The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  The shaded Samuel Palmer tunnel known as ‘The Woodland Walk’ led to a secluded bench where a group of rough-sleepers, Eastern Europeans, were sharing a bottle of raw spirits. I passed first, with a non-committal wave. Anna, who was wearing a blue cap, zipped jacket, jeans, was given a much warmer welcome. One of the men held out the bottle and waved her over. And then, shaking his head, clearing blurred vision, a muttered word or two. Repeated in English. ‘It’s a woman! A woman!’

  Some of Rope’s panels, crusaders with red crosses on white shields, could serve as UKIP banners. St George in 1933: PRAY FOR ENGLAND. I WILL DELIVER THEE THROUGH THE POWER OF JESUS CHRIST. There never was a greener England, a luxuriant turf island detached from an unseen and unrequired Europe. The crucifix of the naked Christ is driven into the ground somewhere very close to Glastonbury.

  At Quidenham in Norfolk, after she converted to Catholicism, Margaret Rope was invited by the Bishop of Northampton to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. In 1978 she left Putney for the last time and returned to the family farm in Suffolk. She died in March 1988, her short-term memory obliterated, after a long period in which the past grew brighter as the present faded, a condition loosely characterised as Alzheimer’s Disease.

  There is a photograph of Rope, in smock or all-encompassing habit, hair short as a boy, perched on a set of high steps, attending to one of the stained-glass windows with a measuring rod. She makes us feel that she could step through the barrier and take the place reserved for her in the composition. Like the man on the bench in Haggerston Park, she would become a blind watcher on the far side, a still point among the floating debris of the city.

  BY WEIGHT OF WATER

  ‘You find things by the wayside.’

  WG Sebald

  Are the coots, patrolling this stretch of the canal, now suffering from smokers’ cough? Suffering from London? Small lungs choked with duckweed, beaks knotted with slime? Among the vaulting echoes of the railway bridge, a barking sound, a dry tubercular retching. Like a horse being slowly strangled, its chain caught around its neck, as it tries to mount the ramp to the towpath, after stumbling into the water. It takes a moment or two, halting on my morning walk in a place where it’s much safer to keep moving, where wild-eyed cyclists stamp the pedals in furious entitlement, to identify the source of the horror. A small dog, a terrier, is swimming in tighter and tighter circles, clean sweeps of the radiant green surface, coughing for dear life. Coughing like the interior of a nineteenth-century Spitalfields tenement. Coughing, going under, head jerking up, coughing again. While the owner, I now see, waits with his back against the sticky wall, brushing a leather coat, assessing possible spray-can transfers, swaying a little, reaching down for a bottle.

  Every time the animal makes it to the edge, gets its frantically scrabbling paws on the bank, the man nudges it back into the water. Not violently, no kick to the head. A playful prod of the toe. It’s just a game. And then it starts again. The awful sound challenging witnesses who make no move to intervene. This, I recognise, is a feuilleton – as Sebald calls it – to transcribe for future use. A snapshot of Hackney.

  Public officials, invisible until they swoop, are not so fastidious. One of the human markers I catalogued, alongside the Buddha on the bench in Haggerston Park, was a rough sleeper in a black bag (the kind in which a body might be removed from a crime scene), on a muddy shelf disputed by a pair of swans, and sometimes rats, along from the Empress Coaches garage, under Mare Street railway bridge. Every morning through that winter, in rain and snow, I passed him; encouraged in my own pedestrian rituals by this person’s ability to remain just where he was, breathing softly, unnoticed, unmolested and late-rising.

  I worried when a hut was constructed from driftwood and plastic sheets hooked from the canal. When the solitary guerrilla, who melted seamlessly into the canal’s rubbish trail, spindrift among Red Bull cans and burger caskets, hooded and hidden, found some company. The shelf became a camp. A mess of supermarket trolleys, oilcan stoves, improvised kennels, rubber carpets. The other men went off about their business, but the solitary original stayed in his bag well into the morning. His unseeing neighbours, yards away, under another arch, were laying out cafetières and croissants for their round-table breakfasts. It was not to be tolerated. Footage of the Calais holding camp made regular appearances on television. This was Hackney. This was the future, the resurrected canal system. This was the film set.

