Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Our beechwood copse, according to the Standard , was no more than the verdant roof of a subterranean city: ‘one of Britain’s last forgotten deep air-raid shelters, which is rumoured to have been built as a refuge for the Royal Family and their staff if wartime London had been completely destroyed’. Madmen and gangsters of the inner city to the asylum gulag, royalty to their chalk warrens; the pack was shuffled, and all the cards, joker to king, land on Epsom.

Peter Carpenter, who went to school in the town, and whose parents still live at the bottom of the hill, promised to give us the full tour: ‘St Ebba’s — the paupers’ graveyard, isolation tower… Stanley Baker’s house… Tattenham Corner (the mental patients collected the rubbish after Derby Week)… my old school (Dave Hemmings expelled from it)…’ And, of course, the tunnels. Carpenter reckoned that individual tunnels were ‘given London street names’. So that the buried city became a parallel world London, a memory maze. If the metropolis was destroyed, mole-people could relearn its geography and legends by tracking candlelit brick passages.

The complex, so the Standard revealed, had been sold at auction to ‘a mystery buyer’. Agent Conrad Ritblat facilitated the deal. His representative, Stephen Bellau, claimed that a potential purchaser would have ‘the chance to own somewhere very interesting in a beautiful area of land for not a great deal of money’.

Despite thorough research in the records of a number of government departments, no hard facts have been uncovered. ‘All files on the bunker appear to have been lost.’ A report commissioned by the now defunct Property Services Agency recommends an expenditure of £ 116,000 on ‘beefing up perimeter security’ — and mentions, in passing, the fact that the land was requisitioned on 8 February 1941. Floor plans show food stores, a marshal’s post, field kitchens, lavatories, dormitories.

It’s tempting to explore this area now, to go over the fence. The new owner will obviously secure the entry to the tunnels and remove all traces of wartime and post-war occupation. We have no torches, no tools — and Peter Carpenter’s local knowledge, when he leads his Epsom expedition, will give us more time to do justice to the mystery.

Crossing Ashley Road, we enter a cemetery; it’s well kept, white stones bright in the morning sun, a view back over the town. Reservations of the dead are often the best parks; avenues of granite, grey-green envelopes addressed with names that have disappeared from the telephone books and trade directories. Cut flowers, little pots of chrysanthemums from garages, signifying remembrance — instead of the pebbles and black stones of a Jewish burial ground.

As we come to the crest of the hill, through paddocks and stables, we turn back to appreciate the huge sky: a dark stand of beechwood, the poplar windbreaks of the cemetery, a cordon sanitaire protecting Epsom from the white tower blocks of London. Then, soaring above it, fast-moving parachute clouds. We try to recognise familiar landmarks. We imagine groups from the hospitals, bussed up here, working to clear the rubbish after a race meeting: the confusion. Attempts at orientation. After the trip from London, ambulance or train, the years on the wards, the drugs. That is what sane people miss most: knowing where they are. Why doesn’t matter. When is of no account. We have to be able to track the story back: this is where it began, that’s the station, there is the river.

A racehorse, a shivering thoroughbred, is trapped in a cylinder that operates like a set of revolving doors. As we approach, the animal speeds up. It isn’t going anywhere and there is nobody to supervise its drudgery. Observation, by strangers, increases momentum. The method might be economic, but the beast is going to finish up with two legs shorter than the others. If it comes across a clockwise track, it’s finished; it’ll never make it around the first bend. Maybe, this training programme is designed for counterclockwise courses. The horse must feel as if it’s got a termite factory in one ear. The remorselessness of its tight circuits leaves us slightly seasick, hungry for the epic spaces of the Downs.

Massive displacement: crowds that aren’t there. W.P. Frith’s Derby Day painting denuded, stripped to bare canvas. History as a deserted beach. The flags and balconies of the grandstand like a marine hotel. Without prior knowledge, what would you make of this smoothed hilltop? Wide roads, lacking traffic. Combed sand runs (with inward-leaning fences). Hitching rails in the middle of nothing. A battleground? A wounded meadow? When the British regiments were defeated at Box Hill, in George Chesney’s future war fantasy, they fell back on Epsom Downs. The Downs were the final ridge, before the invaders moved on to Kingston and the Thames.

BEWARE. RACEHORSES HAVE PRIORITY DURING TRAINING HOURS. That’s fine with us. The Downs are open to the public. Unlike the defunct and imperialist Wembley Stadium, the racecourse doesn’t make you pay to visit a ruin, to watch videos and marvel at footballers’ shirts in glass cases. Keep your dogs ‘under strict control’ and you’re free to wander. The air is oxygen rich, heady. There’s nothing to bet on, but we feel reckless. It’s easy to understand the delirium of giving it all away, risking your mortgage on a broken-winded nag.

W.P. Frith (1819–1909) was no punter. On trips to Dorset, he was quite prepared to get into the saddle, but his one experience of the hunting field was a disaster. His mount bolted. Redcoats swore at him. He jolted over ditches, hurtled across rough country, boneshaken. He vowed that in future he’d stick to the queen’s highway. But the drama of Epsom Downs gave Frith his greatest triumph.

As a technician, an organiser of large human groups — Paddington Station, Ramsgate Sands — Frith was meticulous. Paintings were campaigns, crafted to whatever size or shape a patron was prepared to sponsor. He moved in society; he made money, knew everybody, wrote in a lively anecdotal style, and was popular with royalty. If Joseph Bell wanted him to produce ‘an important painting, five or six feet long’, the artist would oblige: for a fee of £ 1,500 (residuals from future engravings reserved). Frith operated in the manner of a film studio, an advertising agency. He was a materialist and a hardworking man of business.

Like his friend Dickens, he gave value for money: his canvases could be prosecuted for multiple occupation. They were picaresque slums. Even the largest compositions were claustrophobic. Aesthetic real estate. When Derby Day was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1858, a protective rail had to be put around the painting to keep the crowds back. Mobs stared at the mob. Frith reports one of the royal princes saying: ‘Oh, mamma, I never saw so many people together before!’

Compositions were events, researched, pre-planned, built up from disparate elements, enacted in the studio. Painterly accidents and epiphanies of light played no part in Frith’s disciplined practice. He went to Epsom for the first time in 1856. ‘My first Derby had no interest for me as a race, but as giving me the opportunity of studying life and character, it is ever to be gratefully remembered.’

The artist strolled the scene with his friend Augustus Egg: he was tempted by a find-the-pea scam run by a troop that included a bogus clergyman, a Quaker and a ‘fellow that thinks he looks like a farmer’. Frith didn’t sketch, he trained himself to make ‘mental notes’. His ability to structure epic compositions was a ‘knack’. Derby Day at Epsom saw London decanted: aristocracy, thieves, the ‘sporting element’ and the mob. Gypsies camped on the heath. Race week was a fair, a holiday, a spectacle: there were sideshows in tents, bareknuckle boxing matches, ‘nigger minstrels’, pickpockets, ‘carriages filled with pretty women’. Frith froze ‘kaleidoscopic’ chaos into a narrative that could be read as instantaneously as an advertising hoarding. By his skill in handling gradations of colour, he led the eye to a single defining episode: the acrobat and his son. In other words, Victorian sentiment. A story.