Enfield Chase tucks neatly into the north-east corner, where the A10 (the Great Cambridge Road) meets the pale blue horizontal of the M25. My Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas is a well-travelled, one-and-a-half-kilo wad of overan-notated pulp. The white blank of Enfield Chase is dressed with parks, enclosures, gardens, woodland walks: Clay Hill, White Webbs Park, Forty Hill (Museum), Capel Manor, Trent Park. Greenness slips under the motorway, Rorschach blots mopping up the grey.
On the eastern slope of the Lea Valley is Epping Forest; the people’s forest, festooned with burger cartons, silver cans, ghosts of prisoners, runaways, pastoral melancholies (cop killer Harry Roberts, poets John Clare, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Thomas). On the west is the old forest of Middlesex, Enfield Chase. The broad, marshy floodplain of the Lea is a natural boundary.
The royal family were the first suburbanites, recognising that London was only tolerable if you could run second (third, fourth, fifth) homes in the country, in easy commuting distance. And, if that proved expensive, or you became bored by your own furnishings, you could always land on a neighbour and bankrupt him. The first circle around London, precursor to the orbital highway, was the property portfolio of royal palaces: Greenwich and Eltham in Kent, Havering in Essex, Hampton Court in Middlesex, Nonsuch, Richmond and Oatlands in Surrey. As with the M25 – the ‘missing’ service station on the west side – there was a gap in the chain. Theobalds Park, just north of Enfield Chase, was not in royal hands. It belonged to a servant of the crown, master of the Secret State: William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. His son Robert, Earl of Salisbury, handed the place over to James I (taking Hatfield House, twinned with Welwyn Garden City, in exchange).
Green is seductive. There’s something unnatural about its chemistry. Nature, bent and abused, is grey. We’re happy with the grey variables: silver to sludge. Stand on a footbridge over the M25, anywhere between Junction 26 on the edge of Epping Forest and the Junction 25 exit for Enfield, and you’ll watch traffic through tattered sails of greenery, roadside plantings, overripe saplings fed on diesel. The context of the valley is revealed: mud paddocks bulldozed for future development, new systems of access roads, sour yellow Wimpey boxes for first-time buyers; low, wooded hills; the persistent chlorophyll of Enfield Chase and environs. Captured estates. Garden centres. Pubs that offer Thai, Chinese and Indian lunches, while hanging on to their fustian titles: The King and Tinker, The Pied Bull, The Volunteer, The Woodbine.
We dream of a green paradise. The solution to Gimpo’s teasing riddle – ‘to find out where the M25 leads’ – is here. After the circuits of madness, pilgrims must claim their reward: the secret garden. Residual desire is articulated in street names. Paradise Road and Paradise Row are both located in Waltham Abbey.
Going east from Waltham Cross, a confederacy of country houses and secure estates straddles the motorway. Theobalds Park, to the north of the road, is modest about its royal pedigree. If you drive along its boundaries you will be scanned by surveillance cameras, quizzed by interrogators at unmanned checkpoints. Walkers are suspect. The site reveals nothing that might provoke unwelcome attention. History declines into romantic fiction.
Philippa Gregory in her novel Earthly Joys (1998) nominates the gardener John Tradescant as her hero, a familiar generic trope. Tradescant is best known as a Lambeth figure, keeper of ‘Tradescant’s Ark’, a proto-museum and grand cabinet of curiosities, storehouse of plants, bones and anthropological swag. He is celebrated in the present Museum of Garden History in St Mary’s Church, alongside Lambeth Palace.
But Gregory is more interested in the young man, the tanned, strong-shouldered son of the soil. Tradescant is the gardener at Theobalds Palace. The relationship with his patron, the hunchbacked, avian figure of Robert Cecil is composed as a straightfaced version of a Fast Show homoerotic playlet, enacted by Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse. ‘Any early vegetables?’ his lordship asked. ‘Asparagus? They say His Majesty loves asparagus.’
