“So I went to tea with Roland Haye on the following Sunday. He arrived to call for me, and we walked, in embarrassed silence, along misty muddy Essex lanes and along by the wooden fence of the Claybury asylum, through a bluebell wood, and so back into suburbia and privet hedges to the Hayes’ house; 210 Cranbrook Road; a house in the ‘better’, and older, part of Ilford, a house with some rudiments of refinement, and a maid in cap and apron to open the front door.”
Kathleen Raine, Farewell Happy Fields
In the film 'The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' there’s a scene in which Tilda Swinton is making a dessert with apples (a crumble?–although it looks more like cobbler, or perhaps Eve’s pudding); as Swinton peels and cuts numerous apples, Berger begins to talk to Swinton about his father, and how he would cut an apple: Tilda Swinton changes how she has been cutting the apples, and begins to cut them in the way Berger describes as he talks. Somehow this distills a number of things that the film (or four films–one for each season) is about: a connection with the land, with the seasons (of course), repetition, reenactment, cycles, memory and time.
Having not contributed anything for this blog for many months, having a film shot on film being shown abroad for the first time has prompted me to write. 'Orchard/Asylum', a nine-minute black and white 16mm film, is being shown at the Sluice Film Festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland–at the time of writing–today. As the film is debuting there, I am not currently showing it online at the moment (in an ideal world, I would be there with a 16mm exhibition print, but it will be shown digitally). I have eschewed a voiceover for the film, which could explain it to the viewer as it unfolds, but if it could be reduced to a linguistic utterance, it wouldn’t need to be a film. However, its coming together in fits and starts, out of the pandemic, has echoes with other things I’ve written about recently, like the retracing of the M11 Link Road photographs, and, as such, I naturally had the desire to place the film.
Around the time I first shot some 16mm film, in the autumn of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had been making sure that I took advantage of the permitted exercise by making regular cycle rides that explored ever-wider circles around north-east London where I live. This was an opportunity to find places that I might otherwise have overlooked, or never have had a reason to be, to find different routes through the suburbs, particularly where it begins to peter out, to lose its density, along the Lea Valley, the Ching Brook, places like Larkswood, the Roding Valley Park, Aldborough Hatch. From some of these places one can see an ornate tower on a hill, a landmark on this particular edge of London. When I was at school, in the room that I studied maths for a few years, I could see this tower from the window, and I drew it on my maths folder sometime in the Autumn of 1990. We all knew its reputation, perhaps mistakenly so: this tower marked the Claybury Hospital, once the Claybury Mental Hospital, originally the Claybury Lunatic Asylum.
“Today these great 'museums of the mad', once such a familiar sight on the outskirts of cities and towns across the UK, have either vanished or metamorphosed into business parks, leisure centres or - as in the case of Friern - up-market housing developments. Their former residents are back with their families, or living in group homes or social housing; or they have vanished into the netherworld of the urban homeless.”
Barbara Taylor, ‘The Demise of the Asylum in late Twentieth-Century Britain: A personal History’
When I was growing up in those suburbs, there weren’t that many tall buildings around. There were a couple at Gants Hill, such as Wentworth House; other points of orientation would have been the narrow spire on the church on the Drive or a tall towerblock by the Green Man roundabout, demolished years ago; there was a day walking to school I realised I could see One Canada Square at Canary Wharf through a gap between houses towards Wanstead Park. The tower of Claybury Hospital was a fulcrum, one of the highest points for miles around, looming over a bend in the M11 coming into London, often blue-grey in the distance (it shows up in one of the views in the M11 Link Road photographs taken in 1994/2014, the last picture at the end of the post ‘SQUIBB’). Subsequently, in recent years, quite a few tall buildings have sprung up around central Ilford, diluting the impact these points once made.
