The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  The man has not moved, not once in all those hours. Perhaps his head has tilted a degree or so to starboard, a couple of inches closer to the heaving chest. He’s hooded, dark-wrapped in the fur tatters of an overwintered Antarctic parka. He is evidence, an escapee from a recently discovered Edwardian photograph. A solid ghost from the sustaining darkness of a box camera rescued from melting ice.

  How long does it take to become a ghost? To become part of the city in which you are lost?

  A green prophylactic sheath, so green that it is almost black, shrouds this man’s unthinkable nakedness. Listen. A hissing puncture of breath eddies a track through the daisy-dusted grass. His heartbeat slows to the point of stopping altogether, being absorbed into the pulse of place. And ours in surreptitiously watching him. The Vegetative Buddha anchors the city, the bow of the spine hooked to his ribbed bench. I am fascinated by his physical presence, the discipline of staying just where he is through the waste of daylight: no food, no drink, no cigarettes. No digital devices. He is definitively off-line, definitively present. He challenges everything I think I know, the sorry accumulation of facts and broken histories required to facilitate my continued passage through familiar locations. My daily confirmation of self by witnessing the same structures, the same people in the same places. The man is wedged and supported by pillows of reeking ballast, carrier bags for protection not storage. Slogan visible: EVERY LITTLE HELPS.

  Some of us walk, some wait. They sit or stand, unmoving, meat statues. This Haggerston Park slump was more disturbing: there was no escape mechanism, no ladder of language. The man on the bench was kept alive by the southwards drift of London towards the weather of money: hipster Shoreditch, the City and the river, the dream of a shining future in which we are all supposed to share. And to suffer for, in dust and dirt. Poverty and welcome death.

  Within the opened parenthesis of this special enclosure – the former gas works, the filled-in canal basin undefiled by excesses of boosterism and regeneration – early walkers, joggers and canine accompanists stay resolutely inside their bubbles of entitlement. They swerve to avoid collisions, nodding acknowledgement only when it is strictly necessary. The sitting man is an invisible, a kind of human shrub; a dim, light-absorbing shape curtained by wisteria. They don’t see him, he isn’t there. And his own sight, the intensely local reach of his attention, redacts their nuisance contrails. They are unwelcome zephyrs. He drinks the agitated straw of their fretful momentum. And sneezes. Twice. And then once more.

  Haggerston Park joggers are a different stripe to the gang who have colonised the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. Those stylishly aerodynamic models, Silicon Roundabout athletes in their considered colours (green, lately, to complement the duckweed), take breakfast meetings as they run. They are aware of how they seem and how they want to seem. They advance, elbows out, barging aside mere pedestrians. Their pretty ears are plugged with devices. They are prepared to lease the view to invading TV crews lining up yet another gritty composition that takes in railway bridge, gasholder, and the ivy-choked and intermittently squatted gothic hutch alongside Empress Coaches. Fit young women haul accessorised dogs that are killing themselves to keep up. These wretched creatures are not allowed to shit: ever, anywhere. The canal is a double-banked street of narrow-boats with tricky names. Some of the boat people unclip slim-wheeled bicycles to join the peloton.

  In Haggerston Park, a circuit of wood chippings, sodden in season, has been laid out against the high brick walls, past the gate where James Mason staggered and died in the Belfast snow of Carol Reed’s 1947 film of Odd Man Out. But the track is too obvious an intervention and the body-image gladiators avoid it. But my man, the Buddha of the benches, is quite impervious to the passing figures that thump or stagger through his fixed frame. He is in a deeper trance: damaged, post-operative, on licence, somewhere close to persistent vegetative abdication of sensibility.

  There used to be a Vietnamese couple, or Cambodian perhaps, man and wife, connected to the Shoreditch restaurants or the Community Centre in Whiston Road. They marched, briskly, in silence, no nod or wink when their paths crossed: he clockwise, she counterclockwise, around the plastic football pitches. They disappeared right after the 2012 Olympic moment.

  The Romanian (or Armenian or Kurdish) women – my shameful ignorance of the Babel languages of the city hurts – are sociable and determined, faithful attenders at their early exercise klatch. I first noticed them as a group of five or six; strong, dark, contained; shaped after the fashion of Russian dolls. They conversed as they made their circuits, which extended incrementally, with no visible upgrade in pace, around the entire park; the southern section with the woodland walk, and then the enclosed northern portion invigilated by the unrecognised Buddha on his bench.