Earthly Joys become earthy joys as Tradescant drops his breeches for the Duke of Buckingham. ‘The pain when it came to him was sharp like a pain of deep agonising desire, a pain that he welcomed, that he wanted to wash through him. And then it changed and became a deep pleasure and a terror to him, a feeling of submission and penetration and leaping desire and deep satisfaction. John thought he understood the passionate grief and lust of a woman who can take a man inside her.’
Gregory’s romance limns the period when Theobalds Park passed from Cecil to James I. A property to complete the circuit of royal residences. Known variously as Cullynges, Tongs, Thebaudes, Tibbolds, the palace was built by Lord Burleigh in 1560. The attraction of the estate was its distance from London and the court, a single day’s ride; enclosed forest could be domesticated, organised into gardens, walks, rides, hierarchies of contemplation. Cecil’s son ceded the palace to the Scottish interloper, James I. James’s grandson Charles II gifted the estate to the turncoat General Monck, Duke of Albermarle. So Theobalds declined, always with a sense of favours conferred, male alliances, pay-offs to special friends. Heritage flashbacks were all that remained by the time the land was purchased by the Victorian brewer Sir Henry Meux, Bart.
Cecil, according to a contemporary Life, ‘greatly delighted in making gardens’. Royal visits by Elizabeth cost him many thousands of pounds, but this retreat from the realpolitik of the state, the fabrication of conspiracies, justified paranoia, gave the civil servant scope to construct his paradise garden. On the forest fringe, posthumous fantasies could be played out, an Alhambra of scents, fountains, symmetries. A commissioned painting of Cecil (now in the National Portrait Gallery) places him, absurdly, on a mule: Don Quixote as Sancho Panza. Berobed, ringed, a raddled imago of power. ‘Riding in his garden and walks upon his little mule was his greatest disport.’
James I, resting here at the end of his progress from Scotland, experienced a thrill of recognition. Like romantic novelist Philippa Gregory, he found the discretion of Enfield profoundly erotic. Theobalds Park, according to Gregory, ‘had been laid out by Sir Robert’s father in the bleak elegance of the period. Sharply defined geometric patterns of box hedging enclosed different coloured gravels and stones.’
Tradescant plotted a New Age makeover. ‘He longed to take out the gravel from the enclosed shapes and plant the patterns with herbs, flowers and shrubs. He wanted to see the whole disciplined shape softened and changing every day with foliage and flowers which would bloom and wilt, grow freshly green, and then pale… Tradescant had a picture in his mind’s eye of plants spilling over the hedges, of the thick green of the box containing wildness, fertility, even colour. It was an image that drew on the hedgerow and roadside of the wild country of England and brought that richness into the garden and imposed order upon it.’
The Earl of Salisbury entertained James I for four days at Theobalds, while the new king received the homage of the Lords of Council. Coming from the bleak north, James wanted to take possession of a house and grounds, elegantly planted, artfully laid out, on the side of London in which he was most comfortable. He commandeered Theobalds and a large portion of Enfield Chase, as a kind of dowry. A wall, ten miles in circumference, enclosed his estates.
The circuit of the wall crosses the motorway and cuts through the grounds of Capel Manor, now an horticultural college, garden centre and display of show gardens. The pleasure of walking through the grounds derives from the change of pulse, slowing of breath, coming away from the road gives you. All the usual irritants with which great gardens protect themselves are blessings: they make access difficult. Persistence is rewarded. Capel Manor, like its neighbour Myddelton House, is open to visitors on certain days, at certain times – if those times don’t have to be revised, if there are no plagues or elections on the horizon.
Capel is the first estate you notice, exiting the M25, making the tricky turn into Bullsmoor Lane. Follies, Gothic ruins, are glimpsed over the wall. Ivy-covered John Piper arches floating in sparse woodland. It’s only after you’ve bought your ticket and followed the signs that you recognise these stacks of tumbled masonry as customised fakes, commissioned from William Chambers. Rams and urns and centaur heads among pink rhododendrons. The small area of tolerated ‘wilderness’ is punted as a ‘garden feature’, introduced by William Robinson and other members of the ‘Natural’ school of the late nineteenth century. It doesn’t feel like woodland. A two-minute stroll loops you back to a prospect of the south lawn, the Liriodendron Tree, the famous Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia); the ha-ha which marked the division of the Theobalds and Capel Manor estates.
