Gatton Park

Thursday was a beautiful day, mainly, in contrast to the rest of the week so far, and I took advantage of my day off to take a walk around Gatton Park near Reigate; I was drawn there by a particular historical feature which I’ll talk about in a minute. I didn’t know until setting out that there’s a National Trust car park with a little café where you can enter the Park, and on arriving found it jammed with vehicles after the whole population of eastern Surrey had apparently had the same idea as me: I was lucky to find a space. Dogs, bikers, walkers, children, in profusion: then I plunged down the footpath into the Park and they all but disappeared, leaving me mostly alone in the chilly, sunny woods with glimpses through the bare trees of the fields beyond.

The woods part and reveal the parkland, a swooping Capability Brown landscape centred on the lakes at the foot of the slope. Those are private, but you can reach the Millennium Stones, seven sharp slab monoliths carved with verses that muse on the nature of eternity, from the Bible to TS Eliot, and from that strange artwork pass round the stupendously ugly buildings of the school which now occupies the estate to the church (cobbled together from bits and pieces) and, finally, to the focus of my visit, Gatton Town Hall.

Gatton, you see, I remember from history lessons at school as one of the very rottenest of the Rotten Boroughs of the pre-Reform House of Commons. The village was designated a ‘borough’ in 1450 as a bribe by King Henry VI to his steward for his support over the king marrying Margaret of Anjou, giving it representation in Parliament. By the middle of the 1700s the electors of the Borough of Gatton numbered about half a dozen, all of whom were tenants of the Lord of the Manor and not likely to want to vote for anyone other than his preferred nominees. The Town Hall was erected in 1765, a little gazebo like a Classical temple, framing an urn: it was here that the voters gathered solemnly, or perhaps not so solemnly, to elect Gatton’s two Members of Parliament. The urn is inscribed, in Latin, ‘Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law’. It’s a political joke of breathtaking cynicism; it could only have made sense in the 18^th century, not just because the constitutional arrangements only existed then, but because an open mockery of political principle would become impossible later.

The photograph of the Town Hall in Pevsner’s Buildings of England shows it surrounded by trees which lend the shocking humour a kind of Romantick melancholy; today it sits hemmed in by school bungalows, next to a children’s playground, facing the old mansion house which is almost as ugly, in its neo-Classical way. It makes the joke seem all the more outrageous.