Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The owner of the ephemera shop recommended a café: ‘Carry on past Sainsbury’s, end of the High Street, Café First.’ We soon faced a choice of more than twenty blends of coffee, every combination of egg and sausage, bacon, tomato; fresh orange juice in an iced glass. I go for the Ethiopian coffee: ‘with cheese undertone and flavour of chocolate’. The long, narrow design of the place, the tight Formica units, gives no hint of the quality of the cuisine, the cheerful service. This has to be the best on the road (as I say every time). West Coast America for European-sized diners: germ-free, bright-coloured, a little too eager to explain itself. There is only so much I want to read about a cup of coffee.

Our tell-tale maps and bulging rucksacks involve us in conversation with a retired local couple who are happy to find fellow hikers taking refreshment. As motorists talk road numbers, convinced pedestrians talk gradients. We face a steep pull up on to the chalk. This pair, stately-round and so well-matched as to be virtually cloned, have wrecked knees and ruined feet (flattered by comfortable trainers); they have caps and tinted spectacles. Debating various routes that would carry us towards Epsom Downs, Walton on the Hill and the M25, they follow us out on to the street. The wife favours a scenic route, while the husband appreciates our whim to check on such matters as the underground tunnels, near Chalk Lane.

They wave us off, watching as we recede. When I’ve finished snapping the Albion, a black and white, Tudorbethan pub, they are still there, alongside the café, philosophising over the advice they’ve handed out. The man, prompted, scuttles after us, with several revisions. The woman, who has taken her cap off, looks very much like a younger Iris Murdoch. Self-barbered fringe. Snub nose, bright eyes. A clever child disguised as an old lady. The man, hair tufting in all directions from beneath a flat cap, might be John Bayley. They aren’t, they couldn’t be; but the generosity of their engagement with two strangers, their mutual affection, makes them paradigms of English eccentricity. Kindly ghosts deputed to hang about cafés, setting travellers on the right road.

An excursionist mood grips us, time out; after the dark residues of the asylum colony, we turned our faces to the south, to Epsom Downs. The town has become an inconvenient traffic island, a sequence of roundabouts with shopping centre and public toilets attached. It’s not meant to be helpful to walkers — who came from elsewhere with bad news and germs; if you want exercise, the guide book offers the Gym in the Park and the Epsom Polo Club. Car parks (mostly short term) are everywhere. The route for the ‘M25 & Epsom Hospital’ is trumped by a large red and white box: TO THE HAYWAIN TRAVEL INN & CHALK LANE HOTEL.

Advice to motorists wanting the racecourse is: ‘Follow the one-way system.’ Advice to pedestrians: forget it. EPSOM TOWN CENTRE IS MONITORED 24 HOURS BY CCTV.

We hopped metal barriers, dodged traffic. We hit the suburbs of the suburbs. Overemphatic lakes of carnations and pinks — buttonholes for racegoers? — gave way to shady avenues where insurance brokers and IT operatives showed off their good taste in Grade II listed mansions.

‘The Borough Council will seek to conserve and enhance the built heritage of the Borough; the design of new development is to make a positive contribution.’

Chalk Lane, which runs in parallel with the recommended traffic route, Ashley Road, reeks of wealth and privilege. Horse money. Stables. Easy access to the Downs. The Welsh actor/producer Stanley Baker had a house in this area: remember the racetrack heist from the film he made with Joseph Losey, The Criminal ? Baker liked to associate with underworld faces; they enjoyed his hospitality, having him in the photographs — Soho Rangers FC (with Eddie Richardson and train-robber Tommy Wisbey), a frost of nightclub tables. It was rumoured for years, on not much evidence (beyond the celebrity snapshots), the film roles he chose to play, that Baker funded the Great Train Robbery. His production, Robbery , directed by Peter Yates in 1967, gave Bruce Reynolds and the team a celebratory send-off (for their twenty-year stretches). Mythologising the headlines of 1963, Baker reinvented historical genre painting; the way Victorians like Benjamin Haydon and W.P. Frith could freeze-frame contemporary dramas and make them epic. (The noise of Frith’s Derby Day was the event horizon for our ascent of the chalk ridge, the pull towards the Downs.)

Suspend disbelief in Stanley’s terrible wig, that squirt of octopus ink, and his physicality as an actor makes him an honorary B-feature Yank. Blacklisted, or happy-to-work-in-Europe, American directors liked Baker: Joseph Losey, Robert Aldrich, Raoul Walsh, Robert Rossen. They exploited his hard stare, his displaced Celtic narcissism and melancholy; muscular baroque.

However he made his fortune, Stanley found the right place to spend it. Much came from South Africa, from the film he made with director Cy Endfield, Zulu . Poet and schoolteacher Peter Carpenter, who grew up in the town, called the Epsom asylums ‘our camps’. He reckoned they were built on the military model (Woolwich Arsenal, Netley). ‘They belong,’ he told me, ‘in the period of the first concentration camps in the Boer War.’ So it’s fitting that Baker’s white château was paid for by restaging the heroic but futile defence of the mission at Rorke’s Drift (from 1879).

South Africa was prime landscape for producing imperialist westerns: Zulu warriors were cheaper to hire than Jews (or tent show extras) who usually played generic redskins. Baker had some interesting Old Kent Road connections in the Land of Apartheid: scrap-metal merchant (and serial company director) Charlie Richardson was trading in dubious mining rights, fraud, and political favours for Broederbonders. His ghosted autobiography, My Manor , has a photograph captioned: ‘Best of Friends. Gordon Winter with General H.J. Van den Bergh, head of the South African Secret Service, at his Pretoria farm in 1979.’ Another remembrance of corporate hospitality captures Major L.H. Nicholson, ‘who helped me set up my South African business’, sharing a glass or two with Harold Macmillan and Lord Soames. This was the period when, as Richardson recalls, ‘My brother Eddie was running around with a friend of his, Stanley Baker, the actor. They were making The Sands of the Kalahari film.’

Naughtiness, gaming, risky ventures in the colonies paid for the copper pagoda roofs, octagonal towers, stables for potential Derby winners. Aristocracies of blood, crime and the City set themselves up on the edge of the racecourse; just as rock dinosaurs, deposed politicians and coke barons bought into bunker-land, the golf course perimeters of Surrey.

We climb through a cool woodland passage at the road’s edge; a soft, pepper-red track overhung with tough bunting, ivy. Dappled sunlight. The noise of traffic labouring up Ashley Road is swallowed. These paths are a teasing reminder of revoked liberties. You can see where kids have burrowed, pulling the skirts of the chainlink fence away from the ground. The copse survives, giving shade to motorists, in order to disguise a network of tunnels. Where nature puts on its Ivon Hitchens (or Samuel Palmer) act, overarching vegetation feinting at the Gothic, you know that something is being hidden. Beneath our feet, running all the way to the racecourse, secret tunnels have been cut into the chalk.

MYSTERY OF TUNNELS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ROYAL REFUGE: London Evening Standard (21 November 1999). A supporting illustration in which George VI, Queen Elizabeth and her daughters have been superimposed on a grim brick passageway, disappearing into darkness. The implication, the subliminal message: Russian Revolution, Ekaterinburg.