Strange Labyrinth: Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London's Great Forest

by Will Ashon

In litter-strewn Epping Forest on the edge of London, might a writer find that magical moment of transcendence? He will certainly discover filthy graffiti and frightening dogs, as well as world-renowned artists and fading celebrities, robbers, lovers, ghosts and poets. But will he find himself? Or a version of himself he might learn something from?

Strange Labyrinth is a quest narrative arguing that we shouldn't get lost in order to find ourselves, but solely to accept that we are lost in the first place. It is a singular blend of landscape writing, political indignation, cultural history and wit from a startling new voice in non-fiction.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Nature, London, Memoir

416 pages, Hardcover

Published April 6, 2017

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

It says pyschogeography on the back, but this is nevertheless a good read. Lots of interesting stuff about various characters who've lived round Epping Forest, and a lot on Enclosures, a topic of which I need to know more. Flirts with pretentious maundering of the Iain Sinclair variety, with bonus points for the exasperating "look at me, such a hapless man" persona of the kind that gets a regular Guardian column, but in fact pulls it off, just, by including a high percentage of interesting thoughts and characters. I won't reread as such but my copy is dog eared with things to follow up and thoughts to explore so that can't be bad.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epping Forest is an ancient forest of 6,000 acres in area, stretching between Forest Gate and Epping. It is around 19 miles long and approximately 2.5 miles wide, reaching from the urban sprawl of Walthamstow to the edge of Essex. It has been covered with trees since Neolithic times, became a Royal forest in the 12th Century and is London’s largest open space. It is into this litter-strewn green lung that Will Ashon heads, not totally sure of who or what he may discover, but he knows that some of the secrets contained in the woods will reveal themselves.

With him, we will discover well-known characters from times long gone, the infamous highway man Dick Turpin was an elusive resident, the sculptor Jacob Epstein spent a lot of time in the area and Ashon tries to make sense of his complicated relationships. There is, of course, the Royal influence that still permeates the forest, and I hadn’t realised that the City of London, a slightly sinister organisation with a fair amount of influence, are the owners and managers of the forest. There are lots of other people that have sought the tranquillity of the woods. Most have never been on the public’s radar and as Ashon ventures to parts of the forest he hasn’t been to, he sees the traces that they have left; crashed cars, initials scratched into the bark of trees and remembers the deceased that have been found there. He decides after a long period of time to have another go at climbing trees, finding that the ancient pollards offer the best opportunity for ascending into the canopy. To discover himself, is he going to be able to be brave enough to stay a night in the forest?

This is unlike any book about a landscape that I have read recently; it has a certain rawness and vulnerability to it as Ashon faces his fears. Most natural history books see the localities they are writing about through a romanticised lens; he’s not afraid to write about the ugly and unsightly things that have happened in the forest as much as the beautiful elements. There is plenty of history within the covers too, these stories are teased out and put in a modern context and his interviews with those that have sat on the fringes of society are enlightening as they are interesting. It was well worth scrabbling through the understorey with Ashon to discover the ghosts of the past, the sounds of the present and the possibilities of the future of Epping Forest.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered Ashon through the Open Pen anthology, and liked his writing :)

I wanted to like this book too, so pretty and original as it is. It's closest to Geoff Dyer's style of non-fiction, like of "Zona", where factual digressions weave into a personal narrative. In this case, Ashon wanders Epping Forest and delves into its history.

I appreciate the effort that went into this book, but it didn't grab me. I like Ashon as an author though and will continue reading his works. Also, if you're a Geoff Dyer fan, this is probably for you :)

[Mitch Karunaratne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great ramble through Epping Forest - accompanied by rebels, misfits, political activists, punk musicians, poets and the odd highwayman. The week of the book launch Will Ashon led a event that walked some of the forests paths, then paused and either retold some of the myth / stories from the book or read key sections in situ. This definitely effected my reading of the book (positively!) , so much so that twice this week, I've hopped on the train and retraced our steps across the forest walking and reading this book. The biggest character though isn't the forest, it is Ashon himself - his fear of dogs, of trespassing, of being caught, of not doing the right thing, of getting hurt, of falling, of being ridiculed, of being fond out, of failing, all endear him and connect him to he reader as a real person, with stuff to work out like we all do!

