58 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
annals of design
THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS
How the world ’s foremost maze-maker leads people astray.
by nicola twilley
O
n the afternoon of March 25,
1980, Robert Runcie was en-
throned as the hundred-and-
second Archbishop of Canterbury, se-
nior prelate of the Anglican Communion.
For his first sermon following his ascen-
sion to the Chair of St. Augustine, Run-
cie told the assembled ranks of bishops,
bewigged members of the judiciary, and
assorted royalty about a recent dream.
“You know how sometimes in an En-
glish garden you find a maze,” Runcie
said. “The trouble is to get to the cen-
ter of all those hedges. It is easy to get
lost.” The Christian church, in Runcie’s
slightly strained analogy, was in such a
maze, and could progress toward its goal
only by turning back, toward the periph-
ery, in order to engage with those still
outside the church’s embrace.
“He said, ‘I had a dream of a maze,
and in this maze blah, blah, blah,’” the
maze designer Adrian Fisher recalled,
when I visited him late this summer, at
his home in Dorset, in southwest En-
gland. In 1980, Fisher was twenty-eight
years old and working for I.T.T., a mul-
tinational manufacturing company,
where he was responsible for produc-
tivity enhancement. He was increasingly
drawn to the idea of designing mazes;
he’d even formed a company, Minotaur
Designs, with a wealthy labyrintholo-
gist and former diplomat, Randoll Coate.
But public commissions proved elusive.
“At first, I thought it was impossible,”
Fisher said. “How do you start? How
do you do it?”
Runcie’s dream gave him an idea:
Fisher wrote to the letters page of the
London Times, brief ly outlining the
maze’s long history as a Christian sym-
bol and noting that, as in the Archbish-
op’s dream, a maze’s goal is typically
reached not by “pressing toward the
center” but, rather, by “returning almost
to the edge,” in order to find the proper
path. In his signature, Fisher styled him-
self a “Maze Consultant,” and, before
long, this stealth marketing had reeled
in a customer, and Minotaur’s first pub-
lic commission. Lady Elizabeth Brun-
ner, a former actress who was married
to a chemical magnate, invited Fisher
to tea. Over scones and jam, she won-
dered aloud whether he might create
an Archbishop’s Maze, inspired by Run-
cie’s words, in her garden at Greys Court,
a Tudor manor house in Oxfordshire.
Fisher didn’t yet have official statio-
nery, or even a typewriter, so he submit-
ted his proposal as a handwritten letter.
His design was circular: a brick path,
set in a lawn, that formed seven con-
centric rings winding toward a sundial
in the center. At first glance, it seemed
to replicate the traditional Christian
pavement labyrinth, the most famous
example of which is found in the nave
of Chartres Cathedral. Medieval laby-
rinths of this kind aren’t puzzles; there
is only a single path, arranged in a snak-
ing pattern of concentric folds, and to
process along it to the center is to par-
ticipate in a physical allegory of the
soul’s progress through life and toward
salvation. But at Greys Court a maze
walker—or aspirant, to use the techni-
cal term—encounters a junction within
seconds and has to make a choice. Fisher
cunningly combined the appearance of
the old Christian labyrinth with the
function of the puzzle maze, whose
solution, taking its cue from Runcie’s
metaphor, involves turning away from
the center initially, to journey around
the entire periphery.
The new Archbishop dedicated the
Greys Court maze in October, 1981, and
the resulting publicity generated more
maze commissions. With new custom-
ers lining up, Fisher took out a business
loan, bought a computer, a printer, and
a secondhand car, and reinvented him-
self as a full-time maze designer. The
course of his career, built on equal parts
passion and self-promotion, was set.
“See, you create events out of nothing,”
he told me. Fisher realized that if he
wanted to make mazes he first had to
make people want mazes. From his Run-
cie letter to his (successful) campaign
to have Britain declare 1991 the Year of
the Maze, he has devoted the past four
decades to creating both the market and
the product. Today, at the age of sev-
enty, he seems to have no intention of
retiring. By his own count, he has cre-
ated more than seven hundred mazes,
in forty-two countries. He is the world’s
leading maze-maker by a margin so
large that he has no real competition.
“He’s the only one who’s managed
to make mazes a business rather than
a hobby,” Jeff Saward, a historian of
mazes and labyrinths, told me. Saward,
who edits the research journal Caer-
droia—the Welsh name for a turf lab-
yrinth—estimates that, when Fisher
started out, there were no more than
fifty public mazes and labyrinths in the
U.K. There was just one text on the sub-
ject: “Mazes and Labyrinths: A Gen-
eral Account of Their History and De-
velopment,” by W. H. Matthews, from
- Matthews, a civil servant who had
fought in the First World War, wrote
the book in the Reading Room of the
British Museum on his return from the
trenches. Despite his fondness for mazes,
Matthews was convinced that they were
no more than a historical curiosity. “Let
us admit at once that, as a favorite of
fashion, the maze has long since had its
day,” he wrote. The book, proving his
point, sank almost without trace, and
its poor sales became a family joke.
Yet today maze observers agree that
there are more mazes than ever before,
and more being built each year. Mazes,
under Fisher’s watch, have become part
The Blenheim Palace maze, which Adrian Fisher co-designed in the eighties, is now featured on Britain’s five-pound note.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLAF OTTO BECKER
