Read Will’s Psychogeography column where he goes to work on “celebrity egg-flippers”.

02.08.08

I remember, in my early twenties, visiting a friend who was detained under a section at the Friern mental hospital on the outskirts of north London. The low, brick buildings scattered about the greensward, the pathos of the mullions, the urine-coloured linoleum – it all made a desolate impression on me. Together with its sister establishment, the Halliwick, Friern was – depending which way you looked at it – a therapeutic community, or a gulag into which the non-functioning and the indigent inhabitants of the city could be dumped.

Friern – commonly known as Colney Hatch, hence “booby hatch” – was originally one of the great and gothic asylums of the Victorian age, originally designed as a self-supporting community, with its own farm, gas works, water supply and artisan workshops. As the city grew, so did the asylum. By the time of the First World War there were 3,500 beds. However, following the implementation of that superbly oxymoronic policy “care in the community” this declined to a mere 600.

Iain Sinclair, in his opus magister London Orbital describes the great Victorian asylums in some detail: the hulks of London’s peripheral asylums, hollowed out now for development, their cavernous wards partitioned into – you guessed it – luxury flats. But, of course, this is only the latest chapter in the irrational progress of the mental hospitals, as they were ejected, screaming, from the centre of the city.

Perhaps the most famous of all, Bethlem Royal Hospital – the notorious “Bedlam” – has had a notably peripatetic existence. Since 1377 “distracted” patients were “looked after” by being chained to the walls of the hospital attached to the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem outside Bishopsgate in the City. The asylum was officially established in 1547 when the Priory was dissolved, and then, in 1676, it was moved to a building in Moorfields, designed by Robert Hooke. Here, either side of the gates, stood Colly Cibber’s great statues Madness and Melancholy, life-size figures modelled on inmates, one of whom was said to be Oliver Cromwell’s butler.

I caught up with them 332 years later in a 1970s prefab in Beckenham, Kent. A friend who has an association with the Hospital, suggested I come down for the “Sunfayre” to be held as part of the celebrations of the NHS’s recent 60th birthday in the grounds of the Royal Bethlem, which has occupied a 240-acre site here since the 1930s. As for Madness and Melancholy, the Gog and Magog of this alternative London, they, like Bedlam itself, had a century’s layover. The Hospital took up residence in a new building in Lambeth (now the Imperial War Museum), while the statues languished in the Guildhall Museum.

It was a beautiful April day – but not so hot for July. The boy and I took the bus to Waterloo, then waited for the train to West Wickham at a station café selling crazily priced drinks (£4.28 for a Coke and a Red Bull). On the platform, I turned to see the spokes of the London Eye poking out from the façade of the Shell Building, as if Heath Robinson had taken over London’s skyline. A woman walked past me with a stuffed heron.

Out in the sticks, we strolled down privet alleys to the Hospital, where the bouncy castle had no defenders, and a few distracted tots span in the outsize teacups of a merry-go-round. There were tombolas, a few stalls selling ancient Carpenters cassette tapes, and a small, dapper man in a dinner jacket, barking up an audience for his Punch and Judy show. I left the boy eating a burger and watching teams of staff and patients compete in It’s a Knockout-style games involving foam and inflatables, and wandered round the low, red-brick buildings.

I’m not claiming that the Royal Bethlem was the most uplifting of institutions: it was difficult to get in the mood as the valetudinarian big band belted out “In the Mood”; not while so many of the faces in the crowd bore the impress of either distress, or the ataraxy imparted by the medication used to suppress it. Nevertheless, there was the bright art gallery, with its pleasingly frank exhibition of watercolours by David Beales, a long-term patient in mental hospitals. Each had an explanatory card that detailed – with ruthless honesty – the experiences the artist had endured.

And then there was the general openness of the Royal Bethlehem: no doubt it has its locked wards – its bedlams within – but the calm grounds of the hospital were open to all to wander freely; there was a sense here that everyone was doing the very best they could. While in the tiny museum, there were Madness and Melancholy, tensed and timeless evocations of a time when the screams of mental anguish were a spectacle for the quality to enjoy for the price of a ticket.

Pope called them “Great Cibber’s brazen brainless brothers”. But then, what did he know? They’re Portland stone, while the distress they depict is neither brainless, nor brazen.

