Letters From London

  Within Evelyn’s lifetime, the gardens were indeed exceedingly improved, by George London and Henry Wise. Their plantings included the hedge maze, the most venerable of its kind extant in Britain and the world’s most famous horticultural puzzle. Whether in fact we are right to celebrate its tercentenary this year is somewhat open to doubt: the gardens were laid out between 1689 and 1702, no precise planting record survives, and the birth year most commonly agreed on hitherto has been 1690. But we shouldn’t be overfastidious when commerce and the tourist trade beckon. As Adrian Fisher, the country’s leading maze designer, who for the last decade has been pushing for any year to be the Year of the Maze, explains, “an odd-dated year is best, because it avoids the Olympics, the World Cup, and things like that.” Almost as usefully, 1991 makes a numerical palindrome, the sort of thing that appeals to mazophiles.

  The Hampton Court Maze has had much to put up with in its first three hundred years. Early on, it had to fight off the attentions of Capability Brown, who, as Royal Gardener, lived close by from 1764 to 1783 and had to be specifically instructed by the King not to interfere with it. In the following century, the maze had to endure sanctification in Jerome K. Jerome’s jocose late Victorian banjo-’n’-boaters classic, Three Men in a Boat. And in modern times it has been required to survive the greedy descent of coach parties thronging to one of the most famous sites in England. The pathway has become asphalt, the plantings (originally hornbeam but now multispecied, with yew predominating) have to be protected in places by assegai railings, traffic throbs constantly on the road past the nearby Lion Gate, and the entrance fee has gone up from twopence in Jerome’s time to £1.25. Despite all this, the maze retains a certain mystery, and the height of the hedges (about seven feet) even gives it a gentle menace. It is also a gratifyingly complicated maze. Harris, in Three Men in a Boat, confidently proclaims that all you have to do is keep taking the first turning to the right, and is punished by getting pompously lost. The correct, quick way to get to the center is to turn left on entering the maze, then right, right again, left, left, left, and left. The alternative, slow way is to use the “hand on wall” technique, which unfailingly—if ploddingly—cracks labyrinths of this type. Place your right (or left) hand on the right (or left) wall of green, and doggedly keep it there, in and out of dead ends, and you will finally get to the middle. There you will find two white horse chestnuts whose trunks bear a furious intaglio of victorious names. Cyril, Mad, Tito, Yin, Mig, and Iky, among others, have all conquered the complexities of this trapezoid puzzle, whose design, incidentally, was used for many of the earliest behaviorist experiments on rats. Then there is the problem of getting out. All you need to do is … but that would be telling. And don’t expect any help from the man at the ticket kiosk, either. What does he do when people shout for help? “We don’t take any notice.” These are cruel times, still stained by the ideal of Thatcherite self-help. “In the old days there used to be someone on the viewing platform to guide people out at the end of the day. Now we just lock up and go away. They’ll find the turnstile sooner or later.”

  Britain has the richest and most varied maze tradition in Europe, with splendid examples of the two main labyrinthine genres. Hampton Court is a classic hedge maze: such puzzles are usually found on private land, adornments to aristocratic territory (or, more recently, to country house hotels and theme parks); planting materials generally include yew, holly, hornbeam, and beech. The other type is the ground-level turf or stone labyrinth. Map reading here is no problem: a unicursal path leads inevitably, if circuitously, to a central goal. Such mazes are usually found on common land, at settlements with Norse origins, and were presumably constructed by the immigrants as a badge of their culture. Their original Scandinavian purposes were practical as well as symbolic: they were used either as a means of bringing good fortune to fishermen (nasty weather would be persuaded to rush in and get trapped) or as places to perform fertility and courtship rites, with a maid running complicatedly to the center pursued by her puffing swain.

