THE SOLACE OF WALKING

I was in Faversham last Saturday for the Literary Festival, being an author, and I was on stage with Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage.  

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Among the many things we discussed and agreed on, was that a large part of walking and drifting is about noticing.  You walk, you see things, you record them in some way, in memory or a notebook or a photograph. and later, somewhere along the line, they become something else – a book, an essay, even a blog post.

 

After the event, the inamorata and I stayed in Whitstable for a couple of nights with pals Jacqueline and Nick (thanks kids), and it seemed only natural that we should all go for a walk and a drift Sunday morning and do some noticing. So that’s what we did.

 

And what did we notice?  Well I noticed this sign:

 I’m not sure that we actually walked along the Crab and Winkle Way – we certainly didn’t get as far as Canterbury - but we may have covered some small section of it

 

And I can’t speak for anybody else but one of the things I noticed was the the intersection of what we might call nature with what we might call the built environment.

 

We saw gardens including this one decorated with a stone bearing the message ‘One Who Plants a Garden Plants Happiness.’ 

Now you could argue that one who plants a garden is just as likely to plant frustration, disappointment and thankless labour, but I don’t want to rain on anybody’s gardening parade.

 

There was nature creeping up the walls of houses:

We even saw a couple of Nicholsons:

We saw some interesting ruin:

 

And we saw this classic VW bus – every drift is better when it includes a VW bus:

There was also this very noticeable mural of Somerset Maugham:

 

Now, I didn’t know that Somerset Maugham was a Whistable lad: he was born in the British Embassy in Paris.  But after both his parents died he was sent to England to live with his uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable.   

 

You know it’s a good while since I read any Somerset Maugham – I think the last book I read was Ashendenwhich I really enjoyed, so Maugham is definitely all right with me, but even so, from what I know of his life, I think perhaps he found some forms of solace even more supreme than writing.

MEANDERING IN EDEN

I was thinking about the viability of my ‘walking in gardens’ project, and how to make it interesting, when I had an idea.  Since walking in gardens is a low key, low intensity activity, I reckoned that what was needed was some added rigour.  

 

I wondered how it would be if, instead of just wandering around a garden, going wherever your feet and your eyes take you, you went to a somewhat well-known location, say the RHS garden at Hyde Hall, in Essex, set over 360 acres of more or less rolling hills, and made your walking schematic.  Now obviously there are different kinds of scheme and rigour that could be applied but I thought I’d begin simply enough, by walking systematically down every single path in the garden.  Fortunately there was a map.

I’d been to Hyde Hall before and found one or two favourite spots; the Dry Garden and the Winter Garden especially, but this was no time to back favourites.  As far as the walk was concerned one place was as good as any other, the Rose Garden, the Global Growth Vegetable Garden, Sky Meadow, the Queen Mother’s Garden, the Floral Fantasia, the Sky Meadow, and so on, all had to be treated as equals as I walked the paths.

 

My trusty amanuensis and I started in a section known as the Birch Grove and there was a rather poetic introductory sign that included the words, ‘Meandering paths immerse you in an airy woodland, dappled and cool in the summer sun.’   

In fact it was autumn, but even so that sign set me thinking: here it's the path that meanders, not the walker. And I wondered if you walked rapidly along a meandering path could you still be said to meander?  I admit it isn’t one of life’s greatest questions.  

 

And so we walked.  And inevitably we walked in places we might otherwise not have.  I’m sure, for example, I’d have avoided the Children’s Play Area and yet there was the Grand Bug and Pest Hotel.

 

Who’d have thought there were fans of Wes Anderson at the RHS?

We covered the ground and the paths. NB - that isn't us in the picture above. There were no Keep Off The Grass signs and occasionally we did stray off the path.  There were also one or two desire lines and you might well ask whether a desire line can be construed as a path, and I’d say it probably can, though I wouldn’t fight about it, and in any case we avoided them: the desire lines not taken.

 

To be honest I think by the end, as our resolve faltered, we may have missed a few short stretches of path but for a first expedition it wasn’t too bad.

 

There were others walking too. As a cross section of British society it was hardly representative but as a snapshot of the kind of people who like to walk in gardens it was probably typical – mostly older, mostly couples, mostly though not exclusively white, a few parents and children, some of the kids looking bored, others looking dangerously excited.  Nobody else seemed to be walking rigorously.

 

And somewhere in the course of the walk I started to wonder whether this could be considered a form of psychogeography. And you know, after deep reflection, I do believe it could. Debord says psychogeography is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’  And heck, a garden of any size is full of varying geographic elements and full of specific (and sometimes vague or downright ambiguous) effects, as you move from one part to another.  At Hyde Hall the ‘feel’ of the Birch Grove was very different from that of the Dry Garden, the Floral Fantasia was very different from the Global Growth Vegetable Garden.  So hell yes, walking in gardens may be considered a form of psychogeography. Whether this makes my walking in gardens project any more viable, remains to be seen.

