Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

If you have the model town of Sainsbury’s, with its busy avenues, young mothers, kids, arguing couples, flirting singles, cruisers, slow-moving oldies (walking frames on awkward wheels), you don’t need Cobham. Sainsbury’s is universal (like America). In supermarket heaven, you’re at home everywhere. The name sounds like Salisbury. You might bump into Edward Heath, V.S. Naipaul, Cecil Beaton. Or find John Constable sketching meadows of lettuce. The retail landscape supplies all the ingredients for a day out: butcher, baker, fishmonger, deli, confectioner, video store, florist. The acoustic environment keeps trippers in a trance state. Lulled by the scent of lilies, tulips, carnations, weary excursionists rest on the bars of their trolleys. Dazzled by cosmetic colours, the eye-damage of too-red strawberries, tomatoes, peppers as green as the deep Atlantic, sleepwalkers call up mildly erotic reveries. Their hands keep moving, making guided choices, filling the basket. Supermarkets are the last pleasure gardens, brothels of the senses.

Do we take the time to visit Painshill Landscape Garden (aka Painshill Park)? We don’t know anything about the place, but here it is — and, on this rather dim section of the walk, we’re ready to access the unexpected. The A3 runs down the west side of the extensive grounds and the M25 carves around to the south: Painshill (supported by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, English Heritage, the Countryside Commission and Surrey County Council) is overendowed real estate. Like so much else that we’ve encountered, it is dedicated to customising the past as a way of making us feel good about ourselves: we come from somewhere, we have a lineage. That which is worth preserving has been preserved. We meditate, by walking specified and guided routes, on the lessons that history can teach us. The M25 is ringed with National Trust properties, mansions, estates, hills, towers. Runnymede through Hatch-lands Park to Box Hill. Brochures tell you what you should notice: ‘mammals such as the dormouse, plus a nationally important bat population’. Box Hill is doubly blessed: by ‘spectacular views towards the West Sussex Downs’ and by its association with the Jane Austen movie franchise. Surrey is divided between the bits where Merchant/Ivory exercise their Forster options (watch out for a naked Simon Callow plunging into a woodland pool) and hillocks where one of Austen’s headstrong young ladies can be beastly to her elders. For location caterers, it’s west to Hardy country (Polanski, Schlesinger) or east to India (David Lean).

The ascent of Box Hill, formerly a Cockney outing (deplored by mandarin essayists like Sir Sidney Colvin), is now pictured in the National Trust brochure as a procession of mountain bikes. ‘On the summit there is a visitor centre, shop with plant sales, servery and a fort (partly open to the public).’

My feeling is that anywhere with a ‘servery’, anywhere that is ‘partly open’, is to be avoided. Why let someone else nominate sites that are worth visiting? If you want a shop, you should find a shop. Sainsbury’s (Cobham) has a better servery than Box Hill. The space underneath Runnymede Bridge is more exciting than the National Trust recommended Runnymede Meadows (with ‘popular tea-room’). Don’t take my word for it, don’t bother with my list of alternative attractions — Junction 21 of the M25, the Siebel building in Egham, Hawksmoor’s gravestone in Shenley; discover your own. In the finding is the experience.

Painshill, unrecommended, unknown to us, was irresistible. Acquired, designed, planted by the Honourable Charles Hamilton (1704 — 86), the estate consists of several hundred acres of barren heathland converted into a gallery of views, framed landscapes, to rival Stourhead or Stowe. Hamilton almost bankrupted himself in the process. An enterprise undertaken to satisfy his vanity, and to astonish his friends, is now — after two hundred years of ‘seclusion’ — offered to the public, as a venue for ‘events’. Days are given over to Teddy Bear Trails, Santa in the Grotto and demonstrations of water wheels. The park, with its Augustan conceits, its Gothic fantasies, has been thoroughly democratised.

We’re conscious, from the start of our tour, from the moment we pick up the Painshill Park Trust leaflet (and map), that we are processing through an elaborately staged masque; graded effects. The aristocrat Hamilton, youngest son of the Earl of Abercorn, travelled widely. He was influenced by ‘poetic and literary sources’. Alexander Pope’s Grotto at Twickenham. The fashion for chinoiserie. The lake, created above the circumfluent River Mole, looks like a faded transfer on a willow pattern plate. The South Bank bridge has the spindly quality of something borrowed from an oriental romance: a landscape in quotation marks. Dank English reality shaped to provoke memories of unread books, almost-familiar illustrations. Catherine the Great commissioned a dinner service from Josiah Wedgwood, decorated with scenes from Painshill Park. If we followed the route suggested by the official guide, pausing to appreciate the Gothic Temple, the Ruined Abbey, the Temple of Bacchus, the Turkish Tent, we would be tramping through a vista of smashed crockery. A Julian Schnabel replay of William Gilpin’s watercolours, the generic views of Prosser and Wollett. Between the artifice of the Augustans and the passion of the Romantics, we were lost: day trippers in quest of easy revelations, shock effects, anything that could be satirised in a couple of sentences.

But Painshill outmanoeuvred us. There is a triangulation between the paradise gardens of Enfield Chase, Painshill (and Wisley) on the south-west corner, and Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham (the Valley of Vision). A recrudescence of the pastoral in the teeth of all contrary indications. A triangle within the circle of the motorway: flashing like a hazard sign. Heaven and hell. Early visitors to Painshill referred to it as Elysium or Eden. A place to be enjoyed after death. Or through the myth of origin. A sanctuary in an unpeopled world. A doomed experiment by some remote and paternalistic deity. The Painshill leaflet stresses this theme: ‘Paradise, once lost, cannot be regained in a single day… We are recreating an inheritance — the magic and mystery of Hamilton’s garden.’

Seduced from the road, let into this estate, our duty is to record the eighteenth-century theme park experience. The decahedral temple is too white, wood as stone; the recreation of a fraud, the missing turret of a Disneyland castle. A cardboard crown from a touring production of Richard III . The temple is anti-Gothic, lacking creepers, dirt, dust, spiders, any trace of the North European spirit. The temple should have been located much closer to the M25, peeping out of a thicket of salt-resistant grass. It’s a hut, open on all sides, arched windows acting as doors. The design of the floor points inwards to a jagged circle made from hexagonal tiles. The white orbit contains a brown centre which contains the outline of a square. The floor, as we contemplate it, becomes a theoretical dome.

Hamilton’s architectural conceits, stressed by tame artists hired to make promotional sketches, demonstrate the proposition that there are always two viewpoints. The distant prospect of an exquisitely sited folly. And the view out , from that privileged position. Prosser, in his 1828 drawing (made at the Gothic Temple), highlights the lake, the Chinese bridge, two figures at the water’s edge. Further attractions — Turkish tent, Temple of Bacchus, Gothic tower — are distant features. The drawing teaches you how and where to look. Where to walk.

Contemplating the lake, we find ourselves alongside it. No digressions, no psychogeographic detours. Each view leads, directly, to the next feature. The ‘ruined abbey’ is insufficiently distressed, the fake of a fake. This sort of thing was, until very recently, known as ‘postmodern irony’, but architecturally contrived ruins don’t seem so ironic after the newsreel footage of 11 September at ‘ground zero’, New York; or photographs of collapsed tower blocks in Mexico City, crumpled flyovers, devastated cheap hotels. Hamilton’s abbey, incompletely complete, is cheesy and nibbled. The lakeside setting is picturesque; a potential swamp waiting on winter rain.