THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 61
of the British heritage business, de ri-
gueur at stately homes, where, along
with tearooms and gift shops, they can
raise money to pay for otherwise crip-
pling repair and tax bills. They have
also diversified: Fisher helped invent
the corn mazes that pop up alongside
pumpkin patches on farms across Amer-
ica each fall, and reintroduced mirror
mazes to piers, theme parks, and malls
worldwide. He will happily design a
labyrinth inscribed with religious quo-
tations for a megachurch in North Car-
olina; a maze adventure with an artifi-
cial volcano, lake, and safe room for a
Middle Eastern princess; a thumb-size
maze tattoo for an anonymous female
client; and a vertical maze for a fifty-
five-story skyscraper in Dubai, with
meanders that double as balconies. He
does eighty per cent of his business
overseas, and he told me that he has
won nine Guinness World Records for
superlative mazes of various sorts. “Of
course, I wrote the rules about how a
maze qualifies for the Guinness Book
of Records,” he added.
I
f you rely on G.P.S. directions to visit
Fisher, you will arrive at the wrong
place: in front of an imposing Regency
mansion, built two centuries ago to
adorn the estate of the local landowner,
the First Viscount Portman. Fisher used
to live there, but he and his wife down-
sized a few years ago, after the young-
est of their six children went to college.
They moved to a modest brick cottage
in the stable yard and sold the main
house, but retained much of its seven-
acre garden. The fact that Fisher’s new
address forces unwary visitors to per-
form a three-point turn on a narrow
country lane and then retrace their route,
craning their necks to spot a lengthy
driveway that loops around to the cor-
rect entrance, is an ancillary benefit.
In person, Fisher cuts a Colonel
Blimp-ish figure, barrelling along rural
roads in his battered four-by-four, nosh-
ing on suet-crusted steak-and-kidney
puddings with lashings of Lyle’s Golden
Syrup, writing a column for his local
newspaper, and airing his pet peeves:
“woke” culture, Eastern European im-
migrants, and, above all, the French.
Portly, white-haired, and clean-shaven,
he sports the uniform of middle-class
Englishmen of a certain age—pleated
chinos, a collared shirt, and a jewel-tone
sweater, down which he has invariably
spilled some of whatever he was eating.
At his home, Fisher first talked to
me in his studio, a big shed stuffed with
books, models, and vast amounts of
clutter. His wife, Marie, who is also his
business partner, brought us coffee and
biscuits. “It’s a colorful existence I lead,
I suppose,” he said, as he rattled off his
past projects and expressed the hope
that I would be able to capture the full-
ness of his talents, “as a Renaissance
man of diverse fields of endeavor and
creativity.” (These efforts include an
unfinished novel involving astronauts,
Admiral Nelson, and Arthurian knights;
and elaborate mosaics made using his
own geometrically advanced tiling sys-
tems.) As he told me story after story
about the stuff in his office—a tapes-
try he’d embroidered depicting the
Blenheim Palace maze, which he co-
designed in the late nineteen-eighties
and which is now featured on Britain’s
five-pound note, and a rather fetching
Scottish tartan created for Queen Vic-
toria by a distant ancestor—I concluded
that Fisher is either slightly deaf or
given to ignoring questions he doesn’t
find interesting.
Fisher’s relentless drive—“he’s just
carried forth on the crest of the wave
of his invention and energy,” as his friend
the artist Patrick Hughes put it—makes
him both difficult and admired. Several
of the maze experts I talked to, while
conveying great respect for his work,
hinted that they did not necessarily ap-
preciate his company. His business part-
ners prior to Marie ended up parting
ways with him; so, for that matter, did
an earlier wife.
Born in 1951, Fisher grew up in
Bournemouth, on the south coast of
England. As a boy, he liked to make up
his own riddles and card games. “I took
a book on recreational mathematics on
holiday once,” he recalled. “My father
said, ‘That’ll do you a fat lot of good.’”
Fisher’s father was a family doctor, like
his father and his father’s father before
him. “He couldn’t see how I could get
a livelihood out of it,” Fisher said.
Fisher was sent to Oundle, a posh
school in the Midlands, and then he
took a course in accounting at Ports-
mouth Polytechnic (now the Univer-
sity of Portsmouth). He spent the next
eight years in industry, conducting time-
and-motion studies in order to help
businesses, including a paper-and-pack-
aging conglomerate and I.T.T., the man-
ufacturing giant, optimize efficiency.
But his obsession with mazes, above all
other puzzles, had already taken hold.
In 1975, several elm trees in the Fisher
family’s back garden succumbed to dis-
ease. Fisher, by then in his twenties, and
his teen-age siblings decided to bend
and weave a newly exposed thicket of
holly bushes into a maze shape. His
younger brother, Bill, told me, “We used
to have big parties every summer, and
friends would use it and go through the
little tunnels and things, usually com-
pletely drunk.”
T
he oldest hedge maze still in exis-
tence is, coincidentally, the one
with which I am most familiar. As teen-
agers, my brother and I lost at least half
a dozen French and German exchange
students within the clipped evergreen
walls of a small yew maze tucked into
an odd triangle at the northern edge of
the gardens of Hampton Court Palace.
The Tudor palace, which lies southwest
of central London on the banks of the
Thames, was a favorite residence of
Henry VIII, who received it as a gift—
albeit one offered under some duress—
from Cardinal Wolsey, his chief min-
ister. Today, the palace is perhaps best
known for its maze, the lone survivor
of three or four labyrinths built there
around 1690, as part of a substantial re-
design that converted what had previ-
ously been an orchard into a fashion-
able new garden called the Hampton
Court Wilderness.
“The word ‘wilderness’ doesn’t mean
the same as we know it today,” Graham
Dillamore, a head gardener at Hamp-
ton Court, told me, as we strolled past
beds filled with the last of the summer
roses on a misty September day. “This
would have been an area where you
could have had some mystery and some
thrills in an orderly fashion, without
having to go somewhere and actually
be lost.” The maze, which consists of a
Fisher’s career has been built on equal parts passion and self-promotion. “See, you create events out of nothing,” he says.