  Two white women, blondes, they might be mother and daughter, approached each other, down the whole length of the straight path visible to the slumped figure with his back to the wall. If he had lifted his head from his chest. If he felt the need to register this trivial intervention. The passing scene. How buoyant, how fresh and bright the women were, that morning. How pleased, even surprised, to come across one another, as they travelled in opposite directions, in this place. The older, slightly heavier one was waving and laughing. Or so I thought, until they crossed without a flicker of recognition, and I saw that the ‘mother’ was yapping into her fist-phone. That the ‘daughter’ was counting her paces, achieving the required footfall for her exercise regime.

  The park’s defining quality was its partial enclosure: the high wall behind the sitting man’s cloister, and the green wall to the south, beyond the toilet block, and the open fence on to the fitful stream of Queensbridge Road to his right. There was living history here, undispersed by improvers and salaried exploiters. An atmosphere that drew in London solitaries, along with fair-weather rug sprawlers, amateur and professional dog walkers, knots of uniformed Academy kids, and browsers of a certain dispensation testing the rose-scented and lavender-drenched air. No barbecues, no silver-torpedo whippets and shredded condom balloons. There were few published prohibitions but Haggerston Park never attracted the flash-mob hordes, the convention of chattering charcoal burners overspilling from Broadway Market into London Fields with no reference to the back story of resting geese, traumatised sheep and cattle taking a last munch before the tramp to Smithfield and slaughter. The road at the edge of the park is aspirational. An approved cycle track – they count the numbers – negotiating a spanking property cliff, growing floor by floor in the night, covertly, wrapped in flapping sheets like a Christo. And a City Farm. Cockcrow drowned by drills and sirens. The heartbreaking resignation of donkeys. Therapeutic animals on contaminated land.

  The park of the Vegetative Buddha is an island, a refuge. He is Crusoe, electively shipwrecked on a daily basis, vanishing at nightfall, before returning to the precise position, marked out by stains of cold sweat and leaking body liquors, that is his and his alone. His ears are stopped to excited languages from every quarter of the globe. London is a magnificent plurality, an iteration of potentialities: new lives, new beginnings. The bared ice dentures of the City skyline on the southern horizon glint with invitation. There is no patch of ground on this earth beyond the reach of that insatiable bite. There is no corrupt fortune, no spurious liquidity of kleptocrats and arms-dealers that cannot be sweetened within a couple of miles of this park. But within the close folds, within the posthumous dream of the man on the bench, London is a treasure trove of particulars. The new-builds and transformed children’s hospitals, the betrayed schools and bathhouses, speak of uniformity; gleaming surfaces, secure access, present debt and future profit. London as a suburb of everywhere: Mexico City, Istanbul, Athens. The same malls. The same managed alienation. The Babel of misunderstood tongues. In Soft City, back in 1974, Jonathan Raban admitted his confusion. ‘Turned to a dizzied tourist myself, forgetful and jet-shocked, I have to hunt my head for the language spoken here.’ We are transformed, as Raban anticipated,
into dumb tourists in our own midden. ‘But this is where you live; it’s your city,’ he said. ‘London, or New York, or wherever – and its language is the language you’ve always known, the language from which being you, being me, are inseparable.’

  The bench in the Haggerston cloister is steerage class, attracting new citizens and those who hope to achieve that status. They sit in the shadows, glugging on Red Bull, waiting for who knows what. Then departing for other benches, other parks, buses on which they will be challenged, properties where, if they arrive at the right hour, they might be allowed inside. Offered soup and a bed. Our hooded man, thick legged, heavy bodied, a deadweight, does not stir.

  The low ceiling of the cloister can be touched by an upright six-foot man. Above the ceiling, masked in a profusion of wisteria, is the bridge of the ship, an observation platform favoured by unsanctioned teenage lovers. Most frequently Asian. And sometimes rough-sleeping Polish builders in body bags.

