Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The London County Council acquired the estate in 1896. The name of the vendor, on the original document, was Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Buxton, from a family of Whitechapel brewers and philanthropists, was an ancestor (on his mother’s side) of the cultural historian Patrick Wright. In A Journey Through Ruins (1991), Wright honours an earlier Thomas Fowell Buxton, abolitionist, opponent of capital punishment. ‘Buxton the Liberator’ was the nephew of Samuel Hanbury, who had him appointed a director of the Brick Lane brewery. On 26 November 1816, Buxton made a speech at the Mansion House in which he drew the attention of the wealthy to the plight of the ‘naked and hungry’ of Spitalfields. His namesake, at the end of the century, cashed in land, moved to Australia: so that the wretched of the inner cities could receive a custodial sentence to sample estate life. There were no voluntary patients, no patients from the middle classes. These were members of the urban underclass brought before a magistrate and certified. The population of asylums rose as the century withered. The plan was to build twelve hospitals for twelve thousand inmates: a town with exactly the population of Epsom.

Horton Asylum opened in 1902. Only five of the proposed twelve hospitals were actually built. The architect who always seemed to pick up these gigs (after suspicious mutterings from less successful rivals) was George Thomas Hine. Hine had a standard design: he used it at Claybury. School, prison, barracks: European detail on a Soviet scale. Local, sour mustard, London-stock brick. And lots of it. A gigantic semicircular corridor — like half a cyclotron, a particle-accelerator chamber. A geometry that allowed those early forms of twentieth-century spiritual malaise — melancholia, dementia, mania — to spread like a contagion. Morphic resonance. Patients grew into the disease descriptions that were offered to them; they defined themselves in poses captured by photographers looking for genealogies of defect.

The ghosts of Victorian fiction, working-class women in white, were put away for offering visible proof of their sexuality, conceiving a child out of wedlock. Middle-class women could also be banished for trivial acts of ‘rebellion’. Valentine recalls the case of Anna Wickham, sent by her husband to a private asylum in Epping (shades of John Clare) for having the audacity to attempt the publication of a volume of poetry. Females dominated the asylum population as black males were to do in the post-war years. Horton was a reservation, remote (a long and expensive journey from Central London), well-intentioned. ‘Kindness, fresh air, country views, sweet reason,’ wrote Valentine. These aspirations, it’s true, were available: on the other side of the glass. Beyond the iron bars.

Walks were not walks. The citizens of the spa town — busy market, pubs waiting to welcome race crowds — didn’t approve. There were petitions. Lord Rosebery, owner of the Derby winners of 1894, 1895, 1905, and (in his spare time) Prime Minister, attended a protest meeting, called in 1908, to oppose the building of further asylums. ‘I represent a constituency of the sane,’ Rosebery proclaimed.

The local press — our friends on the Epsom and Ewell Herald — agreed with his lordship: ‘LUNATICS AT LARGE’. Gangs of the insane roamed their streets, frightening the horses. Wealthy Londoners who kept ‘Derby houses’ took their stables to Newmarket — where the racing programme was expanding while Epsom’s was curtailed. A naked madman escaped from one of the walking parties and terrified respectable ladies.

Processions from the hospital, shuttling from estate to town centre, hand-in-hand like something out of Breughel, were embargoed. Inmates were denied walking therapy; they were kept to ‘airing courts’, grim circuits of an enclosed yard. The system was more convenient, it could be fitted to a military time-table. These circuits became the treadmills that drive the Blakean geometry of London; spiral visions that find their deranged resolution in Margaret Thatcher’s orbital motorway.

Fantasies of escape were uncommon. Most of the patients seemed resigned to their rural limbo, the food was better than at home. They worked, if they were able, and were paid in coin. But there were occasional attempts to breach security. A woman called Lydia Johnson had been committed for no good reason, so her sisters said, by a spiteful husband. The sisters smuggled in a dress. Lydia changed out of her asylum uniform and set off down the long avenue. Walkers were suspect. She was caught. Her sisters were banned from making future visits. One sister, Louisa, applied to have Lydia discharged into her care. The application was refused. Dr Lord told the subcommittee that Louisa must herself be insane to make such a request.

A later sibling escape plot was more successful. It wasn’t just the remnants of Jewish immigration who were being tidied away in the Sixties. Other anachronistic elements of the East End were incarcerated in Long Grove: exile as punishment. Ronnie Kray, a paranoid schizophrenic gangster, a fury from the ghetto, was certified insane. Which was about as useful a procedure as sticking a ‘Police Aware’ notice on the burnt-out shell of a stolen vehicle on Rainham Marshes. Ronnie wasn’t insane, he was insanity: a psychotic elemental, a whirlwind of malignancy. A crazy comedian with a cutlass and a court of celebrity sycophants.

Early in his career, Ronnie was banged up in Long Grove. In the psychiatric wing of Winchester Prison, he had received news from his twin of the death of their favourite aunt, Rose. They had to put him in a strait-jacket and bus him to Epsom. All the material London didn’t want — aliens, slum bandits, ranters, poets — was dispersed in a southerly direction. To the colony, the walled estate.

‘All the discretion and forsythia in the world will never alter the outline of the old lunatic asylums built to an identical pattern round London at the turn of the century,’ wrote John Pearson (in the least-contaminated biography of the Kray Twins, The Profession of Violence ). ‘Ronnie was driven here from Winchester Prison on 20 February 1958. He was never to forget the terror of those first days.’

Kray made a radiator his best friend and thought the man in the opposite bed was a dog. ‘If I got his name right he’d come and jump in my lap.’ Medical reports disclosed signs of ‘verbigeration and marked thought blocking’. (Verbigeration is the constant and obsessive repetition of meaningless words or phrases.) It took an old school journalist as thorough as Pearson, and a self-recorder as voracious as Ronnie Kray, to rescue medical records from the Long Grove fire. David Rodinsky was unrecorded, without papers or documents — until Rachel Lichtenstein moved away from the cluttered Princelet Street garret, that museum of false trails. No photograph of Rodinsky has ever been published. The Krays, by contrast, had every scrap of memorabilia logged and filed. Fat albums of gangland nostalgia are offered for sale. The distribution of Kray-approved relics (sanctioned by Reg from his cell in Maidstone) is one of Bethnal Green’s most successful industries.

The Long Grove medics dosed Ronnie on Stematol and assigned him to Napier Ward. Sunday visiting, as Pearson pictures it, with the tribes arriving from the East End, was like Derby Day. Wards loud with argument, contraband food, kisses and rucks. Two cars, gas-guzzlers, made the trip from Vallance Road: an electric-blue Lincoln and a black Ford. Squeezed inside were men in square-shouldered suits, black shoes gleaming like their creosote hair.

Ronnie put on his twin’s camelhair coat and strolled out, like a bookie coming back from Brighton. Reg stayed in the ward. When the nurse sounded the alarm bell, it was too late. Ronnie was on his way to London. The motorised Krays succeeded where the pedestrian Johnson sisters, with their long walk to the station, failed. Ronnie had the wrong kind of craziness for Epsom.