On a mound that overlooks the motorway is another folly, an open-sided, open-roofed Temple of the Winds. Voices from the gardens are distorted. Children scampering around the maze. Water. Filtered traffic whooo-whooo-whoooing under Bulls Cross Ride.
Capel Manor, promoted under the slogan ‘Where the City meets the Countryside’, has downgraded the paradise theme to a series of botanical rooms, conservatories with the lid lifted off. There is a garden for ‘Physically Challenged People’ and a garden for ‘Visually Impaired People’. There is a Yellow Garden and a Blue Garden (with flowers blessed by the M25 ribbon-cutter). ‘Now this is my type of garden,’ said Margaret Thatcher at a photo-opportunity in 1989. Wisteria sinensis, Brunnera macrophylla, Lirioe muscari and Cynara cardunculus. ‘Blue is one of the “cold” colours, providing a calm and restful feel.’
There’s a lake, of course. But it’s notable, in this area of springs and rivulets, riverine speculations, that Capel Manor has chosen to market non-liquid water, fake water. This season’s idea is the virtual water garden (a drought fancy which only succeeded in predicting the continual rain that would raise London’s water table and float off anything that wasn’t firmly anchored). The concept of designers Angela Grant and Nigel Jackson was to stimulate those parts of the brain that ‘think water’ – without actually involving that precious resource in the exchange. Diuretic gardening: as sponsored by a ‘cooperative venture’ (Anglian Water, West Water, Yorkshire, Thames Water, Severn Trent). Nifty arrangements of broken slate and silver paper (gallery quality) make up the ‘water conscious’ garden (i.e. the garden that makes us conscious of the absence of water). A notion that is about as much use as handing a dehydrated marathon runner a photograph of a high-energy drink. Or playing a video loop of Ullswater-at-dawn on a Tunisian sand dune.
Princess Elizabeth, the future Virgin Queen, was brought from Hatfield House to Enfield Chase by her ‘keeper’, Sir Thomas Pope. She travelled, according to Nicholas Norden’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, with ‘a retinue of twelve ladies in white satin, on ambling palfreys, and twenty yeomen in green on horseback, that her grace might hunt the hart’.
The forest was a site of enchantment for a green belt monarchy; a theatre for role reversals, sexual travesty, debating schools. ‘The Queen came from Theobalds to Enfield House to dinner, and she had toils set up in the park to shoot at the buck.’ The court stood for wild nature, ecology, the preservation of animals so that they could be killed for sport. The forest, when it is enclosed and exploited, is royalist. Republican sentiment cuts down trees. The major deforestation took place under Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The diarist John Evelyn described the Chase as ‘a solitary desert with 3,000 deer’.
Royal physicians were rewarded with Enfield estates. Trent Park was given by George III to his favourite quack. Elizabeth I presented White Webbs House to her physician, Dr Hucks (or Huicks). Huicks – and the house he occupied – came under grave suspicion in the time of Elizabeth’s successor, James. Guido Vaux (aka Guy Fawkes) was a frequent visitor. Heretics (Catholics) were always shunted out to the fringes, rural and riverside suburbs, while nonconforming fundamentalists clung to the city, plain chapels and places of assembly. Recent aristocrats, royal servants, cash-rich bureaucrats bought into the green girdle, leaving the inner suburbs, Hackney and Hoxton, to argumentative mechanics and tradesmen.
Vaux took White Webbs House and furnished it at his own expense. Garnet the Jesuit stayed with him. The house was reported, by government agents, to be filled with ‘Popish books and relics’; a fiendish warren of ‘trapdoors and passages’. What is now White Webbs Lane was once known as Rome Lane. Terror and counter-terror lived in close proximity: the spymaster on one side of the fence and the heretical assassin on the other.