[Mike Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most male mid-life crises follow similar and depressingly predictable patterns - they involve embarrassing encounters with much younger women, much faster cars and far more taxing physical pursuits than are ever strictly advisable. Then, somehow, they quietly slip into being either part of the subject's new, more insufferably identity - or perhaps simply disappearing, not to be mentioned by those who witness the manifold indignities. My own mid-life crises have been a little different - and in terms of lasting impact, somewhat more prosaic. If you discount my dash across the ocean to marry someone a continent away - who was, it must be said, just a little younger than me - then the rest has been mostly about walking. Walking has become a structure around which I focus my reading, my writing, and most definitely my thinking. It gives form to my year as I trace the seasons via walks, and it allows me to calibrate my reactions to the sometimes confusing world. It is, it must be said, a solitary pursuit - but that seems to work just fine too. Given that much of my recent walking has been in and around the environs of Epping Forest, this recently published book about Will Ashon's own mid-life crisis brings both reassurance and entertainment.

Ashon starts the book at a crossroads - he has given up his job to write, but he's not sure what to write about. He indulges himself in research which leads him nowhere and convinces himself that the book will, when it's ready, come forth. In the meantime, he is also a coward. This might sound like an unfair charge - but I feel comfortable stating it because I share Ashon's particularly British cowardice. I too feel a cold sweat begin to break on my brow when I pass the 'Private' sign, or find myself obeying patently unenforceable prohibitions to the letter. For the walker, these matters can often make the difference between miles of detour and a straightforward path. Throughout Strange Labyrinths Ashon takes the detour - and it leads him to a cast of forest-related characters which are unpredictably various, but share a curious independence of spirit which echoes the remarkable survival of Epping Forest into the 21st century.

The thread of the book, in so far as there is one, is Ashon's gradual accumulation of knowledge about the forest via a study of those who've walked it before him. He is ostensibly building up to spending a night in the tree-canopy, just him and the forest. Naturally, the fear of the unknown means this is put off again and again, which allows Ashon the space to explore the outsiders who have used the forest as inspiration for the creative endeavours or cover for their nefarious deeds. Along the way we meet the ghosts of John Clare and Dick Turpin - both escaping capture and enclosure of different kinds as they haunt the forest floor. Ashon hits on another of my great fears here - treading in the footsteps of Iain Sinclair as he writes about Clare and not being quite comfortable with the process of re-walking ground already covered by another. However, Ashon's investigation of the beginnings and the later life of the asylum at High Beech add a great deal to Clare's forest narrative and he has nothing to fear. He also strays out of the forest to find Penny Rimbaud of anarchist second-wave punk collective Crass, who has occupied Dial House on the northern edge of the forest since the late 1960s, slowly turning the once-derelict farm on former GPO land into a centre for the radical arts.

Rimbaud provides a link to another collective occupying part of the southern reaches of the forest - the M11 Link Road protestors of the early 1990s. In particular, to the elusive and much loved Old Mick who was an ever present face in the coverage of the quite remarkable resistance to the road. Ashon delves into Mick's mysterious and unwritten past, unravelling a early life of not-so-petty crime which paved the way for an instinctive non-conformism which inspired a generation of younger protesters to wage a non-violent campaign of resistance as spectacle. Throughout these encounters, Ashon's own quest - to turn his disparate researches into a coherent non-fiction work centred on the forest - begins to come good. He is at his most lyrical when he is describing the interior of the forest, and while like me lacking the technical names for the plants and trees, he manages to evoke the rather strange sensation of isolation despite being mere feet from the road which I too have experienced in the forest. He describes the litter and the trails left by temporary human habitation with as much care and precision as he does the flora and fauna. In that sense, this book captures the forest's present as accurately as it catalogues a version of its surprising past.

