Pleasant. Traditional. Convenient. Those are the terms to hammer home. The convenience of the golf course was the reason why Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman took a house here while they underwent the Stanley Kubrick endurance test, making Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley himself, being chauffeured at a steady forty mph, from his St Albans hideaway, around the loop to the studio. Pinewood, Elstree, Borehamwood, Denham: image factories and their green belt backlots, shadowing the motorway, shadowing the chain of mental hospitals.
We find it difficult to escape the Crest Homes development; the units are red brick, rather than the muted yellow of the Camberley illustration. The homes, for the most part, are unoccupied; ghosts press on every window. The surviving components of the hospital — water tower, church — have a niggling poignancy. In time they will adapt, be seen as ‘historic’, but for the moment they are too much themselves. The church with its low tower, narrow windows, red, pantiled roof is Bavarian. There’s a path, hidden between slanting earth banks that runs into the basement, a secret door. It’s easy to imagine all kinds of unpleasant compromises between obedience, stern care and obligatory ritual.
We left the Crest colony (which replaced the previous colony of the mad with a grid of nicely finished units, pressing too close against each other), and moved on to the mansion, once known as Shenley Manor. The mansion commands fine views of Watling Chase, Coombe Wood, Swanley Park. It looks like one of those hotels to which politicians or jaded executives go for strategy sessions (the strategy being to lig as much booze-sauna-TV porn-golf as can be packed into a hoggish weekend). Swanley Manor is ready to take on the Hamiltons, Jonathan Aitken and a bunch of Saudi money men with their massage parlour-maids. It’s white, discreet, lawned, planted. Bowed, pillared, balconied. There are heraldic shields, verdigris domes, weather vanes. Behind dark yew hedges there is a maze that isn’t a maze, a hidden meadow with erased patterns in the grass; disguised exits that shift as we attempt to locate them. Swanley Manor cries out for Peter Greenaway.
No plutocrat is in residence. No megalomaniac or software czar lives here. No Branson or Maxwell. If they did, we’d never have got up the drive. Renchi, with his silver beard, red scarf and ear-flapped, cross-country ski cap, might be a Russian commando on a recce. The first of the Mongol horde to reach the gates. A fleeing Chechen.
Grace Avenue climbs, padded in leaf-fall from a spreading oak, towards the house on the hill, PRIVATE ROAD, RESIDENTS ONLY (white on blue), SHENLEY MANOR (gold on green). ‘Restored Late Georgian Houses’, Town & Country (green on cream), ALL SOLD (white on red).
This house, before it was parcelled up into executive apartments, was known as Porters Mansion. Yes, we’ve picked up another leaflet. ‘For centuries this house and its surrounding estate were a dominant feature of the local landscape and witness to many changes not least its encirclement by Shenley Hospital in the 1930’s… The Mansion has had a fascinating history.’ Has had. Present perfect. History, once again, put in its place. The future used up.
Porters, as an estate, dates from the thirteenth century. Farms were added, plantings undertaken. Royal courtiers, self-made men of business, politicians, naval officers: the usual mix of exploiters and improvers acquired house and land. Sir Richard Coxe. John Mason (distiller of Greenwich and Deptford). Viscount Howe, First Lord of the Admiralty and victor of the Battle of Brest. Howe was known to his men, so the pamphlet claims, as ‘Black Dick’. ‘Solid as a rock and just as silent.’
And so on, from the Marchioness of Sligo to Luke White, to Colonel Henry White, Samuel Clarke Jervoise, William Joseph Myers, James Harris Sanders. Sanders met his wife Mary in New Orleans. She undertook good works for orphans and the poor of the village, she improved the garden. The author Ann Bridge was one of eight children. Portrait of My Mother is set at Porters.
After the gardening Mrs Sanders came Michael Paul Grace. It is rumoured that W.G. Grace laid out the cricket square. The ground is still there, we visited it, just beyond the walled garden. A green sanctuary. Cecil Frank Raphael, who bought the estate in 1902, built the pavilion. His son John captained Surrey — and died in the First World War in 1917.
During the war, part of the estate was used as an airfield. It was known, to avoid confusion with the field at Kenley (to the north), as London Colney Aerodrome. The sheds and huts on the east of Black Lion Hill were the base for 56 and 54 Squadrons. Temporary hangars known as ‘Besseneau’, wooden frames and canvas covers, were still in use in the Forties. In this empty landscape, the floodplain of the M25, with its scattered villages, hospital colonies, sewage plants and rescued mansions, there are always characteristic features: war debris and immaculately tended cricket squares. Bunkers, concrete ziggurats: overgrown, bird-occupied, or converted into piggeries.
Many of the young men at the London Colney base didn’t survive the training period. They are buried in the graveyard of the small roadside church of St Botolph’s. The last of the Royal Flying Corps sheds, known as ‘The Hangar’, were incorporated into one of the local asylums, Harperbury Hospital.
In 1924 Raphael sold Porters Park to the Middlesex County Council, who used the site to build Shenley Hospital. Patients arrived, sectioned, drugged, or by their own volition, from Harrow, Wembley, Acton, Willesden. The hospital, at its peak, housed 2,000 of them. It’s hard, seeing the photographs of the place in its Thirties pomp, not to think of other experiments in social engineering, eugenics. This is a camp, a colony, a plant to process non-conformity, to tidy away girls who got into trouble, drinkers, ranters; those who gave too vivid an expression to the overwhelming melancholy of urban life. Shenley, with its blocks, its wards, didn’t belong on the outskirts of London. To achieve its benevolent aims, the colony needed alps and forests, not ‘pleasant undulating countryside’. Shenley mixed (Rudolf) Steinerist notions of garden cures, plant magic, sympathetic colours, with the flipside: control, mind-experiments, coercion.
The site was chosen for its location, near the Middlesex border, a short drive (or march) from Radlett station. Madhouses belonged on the periphery. Instability might infect healthy working people. Out here, in the clean air, the virus was contained. The plan, according to the Middlesex County Council, was ‘to build a new mental hospital and a Colony for Mental Defectives’. In other words, transportation. Far Pavilions. A Tasmania established at the rim of London. The contract for the building work was given to John Laing. A firm that would, in the future, be one of the major motorway contractors; responsible for the Dartford to Swanley section of the M25 (1974–7). Laing would also develop significant off-highway estates. (Laings had a discreet colony of their own, not far from here, with a number of fine cricket pitches.)
Another Laing, Ronnie, the charismatic Glaswegian anti-psychiatrist, was to make his mark on Shenley. The ‘Villa’ system, taking patients away from huge wards (and a recreation hall that seated 1,000 people) to ‘family’ units of between twenty and forty-five members, fitted nicely with the Laingian ethic. The grounded ocean liner of the Thirties, with its rigid hierarchies, became a flotilla of pirate craft, ships of fools with crazed or inspired captains.
Clancy Sigal, a successful screenwriter and novelist, an American exile in Sixties London, became a patient of Laing and left a fictional account of those years. His novel Zone of the Interior was suppressed in England. The Sigal character is in awe of Last, a lightly disguised version of Laing.