  The largest surviving turf-cut maze in the world is on the common at Saffron Waiden in Essex: thirty-eight yards across, it looks from the air like a circular griddle pan with four jug ears, and the path that winds its serpentine way to the center is almost a mile long. The maze’s date of origin is unknown, the earliest reference to its existence coming in 1699, when the Guild of the Holy Trinity paid fifteen shillings for it to be recut. (It has been recut six times since then, and in 1911 the path, previously chalk, was relaid in brick.) An eighteenth-century document describes the ancient running contests that still took place on it: “The Maze at Saffron Waiden is the gathering place for the young men of the district, who have a system of rules connected with walking the maze, and wagers of gallons of beer are frequently won or lost. For a time it was used by the beaux and belles of the town, a young maiden standing in the centre, known as Home, while the boy tried to get her out in record time without stumbling.”

  Walking the Saffron Waiden maze takes about fifteen minutes if you decide not to cheat, and since there are no forking paths the only anxiety aroused is about whether you might turn an ankle where the narrow brick path and the foot-wide turf corridors meet at uneven heights. It is a pleasantly mind-emptying activity—a sort of pedal mantra—and its uniformity of experience tempts you to reflect on how simple some of the Simple Pleasures of Times Past were. Finally, you reach the raised circular mound where an ash tree stood until it was burned down during the Guy Fawkes celebrations of 1823. Here intimations of twentieth-century superiority tend to evaporate as you examine the celebratory detritus left by contemporary smokers and dogs.

  Nowadays, the curiosity of the tourist has largely replaced the atavism of the turf runner or the piety of the Christian pilgrim as motive for maze treading; but occasionally the old associations resurface. When the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, was enthroned in March 1980, he included in his address the following psychoanalytic detail: “I had a dream of a maze. There were some people very close to the center, but they could not find a way through. Just outside the maze others were standing. They were further away from the heart of the maze, but they would be there sooner than the party that fretted and fumed inside.” Such a dream might be taken to offer surprising encouragement to those of us who loiter theologically outside the labyrinth; more directly, it inspired Lady Brunner, of Greys Court in the Thames Valley, to order the construction of an Archbishop’s Maze. A neat brick-and-turf design, bedding easily into gardens that consist of a series of secret spaces each with its private character, it is both unicursal and multicursal, and bubbles with Christian symbolism (the seven days of Creation, the nine hours of Agony, the twelve Apostles). At its center, a Roman cross of gray Bath stone is laid within a Byzantine cross of blue Westmorland stone, proposing reconciliation between West and East, Catholic and Protestant, Roman and Orthodox (an ambition dear to the incoming Archbishop’s heart). On a square stone pillar, four texts are carved, the most mazily appropriate being from St. Augustine: “We come to God not by navigation but by love.” The Archbishop of Canterbury himself dedicated the maze a bare nineteen months after going public with his dream, and if its psychic origins seem perhaps a little back-to-front—the symbol inspiring the Christian thought, rather than the Christian thought embodying itself in the symbol—it shows that one strand of the maze tradition is still alive.

  There is further evidence of this, if of a less Establishment kind. While mazes appeal to cerebral crossword-puzzle solvers, it’s clear that they equally delight the spoon benders. Witness the large and respectful gathering at the Church of St. James Piccadilly in the fourth month of the Year of the Maze, to hear the words of the American labyrinthologist Sig Lonegren. Wren’s church is elegant, rectilinear, and cool, arguing a rational relationship with God. Sig Lonegren, a resident of Vermont, is rumpled, curvilinear (potbellied, to be precise), and effusive, leaning perhaps toward the intuitive in intellectual matters. The evening began
in the modern ecclesiastical manner—that’s to say, one calculated to bemuse the outsider. First, we lit three candles—“one for Love, one for Truth, and one for something of the speaker’s choosing.” Sig had chosen Communication. Next, we had a democratic show of hands as to whether we should have two, five, or ten minutes’ silent meditation. Being British, we chose the middle path on this one. Finally, we had an obligatory two minutes’ conversation with a nearby stranger, and then we were away. Well, almost. There were just a few announcements, including the almost parodic one that there would be no food tonight, as “Inneka has gone to a business-network meeting”