  The frame of the view that the man on the bench continues to ignore is confirmed by two columns like stacks of carefully positioned brick doughnuts. Thin columns strangled by the gnarled trunk of the wisteria. There are flagstones in front of him, four lines, slabs with bumps and bubucles, open pores. The cracks between the slabs are dirt-encrusted, mortised with cigarette butts. Then a neat border of grey bricks, a cambered path, more bricks, furled cypresses in pots, and the carpet of grass on which twenty-three dogs, leads tangled, are trying to revert to a pack. The man on the bench absorbs it all, fixes the agitation with rigorous disinterest. Around him and beyond him, the conversations of dog people. The groaning of the lastbreath jogger. The synchronised march of economic migrants. The back strut of the hard bench, offering support to his boneless mass, touched a nerve at the base of the spine, tapping the stored sunshine in the bricks, the breathless shifts and shimmers of the leaves and plants. The susurration of the drooping willow tent. Undisturbed in the shallows of Haggerston Park, our Vegetative Buddha is part of a climate of managed despair. He is outside time. And beyond language. His silence provokes our talk. His stillness our motion. He is learning to fade from his own consciousness and thus from the reach of a city that has no use for him.

  Within the restless nightmare of the man on the bench, in which I am now trespassing, while trying to take no conspicuous notice, old stories flicker. From 1832, after the cutting of the canal system, and the swinish rush of exploiters responding to a revised geography, the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company took over this ground, old market gardens and brick kilns, for their operations. A substantial part of the northern portion of the present park became a basin for coal-carrying barges. There were feeder ponds. Through the eyes of the Vegetative Buddha I saw water instead of grass. One morning, after a night of storms and heavy rain, immediately after the Brexit decision, the ill-considered quitting of Europe, gesture politics of the most stupid kind, Haggerston Park became a lake, herring gulls floating in strategic occupation.

  Where did that name come from, Haggerston? Norseman’s Hergotstane. Or Agostane: as John Rocque’s map of 1746 has it. Hackerstone dissolving into stoned hackers. The walkers, rushing, striding out, chasing, are addicts, convinced that there is an improved and edited version of the world to be transfused through the pulsing tablet in the hand. They are wedded to these digital phylacteries, carried everywhere to announce an irrational faith in dangerously corrupted information systems.

  On 29th July 1992, a helicopter landed in the park, breaking the code of silence. There were other noises from busy roads, Whiston and Queensbridge and Hackney. From dogs. And crows. And chickens. There was visual noise too, from spray cans, upbeat slogans, fences shielding music festivals. Red helicopters ferried road victims to the Royal London Hospital. Police helicopters from High Beach, on the edge of Epping Forest, hovered at twilight, reminding malcontents and post-code affiliations that they were under 24-hour observation. But the intrusion on that July day was unexpected. From the shining pod emerged a weird anthropomorphic couple, genetically modified rodents, honeymooners perhaps, Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Attended by their plutocrat Hollywood patron, Michael Jackson. He was trembling and waving, like one of the undead in aviator shades, on his way to another recorded charitable visitation at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road.

  From the skies again, 15th March 1945: god’s fire. A V2 rocket from Peenemünde achieved a direct hit on a Haggerston gasholder. Earth shuddering. Epoch defining. Oral histories recalled, as bright as ever, in old age. In that retina-tearing flash was an archive of deleted sepia landmarks: the Nag’s Head pub, Tuilerie Street of the tile-makers, coal barges supplying the cylindrical iron retort in which London’s gas was manufactured.

  Wilderness, not to be tolerated – rubble, convolvulus, sycamore – was sanctioned as parkland in 1956 and opened to the public in 1958. The design by Rupert Lyell Thorpe, an old naval hand and jobbing London County Council architect, was shipshape, invoking the concrete boat buildings of the Thirties, beached avatars of the Queen Mary, like Marine Court in St Leonards-on-Sea. HMS Haggerston Park: a realised vision. A cruise ship with brick superstructure and meadowed deck was moored beside the canal, as part of an armada of imperial nostalgia, before casting off to conquer the unknown – in company with the weathervane galleon waiting for a fair wind above the decommissioned Haggerston Baths in Whiston Road.

