MOCK TUDOR

 

CASPER PEARSON

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Chingford stands on the far periphery of north-east London, a marginal zone in which the urban and suburban intermingle with countryside to form a patchy geography that is difficult to construe. Exit the train station and all looks like London but just a few minutes’ stroll takes you to Ranger’s Road, where big suburban houses rise up on one side and the grassy expanse of Chingford Plain opens on the other. Enter the plain and you might find yourself among the herd of longhorn cattle that roams there; continue a while and you are in the ancient woodland of Epping Forest. Looking back towards the city, the skyline is eclectic. A modern block looms to the right. To the left, a church spire punctuates a pastoral vista. Between them, on a hill overlooking the plain, stands a tall white box that is by many measures the area’s most significant historical building: an intact, timber-framed Tudor hunting lodge, the only surviving example of its kind.

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Easily reached from my part of north-east London, Chingford has provided essential breathing space in these days of confinement. The heavy magnetic pull normally exerted by the city centre has been reversed and it is now the periphery that commands attention. The wide-open spaces of the plain and the impossibly lush and fragrant surroundings of the forest offer release from hours spent tethered to the screen and to the news. There is a strong sense here of the rhythms of the earth continuing; a comforting reminder of our connection to the deep time of nature, which itself prompts an awareness of the ephemerality of the current moment.

 

The splendid white Tudor building might also serve to lift the observer out of the present, gesturing as it does to the idea of long societal and cultural endurance. However, it is also a sharp reminder of historical complexity, since it was itself born from rupture. Known as Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge, its initial construction in fact took place in 1543 during the reign of Henry VIII, in a moment when the regime was flushed with newly appropriated wealth and self-aggregated power, having embarked upon one of the greatest upheavals in English history: the dissolution of the monasteries. If time has smoothed over these jagged edges, so that the building now has a tranquil and reassuring air, its surrounding spaces continue to disturb it. In an act that would now cause planning officers intense pain, Victorian businessmen erected next to it in the late nineteenth century a mock Tudor building, so vast in its proportions that it quite dwarves the lodge. These days a part of the budget chain Premier Inn, The Royal Forest Hotel was once an alluring destination for visitors from London who could use a newly established train line to reach the royal hunting forest that Queen Victoria would gift to the public in 1882. At the hotel, guests could once enjoy private dining rooms done up in Renaissance, Indian, Japanese, Watteau, Elizabethan, Queen Anne, Spanish, Louis Seize, Dutch and “aesthetic” styles before going for a stroll in the building’s sylvan surroundings.

 

Undoubtedly, the hotel sought to pay tribute to the hunting lodge. Simultaneously, its self-consciously historical outer shell, which surrounded spaces referring to a veritable smorgasbord of times and places, could not but highlight the constructed nature of Tudor-ness itself. The hunting lodge is simple in form, somewhat resembling a child’s drawing of a big house. There are no large surviving heraldic displays and little by way of triumphalist rhetoric. Making no great claims, it well withstands the heavy dose of mockery dealt out by its neighbour, and perhaps even benefits from it. Churning up the waters of historiography and reception, the emulation performed by the hotel in some senses guards against the lodge’s slipping into the historically flattened- out status of “mere” picturesque monument or heritage site.

 

This churning up and denaturalisation of things is characteristic of the entire area. Containing elements of city, suburb and country, without allowing any one of them fully to predominate, it can be difficult to know, in this part of Chingford, what kind of place you are in. Those jarring juxtapositions can generate a sense of freedom from familiar spatial hierarchies while also prompting a willingness to reflect on the structuring of a city that can all too easily be mistakenly thought of as a neat concentric composition. Such conceptual undoing is a particular power of the margin, the place where one thing gives way to another (and here one really is at a margin—walk five minutes past the hunting lodge and a sign announces that you are now in Essex, the county that once included the entire area, until Greater London gobbled it up in 1965).

 

In the current pandemic, the UK has been among the worst-affected countries in the world.With tens of thousands dead and with the inadequacy of government and the degradation of the austerity-racked state brutally exposed, to search for positive outcomes seems misplaced. Yet among the many consequences that will flow from this period that has so thoroughly reshaped the practices of everyday life, it is to be hoped that a broader denaturalisation of structures, hierarchies and habits might be among them. An economic response of truly staggering scale has made a mockery of the regime of austerity itself, revealing it to be founded only on a flimsy representation. Lockdown has introduced jarring juxtapositions and contrasts of its own, between work space and domestic space, confinement and mobility, and moral and economic imperatives among others. For those of us who work in academic institutions, the moment of crisis has helped to lay bare the artificial nature of the ubiquitous monitoring, measurement, and reporting systems that govern higher education as yet more representations, the suspension of which have brought no ill effects. It has caused us to consider what is really at stake in education, even as it has posed troubling questions about its future shape. A refashioning of universities in a way that frees teachers and students from the dead weight of an invented market and the associated tyranny of metrics has perhaps been made easier to imagine, even if its realisation remains a formidable task.

 

Chingford Plain points in other ways towards the challenges facing those who work in historical disciplines. It is possible, standing among the longhorn cattle, to experience a great degree of tranquillity; one that is connected to what seems to be the animals’ own peaceful indifference. That indifference, however, is not one that we can share. Nietzsche famously asserted that the happiness of cows rests in their having no consciousness of history. Human beings, on the other hand, are condemned to historical thinking, a fact that on the plain is brought inescapably to the visitor’s attention as soon as their eyes wander from the cattle to the Tudor hunting lodge and its historicising Victorian neighbour. Recent weeks have witnessed the start of a profound reconsideration of official histories and the nature of cultural heritage, initiated by the anti-racist movement in the USA. In the UK, statues of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and the slave trader Edward Colson in Bristol have tumbled, perhaps indicating the beginnings of what could become a serious public discussion about the history of empire; a topic that does not currently appear on the school history curriculum. Issues pertaining to historical and cultural disciplines will be at the forefront of that discussion and those who are involved with them will, over the coming years, need to redouble their efforts to ensure that history truly does serve life.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes on Contributor

 

Caspar Pearson is a historian of art and architecture. His research focuses primarily on the Italian Renaissance as well as the afterlives of the Renaissance in the modern period. He also writes about aspects of contemporary art and architecture, particularly in relation to Europe and the European Union.