The final cost of the collegiate fantasy in Virginia Water rose to Millennium Dome proportions; by the time the first brick was laid by Jane Holloway, her husband had become a melancholy recluse. He died in 1883.
The architect Crossland’s last major commission was the Memorial Chapel to Holloway at Sunninghill. He died in a Camden Town boarding house in 1908, leaving an estate of £29.
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.’ Imagery is hysterical. The eye can’t settle. The part of the brain that has to unscramble visual information spins like a fruit machine.
The front door is still open, the stone floor is cool. The woman who does PR for Octagon is a helpful and reassuring presence. Knowing how we feel, she distracts us; leads the way to the hammerbeam-ceilinged dining hall.
Dark wood — inset with Arts and Crafts panels. Stained glass. A Pre-Raphaelite hall. Illuminated by low-hanging glass bowls. The heat has us coughing. Hothouse moist. Comfort pushed, until it becomes a torment.
We make admiring noises. This is a very striking set. But it is also a brain teaser. When you walk around Virginia Park you develop split-screen vision: the ceiling of the dining hall is just what you might expect in a Victorian public school, a university of the right vintage, but the body of the room has been utterly transformed. It is now a swimming pool. An attractive woman — I think of Ballard’s narcoleptic Mediparc communities — does her lazy laps. The acoustic memory-track of Holloway’s disturbed patients is absorbed in steady plashing, lost in tall space. Temperature has to be cranked up to preserve the fancy carpentry. The solitary swimmer, observed by the ruffians at the door, doesn’t break her stroke. She cultivates a method of moving through this speckled blue medium, excluding all fear of the tons of overwrought wood, the stalactite forest that hangs above the water.
After the empty gym, the abandoned exercise bicycles, we are free to explore the development. The Grand Hall, once a rather intimidating library (not many books, portraits of worthies), now features a stage and a sheeted grand piano. The foot-pedals have been slipped into cosy white socks. The scale of the Hall would have agoraphobics cowering under the piano. It struck us, perambulating the acres of polished floor, that every phobia was humoured: you name it, we’ll give it to you. A white-knuckle ride for the mentally incapacitated, the morally enfeebled.
We’d been loaned a swipe card which let us into the chapel. Octagon realised that their transients would never agree on a form of worship: there were Buddhists, Catholics, Greek Cypriots next to Turkish Cypriots, US fundamentalists, flag-worshippers and total abstainers. The chapel, once the focus (social and ethical) of the community, had been reconceptualised (and left out of Octagon’s brochure). Patterns of coloured light from stained-glass windows played on a brilliant parquet floor. The altarpiece was curtained off, but we had been given permission to look at it. Madonna, gilt. Niches, stone vines, elaborate iconography: symbols of discontinued superstition (that the developers were superstitious enough to preserve).
A new cross-substitute had been erected in front of the altar: a basketball net (black tree, white halo panel, string bag). The floor had been polished for a purpose. The chapel was now a basketball court, divided into zones and quarters. The Jesus figure from the stained-glass window (scarlet loincloth) gazed down on the spectacle: an athlete sponsored by Nike. The saints and apostles were witnesses of a new cult: narcissism, conceptual exercise, the squeak of rubber soles on pale wood.
Going for a double-header, we walked back to Egham, to visit Royal Holloway College. Renchi was keen to exorcise the theft of Queen Victoria’s hand.
We stopped in a pub, an average English summer’s day (wickets were tumbling in the Test Match), then marched up the hill. The College was as strange as the Sanatorium: twin cloisters, an excess of windows, a history that overwhelms present occupants. Having entered one set of cloisters — panned around in amazement — we located the wrong statue. Victoria occupied the other court. Trying to figure out a way of getting close to the royal pedestal, without backtracking, we lost ourselves in subterranean passages, kitchens. An alarm sounded.
Had we set it off? Intruders. It went on and on ringing. Students, unconcerned, ambled into the cloisters. Corridors, staircases, walkways were deserted. We had the place to ourselves. A fenced-off rectangle of grass, a statue; red brick on all sides. An overemphatic alarm.