WALKING WITH BACON

 I was reading about Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1662), philosopher, writer, begetter of the Baconian method of scientific investigation, and latterly a disgraced politician in the days when politicians were capable of grace.

 

He also had a lot to say about gardens, and from the late 1590s he was responsible for the grounds of Gray’s Inn,  known as The Walks.  In 1702 it looked like this:

 

Like this in 1804:

currently like this:

 

Bacon’s Walks were a place to go for a walk, and a fashionable one at that, as recorded by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.  I suppose they're less fashionable now; a private garden but open to the polloi sometimes.

 

Polymath though he was, Bacon seems not to have been much of a walker.  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this passage, ‘I remember Sir John Danvers told me that his lordship (Bacon) much delighted in his curious garden at Chelsea and as he was walking there one time he fell down in a dead swoon.  My Lady Danvers rubbed his face, temples etc and gave him cordial water: as soon as he came to himself, said he ‘Madam, I am no footman.’” I can’t help feeling I might be missing something in that reply.

 

And here’s an illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton titled, ‘Accompanied by a friend to jot down his thoughts, Sir Francis Bacon takes a walk in his garden.’

 

I made a note to go for a wander around The Walks just as soon as the weather warms up, and while I had this in mind a couple of days ago as walking in London, around the back of the Royal Academy, what was the old Museum of Mankind, and blow me down, there was a statue of Sir Francis Bacon, which of course I'd seen before but never took any notice of:

Sir Francis Bacon was a quotable man – “knowledge is power” that’s one of his - but of course he is not the only Francis Bacon in the world.  This is how he’s remembered on goodreads.com:

 

That, of course, is the wrong Francis Bacon, the one seen below, ‘Francis Bacon Walking on Primrose Hill’ by Bill Brandt.

THE HANGING GARDENS OF LETCHWORTH

I went for a walk in Letchworth Garden City – I had my reasons.  When you get off the train there’s a sign in the station reminding you, if you need reminding, that you’re in the world’s first garden city, though I’d have thought Babylon with its hanging gardens might have been in with a shout.

And if you walk down to the southeastern end of things there’s another signpost hammering home the message. This is the front: 

And this is the back: 

That’s a low relief image of Ebenezer Howard (and not a great likeness, if you ask me), the founder of Letchworth Garden City, and of the garden cities movement in general. 

Now, Howard’s notion of a “garden city” was not as we might imagine it today.  Like so many other people before and since he was worried about urbanization, about people leaving the land and moving to big cities, especially in this case London. 

So he conceived of a much smaller city, adjacent to fields, where people would work the land and then go back to their pleasant, nearby, arts and crafts style homes; which of course did have gardens.

It’s not clear to me how many, if any, agricultural labourers actually moved into Letchworth; the received wisdom was that it was far more a haven for socialists, vegetarians, nudists, teetotalers; New Agers before the term was current.  I’m not sure how many of those are now in Letchworth either.

This picture above taken in 1912 suggests it wasn’t entirely a rural idyll – and those front gardens look extremely perfunctory.  The picture below looks far more as though the inhabitants might, at least, be trying to feed themselves from their own gardens.

 I set myself the task of walking around Letchworth looking at gardens.  I was, for sure, in search of individuality, eccentricity and, OK, a certain kitschness, but all of that was surprisingly hard to find. And yes it was end of November, when few English gardens look their best, even so I really had to search hard to find much of anything out of the ordinary.  But I didn’t fail completely

There were some curious plantings:

Some curious topiary, if that’s the right word in this case:

A decaying chair in the shape of a hand:

And yes, one garden that looked like the householder might be aiming for self-sufficiency:

But the majority were tidy and unexciting – nobody seemed to be expressing themselves through their gardens.  And I wondered if this was a class thing.  Perhaps the upper and lower classes do indeed express themselves through their gardens, either on a large scale or a small,  but the middle classes just keep them neat and tidy, and above all they keep them to themselves.  They don’t want passersby (like me) to know their tastes and their business.  And of course, I was mostly looking at front gardens. It was possible perhaps that there were untold follies and grottos, and for all know hanging gardens, in the back , but somehow I doubted it.

Naturally enough there are public gardens in Letchworth.  There are the Broadway Gardens, a name they got at the time of the Letchworth centenary. For while before that were the John F Kennedy Gardens – a fact memorialized by this block of (I think) granite:

There are also Howard Park and Gardens – which contain an adventure playground, water features, a bowling green and statue of Sappho – not every public garden has one of those.  And for a good while Howard Park and Gardens didn’t have one either.

The statue was presented to the city in 1907 and moved around, ending up in 1939 in the Ball Memorial Gardens. But the statue was stolen in 1998, so what’s there now is a replica, and its been moved round the back of the International Gardens Cities Exhibition, away from prying and criminal eyes.  

Clearly Letchworth contains elements that would have appalled Ebenezer Howard, and I can’t even imagine how he’d feel about some of the businesses on the main drag such as No Morals Tattoos. 

I guess this is known as reaction.