Heath were the topographical mother lode.
In common with the celebrated Victorian explorers of the Amazon Basin and the Central African Highlands, the old topographers had more than a touch of the eccentric about them. In the preface Maxwell explains the origins of his book:
One night I had a dream – a vision, if you will. I was on a vast heath stretching desolate and wild for miles. I was alone yet in the midst of a great company – of ghosts that moved as shadows around me. Not malevolent spectres, you understand, but vastly interesting, for in their dim outlines I recognized many famous in history, song and story.
This vision comes to him as he was sitting on Hounslow Heath one morning. He is approached by a group of maidens wearing white robes who tell him they are the ‘Nine Muses’. They scatter jewelled beads across the Heath, hand Maxwell a magic cord and instruct him to travel about the Heath threading the beads together, and that is the contents of the book, like a Middlesex Book of Mormon.
Armed with these potent images of the ripening gallows fruit and the magic cord threaded with the beads of history, I left Leytonstone one Saturday lunchtime. I’d put on a double pair of socks and strapped up my dodgy left knee, as Google Maps had informed me the route I’d plotted from Gunnersbury along the Great West Road, across Osterley Park, through Heston and down to Hounslow Heath would be around ten miles, and that was without the inevitable diversions and detours.
Since an arthroscopy I’d had performed on the knee in Homerton Hospital it had developed the annoying habit of ceasing to perform the basic function of a joint, bending, at almost bang on the eight-mile mark. It’s as accurate as a pedometer. From that point I’m swinging a useless leg-shaped post as if I’ve suddenly received a grant from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. This affliction has struck me down all over the London region, from a slip road beside the M40 near Beaconsfield to late night at the wrong end of Lea Bridge Road as I attempted to make it back to my local in time for last orders. It’s then that I reflect on Homerton Hospital’s reputation as the best place to be treated for gunshot wounds this side of a military hospital in Afghanistan. The most minor keyhole surgery probably lacked a certain jeopardy for the surgeons there.
On the packed Overground train I cram in a few more pages from Highwayman’s Heath and read about the old rural paths that led from Heston to Lampton, adding these to my itinerary. Arriving at Gunnersbury I start out in the direction of Gunnersbury Park, former home of mad King George III’s aunt, Princess Amelia, and later the Rothschild clan. As a tourist exploring foreign cities I’ve sought out palaces and grand houses as a reflex first resort, so why not do the same in the London Borough of Hounslow?
The traffic on Gunnersbury Avenue is bumper-to-bumper heading southwards but northbound you could skip down the white lines in perfect safety. There are allotments along the roadside with ramshackle sheds made from foraged materials that look as if they are left over from the wartime Dig for Victory effort. The sign for a salsa bar props up one end of a planter sprouting triffid-like weeds.
I pass above the traffic on a footbridge and enter the gates of Gunnersbury Park. One possible derivation of the name ‘Gunnersbury’ is from Gunnhild or Gunyld’s Manor, the niece of King Cnut. The Danes held lands in the area up to the time of the Battle of Brentford in 1016, when they were defeated by Edmund Ironside – how could he ever lose a battle with a name like that? Well, he did later on, and ended up having to divide his kingdom with the Danish.
From that point on the manor changed hands through various minor royals, merchants and bankers till it was finally handed back to the people in 1926, fittingly enough the year of the General Strike when the British establishment genuinely teetered on the brink of collapse. In the end it was the building of the Great West Road along the edge of the park that forced the aristocrats and bankers out of their city retreats, rather than a popular uprising.
Neville Chamberlain, then Minister for Health, presided over the grand public opening of the house and its grounds just a week after the strike had ended and Parliamentarians had returned to harrumphing at each other across the Westminster benches as if nothing had happened. There’s twenty-eight seconds of silent Pathé newsreel that capture the dignitaries lined up on the veranda above a huge crowd – ‘Another Lung for London’ the title declares.
When he was Prime Minister, Chamberlain passed through Gunnersbury again, on a more historically resonant occasion. In 1938 he flew from Heston Aerodrome, just a couple of miles away, to appease Hitler in Munich. Chamberlain pictured on the runway at Heston waving the treaty he’d signed with the Führer to a triumphant crowd is one of the enduring images of the 20th century, and it took place in a field that I’ll traverse later. As he made his way back into central London along the A4 did Chamberlain remember that May afternoon twelve years previously when he’d cut the ribbon at the house?
The exterior of the house now shows signs of neglect and decay. The white paint on the walls and wooden window frames is chipped and peeling. Buddleia sprouts from cracks in the foundations and crevices around the guttering and spills out of the chimney pots. Weeds flourish in a Grecian urn.
Gunnersbury Park House
Through grimy windows I can see sparse rooms furnished with trestle tables and moulded-plastic school chairs. What were the guest rooms of the Rothschild dynasty now host education workshops and talks by local community arts groups. On the veranda that boasted one of the finest views across the south of London out to the Surrey hills the only other person is a forlorn-looking bloke sucking on a can of lager where once royalty took tea. The intensity of the birdsong adds to the feeling of abandonment. I’m heartened by this first impression of Gunnersbury; I wasn’t in the mood to pay my respects to the gentility of former times.
The house now hosts the Ealing and Hounslow municipal museum. I drift about half-looking at the exhibits but mostly enjoying the current incarnation of this grand country residence as a council utility with its scuffed skirting boards and fire exit signs. In a room with gold-leaf trim around the ceiling and lit by a crystal chandelier there is an exhibition of children’s art mounted on free-standing boards that obscure the finery of the room. This could be the place where the antiquarian Horace Walpole was summoned to entertain Princess Amelia and commissioned to write verses for the Prince of Wales. There is little reverence for its former glories.
It’s a brief glimpse of what Britain might have looked like if the more radical elements of the General Strike had been successful. We could be going to Buckingham Palace to make a housing benefit claim, or you might be residing in a council flat in the converted Windsor Castle.
The revolution has yet to come, of course; we’re a nation still enthralled by monarchy, addicted to Downton Abbey and ruled by a government of privately educated millionaires. But there was something about this house that made me feel optimistic. Maybe it was the photocopied information sheets on sale in the gift shop for 20 pence each.
According to conspiracy theorists, this would have been the nerve centre of the shadowy Illuminati whom they believe were established by the Rothschild banking family to control the world. Being unimaginably rich and Jewish, the Rothschilds have been a magnet for conspiracy nuts. My favourite bonkers Rothschild conspiracy theory is that, not content with owning the Bank of England, between them Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his son Lionel fathered most of Queen Victoria’s children. I’d have thought they’d have had their hands full containing the weeds in the huge garden.
Lionel might not have cuckolded Prince Albert, but Victoria’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is believed to have asked him for a loan in the library of this house to buy shares in the Suez Canal. Disraeli had been the first Jewish MP, holding out for eleven years to take his seat in the House of Commons until the law had been changed to allow him to swear a modified non-Christian oath.
The history hits you from all sides, but ultimately it is people who create the narratives. It’s the mundane day-to-day lives of the small army of domestic workers who churned the butter in the kitchens, lovingly tended the grounds and groomed the horses in the ruined stables propped up by scaffolding in a shady corner where I watched