26.07.08

Will’s latest Psychogeography column is here.

19.07.08

To read Will’s latest Psychogeography column, click here.

12.07.08

For years now pressure groups such as Living Streets and the Ramblers Association have been urging the Government to produce a co-ordinated national walking strategy. With almost geological slowness a “discussion paper” has been circulated, limping from not very interested party to indifferent one. In the meantime, local authorities have pushed ahead with their own walking strategies. If you feed these words into Google you’ll come up with plans advanced by councils as various as Luton and Cheshire. Reading them is to stroll into a petrified forest of bureaucratic jargon, where a Sits (Sustainable Integrated Transport Strategy) sits on the rotten boughs of verbiage.

Meanwhile, the situation gets worse and worse: between the mid-1980s and 1990s walking declined as a proportion of journeys undertaken from 34 per cent to 27 per cent. Assuming — and I see no reason not to — a similar decline for the past decade, we have only one in five journeys being made on foot. It’s just as well that native habitats are declining and woodland being grubbed up, because on current projections no one will walk anywhere at all within 30 years.

Already the evolutionary consequences of our lack of ambulation are being seen: concrete evidence that the theories of Lamarck, for so long discredited, do indeed accurately describe the mechanisms of heritability. Three years ago in Stoke-on-Trent a child was born who, while perfectly healthy in every other respect, had a completely globular body covered with an epidermal layer of dense latex. “Roland X” — as the child is known — is now attending nursery school, and makes the half-mile journey there by car, after being “bounced into the back seat of the family Jeep” by his mother.

Roland is not the only sport: in Peebles there are now five-year-old twins who instead of feet have sets of double bogies curiously reminiscent of those found on shopping trolleys. The obstetrician who delivered them, Dr Finlay Quaye, told The Herald: “They’re in all respects happy, normal children, although they find it difficult to avoid being pushed about a bit in the playground.”

The apparently “natural” occurrence of wheeled or ball-shaped human beings has led to a disturbing new fad in radical elective surgery. Adults are having their feet and legs amputated and replaced with a variety of wheeled prosthetics, ranging from in-line skates to powered scooters. Hermione Forster of the Disability Alliance has described these people as “sadly deluded concerning the consequences of abandoning bipedalism. Once they discover just how parlous the facilities are for wheelchair access they often want to change back — but by then it’s too late.” Then there’s the Weil’s Disease epidemic raging in the Fens, as more and more teenagers have their legs sewn together and take to the waterways, rather than put up with the unutterable tedium of putting one foot in front of the other.

Obviously it’s high time the Government acted on this, and I’m pleased to see that they have: this year a communique was issued by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport pledging that by 2012 every man, woman and child in Britain will have been encouraged to increase the amount they walk by the staggering total of 1,000 paces per year. Moreover, walking is being trumpeted as one of the key legacies of London’s 2012 Olympic games, with a colossal £7m earmarked for encouraging people to put one foot in front of the other — that’s 12p for everyone!

Tessa Jowell has said: “It is no longer enough that we be seen to walk the walk, we must talk up the walk even if this requires cutting corns. We will be creating a new brand mark of excellence — the first in the world for pedestrians — to be called ‘The Golden Foot’. Walkways, paths, trails, woods, fields and even roads can all apply to display the Golden Foot together with jaunty stickers saying ‘I’m a Toe-Sucker’. The campaign will be launched by the Duchess of York at a mass rally in Birmingham city centre at which thousands of former couch potatoes will symbolically stamp to pieces their TV remotes. A new long-distance path, running 1,000 paces from Parliament to Downing Street will be opened by the greatest living human being, Nelson Mandela, and in his honour will be named ‘The Long March to Freedom’. Anyone who undertakes the path will be rewarded with a statue of Nelson Mandela in their home town.”

Stirring stuff, I think you’ll agree, but we’ve seen it all before: the grand vision, the will to change, the huge spend — and then it all ambles into the ground. No, I think that if the Government wants to get more people walking they’d be far better advised to deal with the real impediments: the snakes in the grass, the dodgy paving stones, disused mineshafts and chronic laziness.

To see Raph Steadman’s art work, go here

05.07.08