Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

It isn’t easy to work the trick in a CinemaScope format. Fluttering flags demonstrate the prevailing winds, a busy June sky presses on the Downs. The crowd divides into a dark X; leaving, in the foreground, the ‘incident’, the splash of white that catches our attention: kneeling man, child with back turned, broad-skirted woman. Every major character was modelled from the life: Frith found the acrobats, Joseph Bell provided the women. They were all condemned to hours in the studio — even the jockeys were made to pose, up in the stirrups, on wooden horses. The conceit is architectural, literary: a mass of anecdotage, human types, dressing a small episode of the picturesque that anticipates Picasso’s Blue Period. It was an art for well-to-do English folk at a period when art was still respectable. The Prince Consort surprised Frith ‘by his intimate knowledge of… the conduct of a picture’. Frith took the proffered advice, made alterations and improved his painting ‘in every instance’.

While Frith laboured, his sitters talked. Derby Day is a madness of noise, competing voices. The achievement belongs in the register of mechanical feats, like Clifton Suspension Bridge or the Great Eastern . Sociable as the work pretends to be, its clutter isn’t far from the hyperactivity of patricidal Richard Dadd and the Bedlam hordes of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke . (The two paintings hung side by side in the old Tate Gallery at Millbank.) But Frith’s narratives have died. Warped into rhetoric. They are a lecture on social history, a prompt for costume designers. The catalogue of accurate detail condemns them to a bell jar status: like wilting fox-masks and white ferns.

Degas, using photography for his racetrack scenes, exploited the camera’s capacity for roughing up an image, framing the action in an unexpected way. Humouring ‘accident’, he achieved a degree of formality that was far beyond Frith’s range. The photographs Frith commissioned were regarded as footnotes, less useful than the costumes he kept in his studio.

The viewpoint from which he composes his scene is the viewpoint of the photographer, the same sliced segment of the grandstand. But Frith stretches the composition — like a battlefield scene — to include necessary incidents from the theatre of Derby Day. The horizontal strip could be spun, effortlessly, into a cyclorama: primitive cinema.

The source photograph, to contemporary eyes, is more interesting than the epic painting. Documentary reality becomes surreal: men in polished top hats standing on carts and trestles. Other figures, dejected, formally dressed, sit on the ground. Massed tadpole-heads of the crowd in the grandstands. And nothing to be seen. No race. No parade. It’s over. The image defies explanation. The form is democratic: the crowd is a crowd, united. There are no discrete episodes — false lovers, ruined gamblers, rustics in smocks; there is no obligation to charm. Photography doesn’t, as yet, play to an audience. It’s a trade, not an art; it serves. It logs information. And, in so doing, it is making a dark trace of the world. The photographic plate exists in our present, while the contemporary/historical canvases of William Powell Frith belong in a cabinet of curiosities. They tell us about the painter, not the place. The day, the time. The taste of high air.

LOOK RIGHT HORSES TRAVELLING AT SPEED. A flashback to black and white newsreel, Frith’s famous print twitched into life: the suicide of a suffragette, Emily Davidson, throwing herself under the horses’ hooves in scratched and jerky archive footage. A tragic clip by which a political campaign is misremembered.

Striking south, across the Downs towards the motorway, we navigate by a distant church steeple; we walk old paths, climb stiles, exchange greetings with other walkers (an elderly man in a white cap, barechested, creased naval-issue shorts, white shoes, piloting a small craft, a six-wheel buggy in which an infant is shaded by an umbrella-sail).

We’re aiming for Walton-on-the-Hill. And there’s a reason for this: Renchi wants to locate his grandmother’s house. He remembers: the chauffeur, the drive out from London, a Surrey village and a classic Voysey/Jekyll house and garden, chosen for its proximity to a good golf course. There was a gatehouse. Granny kept, as well as the chauffeur, a nanny and a team of gardeners. The garden was what Renchi remembered most vividly: the scar on his chin, now disguised by a silvery beard, came from the Walton-on-the-Hill rockery. Long drives, pinned back against the yielding and over-padded upholstery of the car, left him queasy. A landscape too green to stomach.

By glaucous tunnels and sandy tracks, we emerge into another deserted English village. Through sun-shafted copses, Renchi has been spinning anecdotes from an episodic and unreachable past. Now, in Walton, he moves towards fullblown Proustian seizure. The past is shrivelled and chipped, but easy to map. Following faint Clarks sandal footprints, he walks the once-familiar village street. The major difference is the soundtrack: rolling motorway surf.

A Tudorbethan prefab offers: JAMES CAR HIRE, STATIONS AIRPORTS CITY AND WEST END. Nice to imagine this enterprise being run by the former chauffeur, remembered perhaps in the old lady’s will. Proust was fond of chauffeurs; caps, boots, gloves.

Renchi is on the trot; he’s found the gatehouse, the lane — and he’s marching up the drive towards the Surrey mansion. We’ve had a good run, no police cars, nobody has pulled us in since we escaped from St George’s Hill; but this is pushing it. Renchi, red T-shirt bandanna, ringing the bell of a stockbroker house in the burglary belt: less than half a mile from the M25. With bulging blue knapsack and cold-sweat partner.

I’m at his heels, poised for flight, camera hidden behind my back. The intensity with which Renchi has vanished into childhood — the drive from Central London, the moment of stepping from the car, the chauffeur holding the door — is palpable. Then is now. The bell chimes in the depths of the house. On one side of the button: a vaguely classical statuette, breast exposed, amphora cradled under arm. On the other, a large yellow and black notice: NO DOOR TO DOOR SALES PERSONS. WE DO NOT BUY AT THE DOOR.

Nobody at home. Good. Let’s get out of here. The door opens a crack. Renchi has convinced me, we’re in a warp, the dead grandmother is ever-present. On the loop.

Out of the gloomy hall, framed in the slit, catching reflected light from frosted glass panels, is a grinning leopard. A Saki beast. Above its glistening snout, a silver-haired woman. Renchi’s long-buried granny. Who else would wear a Save-the-Leopard T-shirt in a Voysey house?

The old lady is a charmer. Renchi explains the case, his family’s stake in this property, his freight of memories. She shouldn’t do it. Slip the chain. Step outside. But she is perfectly happy to let us wander through the garden, explore the grounds.

The past shatters. The house has been split in two. The garden is a remnant of what it once was. From the woods, we can hear traffic hammering down the motorway. The views to the south, towards Box Hill, Reigate and the North Downs, have been eliminated by tactful M25 soft estates, gentle gradients with incipient forestry.

There is a touch of Sunset Boulevard about the swimming pool: Ganges-green sludge, loose bricks heaped in the shallow end. Abandoned garden furniture. Moulded plaster nudes posed against a high box hedge. Nothing belongs in this pool — except perhaps a crocodile. Or a human floater. A posthumous tale-teller condemned to repeat the legend of a lost life. The pool is finished. It’s about to be filled in.

Before we get back on the road, the old lady invites us inside for a cup of coffee (revised, on closer examination of our dusty appearance, to lime juice). Madness! I want to tell her: ‘You shouldn’t do this.’ Sitting in the kitchen, I feel an overwhelming urge to confess to all the crimes and insults enacted by London on suburbia. The rapes, thefts, murders. Renchi, no longer a city dweller, has no such qualms. He crunches through a plate of biscuits.