  On the morning of 14th April 2016, they came: at cockcrow. Mobhanded, and by the book, insultingly polite, the bailiffs surrounded his nest before the sleeper had time to take in what was happening. HOME OFFICE IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT. But it wasn’t immigration they were enforcing, quite the reverse. Black vans parked where TV catering trucks were usually to be found, outside that dowager among ruins beside the Empress Coaches garage; a barrel-chested building regularly in employment as shorthand for blight in neo-noir dramas, and as familiar to viewers as the flaking pink house in Princelet Street, Spitalfields, from Dickens and Ripper heritage pieces.

  There were six officers in black uniforms. Most of them on phones, walking up and down, with their backs to the humans whose particulars they were checking. Three of the sleepers stayed on their mattresses. Notices had been posted, earlier that week, along this stretch of the canal, inviting ratepayers and concerned citizens to report rough-sleepers. By the afternoon of that same day, the unapproved immigrants were gone. The rubbish was untouched. The hut unbroken. From the dank shelf the sorry troop would be taken into a purgatory of suspended identity, endless paperwork, postponed hearings. They would be held pending further investigation. Sometimes for months, years, decades. Insulted with tokens to spend at an approved store. Forbidden public transport. Removed from sight.

  On the following morning, the pioneer bivouacer was back, alone. Dug in among wreckage. But it didn’t hold. The balance of the world was disturbed. He was landfill. The magic was cancelled. He disappeared.

  That was not quite the end of it. With London it never is. Detouring to pick up an oversize package – Atlas of Improbable Places by Travis Elborough and Alan Horsfield – from the sorting office in Emma Street, I found the pavement blocked by a nose-to-tail rank of coaches. Touring models with coffee-coloured paint jobs and Empress of London heraldry. The oily puddle of the garage beside the canal was, I presumed, in occupation by a TV crew.

  And so it proved. The displaced squatters and the campers from the shelf under the bridge were reduced to leaving painted messages, sentences with missing letters, on the walls of Corbridge Crescent: raying you won’t be beaten up sleeping rough. ife without hope. It was not easy to tell, in an era of digital cannibalism, if the messages were an authentic cri de coeur, spraycan interventions, or set-dressing for a film. ife without hope.

  A genuine communication, handwritten, was attached to the broken fence alongside the mooring once favoured by the more anarchic and off-grid narrowboats. CREW LUNCH. Film not nautical. This water was no longer water, big-foot coots hopped from bank to bank. The duckweed baize was a glitter of meshed emeralds. A parked camera crane, Nifty HR12, waited its moment. The expelled were not quite ready for their terminal close-ups.

  What might, a mile or two down the A13, near the smoking landfill dune at Rainham, have been an exotic junk-ghetto of unwanted containers, was a hip retail park, a post-industrial stack set beside the decommissioned gasholder. The investment presented itself as a city of the future: CONTAINERVILLE. Shared space had already been allocated: POP UP PROJECTS, RECORD-PLAY/PHONEFILE/ FINDTUNES, LONDON CRAFTED BEER FESTIVAL LIMITED, WOOZLE RESEARCH, MAX BETS, CURRENCY CLOUD, DIGITAL MUMS STUDIO.

  From the curve of the wall under the bridge, I had a privileged view of the squatted shelf. The sleeper was back. I watched him, fully clothed, trainers ready for rapid departure, tossing and turning on his mattress. He was shielded from the sight of potential informers on the towpath by a strategically positioned slab of plywood.

  On the north side of the canal, in alignm
ent with the Corbridge Crescent rough-sleepers, buddleia bushes alongside the bus garage on Sheep Lane offered useful cover. There was also a stinking porch, yards deep in encrustations of pigeon crap. An optimistic junk dealer had two liberated street signs on offer, symbolic markers for the last London: WARDOUR STREET W1, SPITALFIELDS E1. Like trophies rescued from the rubble of the Blitz. Areas devasted by intrusive Crossrail burrowing.

  Ah! Reach for that notebook. Freshly sprayed this morning: ANGELS GATHER HERE.Woodsmoke from tin chimneys.Yawning cats. The settlement of the moment isn’t brownfield, but the emerging water village. Double- and treble-banked streets of narrowboat dwellers grasping, before the rest of us, that the defining process of the times is migration. Occupation is anarchy. Property is debt. Why not play at riparian bohemianism for a season, while staying as close as you can to the artisan bakeries of Broadway Market. Before moving on, moving out. Accepting in a spirit of enquiry your banishment to Ponders End and beyond.

  Used-book barges. Fancy cake-makers. Menders and bodgers and tarot readers. And collectors of empty bottles. The world is turning fast: new-build canalside towers are purchased by Chinese investors while nice middle-income English couples become boat people in a parody of crowded, deck-to-deck Asian harbours and rivers. A new white stencil among the wall-tats on the towpath: SHOREDITCH IS THE REVENGE OF FU MANCHU.