While this probably isn't the book Will Ashon set out to write - or even the book he thought he was writing for a good deal of the time he was working on it - this is ultimately a satisfying and erudite view between the thick foliage which sometimes obscures the true nature of Epping Forest. The forest is as much a hiding place now as it has ever been, and having hidden away from reality within its depths myself I can feel my own experiences echoed throughout this book. I'd urge anyone with an interest in the topography or the history of the forest to delve into Ashon's work - along with those who are curious about just why the edge of this ancient woodland has inspired so many unexpected characters.

[Alex Sarll]

A record label boss from Walthamstow having what he admits to be a fairly feeble mid-life crisis quits his job and starts titting around in Epping Forest on the vague excuse of writing a book. And then actually produces the book. The result should by all rights be terrible, the worst sort of blokerature, hipster Partridge. On top of which, this is crowded territory, and of late I've become more ready to ditch nature writing and psychogeography which feel too much like makeweights for fashionable scenes. But through whatever necessary combination of writing skill and personality, Ashon somehow flukes it. He's less expert than Sinclair (regarding whom Ashon feels an anxiety of influence about which he's endearingly open), but also less crabbed and crabby. He's aware the whole enterprise is on some level fundamentally ridiculous, without letting the book turn into an irritatingly jokey piss-take or verge on the philistine. He doesn't really believe in magic, but he still hopes to encounter it. He occupies, in short, that very British sweet spot which neither believes nor denies, but supposes. A concept he borrows from jester-shaman Ken Campbell, who in this account becomes one of the forest’s key figures – though less happily, Ashon also borrows from Campbell the concept of entaniodromia, a word Campbell admitted he only used because it meant he could charge more, but whose prevalence, alongside a mid-book overuse of italics for purposes not immediately clear, is Ashon’s main stylistic failing. There are other artists too, from Jacob Epstein and the women around him to Mary Wroth, of whom I’d never heard but who is so intertwined with the spirit of her age that she feels almost like a Neal Stephenson invention - lover of Mr WH, dedicatee of Ben Jonson, niece to Sir Philip Sidney, a rumoured grandmother for Aphra Behn, and the writer (most unusual for a woman at that time) of Urania, a prose romance which is either a teetering mess or an extended alchemical allegory, or possibly both. Mixed in with the artists are an assortment of outsiders, criminals and radicals, such as the road protesters who would later morph into Reclaim the Streets, though obviously it is part of the condition of the forest that these categories should not be firmly bordered. One of the bridging figures is Crass’ Penny Rimbaud. Now, I’ve heard and read a few attempts at explaining Crass, but Ashon’s is the one which did the best job of making me understand the point of them, and of all the strands running through Strange Labyrinth I think the one which affected me most is where Rimbaud and co manage to fight off a redevelopment plan and save their commune, Dial House…but only by becoming homeowners. It’s such a perfect parable of how capitalism snookers us all in the end.

It’s a recurrent theme, this – as of life, to be fair. Striving for transcendence, and instead falling flat on your face. More often, though, the note is bathetic. There’s the bit where Ashon tries to emulate “Robert Macfarlane, the dashing cavalry commander of the new nature writing movement” and walk barefoot, only to have an embarrassing encounter with people walking the other way and wondering what the Hell he’s up to. Ashon’s – again, very British – fear of confrontation and awkwardness is another note which keeps returning. Possibly the finest example is the passage where he ends up on the same path as an old woman walking her Alsatian, and is equally and simultaneously terrified of the dog attacking him, and of her thinking he's a predator himself bent on attacking her. And yet, inevitably, all his efforts to dodge her or find a divergent path just make it worse…at times like this, it’s pure sitcom. But there’s always the awareness that the forest is a place where genuinely bad things happen too. And that, in a sense, it is itself a bad thing – the very category of ‘forest’ being a legacy of Norman enclosures ('forestare', to exclude), prohibiting the people from part of their land. Which brings us back to those various radicals and protesters who’ve hidden out here, or defended it against subsequent establishment power-grabs – but also takes us forward through the history of subsequent enclosures which, much like the current bullying of benefit claimants, were always supposedly going to make things more efficient, yet always seemed instead to coincide with rising prices and poverty wages. Even now, the only reason Epping Forest was saved from being entirely erased was a takeover by the Corporation of London - which Ashon not unreasonably terms a demon - posing as a representative of oppressed commoners, then turning around and removing their ancient rights. Yet for all the romanticising of people who stand against these various faces of power, they’re often not the folk heroes one might hope for; Dick Turpin gets romanticised* into a dashing countercultural figure now, but really he was a thug and a rapist, as happy to burgle and threaten old ladies as pull off any sort of elegant heist. But then, the forest is after all a place of escape, a place of opposites, of rules suspended – and however much that might sound tempting, it doesn’t just mean suspension of the rules you don’t like. Not even in what Ashon acknowledges is in many ways a rather silly little simulacrum of the dark primeval space the world ‘forest’ conjures for us.