In the second year of the pandemic, I cycled to Claybury for the first time. It was one of those places that one might otherwise have needed a reason to go to, certainly while it still operated as a hospital; Claybury finally closed in 1997, the era of ‘care in the community’. It appears as the phonetic ‘Clayberry’ in Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room, the misspelling a quote from a letter (David Rodinsky’s sister was a patient there). Rodinsky’s Room was published in 1999, the year I moved back to London after my degree; I had read Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory the year before, which was both part of but also a spur to the psychogeography which was then becoming prevalent and had visited the Princelet Street Synagogue that year during London Open House, which features in both books, being built behind the house where David Rodinisky lived. The publication of Rodinsky’s Room was accompanied by various events (I went to a talk by the authors at Toynbee Hall) and a couple of small chap-book-like publications: Rachel Lichtenstein's Rodinsky's Whitechapel and Iain Sinclair’s Dark Lanthorns, both of which had walks that the reader could follow (the primary means of becoming a psychogeographer). Dark Lanthorns took the form of a series of walks Sinclair had made following lines traced in pen in David Rodinsky’s copy of the London A to Z, reproduced so that the reader could follow them. One of these was a route from South Woodford station to Claybury. In Sinclair’s narrative, he reaches the end of the walk to be met by the scene of Claybury Hospital being converted into the gated community it is today.
“As a tangible commodity, Dark Lanthorns asserts a powerful aura; it both palpably recalls those other A-Zs that the reader is presumed to have handled and evokes the unique singularity of a hallowed holy relic. This strange doubling makes the book’s facsimile maps feel like something of a challenge. Rodinsky’s drawings are generally more complex than the linear routes documented within Sinclair’s essays. It is hard, therefore, not to scrutinise his marks for some deeper significance, plotting out alternative routes that Sinclair might have taken, or which, by haptic invitation, one might now go out and walk oneself.”
Richard Hornsey,‘The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas’
I didn’t do any of these walks at the time. Possibly I felt that I was familiar with the walk traced around Whitechapel by Lichtenstein in Rodinsky's Whitechapel (and I had recently done Janet Cardiff’s 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B)', both Artangel commissions, contemporary to the publication of Rodinsky’s Room). I had also spent a year at college there five years earlier, then happened to be living with someone selling clothes at Spitalfields market on Sundays, so I naturally spent a lot of time in the area; the walks in Dark Lanthorns I think I possibly felt could be experienced sufficiently through the text and perhaps the walk from South Woodford to Claybury felt close to home or old ground–but ultimately, looking back twenty-six years, I’m unclear why I didn’t walk these. I finally followed the walk to Claybury in the spring of 2023.
Setting out by bicycle without a smartphone, once one begins to get close, the tower of Claybury is frequently hidden as the hill it sits so prominently on rises up around it. The route I took there the first time was not entirely unfamiliar, on the edge of my world growing up, with some friends in Snaresbrook, South Woodford, Hermon Hill, with the occasional school event in some odd venue around there. It was the last weekend of summer before the start of term, the rhythms of the academic year still dictating my seasons, with concurrent teaching and studying part-time. The initial spur to go there was nothing to do with Kathleen Raine or David Rodinsky: I wanted to investigate the community orchard there; the hospital’s grounds are now open to the public as Claybury Park which include the orchard. The oldest apple trees are believed to have been planted in the 1920s, possibly by the inmates themselves as part of what was then seen as the hospital’s progressive therapeutic regime; on the marked page from Rodinsky’s A to Z reproduced in Dark Lanthorns this area has the legend ‘Asylum Farm’. After years of neglect, most of the orchard has been restituted by The Orchard Project (some of the veteran apple trees are still surrounded by impenetrable undergrowth); the brief passage from Farewell Happy Fields that mentions the fence around the asylum was a felicitous coincidence. I arrived to discover signs prohibiting picking (it was no doubt far too early for almost every variety of apple , needing a couple more weeks to ripen then at least); my interest in the community orchard was as a result of wanting to discover where I could forage apples in the wider local area, something that had grown out of my cycle rides from early in the pandemic. With heavy overcast August weather, I took a few underexposed photographs as a record then.