Walking through Enfield Chase, estate to estate, you notice small streams, channels cut for Sir Hugh Myddelton’s New River. Myddelton was a speculator, water was a resource. By the late Elizabethan period, medieval wells and conduits could not adequately supply the needs of the City. Edmund Colthurst looked to the Hertfordshire springs at Amwell and Chadwell, near Ware. The goldsmith Myddelton exploited Colthurst’s initiative. Born in Wales in 1560, he was MP for Denbigh and jeweller to James I. The dull silver of the River Lea was converted, by labour and promotion, to gold, a personal fortune. Adventurer shares were issued and Colthurst was appointed as overseer of the work, the digging and cutting; the New River would travel forty miles in making the twenty-mile journey to London. It hugged the 100-foot contour line, falling eighteen feet in the course of its travels. It opened at Christmas in 1613. Myddelton was knighted, made a baronet. He prospered. He died in 1631, leaving versions of his name scattered through the suburbs, tracings that can still be followed into town.
But any attempt to walk the length of Myddelton’s New River is a forlorn exercise. Water: known but not seen. Dishonoured water. The muddy trickle of streams that no longer pay their way, edging in embarrassment through the dog-exercising pastures of Enfield Chase. Relics of Pymmes Brook, Salmons Brook, Turkey Brook.
The New River Head on the Penton Mound in Islington has been developed by Stirling Ackroyd. A spindly fountain playing in a shallow pool. A wink at those who have chased the brook from Hertfordshire. St James Homes promote: ‘a dynamic living environment’. There are still parties of intent walkers, greyheads in anoraks and trainers, straining to catch the guide’s patter above the noise of the traffic. Elderly street signs, white on blue, with their brighter replacements: Myddelton Square, Amwell Street, Chadwell Street, Sadler’s Wells, Merlin’s Cave. Just as the reprieved statues and arches of the old city migrate to the green belt, so the names of the source places, the springs, are planted in a townscape: pastoral aspirations. Lloyds Dairy in Amwell Street: a black and white chequerboard display for bottles of contour-banded yellow milk, heavy with cream. Simulations. Heritage nudges with a true heritage: Welsh cows, draymen and dairymen from the west. Thick-necked bottles are clotted to give the lie to Cockney rumours of Welshers (from Cardiganshire) watering their milk.
The Metropolitan Water Board (privatised, defunct) have left a sepulchral, marbled wreath behind them, a text nobody bothers to read: ERECTED BY THE METROPOLITAN WATER BOARD ON THE SITE OF THE NEW RIVER HEAD. On the corner of River Street is a peeling signboard: The Village Buttery. Cream, milk, butter, pseudo-apothecaries: the village within the city, the small green oasis of Wilmington Square Gardens.
Following the New River, north, up Colebrooke Row, brings you to the cottage Charles Lamb shared with his sister Mary. Restored, white-painted, plants on window sill. The cottage dates from 1760. The Lambs lived here from 1823 to 1826. The New River, already tired, drudges past the front of the house. My children, when they were told the story of Mary Lamb murdering her mother, preferred to walk on the other side of the road. What is curious is how the Lambs, taking up a rustic retreat in Enfield, followed the river out. Water remains, in my fancy, a messenger substance, linking reservoir with source; a dream hinge between city heat and Arcadian potentiality.
Lamb has been heritaged as one of the treasures of Enfield. Contemporary reports were ambiguous. ‘Charles Lamb quite delighted with his retirement. He does not fear the solitude of the situation, though he seems to be almost without an acquaintance, and dreads rather than seeks visitors.’
With Mary Lamb’s health deteriorating, brother and sister shifted from house to house, lodging to lodging: The Poplars in Chase Side to Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton. Lamb was buried in All Saints Church.
Enfield lacked culture. Enfield was not Islington. Food was dull. The chief bookseller, Lamb informed Mary Shelley, ‘deals in prose versions of the melodrama, with plates of ghosts and murders and other subterranean passages’. The fraudulent antiquarianism in which the Chase specialised: the plaster devils of Capel Manor.
Back on my New River trail, I tried to photograph the heritage plaque on Colebrooke Cottages. Two women brushed past. ‘He’s sharp as a pin. Got all his marbles, only he can’t talk.’
