‘The country, by the gentleness and variety of its landscapes,’ Foucault wrote, ‘wins melancholies from their single obsession “by taking them away from the places that might revive the memory of their sufferings”.’ The country, or this remnant of it, was therefore a kind of amnesia, and the asylum a place of forgetting. Urban loci — churches, pubs, markets — were always provokers of pain. The narrative burden of the generations was overwhelming. Out here on the motorway rim there were no memories. Nothing had happened. All accounts of incarceration, all voyages towards recovery, begin with that journey: the cart, the ambulance, the distance between home and the walled nowhere.
Colne & Green Way Abbots Langley to Staines
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8 February 1999. Meeting at the railway station at Denham (Renchi has vague memories of having edited a film here, the beginning and end of his career in art house cinema), we ticket one car and drive the other back; a short, liberating burst of M25 motorway. To Abbots Langley. And the Leavesden Hospital.
It’s early enough to experience the sense of motoring-as-freedom, the open road, that Abercrombie and the other visionaries of the County of London Plan espoused. They saw: city centres with monumental civic buildings surrounded by rubble; then suburbs, garden satellites, to be reached by an interlinked series of parkland drives. We were skimming around the lip of a dish, climbing through lightly wooded countryside, sleepy villages, the fantasy England of J. Arthur Rank and his film studios. This excessively domesticated landscape had never recovered from its exploitation in hundreds of undistinguished films. It sulked about its status as generic woodland: highwaymen, beauty-spot ladies with scooped necklines, farcical campers, middle-aged medical students whooping it up. Dirk Bogarde, Leslie Phillips, Diana Dors, Joan Collins, Kenneth More, the Mills family, Virginia McKenna, Dickie Attenborough.
Back at Leavesden Hospital in Abbots Langley, there were signs that the developers were moving in. We could still park undisturbed in the grounds, but that wouldn’t last. Since our last visit I’d read up on the history of this estate; I’d looked at maps and plans, drawings by the original architects John Giles and Biven of Craven Street, London — who produced the successful application in March 1868. Giles delivered a layout of separated (and segregated) units, an E tipped on its back, with a single extended building as its spine. The E is not only the code-breakers’ friend, the commonest letter in any document, it is also the most common element in the architecture of social containment. Around the motorway there are numerous E-shaped blocks, scoring madness. Sounding, when pronounced, like a cackle of mocking laughter: ‘E-e-e-e-e.’
Leavesden was set up to deal with rigorously enforced categories of incapacity: the mentally handicapped, imbeciles (who couldn’t look after themselves), and idiots who were deemed to be ‘deeply defective’. The hospital was organised around rules laid down in the 1845 Act ‘for the Regulation and Care and Treatment of Lunatics’.
Curved paths and tactful plantings disguise the nature and extent of the hospital colony. We are parked on the drive, near the entrance gates. Visitors would see a chapel, an administrative building with a clocktower, the darker blocks with their narrow ‘airing courts’ would be hidden.
London was divided, as if by a rope stretched from Poplar to Paddington. Those who lived south of that line, if they were thought to be in need of care and treatment, were removed to Caterham in Surrey, to St Lawrence’s Hospital. Those who lived to the north of the Poplar/Paddington line were dispatched to Leavesden.
The notions of the Victorian committee men who drew up the rules for the treatment of lunatics (and the designs for the hospitals that would hold them) were very much like the projections of present developers. Hospital estates should be ‘not less than twenty acres in extent’. Hospitals should be sited ‘within a radius of twenty miles of Charing Cross’. But twenty miles was often too far for friends and families of the Leavesden inmates. One visit a month was permitted, but rarely taken up.
The ‘quiet and harmless’ imbecile who could be trained to undertake simple tasks was the ideal. Women were put to the picking and coiling of hair. Their bed linen was made by patients at Colney Hatch (later Friern Barnet, later still another development site). Mats and baskets were woven by prisoners in Coldbath Fields, Clerkenwell. Clothing was coarse. It was taken away at night, locked in another room, to be re-sorted and claimed the next morning: a cumbersome proceeding that resulted in garments going missing or finishing on inmates of a different shape and size. Men slept in their work shirts. Women were given Turkish baths, to counter the ‘biliousness’ consequent upon poor diet, lack of exercise.
When there is only the Italianate water tower left, the coldness of the water, drawn up through chalk or clay or sand, seeps like a shadow across the tame lawns. Water was always a hinge for magicians, a means of switching modes of consciousness. Water was universal memory. The hospitals belonged to water, to underground reservoirs. Water for treatment. Water for hygiene. Water for sanitation. It wasn’t until the 1920s that patients at Leavesden were, if they earned the privilege, allowed to use toilet paper rather than cut-up squares of railway timetables.
Patients were watchers, never participants. They watched the staff play cricket. They moved about the grounds on lines of tolerance, keeping off the grass, forbidden to wander. They were rounded up for weekly dances. They attended film presentations in the early days of cinema — until the projector was banished as a fire risk. They witnessed films that were juddery snatches of reality; a train coming into a station, a hosepipe on a lawn. They saw frantic comedies that parodied their own convulsive movements. The films were silent. There was no musical accompaniment. They were marched into concert parties performed by the staff. That was the world of the hospitaclass="underline" warder and patient, subject and object, performer and milk-eyed witness. Patients were encouraged to achieve the Buddhist sense of clinging to nothing, disembodiment, no desires: strange ceremonies were put before them but they must react without excitement or hysteria. Their days were slow circuits of obedience, repetitive tasks, brief exposure to the weather. Leavesden was a monastery policed by non-initiates, uniformed citizens who must make their own entertainment — sport, music, theatre — like colonialists in a distant outpost of Empire.
In 1884 the Medical Superintendent, Dr Case, decreed that ‘the use of tobacco was absolutely necessary in the treatment of the insane’. Smoking was encouraged. Clay pipes were issued. After 1905, wooden pipes were permitted. Smoke soothed. The fiddly rituals of the smoker gave a shape to the day. Tobacco was a form of shamanic magic. The sweat lodge of the Turkish bath. Blue smoke curling upwards in the long wards. An interior fug that made them nostalgic for London’s autumnal peasoupers.
The hospital accurately reflected society. By 1913 new categories of infirmity were recognised as suitable grounds for certification. The ‘feeble-minded’ (any nuisance, drunk, women suffering post-natal depression) could be banished to Leavesden or Caterham. ‘Moral imbeciles’ were also rounded up in a programme of culling that would eugenically cleanse the national blood stock. Anti-social behaviour — inappropriate pregnancies, adultery, radicalism, riot — could see the offender put away, signed for by GP, magistrate, or their own disaffected relatives.