Surrey Homes*
July 2025. I am sitting in a café in Surrey, on what was once the A3, but is now a quiet no-through road leading to The Devil’s Punchbowl. I am wondering why I’ve returned and what connects my paintings, not just recently, but in the long-term. By contrast, earlier this morning, I drove 25 minutes up the road from my home to The Bell Hotel in Epping. Though quiet this morning, over the last couple of weeks the The Bell has been the site of demonstrations. These follow the arrest of a resident at the hotel, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia. The demonstrators include people wrapped in the flag of St George, often used to represent English nationalism.
2 years earlier I took my summer holiday in Surrey. I wanted to visit the Peaslake home of the illustrator, Margaret Tarrant and also to look at a number of Victorian Oxford Movement and Edwardian Charles Spooner churches. In this county, developed into a commuter belt for London, I was intrigued by the paradox of cosy, Arts & Crafts dwellings surrounded by formidable high hedges and locked gates. Looking through one of these, I was questioned by a member of staff. What was I doing? What did I want?
I have continued to reflect on the symbolism of the hedge, a quintessentially English feature: the hedge as manifest in the most affluent area of an affluent country; the hedge that keeps people out, that defends ‘the Englishman’s Castle’ from intruders and the inquisitive; the glimpses of the wealth that lies behind.
At the same time hedges themselves can be metaphors for populations: some, often the older agricultural hedges, are rich with diversity; others, often cultivated domestic/suburban hedges, are of a single species.
Shortly afterwards I watched an amazing and moving film* about people trying to escape North Korea. I was struck by the way in which the human race creates edges to lock people in or out. And by the extraordinary hardships of people around the world, in contrast to the comfort and safety I found in Surrey. The struggles we all face, big and small. Out of this film came the Crossings paintings.
So, sitting in the café I am in the heart of affluent, safe England, experiencing and observing people with the luxury of leisure, the luxury of peace. And I have come from The Bell Hotel, a holding house for those whose experiences have been very different and who have some idea of what we have and want it too. I speculate that the stability and security most human beings long for is also something we fear having taken from us.
*The title ‘Surrey Homes is a nod to magazines like Homes and Gardens’ which advertise the ideal of the comfortable middle-class home.
*Beyond Utopia, dir. Ann Shin