Myddelton is memorialised by a statue, facing south, at the sharp end of the little park that divides Upper Street and Essex Road, Islington. The water speculator on his high plinth is a carry-on conquistador, back turned to the lowlife scramblings of park bench, bushes. Palm trees surround the base. Myddelton has hacked his way through a Douanier Rousseau jungle, climbed a small hill to stare over unconquered lands; his eyeline will carry him to Cleopatra’s Needle and the Thames. Stone putti with pockmarked skins kneel in the shrubs, flanking a dish of rusty water. Myddelton’s right hand keeps his cloak clear of the muck; while his left hand clutches a map or charter.
Sir Hugh Myddelton, fortune secure, built himself a house and laid out gardens in the neighbourhood of Forty Hall, near Enfield. The New River flowed through the grounds. Forty Hall was later acquired by H.C. Bowles, described by James Thorne in his Handbook to the Environs of London as ‘the fortunate possessor of shares in the New River company’. Into these suburban reservations was gathered the cultural ballast of London: a portion of ballustrading from Christopher Wren’s church of St Benet (demolished in 1867), a Portland stone Grecian temple from the Duke of Chandos’s house in Edgware, twelve stone balls from the front of Burlington House, Piccadilly. Scattered throughout the Chase were jigsaw mementoes of a lost London.
Bowles, on a site adjoining Forty Hall, once known as Bowling Green, built Myddelton House. Here all the elements that defined Enfield Chase came together: accumulated wealth, green politics, architectural salvage from the City, royal courtiers working their connections, paradise gardens. Myddelton House, glorying in the name of the original water promoter, is presently the headquarters of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. On those days, and at those hours, when the grounds are open to the public, you can creep up to the high windows of this comfortable property and see computers, coffee machines, filing cabinets, the steel-grey trappings of bureaucracy. But, unless you have business with LVRPA, you can’t go in. You must shuffle across the gravel to wonder at the heritage of the notable botanist E. A. Bowles.
Philippa Gregory and her sorority got it right. The Bowles story and the story of the garden do play like an historical romance. It is a romance. At the Capel Manor garden centre, massed copies of Joan Hessayon’s Capel Bells are offered for sale. An Edwardian lady with parasol drifting across lawns. Beneath the heavy relief lettering of the author’s name, a tapestry of fuchsias, the eponymous ‘Capel Bells’. Prosperity on a stalk: ‘They look like petals, I grant you, but those of us in the know refer to them as sepals… Blooms increase on a mathematical progression. Damned clever little things.’
Capel Bells is a grand read, pre-optioned television: Cookson heroine battling to establish herself in society, knockabout subplot of Cockney chancers, horticulture, discovery of unknown father, sail off into sunset with the inheritor of this magical country house. It’s like finger-licking your way through a seed catalogue with racy bits, headset history on a guided tour of the grounds.
The gravity of Hessayon’s novel pulls towards the notion of Arcadia as an achievable condition, the contrary of urban struggle. ‘Charlotte had boarded the train at Liverpool Street station in the sooty air of the City, deafened by the cries of unhappy children, the whine of beggars, the scolding of irritated mothers and the bellows of station staff. Fifteen miles north of this cacophony, the outer reaches of Enfield were a paradise of leafy trees and empty roads. She had not seen a single motor car.’
Paradise. That word again. A.R. Hope-Moncrieff in his book on Essex calls up the spirit of William Morris. ‘Morris also played in a suburban garden, and was mainly brought up in the next parish, on the edge of Epping Forest, that was an Earthly Paradise for his youth.’ Paradise Road, Waltham Abbey. Paradise Wildlife Park, just north of Junction 25, on the orbital motorway.
‘Strangely, for a young woman known for her down-to-earth attitudes, she felt an almost mystical affinity with Capel Manor,’ writes Hessayon of her heroine, Charlotte Blair (a working girl who has the temerity to rent a substantial Essex property). ‘She had no idea what exactly she craved, but felt certain that a few months living in the old house in Enfield would solve the mystery and give her peace.’