  Besides being a labyrinthologist, Sig Lonegren has been a big twig in the American Society of Dowsers; indeed, his first volume, Spiritual Dowsing, is still available. He has put in good time at Glastonbury, the center of English hippie-spiritual activity, and has the unnerving habit of referring to the Earth as “Mom”—as in “There’s something about being right on Mom, right on the Earth, when you’re dowsing” And his involvement with mazes? “For the past twenty years, I’ve been working with ancient tools that can help us with our intuition.” So we were off into an evening of “sacred geometry,” “nodes of power,” numerology, Mom, the music of the labyrinth (wonkily executed on the recorder by Sig), Jungian-shadow talk, “what I like to call herstory,” and the myth of Daedalus cozified for modern use. (Daedalus told Icarus not to fly too close to the sun “But do kids listen? Never”) Sig, promiscuously mixing his religions and civilizations as if sifting homemade muesli, worried briefly whether anyone might take offense when he modishly renamed the Lord’s Prayer “the Lord-and-Lady’s Prayer.” But who would take offense at anything in the modern Anglican Church? Only the shades of Wren’s benefactors growled back from their beleaguered lair in the organ loft—whence they could see that Sig had laid out a red-yarn labyrinth in front of the altar area, so that we could all tread it after the lecture. Well, all but one. As Sig reached his closing theme of the evening, “How we can use the labyrinth today,” the Candle of Communication blazed on unashamedly. That’s enough awe, admiration, diversion—what about use? “The labyrinth is a problem-solving device,” announced Sig. “It works great with kids.” At which point, like a yellow-press reporter before a den of vice, your correspondent made an excuse and left.

  In 1980, there were forty-two mazes in Britain. The present count stands at more than a hundred, with about twenty of them having been opened during the Year of the Maze. Over a third of those built in the past decade are the work of a firm called Minotaur Designs, whose chief executive is Adrian Fisher. A plumpish, ebullient forty-year-old Englishman, Fisher comes from the other side of the rainbow to Sig Lonegren. He lives in a large red-brick semi in St. Albans, his front door guarded by two garish knee-high gnomes, “so that we don’t get too pompous about gardening ideas.” Inside his front room are stacked rolls of vibrantly colored plastic matting, which make up into cart-away mazes. Formerly a management consultant with ITT, Fisher built his first maze in his father’s garden. (It was made of holly, and “if you turned left right, left right, left right, you got to the middle; if you turned right left, right left, right left, you went one and a half times round the maze and still got to the middle.”) He became a full-time maze designer in 1983. Since then, he has constructed hedge mazes, path mazes (including the Archbishop’s at Greys Court), water mazes, pavement mazes in city centers, a Beatles maze in Liverpool with a diving Yellow Submarine, and even a mirror maze at Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset. Such items do not come cheap. A maze might start in the £20,000 to £50,000 bracket—a pair of Lion and Unicorn brick pavements for the pedestrian precinct in Worksop cost £35,000 each—and can rise to £250,000 or more. Fisher also designs bus-route maps and visitor plans for country houses; these will cost you less.

  Minotaur Designs is the only maze-building firm in Europe, and probably in the world; Fisher has heard of no other, at any rate. Asked if the extraordinary resurgence of the British maze in the last ten years can be credited to him, he replies, “Yes, mainly.” He sees maze design as “a thoroughly modern art form” and “a new way of treating landscape,” and locates the appeal of the labyrinth in its being “a description of life.” (“The choices you made in your twenties you’re stuck with in your thirties.”) He has noticed the way mazes seem to release the spirit of the child in most adults but becomes wary, not to say downright evasive, when asked if for him they have any transcendental element. “It’s a bit hard when there are kids around,” he finally concedes. He is happier talking about the business and design side of things. “My style,” he explains, “is to find a market where no one’s in, and exploit it.” He thinks of a maze as “a marketing machine;” to give one a name is “a good marketing strategy.” This is all sensible, if unmystical. But then even at the Archbishop’s rampantly spiritual maze few visitors, on reaching the armillary sundial at the center, appear to reflect, as they are intended to, upon how they, frail mortals standing on a particular spot at a particular time, are rendered inconsequential by the eternal time and eternal space of the divine setup. Far from it: when I was there, the next maze solver along first checked his watch, and then lamented that sundials aren’t adjustable for British summer time.

