Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The pharmaceutical industry is fond of the urban fringes, nice clean estates, discreet grants, none too scrupulously supervised research. The green belt propagates science fiction: from Wells’s robotic invaders to the chemical controls of Aldous Huxley. When J.G. Ballard, at the start of his career, depicted drowned worlds and Devonian jungles erupting around Shepperton, he was reactivating deep-images derived from Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells. The red Martian weed which proliferates in the Thames Valley (from The War of the Worlds ) prefigures anxieties about genetically modified crops — and George Monbiot marching on St George’s Hill.

Long Grove, Horton, The Manor, St Ebba’s, West Park — linked reefs in a green sea — became, with the tacit blessing of the supervisory authorities, a testing ground for experimental procedures: The Island of Dr Moreau . Much was cruel, much fantastic. A captive populace inducted into a science fiction narrative. Within George Hine’s crab-shaped buildings, long wards looking out on the pastoral scene, drugs known as ‘liquid coshes’ were developed. Before the early Fifties, only one chemical form of sedation was available: paraldehyde — which, Ruth Valentine says, ‘was addictive, smelt terrible’ and ‘rotted your teeth’.

Chlorpromazine (Largactil) followed, introducing the range of pharmaceutical mind-benders that feature in all the ghosted memoirs by East End hardmen. At first they were dished out like Smarties at a children’s party, side-effects were never considered. A tame, blank-eyed population made the smooth running of the asylum colony possible.

Electrical torture, invasive surgical procedures, brain-clamps were props in a grand guignol theatre. Insulin comas, ECT (widely used, in the late Forties, without anaesthesia), modified narcosis (week-long sleep cures), pre-frontal leucotomies: no fantasy was too extreme. The logic for these experiments was itself insane. If epilepsy and schizophrenia were incompatible, then induce epilepsy. Nightmares of the city, of immigration, poverty, families crammed into one room — image and acoustic overload — were treated with fire and blade, earthed in Epsom’s tranquil parkland. David Rodinsky, removed from his books and papers, his solitude, living in a ward of strangers. Ronnie Kray befriending a radiator.

The most Wellsian of all the curious fictions imposed on the kidnapped Londoners was the Mosquito Chamber.

The unsuspecting patient is led into a room with double-doors and sealed windows. The walls are smooth. There is no fissure or crack in which a fly can conceal itself. The patient waits. And waits. The milky window a frozen panel. There is a humming in the ears, imagined tinnitus. The patient scratches at the irritation. But it is not imagined. The clean, featureless room is loud with things that can barely be seen: swamp mosquitoes. They are released, one by one, from a specially constructed box. The patient suffers repeated bites. He remains in the room until the observers are happy his blood has been infected. He is returned to his ward — and, in due course, develops malaria fever: sweats, shivers, high temperature. Parasitic protozoa multiply, destroying his red blood cells.

The researchers are satisfied. The theory has been tested, if not proved: malarial fever, when it has passed, helps sufferers from ‘general paralysis’ to recover their sanity. GPI (General Paralysis of the Insane) is the result of syphilis reaching the brain. Malaria is supposed to kill the spirochaetes: in the way that decapitation could be said to cure the common cold. Malarial therapy was developed in Germany. In England, experiments were conducted at Claybury and at Horton — where the fourteen-bed isolation hospital provided the perfect research facility. The laboratory at Horton became the leading mosquito-breeding centre in the British Isles. Seventy per cent of those treated at Horton survived. Three out of every ten died.

The closure of the hospitals around the motorway fringe, which we witnessed in the course of our walk, and assumed to be a New Labour initiative, was revealed on further investigation to be another borrowed Tory policy. The story went back much further than the Mad Ribbon-cutter of Potters Bar, it reached the fons et origo of Maggietone philosophy: Enoch Powell. Powell, the unbending moralist who would dive into any sewer to keep a handle on power, was the motorway Mekon.

In 1961, the National Association for Mental Health invited the Conservative Minister of Health to address their Annual General Meeting. Enoch Powell, Latinist poet, was always happy to put his trenchant views to a captive audience. He announced: ‘the elimination of by far the greater part of this country’s mental hospitals’. No more money must be wasted on ‘upgrading and reconditioning’. The insane must pull themselves together, get on their bikes or face eugenic engineering; castration or expulsion.

The move towards Barratt estates had been in place for more than forty years. Laingian anti-psychiatry (the heritage of Foucault) had some sympathy for Powell’s policy. Victorian asylums had ceased to be asylums, they were mind-prisons, politically repressive, socially divisive. Smaller units, urban communes, retreats, were more useful than George Hine’s minatory colonies: the architecture of fear and control. Not for the first time, extremes of left and right found common ground.

Tories enact grand gestures that always result in land sales, asset stripping, collapse of public services. New Labour loves phantom government, virtual policies, obfuscation. Talk of ‘care in the community’, as Ruth Valentine recalls, was denounced by the House of Commons Social Services Committee in 1985 as ‘virtually meaningless’. That was the Thatcher method: the shameless lie, endlessly repeated, with furious intensity — as if passion meant truth. Blair lets it float, drift, until it’s all too late; the shrug, the missionary smile, the shafting of another convenient scapegoat. The 310 patients, living in Horton in 1993, were dispersed, struck from the record. Some stayed in the grounds, tolerated in a half-life, while they waited for the developers to finish the job. As ever, the minister responsible would be elsewhere; enjoying a recuperative break in the Maldives or smoothing a crisis in Kashmir.

The hours circling Long Grove and Horton had not been wasted, we could walk away. Back down the green lanes towards the station, in quest of a late breakfast.

We found: a cheapjack clothes store, everything racked, everything one price. I bought a grey polo-shirt for £ 1 and put it on. Breakfast in the centre of Epsom might require ‘smart casual’ dress. It was that sort of town: clock tower, pubs with history, chainstore catalepsy (Boots, Burtons, Dickins & Jones, Dixons, Dolcis, Dollond & Aitchison, H. Samuel, Laura Ashley, Marks & Spencer, Next, Paperchase, Mothercare, Top Shop, Waitrose, WH Smith, Oddbins, Victoria Wines, Monsoon, Radio Rentals, Thomas Cook, Vision Express). Multi-storey car parks and a ripe undertow of horseshit among the carnations. Serious money has colonised the higher ground, the foothills of Epsom Downs; small dank pubs, near the railway, cater to traditionalists with fond memories of riot, debauched soldiery, racetrack shysters and quick-fisted travellers.

A memory technician, with a window display of cigarette cards (British regiments, cricketers) and collectible issues of Picture Post (Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini), peddles sentiment; the heritage Epsom of sepia postcards, railway histories. We browse. The cluttered shop is like an annex of the asylum colony. Vintage magazines are so crisp they might have been published that morning. Punters discuss the hospital railway as if it were still running. And running over the unwary. Rough sleeper Mary Tobin was killed at the Hook Road level crossing. The Long Grove Light Railway, sections of track still visible in the ground, carried building materials for contractors.