The romance, bastard progeny of Malory and Spenser, is the proper form for describing this territory. The structure is formal, fixed rules that shock us into enlightenment: a still pool in a woodland glade, an artist who captures essence with a few swift brush strokes. The owner of Capel Manor goes into business with a Tokyo firm in anticipation of global capitalism. All the scams and development pitches of the Lea Valley are here in outline. Future shadows creep across rigorously managed lawns. ‘Of course we couldn’t live on a pound a week. What a thing to say! Popple will buy you a nursery… I believe the area is full of nurseries. The Lea Valley. That’s true, isn’t it?’
Of course it is. As true as the hero’s chum Buffy who comes up with a wizard scheme ‘to make a fortune by building homes in the suburbs’. The first paradise of the car. Nobody demands an orbital highway. The only routes follow the rivers, north/south, follow ancient trackways. Great estates are always one day’s ride from the centre. The suburbs wait on the railway. They swallow up dozy market towns, places of retreat: Enfield, Waltham Abbey, Chigwell, Edmonton. Then polyfill the bits in between.
In Joan Hessayon’s romance, characters represent the categories of invader who will come to occupy the fringes of the old forest. Essex man and woman in embryo. The Covent Garden entrepreneur. The flower girl with push. The ambitious Big House servant with an unhealthy passion for fuchsias. The bent solicitor with a nubile daughter. Jack-the-Lad from the Rookeries with an eye for horseflesh. Plants are currency. Gorgeous swathes of scent and colour. Bearded iris for toffs and auricula (‘gold-laced polyanthus’) for the working man.
‘I dare say people whose hobby is growing auriculas would not be received in the neighbourhood, although I doubt if that was the reason Lady Meux wasn’t received,’ remarks the catty Charlotte.
Hessayon’s romance doesn’t simply predict coming social trends, it inducts historic personages into the narrative. There is Lady Meux, Valerie, chatelaine of Theobalds Park – who is not (as a widow) received in Upper Lea Valley society. Her husband, the brewer, picked up the former royal palace and brought his much younger wife with him. Valerie had served behind the bar at Meux’s Horseshoe Tavern, on the site of the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road. Hessayon sketches her as a game widow who entertains unmarried men and makes very imaginative use of an indoor swimming pool.
But the dominant figure in this patchwork of country houses is E.A. ‘Gussie’ Bowles of Myddleton (sic) House. Bowles drops in at Capel Manor, accompanied by the formidable garden-planner and author Gertrude Jekyll (venturing north from her Surrey patch). Gussie, a confirmed bachelor, is rather sharp with women and amateur horticulturalists. Jekyll is one of the chaps.
E.A. Bowles was a gift to writers of fiction. The family were Huguenot (original name Garnault). They purchased a block of shares in the New River Company, enough to provide them with a controlling interest. In 1724, according to Bryan Hewitt (The Crocus King: E.A. Bowles of Myddelton House), Michael Garnault acquired ‘an estate with an Elizabethan house called Bowling Green House at Bulls Cross in north Enfield. By coincidence a loopway of the New River cut through the garden.’ This loopway had, it was said, been created to prevent the destruction of a Tudor yew hedge.
Henry Carrington Bowles married into the Garnault family in 1799. A swamp cypress was planted to celebrate the nuptials. When Anne Garnault, the last of the line, died, the Bulls Cross property passed to the Bowles family. A new house, white Suffolk brick, was built in 1818. And was eventually inherited by Henry Carrington Bowles Treacher, on condition that he assumed the Bowles surname and coat of arms. E.A. Bowles was Treacher’s fourth son.
The process of drift, centre to margin, is very evident at Myddleton House. Huguenots, frequently associated with Spitalfields, the streets around Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, remove themselves to an area of play country. They become more English than the English (aping the parodic squirearchy of the royals). A great chum of Gussie Bowles is Thomas Hanbury, one of the Quaker brewers of Brick Lane (hops to the city, profit to the suburbs). Bowles stays with Hanbury in his fourteenth-century palace (with terraced gardens) at La Mortola. Quaker wealth comes with responsibility: schools for the children of workers, grace and favour cottages. Gussie is also keen on good works, socialising with the lads of Enfield, ‘Bowles Boys’.
