It was my birthday at the beginning of the month and, as has become somewhat customary for me, I went on a trip to the countryside with my parents and partner. Actually, we tend to go to the coast more often, but the countryside trips are memorable in a different way, they lend themselves to thinking about land, culture and class relations in a different way. After working all our schedules out – it was a Friday mind – we decided on going somewhere relatively nearby, and my mum suggested Painshill, a garden-cum-park, situated south-west of London, in deepest Surrey. After a leisurely morning, we met up at a vegan cafe-restaurant in Brixton – the mushroom ragu being the star of the show if you were curious – before heading out of the big smoke.
Grandma was coming out of the hospital – breathing issues related to her first bout of Covid in February 2020 – so arrangements were being made on speaker-phone all through the car-ride. It was a kind of eventful mundanity, the everyday chatter that usually sinks into the peripheral background, but with the part-eavesdropped quality it took a different tenor, somehow more surreal and theatrical. We actually talked about what it reminded us of: the film set in the confines of conversations taking place in a taxi in Tehran (I think we meant Ten by Kiarostami, but Panahi’s Taxi Tehran is pretty similar too); that bad but strangely memorable film with Tom Hardy, Locke; and tv show Peter Kay’s Car Share, a successor to Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere. Gupshup to pass the time.
We arrive at Painshill, greeted by a chipper American woman at the entrance, and slowly make our way into the garden, passing by various signs for recognisable comedians who play the garden, as well as questionable cover bands, while stopping off for coffee and cake to go. Their raspberry chocolate cake was incredible with luscious mousse, almost cheesecake-like, all topped off with being somewhat surprisingly vegan/gluten-free.
Now the garden-park itself is really quite bizarre. We decided on attempting the slightly longer route, which would put us dangerously close to closing time, and so slowly walked up the first verge finding the beginning of Serpentine lake below us upon our ascent, along with a south-facing vineyard on the slope. To the right an ‘ampitheatre’ was marked, though it was more of an oval clearing of putrid green grass. I should note at this point that the weather was gloriously clear and sunny, in stark contrast to the bouts of rain and sleet earlier in the day. It added to the slightly surreal feel to the afternoon. We also passed a huge Cedar tree, one of the largest in Europe apparently.
Walking onwards we reached the Gothic ‘Temple’, which appeared much more like a pavilion out of Lord of the Rings, sat overlooking the rest of the lake’s winding expanse. Walking down to the water’s edge we passed a ‘folly’, one of these absurd simulated ruins, then onto a small island with a crystal grotto, closed by the time we got there unfortunately. Another folly, a strange Renaissance statue, the shadow of the Temple of Bacchus and a water-wheel situated next to a cow field all followed while we ambled through the alpine valley. It was both very tranquil and strange. We made it to the Gothic tower, unfortunately closed at the time, and turned up into the hill to see the ridiculous Temple of Bacchus complete with cardboard cutouts of Greco-Roman statues standing in the front coves. Next was the Turkish Tent where we took a break, again overlooking the sun-drenched lake, before making our descent and eventual completion of the circuit. It seemed we only missed the hermitage. From there we drove off and stopped in a lay-by for coffee-and-walnut cake and prezzies, had a thali at an upmarket Indian restaurant, ending the day with a film at home. A job well done.
Reflecting on the garden it felt like an Orientalist fantasy, full of far-flung and poorly connected edifices that typified an English colonial ideology. The Grand Tour in miniature. And doing some reading in the days following our trip, I wasn’t too far off the mark.
It was initially started by Charles Hamilton who began buying land in the area in 1738, building up to a peak of 200 acres by 1773. Hamilton was the son of an Irish aristocrat, studying at Westminster School and Oxford in England, before undertaking two Grand Tours in 1725 and 1732. He developed the garden early on in the style of naturalistic landscape garden, rather against the geometric formalist style that predominated. The garden received attention and acclaim from those invested in the picturesque and gothic, while visiting notables included Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with views of the landscape engraved on the Frog Service for Catherine the Great, a luxurious set of tableware. After Hamilton losing the land due to debts, a variety of aristocrats and private wealth took ownership of the property, including Henry Lawes Luttrell, who fled to his Surrey holdings after brutally crushing the 1798 Irish rebellion. Victorian intellectual Matthew Arnold also stayed at the cottage until his death in 1888. In the wake of World War II, the land was split up and sold to commercial enterprises, before the Elmbridge Borough Council repurchased part of the land in 1980 for public cultural and recreational purposes. It now stands at 158 acres of the original peak of 200, with many features having been reconstructed and preserved to date.
What is perhaps striking about the landscaped garden are the gothic and picturesque elements that were so venerated by eighteenth century contemporaries in its groundbreaking quality. To situate, the landscape garden movement really began in 1730 with William Gilpin a major exponent, and admirer of Painshill, with a major emphasis to incorporate rugged woodland elements, vistas and peaks into the controlled environment. The vista was meant to create these painterly images of sovereign assertion over the natural worlds, a colonial pastoral very much commensurate with elements of Romanticism. Thinkers such as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth and Immanuel Kant have figured this aesthetic sensibility through the sublime: an awe-inspiring beauty that exceeds the classical aesthetic regime, figuring deeper into the very ontology of the experiencing subject. Freud goes further to think about sublimation as the displacement of sexual desire into aesthetic or cultural pursuit. There is clearly something here about the colonial desire to dominate and reproduce a bucolic versioning of that within a controlled natural world.
Horace Walpole, a major figure of the Gothic Revival movement, was also enamoured with the garden for these gothic elements that peppered the verdant grounds. The gothic is perhaps difficult to pin-down, and one that I have wrangled on-and-off for some time, but certainly sits as a sort of stand-in for an underlying fear of otherness within emergent European discourse imbued with eerie atmosphere and portentous symbolism. As an anti-enlightenment aesthetic movement the gothic finds itself rearticulating various motifs, particularly in architectural terms, that come across as gaudy, almost-postmodern in its smorgasbord of influences. Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is a great exemplar of this. But in its wayward kitschiness lie tools for reshaping hegemonic conceptions from below - what Spivak terms the ‘ab-use of Enlightenment’. The English countryside as a gothic realm of peril, paranoid agoraphobia and sublime visions of sovereign excess perhaps tells us much more about the English as decaying colonial power than the provincialising dowdiness of the picturesque in all its parochial torpor. If going on a landscaped countryside walk leads to the introspection of sublimated interiorities, and the extraneous atmosphere that produced such conditions, perhaps we should sit in that and learn. History reveals itself in many guises.