Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

A walled estate, effectively restored and policed, the Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water was the ultimate heritage-asylum conversion. Discreetly positioned, within a few miles of Windsor Castle, Eton College and the liberties of Runnymede, the sanatorium catered to the carriage trade. Socially awkward relatives of the well connected were boarded out: inconvenient pregnancies, mild eccentricities, boozers, society dope fiends. No headbangers, no drooling imbeciles, no lowlife. Marienbad on the Bourne.

Mervyn Peake was treated with ECT in Virginia Water: the Holloway Sanatorium as an electro-convulsive manifestation of Gormenghast. In more recent times, the poet John Welch, undergoing remedial therapy, was given the task of burning medical files.

Thomas Holloway, the philanthropist responsible for college and asylum, spent £ 40.000 on the Belgian Gothic building. He consulted E.W. Pugin, launched an architectural competition, and named Crossland, Salomans and Jones as the winning firm. It wasn’t charity, wealthy relatives would pay a premium to lodge patients in a set every bit as extravagant as St Pancras station hotel.

How many lunatics was Holloway expecting? The restored sanatorium buildings, rebranded as ‘Virginia Park’, seen through ironwork gates, are grouped like an Ivy League campus (imposing, pastiched). Big Ben tower, numerous chimneys, turrets, archways, cloisters: Holloway Sanatorium was a magnum opus. The architect William Crossland, pupil of George Gilbert Scott, made a huge emotional investment in this paradise of the slightly disturbed. Everything about his pitch was wonky.

Examine the Victorian portraits in their silver-framed ovals. Crossland, bald and bearded, is a serious man with an expanding forehead. Holloway, on the other hand, is quiffed and teased; commas of luxuriant growth decorating his cheekbones. Crossland, the artist in stone, presents himself as a solid citizen. Holloway, peddling his patent remedies, ointments possessed of a ‘healing genius’, photographs like a male lead out of Dickens: Pip or the youthful David Copperfield. The magic medicine, when analysed, was found to consist of yellow beeswax, lanolin and olive oil. It made Holloway’s fortune, sponsored his civic benevolence: two colonies, red brick monsters, college and sanatorium. A theme park madhouse carved out of beeswax.

The final cost of the collegiate fantasy in Virginia Water rose to Millennium Dome proportions; by the time the first brick was laid by Jane Holloway, her husband had become a melancholy recluse. He died in 1883.

The architect Crossland’s last major commission was the Memorial Chapel to Holloway at Sunninghill. He died in a Camden Town boarding house in 1908, leaving an estate of £ 29.

It took two or three attempts before we were allowed in. We chatted to security through iron gates. We were repulsed at manned lodges. But part of the remit at Virginia Park — the developers Octagon having received a contribution from English Heritage — is to allow students of architecture (and the vulgarly curious) a glimpse of this restored Victorian folly. Virginia Park had always been a high-risk development: lead had been stripped from the roof, decorated walls were damp-stained. English weather had devastated the property. But the Octagon operation wasn’t one of the asset stripping (burn and bury) efforts we’d encountered along the northern section of the M25. Memory was not trashed but tactfully restored, varnished: improved. Virginia Park would combine the gravitas of the Victoria and Albert Museum with five-star facilities, acceptable to multinational transients: gym, swimming pool, state of the art plumbing, landscape gardening.

On the right day, at the right hour, cash in hand, visitors are allowed to pass through the security gates. An (achieved) asylum seeker, friendly, but nervous of writing a receipt, steps from his checkpoint-office to point out the route we should take.

If you weren’t already an orthopedic waistcoat-wearer (laced like Lillie Langtry), the decor of the entrance hall at the Holloway Sanatorium would push you over the edge. If you suffered from nerves, if you were thyroid-twitchy, spots in front of the eyes, flinching from bright colours, here was shock therapy. Nothing in our approach had prepared us for this. The path was immaculate, as were the white sports clothes, white ankle-socks, trainers, baseball caps of the women who cruised the grounds: four-wheel drives, multi-geared mountain bikes (for the bowling-green flat trip to the gates). The investors in Octagon’s award-winning development are looking for convenient crash-pads, close to London Airport: maximum security, modest service charges, en suite exercise equipment, silence .

‘An enviable lifestyle on the grand scale,’ says the brochure. The very pitch that was made to wealthy Victorian families with flaky relatives. ‘Gracious four storey town houses.’ (If you can have town houses without a town.) The message, in the promotional photographs, is confused: Japanese minimalism (one blue and white vase), US hygiene fetishism, ersatz Regency drapes, Trusthouse Forte oil paintings.

However meticulous the makeover, the back story always leaks, seeps through as an ineradicable miasma. Pain, displacement. The agony of knowing enough to know that something is wrong, a moment’s remission will be followed by a renewed attack. Consciousness misplaced in long corridors. Buildings slip and shift and refuse to settle on a single identity. They have been created through the madness of money, designed by a man harried by all the demons of the Gothic imagination.

The entrance hall, restored by ‘artists and craftsmen’, is insane; a Turkish bath of wild candyfloss colours, synapse-destroying detail — Celtic, Moorish, Norse. Sultan’s Palace arches. Pillars dividing into lesser pillars. A bestiary of monsters: tongues, mouths, teeth, claws. If you were a tranquillised stoic, calm as a stone, you’d freak and tremble. ‘I’m not going near that scarlet carpet, that staircase.’ Imagery is hysterical. The eye can’t settle. The part of the brain that has to unscramble visual information spins like a fruit machine.

The front door is still open, the stone floor is cool. The woman who does PR for Octagon is a helpful and reassuring presence. Knowing how we feel, she distracts us; leads the way to the hammerbeam-ceilinged dining hall.

Dark wood — inset with Arts and Crafts panels. Stained glass. A Pre-Raphaelite hall. Illuminated by low-hanging glass bowls. The heat has us coughing. Hothouse moist. Comfort pushed, until it becomes a torment.

We make admiring noises. This is a very striking set. But it is also a brain teaser. When you walk around Virginia Park you develop split-screen vision: the ceiling of the dining hall is just what you might expect in a Victorian public school, a university of the right vintage, but the body of the room has been utterly transformed. It is now a swimming pool. An attractive woman — I think of Ballard’s narcoleptic Mediparc communities — does her lazy laps. The acoustic memory-track of Holloway’s disturbed patients is absorbed in steady plashing, lost in tall space. Temperature has to be cranked up to preserve the fancy carpentry. The solitary swimmer, observed by the ruffians at the door, doesn’t break her stroke. She cultivates a method of moving through this speckled blue medium, excluding all fear of the tons of overwrought wood, the stalactite forest that hangs above the water.

After the empty gym, the abandoned exercise bicycles, we are free to explore the development. The Grand Hall, once a rather intimidating library (not many books, portraits of worthies), now features a stage and a sheeted grand piano. The foot-pedals have been slipped into cosy white socks. The scale of the Hall would have agoraphobics cowering under the piano. It struck us, perambulating the acres of polished floor, that every phobia was humoured: you name it, we’ll give it to you. A white-knuckle ride for the mentally incapacitated, the morally enfeebled.