  The Vegetative Buddha’s sightline, between the twin cypress trees, across the pond of grass, led to a giant compass in the form of a sundial. The flagpole, to starboard, by the raised bandstand area, was once a mast, dressed with a long spar, a main yard. Curved brick windbreaks suggested lifeboats. The gardeners and maintainers of the park respected the metaphor. They spoke of introducing a retired canal barge, planted with black grass, as a memento mori for the water traffic diverted when Haggerston Basin was filled in. Poplars would be set in a circle around the site of the bombed gasholder and trained to mimic its shape. Once you understand how nothing is lost and how tactful design carries industrial residues into an era of compulsory recreation, the odder details of the park make perfect sense.

  The Haggerston enclosure sustains and informs those who choose to come here, to work, to exercise or sit. They are inoculated by its mythology. The microclimate is a heady drench, a bliss drug. I swallow it every morning. I pass this way, cheered by the constant presence of the man on the bench, in the late afternoon. Give me a lever of attention and one fixed point and I’ll move the world. My silent oracle, the beached philosopher in his metaphorical barrel, oversees all the mysterious features laid out around the fringes of the verdant deck. A shallow declivity, produced by some finger-sized meteor fragment, made into a shrine by twelve slender birch trees. A sacred circle of eight stone blocks like an amputated henge. Willow skirts in which new children hide. Heaped woodchip trenches going into scrub woods like a First War invocation. Sheep and donkeys grazing together alongside intimations of vanished streets and tight terraces; a spectral vortex of bootmakers, cabinet fakers and mantua wholesalers. The smell of cabbages, pubs and coal heaps.

  For us, and for the investors in the new flats with their new names, secure entrances, bicycle balconies, this older London is out of reach: a choice download, a tarot of approved images and sounds. Those who notice the man on the bench are hobbled by sentiment: that our city is a sentient being, an organism alive and alert in all of its parts. And capable, generation after generation, of renewing itself by recovering and recording the myths that matter. By tempering greed. By justified riot and the delirium of the mob soliciting reaction. Forcing the grim machinery of state to declare itself in new technologies of repression, a subtler category of taser and thumbscrew. London, after so many abortions and rebirths, is an exhausted womb. But something different is surely emerging. It always does.

  The man on the bench – in my fabricated version of him, my ignorance of the actual circumstances that brought him here – is immobilised by that knowledge. He is liquid-coshed, brain-clubbed, wedg
ed in the shadows. HMS Haggerston Park, the spatial integrity of its shape confirmed by his disinterested affection, sails on. What was he telling me? Was there any significance in the position he took up, every morning, turning right through the gate? I never saw him arrive. I never saw him leave. I was nudged into following his line of his witness, through the park and over Hackney Road, towards the City and the Thames.

  I didn’t get far, Yorkton Street. That old nun, another walker, the one who stormed up Queensbridge Road, arms swinging as if on ski poles, the figure in black I used to encounter in quieter times on the canal path heading towards Victoria Park, she came from here: the convent of St Saviour’s Priory, one of the Sisters of St Margaret. By her pace, the miles she covered, stooped over, eyes glinting, I took these Sisters for a pedestrian order. Beating the bounds on a daily pilgrimage of grace. Good works delivered in person, like it or not. I never knew what to do with her challenging smile, her withheld benediction. Should I drop to my knees or indulge in some pantomime of respect for a fellow tramp?

  The Yorkton corridor, with its car park where six-handed dog walkers met and exchanged leads, was a staging post in the Vegetative Buddha’s reconfiguration of Pilgrim’s Progress. On the right, marking the edge of the frame, the redbrick wall of the Arts and Crafts convent features a relief crucifixion, three sculpted figures. A gaunt harp-ribbed Christ with darkly carbonised features. Two women, one bareheaded, one covered – the Marys, Virgin Mother and Magdalene – at the base of the cross. The tree of execution rests on a skull, a mound of Golgotha rubble. This tableau, unnoticed by cyclists and joggers, is a stolid echo of Albrecht Altdorfer’s Crucifixion of 1514–16. The stone cross seems to be an extension of, and in alignment with, the ship’s mast in Haggerston Park: confirmation of the benched man’s Via Dolorosa. Jesus nailed to the yardarm like a heretic Billy Budd, a warning to others. With no hope of resurrection.