Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Coming away from the small room where Blake and his wife lodged, off the Strand, the Ancients took Shoreham as the realisation of a (misunderstood) pastoral idyll. These door-knob kissing sentimentalists tumbled, by accident, through the gilded frame. And entered a Valley of Vision.

Palmer to Richmond, November 1827:

I have beheld as in the spirit, such nooks, caught such glimpses of the perfumed and enchanted twilight — of natural midsummer, as well as, at some other times of day, other scenes, as passed thro’ the intense separating transmuting heat of the soul’s alchymy, would divinely consist with the severe and stately port of the human, as with the moon thron’d among constellations, and varieties of lesser glories, the regal pomp and glistening brilliance and solemn attendance of her starry train.

This ‘intense separating transmuting heat of the soul’s alchymy’ is what Palmer chased — even when the result was a portfolio of waxy, impacted views and willed visions. The claustrophobic tightness of his compositions reflects the hermetic self-satisfaction of the Darent Valley: moons become blades, elm and beech and oak are pressed into bloodless rituals. Treat the Shoreham paintings as unlocated eclogues and they are revealed as Christmas cards, labels for honey jars; but track them to source, bringing some of Linnell’s Calvinistic exactitude to the task, and the window opens.

The Ancients, sneaking about in thunderstorms, hiding in hollows, tramping the woods at night, were suspect. ‘Extollagers’, the locals called them: conjurers, mountebanks. Their three-legged camp stools were taken for magical instruments. Suspicions were justified. Hymns in cornfields. Shakespeare’s witches summoned to Jenkin’s Neck Wood.

Parodic fecundity. Plump apples. Legless sheep like cottonwool maggots. Church spire as pyramid. ‘The clouds drop fatness,’ Palmer wrote on the mount of The Valley Thick with Corn . The yokel in the fields doesn’t labour, he reads a book: as if the harvest were to be brought in by the proper order of words, by magic. Such prolix ripeness makes its contrary inevitable: virus, pestilence, burning pits.

Blake’s visions were anchored in the ordinary. They happened. Angel trees. Voices. Visitations from the mythic dead. They dropped in, his gods, when it was convenient for the Lambeth artisan to receive them, when the day’s work was done. Glistening fleas with bowls of blood. If they made a nuisance of themselves, they could be dismissed.

The walk, the journey out, was Palmer’s method. If he pushed hard enough, he would surely arrive at the Valley of Vision. It was there to be found — beyond Forest Hill and Bromley. Visionary tourism. Of the kind we practised; linking place with place, going with the drift, meandering through burial grounds and golf courses.

‘It is not enough coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts.’ I knew that Palmer was right; the uniting of parts was beyond me. What should I make of Palmer’s visit to Hackney? He hadn’t wanted to go, to stay with a Welshman in Pembroke House, a private asylum. But he was obliged by the overweening pressure of Celtic hospitality — and his hope that ‘a day at Hackney from which I cannot get off will give me fresh vigour for a new set of work’. Rural Hackney, a suburb of market gardens and madhouses, captured Samuel Palmer — for one night only. He was interrupted, dragged away from a half-finished drawing; brought to sleep in a house of troubled dreamers. Hackney and Shoreham were twinned, in order to promote future pilgrimages. ‘Fresh vigour’. The kind of journey that exists only if it is worth recording.

In Palmer’s day, as he points out in a letter to John Linnell, it was ‘very nearly as cheap’ to buy produce in Shoreham as in Borough Market, Southwark. Under the arches, by Southwark Cathedral, hops could be ‘got retail at less price than you would have paid for in its own garden’. Villages within a forty-mile circuit of London found themselves buying their own goods back — at a premium. The retail logic of Bluewater was already in place.

The Shoreham produce on which Palmer and his mates glutted themselves was only there because the local farmers supplied the London markets. The Ancients picnicked on loss-leaders, damaged goods; windfall that wasn’t required in the city. Tastes that were too unsophisticated for metropolitans.

In September 1999, at Palmer’s favourite season, no breakfast was to be had in the village. So the postman informed us. No call for it. We must go out onto the road, the A225, to a coffee stall.

Huge sunflowers sway against the red brick of the church wall, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD. So it says on the lych gate (where the bier was set down, during burial services, to await the coming of the clergyman). Marc Atkins stoops to photograph a sundial. A yew walk leads the eye towards low hills.

We straggle out of town. And there, in a lay-by on the busy Shoreham Road, is Daisy’s van: dispenser of monster burgers to the carriage trade. A forlorn cyclist in yellow helmet, rain top and tights is the only other customer. Daisy’s cuisine is criminal, the double cheeseburger is obscenely good value. It oozes yolk and tomato sauce and melted goo. Even Marc’s veggie burger looks a shovel of squashed hedgehog. His side order of retried potatoes, a coronary indulgence, spills from the plate. Rain drips into our blue-glaze coffee mugs. We settle ourselves around several white plastic tables, munching and monologuing, and trying to make ourselves heard above the traffic, the downpour; the commuter trains squealing into Shoreham station.

Nothing much on Palmer remains in print; the connection with Shoreham is kept alive by the tourist industry, by an extension of the blue plaque thesis. Addresses are of interest if a literary or social association can be claimed. The story must be grounded. The Valley Thick with Corn is franchised as a Shoreham illustration, even though its location is generic — and it dates from the period immediately before Palmer moved out of London.

The specific was always troublesome. In 1849, long after he left Shoreham, Palmer wrote: ‘If I am spared to go again into the country I hope to begin a new plan — not sitting down to local matter, but walking and watching.’ Walking and watching defined his art. Fretful movement to discover a landscape window, a boudoir of the picturesque — to be prettied up, peeked at through scratched spectacles.

As a sickly, hypochondriac old man exiled to Redhill, Palmer was ordered by his medical adviser to take some exercise. He had managed no more, in months, than an arthritic shuffle around the garden, kicking at weeds. Beyond the limits of his property, two walks were possible: ‘he dreaded the ordeal of either route’. The view had been ruined, he spluttered in traditional suburbanite fashion, by developers. Wrapped in an enveloping Inverness cloak, a copy of Virgil’s Bucolics in his pocket, he dragged himself to a certain five-barred gate.

‘Having touched the gate-post,’ as his son Herbert reports, ‘he returned scowling with anger and disgust much as a member of a chain gang goes back after exercise to prison.’

The business of the gate is pertinent. Gates are handy as destinations, somewhere to lean, a framing device: they promote a view. Weekenders walk to gates. Remember the sequence in Joseph Losey’s Accident ? (Screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by Nicholas Mosley.) The unstructured Sunday afternoon (tennis, overlapping meals, booze, boredom): a short country stroll to work up a thirst, a five-barred gate. A few ominously inconsequential remarks: flies, nettles, corrugated earth.

When the M25 circuit had been completed, and much of the first draft written, Renchi and I returned to Kent to find a five-barred gate. Palmer’s Valley of Vision, stretching from Dulwich to Shoreham, didn’t finish there: it went on with the Darent to Otford, and beyond. A day’s walk to the south: to Underriver. The Golden Valley: the ‘heat of the soul’s infabulous alchymy’. Palmer’s nocturnal ramblings took him into the hills above Sevenoaks, where he watched the sun rise over ‘the flower of Kentish scenery’.