Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

As we advance down the avenue, towards the eastern checkpoint, smaller, ruder vehicles begin to appear. Domestics checking in. The occasional limo, or Range Rover, carrying uniformed children to school. We encounter the only walkers the estate allows: young women struggling with pairs, even packs, of leashed dogs. Accredited canine accompanists. Peripatetic toilet attendants scooping the lush verges. Leather lead in one hand, silver shit-shovel in the other.

The map of St George’s Hill, near the entrance gate, is highly selective: the estate is creamy-white ground, no houses are marked, roads look like rivers. Two islands of greenery represent the only named zones: Tennis Club, Golf Club. The western entrance lets you into the golf club. The eastern entrance adjoins the tennis club. There is no other reason to be here. The notice — YOU ARE HERE — is ironic. You only see it on your way out. As the barrier closes behind you. And the guard ticks you off his list. Phones down the line with an all-points warning.

This second estate, Whiteley Village, on the west side of Seven Hills Road, makes a powerful impression on the map, on my Nicholson. In its benevolent aspect, the village (with its Home of Rest) is a Jungian mandala, circular paths contained in an outer square. We are about to enter a panopticon, all areas visible from the centre. Another ambivalent asylum of the suburbs.

The approach to the village is kinder than anything we encountered on St George’s Hill, the planting is shaggier — a path vanishing into a green tunnel (one of Samuel Palmer’s oval bowers). There are gates with heraldic shields: WHITELEY VILLAGE/PRIVATE/ELDERLY RESIDENTS/PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY. But the gates are open.

Renchi strolling, hands cupped to support his awkward rucksack, leads the way. The taller, shavenheaded Marc (in black T-shirt, dark glasses, white trainers) is the inappropriate figure. He might be security. Earlier that morning, he told us how he’d been in the music business. A roadie at the tail-end of Heavy Metal, the cusp of Punk. He almost fitted on the Hill; delivering substances, a sessions man down on his luck. Up there, Renchi screamed offence: eco-warrior, sans-culotte. Ambling through these red brick bungalows, this play village, he comes into his own. A helper with rolled-up sleeves, a sympathetic listener: suitably rough at the edges, fuzzy in outline.

As with all Surrey estates, there is nobody to be seen. It’s too early for the old folk. The bungalows are generously spread out, detached, with neat garden plots; wide, trim lawns. The design is uniform but not oppressively so. Low tiled roofs on public buildings, twisted licorice pillars. Whiteley Village plays like The Prisoner — but that’s our own perversity; we’ve been schooled to be suspicious of charity, of surveillance (where it doesn’t declare itself).

At the centre of the estate is a raised garden, a plinth; a near obelisk with a stone sculpture of the seated figure of ‘Industry’. Industry is female, wide-skirted; a beehive (covered with bees) is cradled under her left arm. Beneath her, in profile, is a memorial to William Whiteley (1831–1907). Whiteley died in the year that Brooklands was launched as a motor racing circuit. He was a businessman, shopkeeper and philanthropist. His department store in Queensway, Bayswater, was a Victorian and Edwardian institution. A virtual high street with all its retail variety enclosed in a single spacious building; a way of experiencing Knightsbridge or Regent Street in the inner suburbs. Like Arding and Hobbs in Clapham Junction or Jones Brothers in Holloway Road. It was possible to promenade, fit out a house, purchase groceries, reading matter, take tea. The vision lasted for much of the century, gradually declining into situation comedy and shabby grandeur — until Whiteley’s rebranded itself as a true mall, a shelter for: Ace of Cards, Tower Records, Elegant Nails, Poons Restaurant. Railway terminus opportunism.

William Whiteley (of Westbourne Grove) made provision for his workers; after years behind the counter (floorwalking, packing, nodding and greeting in Bayswater), they qualified for a red brick bungalow in the Mole Valley. The memorial tablet alluded to a ‘munificent bequest’. Whiteley purchased the park and built cottages ‘for the comfort of old age and as an encouragement to others to do likewise’.

The verdigris stain made the plutocrat’s plinth look like a green fountain. Instead of being the eye of the panopticon, from which the inhabitants could be observed (and controlled), Industry and her beehive were the focal point. The spokes of the roads led attention in to the statue and its message: ‘Blessed be the man that provideth for the sick and needy.’ Charity being done, and well done, need not be inconspicuous. Retail veterans, their years of useful labour concluded, would meditate — with gratitude — on the benevolence of their patron. They would be encouraged to read his abbreviated biography, as it was carved in stone. ‘Apprenticed at the age of 16 to a drapery firm in Wakefield… went to London to see the Great Exhibition of 1851… the busy life of the Metropolis attracted him… ten years of thrift and constant study with a City firm… small business of his own at 63, Westbourne Grove… won himself the name of the universal provider… world wide reputation… pioneer of the great London retail stores of the 19th & 20th centuries… died in London…’

The memorial bench is a good place to spread our maps, assess their contradictions. St George’s Hill buffers the M25; we have lost touch with our orbital democrat, the conveyor belt of urban dreaming. We decide to follow Winstanley and the Diggers, in the direction of Cobham Heath, rather than pay any special attention to the ‘corner’, where the road begins to pull to the south-east. The Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley will have to be left for another day. It wasn’t, in any case, the gardens that pricked my interest, but the woodland car park (easy access to the motorway).

EVIL THAT LURKS AT THE GARDEN GATE: reported the Evening Standard , dressing a scare story with a photograph of cars and camper vans in a sylvan glade. The Wisley car park has become a meeting place for sex pests, weirdos, stalkers; a venue favoured by motorway prostitutes and gay cruisers. Six hundred and fifty thousand plant-fanciers visit the famous gardens every year without suspecting that the zone of car parks, each catering to a particular taste, is possessed by the Dionysiac frenzy articulated by J.G. Ballard in his 1973 novel, Crash . Adulterous couples favour one area of the woods, homosexuals another, transsexuals a third. Wisley Common, an undulating tract of heathland, Scots pine, birch and oak, is now a popular resort for sexual dalliance: the contemporary equivalent of the old riverside pleasure grounds, Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

The sixty-acre estate took shape as a garden in the 1870s, when it was purchased by George Wilson of Weybridge, a former Treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society. After Wilson’s death, the estate was acquired by Sir Thomas Hanbury, and given by him, in trust, to the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘for the purpose of an Experimental Garden and the Encouragement and Improvement of Scientific and Practical Horticulture in all its branches’. The pattern, seen in Enfield Chase, repeats itself. A paradise garden, owned by a brewer, confirms the relationship of inner and outer, city labyrinth and bucolic suburb. Hanbury, Quaker brewmaster (Truman, Hanbury and Buxton of Brick Lane), laid out a patch of ground where stressed workers could recover their vital energies by walking among beds of exotic plants. The flavour of Wisley (as represented in the RHS booklet of 1969, picked up in one of Shepperton’s many charity shops) is resolutely outer-rim M25, Surrey hill station: bright gashes of colonial colour. Evergreen azaleas, ‘Temple Belle’ rhododendrons. Alpine rockeries that ‘Gussie’ Bowles of Myddelton House would have abhorred.