Gussie fits out his garden with York stone slabs from Clerkenwell. He collects one of those strange, ovenlike, igloo-block shelters that once stood on the old London Bridge. (These structures trace a psychogeographic progress across London, from Guy’s Hospital to Victoria Park in Hackney, to Myddleton House in Enfield. Memory nudges, displacements that weave across an indifferent landscape, as invisible as the New River.)
Bowles rescues the Enfield Market Cross and a diamond-shaped pillar known as ‘the Irishman’s shirt’. Cargo-cult plunder dresses his gardens: a portion of the New River, antiquarian oddities from London, exotic blooms from European plant-hunting expeditions. Myddleton House is a museum of false starts and wilfully perverse hints. Gussie lays out ‘The Lunatic Asylum’, an area of the garden that includes a contorted hazel known as ‘Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick’. Flora can be as zany as fauna. The grounds of Myddleton House are revealed as a microcosm of the Lea Valley/Enfield Chase Arcadia: captured river, a market cross, tulip terraces, beds of gold and white and silver; a reservation for the outpatients of the botanical world.
Beyond Bulls Cross, moving west along the hard shoulder of the M25, from Potters Bar towards Abbots Langley, we learn how the old estates were broken up and rebranded as asylums, retreats, drying-out clinics, holding pens for troublesome inner-city aliens. Looking at my map, before the walk began, I logged: Shenley, Harperbury, Napsbury, Leavesden and, a little to the south (North Circular rather than M25), Friern Barnet.
E.A. Bowles kept gas and electricity out of Myddleton House until 1954. As he got older little quirks of character were refined into fullblown eccentricity. He wore spectacles with a single lens (the left). He put his finger through the empty socket and twirled. He was a member of an all-male dining club, the Garden Society, that admitted only one woman, the Queen Mother (royals are hermaphrodite).
Garden books were produced, small controversies aired: Bowles wasn’t keen on the fad for rock gardens. (The estate of his greatest rival was acquired by a later millionaire gardener, George Harrison, the former Beatle.) Life centred on masculine Christianity, the Jesus Church at Enfield. Boys who attended the church were encouraged to spend weekends messing about in the grounds of Myddleton House, clearing the pond, or doing a bit of weeding. ‘For this they wore bathing costumes, Gussie’s being of Edwardian vintage with blue and white rings reaching down to his ankles,’ reports Bryan Hewitt. ‘A straw hat with his college ribbons completed the outfit (it was the same hat in which the boys picked strawberries).’
The boys were taken on excursions to Brighton. They were given the job of lifting and sorting crocuses. They enjoyed themselves, fishing and playing cricket on the lawns. There is a photograph, something like a Latigue, of a card school dressed in Edwardian bathing costumes. One boy, the nearest to the camera, has stuck out his tongue. Another favourite, Fred, did an impression of Gussie with a watering can. He fell into the river. ‘He squelched off to the house,’ Hewitt writes, ‘where Gussie gave him a bath and dry clothes. He reappeared dressed in a pair of Gussie’s flannel trousers, a Norfolk jacket and a trilby with the brim turned down and proceeded to shamble about giving a hilarious imitation of Gussie who joined in the fun.’
Bowles Boys served on the Western Front in the First War. Gussie wrote to them with news of the harvest and the ‘burning hot days in July’, he sent food parcels. Many were wounded, crippled, killed. The honoured dead of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, the Royal Field Artillery, the Middlesex Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers.
The residue of what Bowles attempted, a life given over to the creation of a garden, remains. It works in a way that Capel Manor, with its strategic planting, its demonstrations, never will. Capel Manor debates a Princess Diana memorial garden, the form it should take: a place of remembrance beside an orbital motorway. Myddleton House has a more direct royal connection. The foreword to Bryan Hewitt’s book is written by the grandson of E.A. Bowles’s brother. ‘I think of my Great Great Uncle Gussie often as I walk around our small Wiltshire garden,’ writes Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, OBE (horseman, courtier and former husband of the royal mistress, Camilla). ‘If, as I suspect, my uncle is looking back from “across the wide river” he will be amazed to discover that his name is still revered and his works much admired.’