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).’