Reading Lights Out for the Territory and Rodinsky’s Room at the time of moving back to London at the end of the 1990s (as well as Peter Ackroyd, Clarence Rook, Blanchard Jerrold, Emmanuel Litvinoff, George Gissing, among others) was almost a conscious project of building a particular world in which the present, contemporary everyday was overlaid with a mythology of a certain vision of London. I have written before about my first real contact with the city of Paris early in in my degree, already-mythologised in comparison to my growing up in the suburbs (see ‘A Fragmentary Snapshot’). Kathleen Raine declared that there was ‘no poetry in Ilford’, seeing it as the epitome of lower middle class philistinism a hundred years ago; making art as a student in the 1990s I think I had an unspoken feeling as though nothing good came of the suburbs–very much a young artist’s cry–echoing Raine: ‘things’ happened elsewhere. Had I known about, or read Farewell, Happy Fields perhaps I might have felt differently about my suburban upbringing then; Raine went to the same infant school as I did, when it was new (she was born the year after it had been built), while it still looked out onto scrubland to the north where the march of bricks and mortar stopped for a time: coincidentally, Raine even mentions the road on which we lived by name. I felt there was a lack of mythology: there were hardly any buildings in Ilford older than a hundred years when I was growing up then, which I think contributed. There were intimations of course, bits of buried history, most of which had left very little trace, nothing to really grasp onto. London was something that happened after one got on the tube: Ilford had no distinct character of its own (or at least that was how it seemed to me then), apart from its paradoxical London/not-London identity, becoming part of Greater London with the formation of the London Borough of Redbridge in 1965 but retaining an Essex postcode. (I only really felt like I came from London when I went away to do my degree, being made to feel so). During my PhD, and particularly during the pandemic, I began to make work about where I was now, and making work about where I grew up in some form: photographs of cinemas or sites of cinemas where I would once have watched films (Gants Hill), traces of cattlegrids in South Woodford, a still unfinished film around Newbury Park, a project retracing the photographs I took along the destruction of the M11 Link Road, revisiting sketchbooks from what was twenty-five and then thirty years ago, rebuilding a world that had formed me (art school had made me disavow that particular way of working–simply drawing by observation from the motif–which I internalised, then, after my education, it became something located in the past, demonstrating a lack of sophistication in my thinking in my teenage years about what an artwork was or could be–despite having a father who was an artist, being brought up with art around me, I still had a narrow view of art to accompany my narrow horizons of the suburbs: I would have agreed with Raine then; as much as the particularity of Farewell Happy Fields makes it valuable, I don’t think I would like Raine as a person if I met her now).
After my first visit to Claybury, I thought I would to like to go back to film there, and planned to do so soon. At this point I had been thinking that it was a hundred years since the walk described in Farewell Happy Fields, and this seemed like enough of an excuse to expose some 16mm film (I had no thought then of making a it a record of this location through the seasons). However, leaving work during the first week back, the handlebars on my bicycle inexplicably snapped, and taking it to a local shop, there were a number of other issues which needed addressing, with the result that was simply not economical to repair. I had to wait for my first full month’s pay of the academic year before I could get a replacement. I finally returned with a new bicycle in October, carrying my Ciné Kodak BB Junior and fifty feet of Ilford film; the signs from my first visit were gone, and very few apples remained. I picked up a windfall cooker only. (This appears in the 16mm 'Three Colour Process' film in the post on the Ciné Kodak Model K.)
Nothing quite cohered as neatly as I would have liked: perhaps I had retraced Kathleen Raine’s steps one hundred years on; the orchard is believed to have been planted in the 1920s, although this is not certain; the 16mm format was created by Kodak a couple of years later; the camera I was using came onto the market at the end of the 1920s; the Ilford film stock I was using, made in Ilford itself, dated to the 1960s. This first attempt at a film was not enough on its own: I had bought enough of this long-discontinued Ilford stock to film four seasons, and there was thus a certain logic in doing so.