  As Fisher appreciates, there is a bums-on-seats aspect to maze building nowadays. Rare is the landed viscount who desires an enigma in hornbeam for his own private puzzlement; he wants one because he needs to open his parkland to the charabanc crowd and a maze is an extra attraction, one that seems to fit historically without being vulgar, something more tony than a ghost train. It goes with the homemade jam, the garden center, and the leatherette bookmarks embossed with monumental brasses. So some of the country’s oldest and most visited great houses have only recently become bemazed: Chatsworth in 1962, Longleat in 1978, Hatfield House in the 1980s,while Blenheim acquired the world’s largest symbolic hedge maze in March of this year. Where the designer puts the maze that embellishes the grand house is a decision based as much on tourist throughput as on landscape aesthetics. Leeds Castle, in Kent, offers the tourist (as of 1988) a split-level extravaganza with surprise grotto and underground exit tunnel; Fisher explains that this maze is deliberately placed quite some distance from the castle, so that customers can be “spread around like Marmite.”

  What constitutes a good maze? According to Fisher, one that contributes positively to its setting, one that makes an enjoyable puzzle (“Fun is the word that gets lost”), and one that is designed with imagination, so as to make the experience unfold “like a Disney ride,” leading, preferably, to “a sensational treat” at the end. Thus, a balance of time spent and trickery conquered, plus reward. And since Hampton Court’s successors must appeal to the turnstile rather than to seigneurial solipsism, the attention span and problem-solving skills of the populace at large have to be taken into account. When asked what makes a bad maze, Fisher cites the one at Longleat (not built by him) with active disapproval. “It goes on for an hour and a half, and that’s not funny. It doesn’t vary its pace, and that’s not funny. There’s an utter contempt for the market.” Or, at least, for the British market. Perhaps Longleat was aiming at Japanese customers. In the 1980s, there was a brief but intense maze craze in Japan, with more than two hundred built in five years. Elaborate, three-dimensional, and made of wood, they were also adjustable: the pattern could be altered from day to day and loyal customers regularly remystified. There would be a series of objectives to be reached, for each of which the visitor would be rewarded with a stamp on his or her entry card. Solving these Japanese mazes took many happy hours—a happiness not unconnected with competitive frenzy.

  Fisher’s design team has also been responsible for one of the boldest, most spectacular, and most contentious mazes built in modern times. Kentwell Hall, near Long Melford in Suffolk, is a distinguished Tudor manor house in mellowed red brick; its principal buildings form three tall sides of a square, with the fourth side opening onto a moat and the access bridge acr
oss it. The courtyard, once cobbled, had long since disappeared under layers of gravel when the present owners took charge. They decided against excavating the cobbles and preferred instead to pave the courtyard with toning brick. So far, so uncontroversial. But as the owner, Patrick Phillips, QC, explains to visitors, “we determined to make it something special.” The something special turned out to be a huge pavement maze in the shape of a monster Tudor rose, seventy feet across, made from 25,000 bricks, about 17,000 of which had to be hand-cut. The bricks are of four colors—pinky red, brown, orange, and cream—and they took two men five months to lay. To install such a maze today would cost about £120,000. “We decided upon a Tudor motif because of the house’s strong Tudor flavor and our own interest in the period,” Phillips explains. “We also wished to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Tudor accession. We decided upon a maze puzzle because we thought it would be fun and would re-create in a modern idiom the Tudor fancy of a knot garden.”

  Did such an addition require planning permission from the local council? “We wrote to them,” Adrian Fisher explains, “and said did we need permission for bricking the courtyard in an unusual manner, and they said don’t even bother to waste our time by applying.” There were some protests from the local civic society, which fell silent when the official opening of the courtyard included the announcement that the maze had won a Heritage in the Making Award from the British Tourist Authority. (The prizes were sponsored by a dairy company, the winners receiving a lump of cheese cast in bronze, with a bronze cheese knife alongside.) But was Fisher himself trepidatious about thrusting his design into an established manor house? He characterizes his attitude to Kentwell as “mildly reverential,” and explains, “To be too timid would be pathetic.” It’s a bit like a mugging, he says: if the potential victim is too acquiescent, he is liable to suffer the more.