What else? He writes interestingly about trees, from the perspective of the novice walker and inept climber rather than as any sort of expert, but still with a zest which brings their characters across well (though I think he’s a little unfair on oaks). He’s hardly the first memoirist to make hay from the gap between the narrator or director self and the actor self at centre stage, but he gets the balance right more often than not. And I only spotted one factual error - describing the component books of Illuminatus! as particularly long when they're shorter than this one, and even the collected edition comes in shorter than a single volume of the Baroque Cycle. Though inevitably, that can’t help but seed a little doubt about everything else herein. Still, I’m not sure trying to treat this as a reference book would do it, or you, any favours. Consider it more a companion piece to Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost, a sort of ritual of recentring through decentring. Or file alongside Philip Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy and the work of John Higgs as an exploration of stories and Britishness in a moment of crisis. It's not quite as good as any of these, but it deserves a place among their merry men.

*The Newgate novel Ashon holds chiefly responsible for this sounds quite something:
“Rookwood is a gigantic mess of a book, a Gothic romance set in Yorkshire packed with murder ballads and songs so awful that even Thomas Pynchon would cut them, about as overwrought and silly and a 1980s Venezuelan soap opera but with none of the tanning or special effects. It has forests and poachers and Gypsies, plus family curses, incest, gunfights, skeleton hands, nice-but-dim leads and sulky villains. It sounds tremendous put like that, but it’s not. It’s awful. It contains lines as shockingly bad as, ‘Nor had he to wait long before its invigorating effects were instantaneous’. It has no characterisation as such, but no real plot either. Or rather, it has a plot but it; convoluted and ridiculous, The more I tell you how bad this book is the more I worry you might think I’m recommending it. I’m really not."

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Ashon goes into the forest to meet people who are at a crisis point, much like himself, although he does admit that his is a very dull midlife crisis whereby he has quit his job without a plan of what to do next. Most of these people are long dead (which gives him an excuse to go the British library and look through the dead tree scrolls of research), including:

Jacob and Margaret Epstein (sculptor/possible witch, respectively),
Ken Campbell (actor/avant garde comedian),
Lady Mary Wroth (17th century writer, first English woman to be published (under her own name, not a pen name or Anon)),
Wally Hope (organiser of Stonehenge free festival, effectively killed by the state),
John Clare (poet/mad man),
Penny Rimbaud* (hippy/punk, very much alive although does resemble a cadaver nowadays),
Mick Roberts (eco-protester/armed robber).
Dick Turpin (highway man/murderer),
T.E. Lawrence (hero/anti-hero).

We also learn that a forest doesn't mean a collection of trees but something that is outside of the normal law, invented by William the Conqueror in order to have somewhere to hunt that wasn't enclosed or developed or coppiced. The irony is that what started off as the noblesse land grabbing ended up as a space for the peons.

Similarly, 800 years later, the Corporation of London saved Epping Forest from sell-off, enclosure and destruction not because it wanted the forest for le peuple but to cock a snook at the Lords, Earls and so forth who were doing the sell-offs, enclosures, destruction etc. At one point he describes Forest Gate (where I live, once – the clue is in the name – the entrance to Epping Forest) as “a scrubby area that can't decide whether it's inner city or suburb”. Well, that's how we like it Will! We don't have to decide!

