London Orbital by Iain Sinclair

Author:Iain Sinclair
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141936017
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

It took two or three attempts before we were allowed in. We chatted to security through iron gates. We were repulsed at manned lodges. But part of the remit at Virginia Park – the developers Octagon having received a contribution from English Heritage – is to allow students of architecture (and the vulgarly curious) a glimpse of this restored Victorian folly. Virginia Park had always been a high-risk development: lead had been stripped from the roof, decorated walls were damp-stained. English weather had devastated the property. But the Octagon operation wasn’t one of the asset stripping (burn and bury) efforts we’d encountered along the northern section of the M25. Memory was not trashed but tactfully restored, varnished: improved. Virginia Park would combine the gravitas of the Victoria and Albert Museum with five-star facilities, acceptable to multinational transients: gym, swimming pool, state of the art plumbing, landscape gardening.

On the right day, at the right hour, cash in hand, visitors are allowed to pass through the security gates. An (achieved) asylum seeker, friendly, but nervous of writing a receipt, steps from his checkpoint-office to point out the route we should take.

If you weren’t already an orthopedic waistcoat-wearer (laced like Lillie Langtry), the decor of the entrance hall at the Holloway Sanatorium would push you over the edge. If you suffered from nerves, if you were thyroid-twitchy, spots in front of the eyes, flinching from bright colours, here was shock therapy. Nothing in our approach had prepared us for this. The path was immaculate, as were the white sports clothes, white ankle-socks, trainers, baseball caps of the women who cruised the grounds: four-wheel drives, multi-geared mountain bikes (for the bowling-green flat trip to the gates). The investors in Octagon’s award-winning development are looking for convenient crash-pads, close to London Airport: maximum security, modest service charges, en suite exercise equipment, silence.

‘An enviable lifestyle on the grand scale,’ says the brochure. The very pitch that was made to wealthy Victorian families with flaky relatives. ‘Gracious four storey town houses.’ (If you can have town houses without a town.) The message, in the promotional photographs, is confused: Japanese minimalism (one blue and white vase), US hygiene fetishism, ersatz Regency drapes, Trusthouse Forte oil paintings.

However meticulous the makeover, the back story always leaks, seeps through as an ineradicable miasma. Pain, displacement. The agony of knowing enough to know that something is wrong, a moment’s remission will be followed by a renewed attack. Consciousness misplaced in long corridors. Buildings slip and shift and refuse to settle on a single identity. They have been created through the madness of money, designed by a man harried by all the demons of the Gothic imagination.

The entrance hall, restored by ‘artists and craftsmen’, is insane; a Turkish bath of wild candyfloss colours, synapse-destroying detail – Celtic, Moorish, Norse. Sultan’s Palace arches. Pillars dividing into lesser pillars. A bestiary of monsters: tongues, mouths, teeth, claws. If you were a tranquillised stoic, calm as a stone, you’d freak and tremble. ‘I’m not going near that scarlet carpet, that staircase.

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