G. Ballard version of the pastoral. Information brokering, fibre-optic transactions, in place of the acres of enclosed, seigneurial countryside. The more apparently opened up an estate, the fewer its freedoms. Security operatives and surveillance cameras replace bailiffs, gamekeepers and man-traps.