* A note on Penny Rimbaud.  Whilst you might find Crass’s music unlistenable and their politics dubious, you can respect Mr R for actually living his ideals and not writing for right wing papers (Bushell/Parsons), hawking butter and supporting Trump (Lydon), or being dead, but when Penny gets onto what I would call hippy bullshit and he would call Buddhist enlightenment (oppositional to Cartesian selfish individualism, which leads him to say that the Enlightenment lead to the Holocaust), you rather wish Ashon would leave Dial House and get back to the forest, Tbh, I can’t think of anything more selfishly individualistic than refusing to get a Covid vaccine.
 

[Colin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only read the first few chapters as it seemed to be biographies of people with tenuous connections to the forest and hardly anything about the forest itself

[Richard Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit of an oddity, found myself alternately engaged and annoyed by it. I know Epping a little, a long time ago I went picking mushrooms with some neighbours - a Turkish Cypriot and his Indian wife - from the council estate in Hackney where we once lived. Came back with bags of ceps. I have also been lucky enough to visit Dial House and meet Penny Rimbaud who features heavily in the book. I liked the deeply researched stories and how it covered both Dick Turpin and the anti-roads protests in Leytonstone but found the author was trying too hard to find his inner (Will) Self.

Ashon writes well though and the book is peppered with ideas and I particularly liked this sentence for its elouence: 'By giving existential primacy to thought, you are turning your body into nothing more than the ship of sensations in which your thought sails.'

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific read!
It’s so well written and compelling.. it brings Epping Forest and many of the characters who have been associated with it over the years with their talents and flaws to life as well as illuminating natural descriptions of the majestic trees and the forest’s nooks and crannies.
Will establishes the strong connections between it and many of the people including himself who have interacted and been inspired by the forest.
Strange Labyrinth also describes other more tawdry aspects of the forest but not without a humorous perspective.
It’s been a hugely enjoyable reading experience.
Thanks Will
Lucian Phipps

[Patrick Gamble · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The first axiom of forest thinking; ‘Don’t believe in anything. But you can suppose Everything’"

From dogging in Snaresbrook to Dick Turpin’s secret hideout, this is a beautifully idiosyncratic psychogeographic exploration of Epping Forest and its numerous outlaws and eccentrics. Ashon not only made me fall in love all over again with my neighbouring woodland, but also introduced me to the poetry of working class poet John Clare, the anarchic music of Crass and the simple joy of just getting lost.

[WaterstonesBirmingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Will's writing style and this is a very interesting meander through Epping Forest.

Any book that has Crass in is probably going to be a winner for me, but this work does jump between time periods and people a lot, so you have to be the kind of person who is interested in everything for this to be your cup of tea.

Saying that, Will is a witty and interesting narrator who really brings to life the people he talks about.

Grace

[Alan Fricker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living locally and being a regular forest wanderer I was delighted by this roving exploration of stories, people and places linked to the area. So good to read of the radical links to what can feel a less than radical place to live.

[Joakim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like it. Ashon shows some great writing capabilities taking us through the history of Epping Forest mixed in with personal anecdotes and important historical figures

[Helena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderfully written, I just didn't find all of the characters interesting, especially in the first half of the book.

[Jack Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, this ticked lots of boxes for me, all the usual; Dial House, John Clare, Ken Campbell, trees etc. Nicely written, thoughtul, and presumably *quite* different from his new book.

[Knut EB · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, but it felt like it was trying to tell several stories and ended up telling none of them well as a result. I wish there'd been more about the actual forest. Not my cup of tea.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an interesting book. I do have a bit of a thing about forests which drew me to this book, initially. However, this book introduced me to such an array of characters, leading to further reading and research, that it went beyond a fascination with forests.

[Amy Tipper-Hale · Rating 2 out of 5]

I laughed out loud at one point in this book. I also grew very fond of Will, but I cared strangely little for the poets, mystics and murderers featured in these pages.

[Alex Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will sets out to uncover stories tied to Epping Forest, and ends up examining himself. Charming, insightful and inspiring stuff.