Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

In captured fields, close to the hospitals, the housing is institutional vernacular: grace and favour cottages, warders (for the use of). Clean, well-presented, lace curtained — with weed-less, lifeless gardens, grey-brown lawns like bad wigs. Only the military (or civilians under the rule of the Official Secrets Act) would tolerate the particular shade of tomato-rust favoured on this estate: two-tone, semi-detached boxes, ketchup-brown below and porcine pink above, with a hint of pebbledash.

Long Grove Road, the hospital approach, is thickly screened with mature chestnut and beech trees; a dull grey fence, assembled from concrete planks, is little more than six feet high. Graffiti are dispirited, painted over. Distance stretches, the walls are unforgiving, as you struggle towards the first checkpoint. Hopping up and down, I manage to see into the grounds. We’re at an angle to the semi-circular design, bulk and depth remain hidden. I’m struck by the tower on which is displayed what appears to be a non-flashing, neon Star of David.

Renchi, red bandanna, PEACE/LOVE — ONE WORLD — STOP ALL DE FUSSIN’ T — shirt, bright blue rucksack, leans on the barrier, trying to bond with the security operative in the red brick gatehouse. CCTV cameras swivel, monitors freak. The loonies are at the gates, begging for admittance.

DANGER, THIS IS A MULTI-HAZARD AREA. NO UNAUTHORISED ADMITTANCE. ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION. ALL VISITORS OR NON PASS HOLDERS PLEASE REPORT TO THE GATE-HOUSE.

Black-spike gates, voice-operated security barriers. Otherwise the site looks abandoned. The gatekeeper, brazenly crosseyed, is straight out of Macbeth . Except that he’s stone cold sober and won’t give up any information. We move on before he can make the call. Paranoia has erected its own exclusion zone, an invisible shock-stun fence. Knowing nothing, passing innocently down the road, you’d be immediately alerted to: fried air. Rubber tyres on a bonfire of petrol-soaked rags.

By chance, we have a notion of the real story: a friend of Renchi’s works here, counselling sex offenders. The other asylums — Long Grove, The Manor — have gone, given over to developers. Horton still contains, among its derelict blocks, a hard core of deviants, many of them clergymen. (The Church of England is one of the sponsors of the operation.) Development plans demand that, very soon, the unit will be closed down and relocated to somewhere remote, Scotland is suggested. This hasn’t worked for asylum seekers, who would rather live anywhere than Glasgow; but a rump of tabloid sex monsters, paedophiles, rapists, might, it is thought, be a negative factor when promoting ‘Quality New Homes’ for Epsom.

And so it proved. In the Bad News avalanche that followed 11 September, the possible relocation of Horton Hospital was leaked. Sex criminals, who had never, visibly, been there, were now presented as a threat. Several had ‘escaped’. For the continued safety and wellbeing of the citizens of Epsom, the lowlife would be removed to Knaphill in Surrey. No mention was made, in all this, of the housing development. No mention either of Knaphill’s proximity to Woking and the Martian invaders. Official spokespersons alluded to ‘a cage’, a secure pen. The Surrey suburbanites were having none of it. Some wilderness would have to be found, ex-MOD. An island, a rock. Nobody, as yet, floated the Millennium Dome option, the unwanted tent on Greenwich peninsula.

Discretion and paranoia are bed-fellows. Hence the high level of security, the CCTV cameras. Pass holders only. A gulag that was once suitably remote and pastoral is now prime, off-highway development land. Decant the inner cities. Wipe memory. The familiar mantra. Say nothing. New Labour have become masters at having ‘nobody available’ for interview. They form committees, convene discussion groups, put out brochures of non-stick language. ‘Management strategy based upon full consultation… partnership… service quality… best value’.

The Epsom hospitals, close to healing springs, were a prevision of town planner Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities: quiet suburbs, independent of the metropolis, where ghetto hurt could be soothed. We are told (in such books as Cities for a Small Country by Richard Rogers and Anne Power) that four million extra houses will be required in the next twenty-five years, sixty per cent of them on brownfield sites.

The large red sign — PEDESTRIANS— isn’t a quiet blessing (like a cycle lane); it announces the segregation of an antiquated life form. A reluctantly ceded track across the minefield of development. Goodman Price Demolition Ltd have taken over the hospital where Rodinsky died. The gate-lodge with its sharply pointed gables is out of our reach, behind silver gates. Red brick buildings and fine old trees, like a minor public school, are visible beyond the temporary board-fence.

LAND SELECTED FOR QUALITY HOMES. BRYANT HOMES. TAYWOOD HOMES. ALFRED MCALPINE HOMES (RECOGNISED FOR QUALITY).

Trenches. Heavy mud. Red cones. ‘Moon boots,’ says Renchi, as we approach Long Grove Hospital. We’re dragging lead-soled footwear, claggy with yellow sludge.

‘It’s all going, nice job,’ an affable Welsh labourer in a blue hard-hat tells us. Should be in work for months, before moving on to the next toy town makeover. The new estates (Laing, Barratt, Fairview, Bryant) are like TV meddling on a huge scale: the gang of cheery bodgers who steam in with decking and water features (builder’s bum) to destroy a perfectly decent suburban garden. Development is an extension of the game show. Beat the clock. A golden key to the lucky winner.

Our man leans on his pick. The ditch runs for a mile or so, in a straight line, and he is the only visible worker. Yellow waistcoat (ALDERSBROOK CONST, LTD.) and battle honour tattoos. He tips us off about a hidden path into Long Grove, a link to the Country Park.

Within minutes we are in Deep England, a track meandering through old woodland, yellow-brown fields with Pony Club jumps and the occasional, solitary horse. ‘Great Wood,’ says the map. Great Wood it is. With an Italianate tower in every clearing. Hospital farms, rundown outbuildings.

Exploring these, we meet a young warden from the Country Park: David Seaman ponytail and Beckham (September 2001) beard. He’s sorting out the merchandise for the coming season; mugs with tree prints, booklets that tell you where you are. Car parks are being developed among the burning chimneys and boiler houses of the old hospital.

He’s interested in our quest and gives us a copy of Asylum, Hospital, Haven (A History of Horton Hospital) by Ruth Valentine. We sit at the roadside and skim this booty. Local histories, conceived, written and frequently published close to the area they describe, are labours of love: genuine enthusiasm, human sympathy, transmits itself to the outsider, the tourist passing through. Valentine, while doing a proper job in documenting Horton, finds room for anecdote, eccentric evidence, case history, abbreviated memoir. Nurses and patients are not excluded. The illustrations, formal and unpeopled or group-posed, are windows on lost time. Focus holds for an instant. The images are dignified, a contract between model and photographer. Nurses, starched till they creak, sit on the grass in a semicircle (an unconscious reference to the standard asylum design). Patients, strapped into the science-fiction devices of the electro-therapy unit, stare out with resigned acceptance.

Valentine’s narrative is a spirited apologia for the failure of benevolence, good intentions undone by institutional inertia, hierarchic regimens. Horton and the other hospitals of the Epsom gulag began as country estates and were downgraded into prisons for urban inadequates: cedars and oaks, woodland walks, Edwardian lawns that were supposed to heal and mend, were glimpsed in segments through barred windows.