THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 69
frightened that it was too big,” he said.
“But the Chinese are utterly driven.”
He pulled out a worn road atlas and
balanced it on the steering wheel, trac-
ing our new route before pointing out
that the crucial element of all networks
is the node, not the channel. “There’s no
point making planes fly faster and burn
up more fuel,” he said, while attempt-
ing to overtake a tractor on a single-lane
road going uphill. “The crucial thing is,
can you shave twenty-eight minutes off
from the moment of touchdown to the
moment of picking up your car?”
“Chop-chop,” he said, chivying the
car in front of us, before describing a
bus map that he had designed for Lon-
don Transport in the eighties, in order
to solve overcrowding on the Tube. At
the time, he said, the average bus jour-
ney in London was only three-quarters
of a mile in length. “If you could get
that up to one and a half miles,” he told
transit officials, “it would give you an-
other five-, ten-, or even fifteen-year
lease of life on the existing underground
network.” Travelling by Tube was, for
most riders, easy but inefficient. What
was missing was a bus version of Harry
Beck’s famous simplified map of the
London Underground: something that
would make it straightforward for pas-
sengers to see what bus number they
should take, where they should get on,
and when they should get off.
Fisher’s prototype, which he dubbed
a “star map,” depicted the immediate
location in a central circle, with sche-
matic bus routes radiating outward, so
that riders could find their desired des-
tination and then trace the bus route
back to see where their nearest stop
was. Officials declined to pursue Fish-
er’s idea, but, a few years later, Lon-
don’s bus system, which had by then
been reorganized into a different agency,
came up with and implemented a sim-
ilar design independently—one that,
under the name “spider maps,” is still
in use today.
This intervention is just one of many
redesigns that Fisher has in mind for
England’s entire transportation network.
Perhaps his most far-fetched dream is
to rename London’s Tube stations using
a numbered grid, for international leg-
ibility. “Tottenham Court Road will be
Sixty-six instead,” he said, explaining
the system, which, to his disappoint-
ment, has been met with a singular lack
of enthusiasm. “Most people don’t ask
the right questions,” he said, “because
most people don’t know how to think.”
Before Fisher successfully contrived
his career as a maze designer, he spent
some years working at Sellotape, an ad-
hesives manufacturer. Back then, the
company made two hundred different
adhesive formulations, but its factory
had only sixteen mixing tubs. One of
Fisher’s proudest achievements there,
he told me, was redesigning the incen-
tive scheme, so that workers got bonuses
not for keeping tubs full but instead for
how little time their colleagues at the
next stage of the production process
spent waiting for a fresh tub. “I squeezed
another three or four per cent of down-
time out of the system,” he said.
A man whose early career revolved
around industrial efficiency might seem
like an odd candidate to become the
world’s leading designer of landscape-
scale devices for wasted movement and
lost time. Then again, as Bret Roth-
stein pointed out to me, Fisher was
uniquely equipped for the job: “Being
a specialist in path optimization is going
to help make you a specialist in path
de-optimization.” Beyond that, how-
ever, I started to sense that Fisher sees
mazes as “machines for helping people
think,” to borrow Rothstein’s construc-
tion. Rather than single-handedly at-
tempt to improve the time-and-motion
efficiency of a nation, Fisher has un-
dertaken a more streamlined, if quix-
otic, process: build mazes that nudge
millions toward a puzzle-solving cast
of mind. The English hedge, histori-
cally uprooted by protesting peasants
as a hated symbol of common-land en-
closure, industrialization, and wage slav-
ery, has, in Fisher’s hands, become an
engine of twenty-first-century produc-
tivity—all the while generating reve-
nue for what remains of Britain’s rul-
ing classes.N
early twenty years ago, after two
decades spent building mazes for
other people, Fisher decided that it was
time to build one for himself, in Dor-
set. The hedges, made up of nine hun-dred yew plants, are arranged in an oc-
tagonal design, with a turreted brick
folly in the center. A couple of years
after planting it, he took a TV reporter
from a BBC culture show on a tour and
launched into a detailed description of
two nonexistent features: a rotating
hedge and a trick seat that, when you
sat on it, would trigger an entire hedge
wall to slide back, revealing the goal.
“It’s only when you give in to Fisher
and sit down in despair that, finally, you
can solve the maze,” he said to the cam-
era, referring to himself in the third
person and gesturing at a row of spin-
dly yew bushes that barely reached his
thigh. A voice-over explained, in neu-
tral tones, that this maze “exists mostly
in his imagination.”
Fisher frequently calls his back-garden
maze a “party machine,” capable of re-
shuffling visitors more efficiently than
the most accomplished hostess. But when
he and his wife took me outside to see
it, a classically damp British summer had
left it looking neglected and sodden. The
yew bushes were shaggy, and the grass
paths between them were strewn with
dandelions. The plywood floor of the
central folly had rotted through entirely.
Evidently, Fisher had moved on: the fi-
breglass ribs of a pseudo-Gothic pavil-
ion were scattered on the grass near the
swimming pool, awaiting construction.
Earlier, in his office, he had told me that
he was determined to build a thirty-foot-
tall pagoda but had yet to tell his wife.
“The whole thing is: What joyful things
can you put in the garden?” he said.
I entered Fisher’s maze. With just one
dead end, and several possible ways to
reach the center, the puzzle took me all
of three minutes to solve. It takes con-
siderably longer to trim the hedges, Fisher
told me: fourteen hours a year. He re-
trieved a power trimmer—a shoulder-
mounted, gasoline-fuelled pole topped
with a two-foot blade—to demonstrate,
much to Marie’s dismay. “There’s no time
for faffing about,” he said, disappearing
around the corner with an ear-splitting
whine, shaving the feathery, light-green
growth atop each hedge wall into a mil-
itary-style buzz cut. “He just trims ev-
erything and leaves it for the minions to
clean up,” she sighed, fetching a wheel-
barrow. “That’s me.” The maze at Fisher’s home, in Dorset. He often calls it a “party machine,” for its ability to efficiently reshuffle guests.