Overlooked Britain
The M25 – London’s grand circle lucinda lambton Next time you’re stuck on the motorway, rejoice in the necklace of jewels strung around the capital
Egham’s Loire château: Royal Holloway College (1886), Surrey, by William Henry Crossland, inspired by the Château de Chambord
‘There is a necklace of jewels that is strung around London – otherwise known as the M25.’ BRAVO! I wrote that sentence many years ago and can proudly say that I have not written a better one since. That motorway, which causes such mayhem and misery to so many, is surrounded by a wealth of historical and architectural diversions. At Egham in Surrey, a profusion of pinnacled and pepperpotted spires and towers rears into the sky, along with domes, fanciful chimneys and finials, soaring ebulliently from the trees, giving the M25 a quite stupendous skyline. It is Royal Holloway College, a gargantuan château of Portland stone and ‘flaming red brick’. According to one contemporary ardent admirer, it ‘fairly scorched the eye’ when it was built between 1879 and 1887 by William Crossland for Thomas Holloway. When one is faced with its vivid vastness, there seems to be no other 82 The Oldie August 2022
building as bright and as big – 550 feet by 376 feet – in the whole wide world. Designed to attract the attention of the passing public on the railways, it reigns triumphant over the speeding motorway. Thomas Holloway, ‘one of the wonders of the 19th century’, made millions with his ‘healing genius’ for inventing all-purpose pills and ointments. So all-purpose were his remedies that one Irish farmer claimed not only to have regained the use of all his limbs, his sight and his hearing but also to have been relieved from pains that had plagued him for 20 years. Holloway’s genius in fact lay in his rhetoric rather than in the effectiveness of his remedies. He became a philanthropist, always claiming to have worked harder spending his money than in making it. Nearby there is yet further endorsement of his excellence with the Holloway Sanatorium. It was built as a hospital for ‘the insane of the middle
classes … and with grounds … equal to those at the Crystal Palace’. Today, it has transmogrified into an ‘exclusive housing development’. Gridlocked motorists should give three hearty cheers nevertheless for the preservation of its Franco-Flemish, Gothic forms, crowstepped gables and great tower, modelled on the Cloth Hall at Ypres. Eight miles to the south, near Cobham, we find Silvermere Haven, a pet cemetery with many hundreds of melancholy epitaphs. There are tombs for the two rats Gladstone and Disraeli. And what sad delight to see ‘Gone for Long Walkies’ emblazoned on a gravestone. A mere mile from here across the fields at Chaldon in Surrey, between exits 6 and 7, lies the late-12th- and early-13th-century church of St Peter and St Paul. Reaching it by a narrow-as-yourcar road, which presents a particularly rural picture, we find its little flint body and wooden spire.