Over the next two years I went back at intervals to film during winter, spring and summer to make a portrait of a place. Each section of film was edited in camera, with the exception of autumn, where there were a couple of false starts from forgetting to make sure the camera’s motor was fully wound (autumn being still relatively early in my use of a spring motor camera); the spring section I cut short at a shot of clouds in the sky: there were a few shots after this but it seemed to lend itself to the transition to summer. The shots weren’t planned as a result, but the general movement in each section is from details to wider views, with autumn, filmed first, showing a panning of London on the far horizon, travelling out of the park, and along the road that Kathleen Raine and Roland Haye might have walked along, where the boundary of the hospital’s grounds once, with a look back at the tower disappearing into the bleached-out light leak at the end of the roll (I did remove the film from the camera in a dark bag, so this should not have been affected by light; however before developing, I stored this in a film can before that was clearly not light tight–developing the roll in two halves, there’s the same light leak near the middle of the autumn section where the film was cut to fit in my developing tank which only takes 33 not 50 feet).
The stock, Ilford Fast Pan Film, came in cans with ‘date of test’ printed on the labels with dates of January and September. The reason for using this film was that it was double-perforated, so I could use it in the Ciné-Kodak BB Junior, I’d acquired it cheaply and the fact that it was branded Ilford did seem to fit; I kept the full overscan so that the name Ilford would periodically appear in the rebate, as well as emphasising the materiality of the film, although this can be a bit too seductive. Despite being well over fifty years old, I exposed the film at an exposure index of 80 and, with no information to go on other than a hunch from having used Ilford Mark V film in the past, I developed it as if it was FP4 Plus. Some of the spring and summer shots used a couple of different strength yellow filters too, highlighting dried grass and deepening skies just a little too. I neglected to keep records but I think most of the film was developed in HC110, possibly with a section in Ilfotec DDX. For titles I took sections directly from Farewell Happy Fields, in the text of which each season is mentioned at least once, and some seasons many times. The words orchard and asylum also appear, and were used for a title. I experimented with a couple of different ways of making the titles: I enlarged passages with a photocopier and filmed them taped to a wall, an played around with different overlays, but it all got a bit arch; the titles in the film were copied from the book, then filmed with the Kodak Ciné Titler, a vintage device made for just that purpose. The title roll does appear to be slipping in the gate, leading to a slight blurring, but I accepted that as a contingent effect in trying to make it all in camera. Finally, I added sound. The first section, winter seemed to fit no sound at all, so I left it silent. Spring is accompanied by sound recorded in the orchard at Claybury at the same time of year, but not at the time of filming; summer does have sound recorded concurrently with filming, although I frequently left the recording device in the same place as I filmed a few different shots around it, which is why the sound of the camera running varies in intensity. For autumn, filmed first, without sound, I thought I would overlay it with the sound of the camera running on its own; there seemed to be a logic to the sound progressing in this way for each section. Retrospectively, possibly I would have been more rigorous in how it was put together, the sound and visuals, choosing the shots and shot length more judiciously, with the idea from the outset that it would be a portrait of a place through the seasons, but the impressionistic qualities that its making effected feel apt.
References
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B)', https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/
D. Fulton, 'Heaven of hell: Representations of Ilford in the writings of Denise Levertov and Kathleen Raine', 2010
'Repton Park formerly Claybury Hospital', Historic Hospitals: https://historic-hospitals.com/2015/06/21/repton-park-formerly-claybury-hospital/
Richard Hornsey, ‘The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas’, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2016, pp. 265-280
Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, Granta Books, London 1999
Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Whitechapel, Artangel, London 1999 https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/rodinskys-whitechapel/
Kathleen Raine, Farewell Happy Fields, Hamish Hamilton, London 1973
Iain Sinclair, Dark Lanthorns, Goldmark Uppingham, Rutland 1999
Iain Sinclair, London Orbital, Granta Books, London 2002
Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, 'The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' https://seasonsinquincy.com/
Barbara Taylor, ‘The Demise of the Asylum in late Twentieth-Century Britain: A personal History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2011, Sixth Series, Vol. 21, pp. 193-215
The Orchard Project:
https://www.theorchardproject.org.uk/blog/claybury-orchard-a-sanctuary-for-wildlife-and-the-mind/
