This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. John Rogers
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picture of it on their iPhone.
Gillette Corner marks the end of the Golden Mile and I feel like I’ve paid due homage to the fading art deco neon strip – the lights on the four faces of the Gillette clock tower would struggle to raise even a blink in their current state. The main function of Sir Banister Fletcher’s redbrick temple at present is to offer
a meaningful challenge to intrepid urban explorers whilst a ‘development solution’ is sought.
I cross Syon Lane, a name so laden with various ancient meanings I should have known opportunity was approaching. In Sanskrit syon means ‘followed by good luck’, and the turning for Wood Lane that followed presented itself to me at the ideal time. Despite winding off away from Hounslow Heath it would take me towards the village of Wyke Green snugly submerged in suburbia.
Yards away from the A4 and the predominant sound is of birdsong, hedgerows bursting with anthems as if there were competing avian hordes of football fans in full voice. ‘Sing us your best song,’ the starlings taunt the thrushes, whilst the blackbirds know they’ve got it all sown up and launch into full-throttle renditions of the early-evening roosting chorus.
A group of teenage lads play in the nets of Wycombe House Cricket Club. I played on this ground once when I was their age, when coming out here from the Buckinghamshire village where I grew up felt like a voyage into the city. What was urban to me then now possesses all the charms of a rural retreat away from the ‘blood and ugliness’ of the Great West Road.
The sports ground sits on the site of the old manor house, which became part of a chain of private lunatic asylums spread across West London in the 19th century. Wyke House was at one point run by Reginald Hill, who pioneered the practice of non-restraint treatment of mental illness, the enlightened idea that the psychiatrically impaired didn’t need to be chained to a wall. At his asylums the patients dined together and lived a relatively civilized existence in the fields of Hanwell, Brentford and Isleworth.
This was a time when ‘trading in lunacy’ was big business, a convenient way to dispense of a troublesome wife. You could buy a diagnosis of insanity for less than a divorce. The doctors were condemned as quacks and ‘nostrum mongers’. The Irish novelist Rosina Bulwer Lytton was confined to Wyke House by her husband, the politician and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is now best known through phrases he used that have become well-worn clichés. ‘The great unwashed’, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and the classic opening line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ all came from his feathered quill.
You can judge which was the greater crime, but his serial infidelity that led to their separation, then denying his wife access to their children and finally having her committed to an asylum because she heckled him at a political meeting don’t look too good. Fortunately, a public outcry in support of Rosina, which even attracted the attention of Karl Marx, meant she was released from Wyke Green after a month.
It is Edward Bulwer-Lytton who appears to have been the one with the troubled mind, seeking cures for various maladies, taking on leeches and potions and hydropathic treatments. His influential novel Zanoni drew on the Rosicrucian quest for the Elixir of Life and centred round a theme of divine madness.
A later science fiction work, Vril or The Coming Race, published in 1871, describes a subterranean master-race that has access to a powerful source of universal energy known as vril. Occultists and conspiracists took Bulwer-Lytton’s writings as fact and various secret societies claimed him as their own. There is a persistent belief that a Vril Society existed in pre-war Berlin, whose members included SS head Heinrich Himmler, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Goering, and Party Chancellery head Martin Bormann. It’s alleged that the Vril Society urged the Nazis to embark on a global quest for ancient artefacts such as the Ark of the Covenant, which it believed could contain the key to the source of vril, and that the Society helped to design the Luftwaffe’s failed ‘flying saucer’ project under the guidance of extraterrestrials.
In the year that The Coming Race was published, Rosina authored Where There’s a Will There’s a Way and Chumber Chase. I’ve found it difficult to discover what they were about, probably because her writings didn’t inspire a genocidal regime and end up as the subject of a documentary on the History Channel.
I sit and revive myself, absorbing the view westwards across farmland. With the early-evening sun on my face, the songbirds and the distant ring of leather on willow, it’s almost a picture-postcard pastoral scene – wedged between a major death road and the M4 motorway. Maxwell cautioned that the bucolic nature of the area was under threat in the 1930s but perhaps the building of the roads has helped preserve it. Now you have an express route into the ‘real’ countryside, why bother with Wyke Green?
The path across Wyke Green
Maxwell noted the flavour of ‘bygone times’ hereabouts and reported how a friend had told him that one of the last bare-knuckle prize-fights had taken place on the green where I was now recovering from being floored by the traffic. Bare-knuckle boxing must have survived in the area as I later read about ex-fighter turned pro-golfer ‘Gypsy Joe’ Smith from Wyke Green, who won the London Heavyweight Unlicensed Boxing Championship at Osterley. Wyke Green sits on the edge of Osterley Park.
The golf course where Joe learnt to play is home to a circular Neolithic earthwork, absorbed into the contours of the course. A miss-hit drive could end up back in the Bronze Age.
I now have just over an hour to reach Hounslow Heath if I want to explore it in the light. I follow the footpath that cuts through a field of young wheat. Legend has it that the wheat produced in this area was so fine it was used to bake Elizabeth I’s bread.
Looking south from here the spire of a church pokes above the rooftops. Low-hanging horse chestnut trees are in full bloom. There are bluebells growing among the stinging nettles and the hawthorns are heavy with their May blossoms. In Celtic mythology hawthorn, also known as May Tree, is where the Little People hang out, waylaying unwary travellers. Maybe that explains my extended rest within the grove on Wyke Green. The workaday world of London life feels far away from here, faery magic temporarily transporting me to a different realm of time. A lad sprawled across the path supping a can of Tennent’s Super and chatting loudly on his phone relocates me to the digital age and so I push on.
This now feels like a country walk. I skirt the edge of Osterley Park, which I had tentatively planned to visit. Osterley is maintained by the National Trust so I imagine that it has preserved its aristocratic trappings. The house earns its keep as a film location, convenient for London-based crews. It’s starring as Batman’s mansion, Wayne Manors, in The Dark Knight Rises, but has also passed for Buckingham Palace in Young Victoria and scored credits in Horrible Histories and The Chuckle Brothers.
The manor houses and mansions form a line through West London now marked by the major roads – Chiswick, Gunnersbury, Boston Manor, Syon Park, Osterley, Strawberry Hill. This part of West London seems to have had the same relationship to the demi-monde and fashionable society of the 18th and 19th centuries that Buckhurst Hill and Chigwell have with Premier League footballers and reality TV stars today. In two hundred years’ time will people be visiting the Brentwood gaff of Amy Childs, looking at mock-ups of her signature vajazzles and fine collection of weaves hung out like American Indian scalps?
The last hangers-on from the world of powdered wigs and miserable marriages were swept away when the ‘age of mobility’ demanded better and faster roads to ease the city-centre congestion. Motorways were built to ‘by-pass the by-passes’, such as the Great West Road, in a grand vision of modern London outlined in The County of London Plan, written in 1943. The M4 careered through the grounds of Osterley Park, leaving it to serve up cream teas and play a supporting role as a backdrop in period dramas. There was a certain democratizing zeal to the early days of the road-building craze, however misguided we might view it now. It also bequeathed us the legacy of these peculiar lands trapped between highways and somehow suspended outside time. That might explain why so many episodes of Doctor Who were shot