Day 146: Secret Garden

Running a pilot workshop at the McLaren Technology Centre.  A homage to light - white walls, water, and steel, all designed by Norman Foster.  The first time I visited I was impressed, but I couldn't figure out how to get in (satellite podule entrances, with underground tunnels to the central node, accessible by a cylindrical glass lift that delivers you from darkness into light - obviously...).  Today - six visits down the line - my palate is getting a little jaded (oh, for some flock wallpaper and East London irony).  Until I bump into a lad in reception who's come for a work experience interview.  His eyes are like saucers and he keeps breaking into a big grin.  It's like seeing a Christmas tree anew through the reaction of a six-year old. 

Ugly

With lots of time to kill before my next job in Maidenhead, I find myself heading to a hotel that I haven't visited in years.  An ugly Holiday Inn near White Waltham.  Remarkable for the fact that behind the standard modern hotel building exists another world. 

Not ugly

Lawns and topiary and an avenue of little trees leading to an ornate iron gate.  And behind the gate, a rambling house.  Beams and mullioned windows and mellow bricks.  Shoppenhangers Manor.  Built in 1915 by an antiques dealer,  who created an extraordinary patchwork house from leftovers - bits of grand old estates and ancient ships.  It looks far older than its construction date.  It may just be a folly, but its eccentricity has its own ricketty charm.

Not any more.  It's gone.  Demolished, and where it stood is now wasteland, complete with rubble, weeds and buddleia.  I duck under the barriers and wander around over broken glass and fragments of brick.  What a waste.  I ask at reception - the dead-eyed Eastern European girl shrugs.  She doesn't know anything about a house.  I try at the bar.  Apparently it cost too much to keep up, so Holiday Inn pulled it down in 2007.  I'm not sure this is the truth.  I rather suspect it simply wasn't ugly enough to qualify as a piece of Holiday Inn real estate...

But the garden still remains.  And nobody from the hotel seems to realise it's there.  I spend two very happy hours lying on the lawn, reading my book.  I see nobody.  I take my shoes and socks off, and listen to the birds, and watch two yellow butterflies dance around the box hedges.