Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Just beyond the Common, to the north, the map revealed a phalanx of hospitals aimed at London. The narrator of The War of the Worlds speaks of making ‘a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead’ (where his wife had taken shelter from the Martian invasion). The plan was: Newhaven and out, reverse asylum seekers. But Wells’s narrative carries the traumatised Surrey suburbanite back along the route Renchi and I adopted, on a late walk (from the Siebel Building and Brooklands) in the direction of Weybridge and Shepperton. At the ferry (still operative), close to where the Wey flows into the Thames, the Martians crossed into Middlesex, devastating the riverbank with their heat-ray tripods (future estate agents’ cameras).

The Epsom hospital colony, serrated semi-circular outlines masked by complacent greenery, looks like a set of schematic plans for interplanetary robots. Transformer toys. Something very black and sharp lies in wait along Horton Lane — with brain-burning lasers and hot wires, knives, masks, drugs, instruments of restraint. To deal with London’s damaged citizens. The hospitals become a second ghetto, wards from White-chapel, excited aliens punished for their difference. Tidied away by misplaced benevolence.

The dissolve from spa town to prison colony was realised by the construction of the hospitals at the beginning of the twentieth century. And now, in the late summer of 1999, conversion is in full swing; the Epsom legend is being rapidly revised. Where once patients were encouraged, as therapy, to summon up and confront painful images from their past, memory is wilfully erased. Or doctored. New names, new roads and roundabouts. Smarter uniforms for the warders (aka security).

Filmmaker John Sergeant, researching a project on the M25, interviewed Dr Sidney Crown, a consultant psychotherapist — who explained how the apparent endlessness of the orbital motorway induced rage and states of trance. The road is a midden of competing archetypes. Driving is a meditational device, summoning future memories: driving is prophecy.

Dr Crown, provoked, remembered Epsom. As a very young doctor, he walked where we were walking, from the station (by paths and green ways, metal signposts) to Long Grove Road. His suitcase a dead weight. Long Grove, Horton and The Manor were dumps, Victorian asylums near the bottom of an overburdened system. The medical staff weren’t ambitious or enlightened. They lived like colonial administrators; priding themselves, as Crown recalled, on the quality of their cellar, the excellence of the kitchen. The natives might be restless, there was little hope of a better posting, but the evening meal was an event: crisp linen, sparkling glass, heavy silverware, four or five courses, decent wines, brandy and cigars. The asylums were country houses in an era of revolution. Old-timers in the town deplore the wanton destruction of trees, removed to make way for the new estate roads. Horton and Long Grove, at their peak, between the wars, were a focus for Epsom society: tea dances, tennis parties.

Themes that flickered like St Elmo’s fire along the northern stretch of the M25, between Waltham Abbey and Abbots Langley, found resolution here. Epsom was the pivot in our story. I felt that this was the halfway point in the walk; after Epsom, we would be heading for home. I had worked on a book with a young Jewish woman, Rachel Lichtenstein; an artist and archivist. Rachel solved one of the great mysteries of Whitechapel: the disappearance of David Rodinsky. Rodinsky lived above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street. One day, in the Sixties, he vanished. The room was sealed like a shrine. When it was broken into, years later, the scattered debris of a life — books, clothes, diaries, food, records, maps — were exposed to investigation, public gaze, incontinent theorising. The man was absorbed by the set which had contained him. Films and vulgar speculation followed. Rachel was the first person to treat Rodinsky as a human being, a man with a biography and a finite lifespan.

Rachel found Rodinsky’s death certificate:

Name and Surname: David Rodinsky, no.391, DX 421235.

When and Where: 4th of March 1969. The Grove, Horton Lane, Epsom.

Sex: male. Age: 44 yrs. Occupation: none.

Address: 19 Princelet Street, El.

Cause of death: broncho-pneumonia, II epilepsy with paranoid features.

She drove to Epsom. ‘Epilepsy’ was the convenient clinical formulation arrived at to explain (or justify) nineteenth-century fugue walkers, long-distance amnesiacs. It meant: restlessness, mysterious expeditions such as those Rodinsky plotted on his London A — Z .

Rachel, a good detective, hot on the trail, fluctuated between rage and fugue. Anger and inspiration. Arriving in Epsom, she met with indifference, hints at conspiracy, perimeter fences and guard dogs. The Grove was off-limits. Long Grove Road, in all its sinister beauty, concrete-slab walls, curtains of evergreens, rebuffed her.

In a pub, keeping to the generic rules of crime fiction, she fell into conversation with a ‘large balding man, dressed in grey overalls’. They were the only customers in the place. He was a driver; for years he had delivered medical equipment to the hospitals in Horton Lane. ‘He moved closer and told me in whispers that the Long Grove had mysteriously burned down, along with its records, five years previously… He lowered his eyebrows and told of strange goings-on, unexplained fires, weird disappearances.’ When Rachel produced her notebook, the man backed off, retreated to the fruit machine. ‘More than my job’s worth,’ he muttered.

Our early-morning ramble down Horton Lane confirms the atmosphere of elective paranoia that infects much of orbital fringe London. Something is happening but nobody will take responsibility for it: any formal announcement will let the cat out of the bag. Boredom has been synthesised into threat. PRIVATE PROPERTY/TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED/TEL. SURREY HEALTH AUTHORITIES ON 0126 445 876 FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.

Being Rachel, she pushes it; face against fence — until the dog, the slavering German shepherd, leaps at her. Being Rachel, she makes the call to the Surrey Health Authorities. ‘A curt secretary answered: all records had been destroyed in the fire, she could not help.’

Without Lichtenstein’s possessed pursuit, the story of Rodinsky’s death would blacken in a convenient bonfire. The medical records of his sister and many of the other displaced and disturbed patients from East London, kept at Claybury (now Repton Park), were burnt in a builders’ skip. Heritaged history is the new TV pornography, the ratings winner. Henry VIII’s wives, Elizabeth II’s suitors. The Normans, the Romans, the Vikings. Ghetto history is unrequired: we want to know about the planting of the estate, the notable figures who lived in the great house. Developers peddle an anodyne future of managed ecology, fitness regimes, security. The Long Grove ward where Rodinsky died was described to Rachel as a babble of arguing Hasids, displaced cabbalists, a city hive. Even now, when the walls are coming down, the noise won’t go away.

I met Renchi at Epsom station on 5 August 1999. He was wearing a T-shirt of many colours, many signs and symbols: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. Not the best disguise for infiltrating what remained of the hospital colony.

Out of the station, past the newsagent (Epsom & Ewell Herald: POLICE DENY SOFT TOUCH WITH TRAVELLERS), We find the route. Our footsteps in other footsteps; the pavements are conveyor belts carrying out-of-towners away from the centre towards the hospitals. Another green way, screened from the business of the town. A prophylactic tunnel to the isolation zone: carports instead of front lawns, monkey-puzzles, cedars, yellow lines to deter opportunist parkers. The roads are deserted. The florist is boarded over with chipboard panels. The signpost — HORTON AND LONG GROVE HOSPITALS — is rusted. Some of the lettering has been chipped away, in an attempt to remove HORTON. Horton is rumoured to be the only active building in the whole development area. Active and therefore secret. Geography has been twisted by a Lewis Carroll logic: if somewhere is featured on a sign, it no longer exists. If it isn’t, it does.