Visionary maps, in muted Ben Nicholson colours, were produced. Lovely fold-out abstractions. Proposals in soft grey, pale green, blue-silver river systems. But always with the blood circuit of ring roads, the pastoral memory rind at the edge of things, at the limits of our toleration of noise and speed and grime. There must, said William Bull (in 1901), be ‘a green girdle around London’s Sphere… a circle of green sward and trees which would remain permanently inviolate’.
Until now. The first usage of the term ‘Green Belt’, in a London County Council resolution of 1924, stressed the same terms: ‘an inviolable rural zone around London’.
By the 1960s there was substantial ‘nibbling’ into that inviolable belt; Hertfordshire and Essex were targeted for housing schemes ‘because spare railway capacity existed’. Surrey and Kent could look after themselves. The Lea Valley with its disused greenhouses was approved as a residential area (for those opting to quit the increasingly ‘multicultural’ inner cities). A 400-acre green belt site was cleared for development in 1966.
New Labour, masters of double-talk, gesture politics, non-consenting consensus, were reversing the old Tory sentimentality over Metroland and the suburbs (Edward Heath in Bexleyheath, Margaret Thatcher in Finchley, Michael Portillo in Southgate). Thatcherites hated the inner cities (Hackney, Lambeth). Their pitch was simple: turn proles into home-owning suburbanites, stakeholders, share-buyers. London would be ring-fenced into ghetto, city of surveillance, privately policed estate. New Labour went further, a two (two dozen in the case of Michael Meacher) home portfolio; town house and country house. Wilderness was abhorrent. Rough pasture must be rationalised into Best Value recreational zones, retirement homes for happy butterflies. Farm animals were dirty, smelly, unreconstructed: cull them. What was required was a vertical wedge through the landscape (the Lee Valley Regional Plan), a designated hierarchy (media, recreation, development). What was not required was an holistic vision, any talk of belts or girdles or circuits. What was lost was the old dream of paradise gardens.
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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.