The best we can do is turn it over to Marc, in the expectation that his tunnel vision, his gift for excluding the unnecessary, will release the arch, or place it in his catalogue of archetypes. With the collection of obelisks, doorways, church towers, graveyard statuary. Temple Bar, removed from its location, is also removed from time. Its energies are released.
A quick hit of the M25 from Bulls Cross Bridge; the confirmation that the metal river still flows. A photo opportunity at the dogs’ home. Drummond caressing a black, plaster bulldog: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO STROKE DOGS. Surveillance cameras on poles. Severed heads. A cacophony of yelps and snarls, pooch to German shepherd, as we slouch along the edge of the Whitewebbs Lane rat run. A country track has been overwhelmed by shorthaul motorway users. Pedestrians, heading for Enfield Chase, are squeezed between a mesh fence and a screen of thorns.
It’s damp, it’s green and it’s English. And Drummond, the displaced Scot, cackles over it. This obstacle course of negatives: DO NOT ATTEMPT… NO SWIMMING… NO HORSE RIDING… NO STOPPING… KEEP OFF… KEEP OUT. Drummond is upbeat. He recommends ornithological textbooks as tools for the replenishment of language. ‘Yaffle’ is a recent favourite: the sound of the green woodpecker. We yaffle. We do the I-Spy country walk. We eye-swipe bluebell carpets, ex-squirrels. Bill holds a dead shrew in his hand, so that Atkins can photograph it (looking like a moustache that has just fallen off).
Tackier properties, shacks with bits of farm machinery, chicken coops, have handpainted notices (white gloss on hard-board): BEWARE BAD DOG. They can’t afford the animal. They’re saving up for a pit bull recording. Ironwork gates, all curls and commas, are deceptive. Slow down and the dogs, which usually operate in pairs, will have you. Lean-ribbed black ones with slavering fangs. If their tails haven’t been docked, they wag.
Detached houses on the edge of the motorway are a shopping mall for thieves with wheels. A nice run out from Dalston or Canning Town, straight up the M11. Hoist a bit of garden statuary, an urn, carry it back to its place of origin.
Once we achieve the path through White Webbs Park, skirting the golf course, heading south-west, it gets easier. We don’t bother with the map. Green patch leads to green patch. Clay Hill to Trent Park. Drummond identifies an Aylesbury duck by its orange beak.
Permitted pedestrianism is still a source of pleasure, old woodland, meadows, brooks. The obelisk in Trent Park is a memorial to the Duke of Kent. Royalty continues to leave markers on the outer suburbs, WATCH OUT THERE’S A PLANT THIEF ABOUT.
What I love about this ‘empty’ quarter of London (if it is London) is the way that, out of nowhere, supervised parkland, suburban clutter, you suddenly find yourself on a long, straight stretch of country road. It’s dreamlike: telegraph poles, hedges, a red farmhouse tucked under a line of low hills. You’re still carrying the weight of the city, the density of talk and noise and interference, quick-twitch nerves that keep you from being run down; but you let it go, bleed away. Momentary transcendence. Soft warm air. Birdsong. And, in the distance, over the horizon, the mortality whisper of the orbital motorway.
In this hallucinatory half-country, we come across a building that is difficult to interpret, easy to admire: a white cube, its windows blinded with hardboard. The boards have been cut to fit their apertures. The shadow of a downward pointing security light throws an elongated cone across the white wall. The building, an assembly of smooth, chalky blocks, reminds me of Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost. Lacking discernible narrative, this structure is an unrequired art work. In a gallery it would solicit cultural comparisons, validation. Out here we can do nothing, beyond registering its presence, the displacement it achieves. The way it offers itself as a memory-flash, between the Trent Park obelisk and the hospital on the hill.
By now, we’re beginning to look at our watches. We stride out. I can’t remember if the Jochen Gerz lecture is at one or at one-thirty. But that doesn’t stop us logging the drift. Twin urns on a gatepost, TRENT PARK CEMETERY, ANOTHER SERVICE PROVIDED BY ISLINGTON COUNCIL. A stretch-limo, selfconsciously mirror polished, outside II Vesuvio Trattoria Italiana. Nothing like playing up to racial stereotypes.
Cockfosters. New Barnet. Cherry blossom hamlets. Drummond gives a sympathetic nod to Barnet FC, a team who will soon be appearing on his beloved Non-League circuit. (I picked up a nice piece of football/motorway ephemera. A booklet entitled Inside the M25: The Football Programmes. A road map linking future nowheres, dormitories, slumped industrial huddles, by the colours of their football programmes: Becken-ham Town, Chingford, Boreham Wood, Erith & Belvedere, Rainham Town, Ford United. Glories of the Delphian, Spartan, Aeolian, Corinthian Leagues. Dagenham linked with deepest Surrey. Harrow with hop fields. Dockside with Dorking.) Bill Drummond’s green anorak comes into his own as he waxes lyrical on the Aylesbury FC experience, the windy terraces, the pies, the purity of kick and rush, the yarning of the mob.
The steep green roof of the National Institute for Medical Research, a fearsome complex (known to its inmates as ‘the benzene ring’), catches the midday sun. It dominates the summit of Mill Hill. Coming on it, from the north, the Folly Farm side, we experience the difficulties that made the planners hesitate when they decided to move the Institute (as an out-station) from the Hampstead Laboratories in 1937.
The ground was boggy, the gradient severe. But Mill Hill was obscure, sensitive research could be conducted without attracting unwelcome attention. Government scientists would enjoy the benefits of country life — tennis, cricket, bracing walks — while staying within an easy commute (underground, mainline, Great North Road) of civilisation. The Hampstead Labs were known for their experiments on animals.
The design of the building, a broad Y frontage, masking an hexagonal spread, was by Maxwell Ayrton. The man responsible for the now defunct Wembley Stadium. Monsters of the imperium lording it over North London’s gentle slopes. The twin-towered arena with its energy-sapping turf (democratic spectacle) and the forbidding cliff (brick-and-glass) of the Research Institute with its bright copper roof.
From the Ridgeway, the Institute offered its public face; dark bricks weathered to a muddy red, narrow windows. The Institute was definitively institutional, government approved, government sponsored. From the rear, the fields: the Big House, the asylum of popular imagination. Where ugly things happen unseen.
The sensitive nature of the research undertaken in the soft corridors, the cells of this building, explained the level of security. ALF, video libertarians, subversives: armies of unreason at the gates. Art is the palliative. Pick up the MRC brochure, Research Opportunities, and it promises: ‘visits to the theatre, ballet and concerts’. Pick up the Millennium Edition of MRC essays and the booklet concludes with a nightshot, a snoop-snap: gold windows, a deep blue sky worthy of Erne Paleologou.
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Brainmash on a glass slide. Up on the hill, gazing out of the restaurant over the fields and small farms — John Constable heathland floating to margin — you wonder if this is the site of incubation, foot-and-mouth, or the place where the virus will be snuffed. Hot cubicles, rooms with double-doors and security locks. Meshed windows. Browse the official literature and you fall into a J.G. Ballard reverie. Pieter Nieuwkoop ‘elegantly demonstrated that sandwiches of cells of two poles recreated equatorial-like tissue’. A Ballardian tropic, jungle flies fat with meat, housed in a secure compound. Infected quacks, pushing the limits of theory, experimenting on themselves. Tennis courts, easily available narcotics. An island of greenery, secluded mansions, cult centres, business parks, surrounded by fast-flowing arterial traffic.