  A box of roughly chopped logs, of the kind I last saw stacked in the porch of a farm cottage in the Neath Valley, to see a poet through the winter, is now vividly present and resinous on the roof of a Hackney narrowboat. Tomatoes in growbags. Beans without blackfly. Gardens in wooden trays. And portholes repaired after intruders. And burnt out shells. And For Sale notices – without the intervention of estate agents. The canal is about a barter economy.

  When they paint JE SUIS CHARLIE on the railway bridge, in the immediate aftermath of the Paris massacre, it becomes as much a post-historic exhibit in the catalogue of London signage as one of the faded Victorian trade signs on some warehouse in Shoreditch or Stoke Newington – or the serial announcements of the innocence of armed robber George Davis, bang-to-rights guilty but fitted up on that particular occasion. George will be remembered as an East End territorial tag when otherwise dead and forgotten.

  I abandoned myself to the excited dialogues of joggers and cyclists from Europe, and all the other places too: London was an integrated acoustic landscape in which every culture was free to ignore every manifestation of difference. We keep to our pods, slipstreaming in parallel lines that never touch. The English language is such a rarity that I took to transcribing odd morsels thrown out by phone addicts, robotic transients who used their smart electronic devices as mechanisms for homing in on a target. A drone in the hand is better than two under orders from George Bush.

  Information junkies were walking faster, heads down, from flats and boats, from ramps and roads, zeroing on the digitally illiterate, making them swerve and cringe.

  ‘So, essentially, I forgot to take the keys back?’

  ‘So ideally that works for you basically? The 22nd of September? Three days or four days is just fine with me.’

  ‘So the problem is I don’t know any proper men. All I know is women.’

  ‘So it might be an idea if you speak to the concierge.’

  ‘So take them. I’ve got a fridge full of fruit.’

  ‘So he’s a chocolate maker, that’s very exciting.’

  ‘So dancing with a dog… yeah, honestly, a dog.’

  ‘So he said I should get Botox.’

  ‘So I’m applying for a US teaching visa. And I’m also applying for German, just in case.’

  ‘So they’re raised in incubators all over the country. But once they mate, they mate for life. Boris is behind all that.’

  ‘People are so hungry, they’re starving. So it’s like sex on your wedding night.’

  ‘So I rang Stacey to say, “What’s the air temperature in Melbourne?” Very important.’

  ‘I’m allergic to honey, so I can’t eat cornflakes. So do you know Will Smith?’

  ‘Uber to Shoreditch House costs about eight quid.’

  There were complicated reasons why I wobbled across the rim of the Cat and Mutton lock gate, before peering down into the sludge, a shifting slop of blue cans and rancid polystyrene cartons. It was the afternoon of the day after the towpath was sealed with blue and white ribbon in yet another malign fiesta. To be guarded by serious, broad-bottomed policewomen in yellow tabards, with comical bowler hats perched on stiff hair: like a Clockwork Orange hen party. More officers, males in padded vests, overendowed with torches, phones and weaponry, requiring a waddle rather than a walk, propped themselves against the open door of a black van to blow froth from jumbo beakers of takeaway coffee and to fang at Broadway Market doughnuts. Sugar moustaches and polished hardnut heads.

  I thought of Wyndham Lewis and his unfashionable purgatorial trilogy, The Human Age. From 1928, when the project began, Lewis laboured to construct the geometrical fortifications for a Magnetic City that could be read, at a stretch, as a prescient blueprint for Stratford’s Olympicopolis (the ugliest word in the language).

  ‘Across the river looms the City of Heaven.’ After blasting and bombardiering in the First War, Lewis recognised canals as formidable barriers for pilgrims seeking access to Paradise. In London, man-made waterways evolved into their own suburbs, ribbons of speculative development. ‘The Waterman was now only a shadow,’ Lewis wrote. ‘He had passed through a veil of transparent steel…The blank-gated prodigious city was isolated by its riverine moat.’

  A sinister lump floated in the Broadway Market basin. There was a bellying green tent around an object not yet detached from the slime. Impossible to tell if this was how the perpetrator of the crime had left the headless torso, or if the authorities, sirening loudly to the scene, lights flashing, had chosen to mask the horror from public view, while they waited for the arrival of the forensic team. Shit happens. They witness it. And file the appropriate forms. Before tipping off one of Rupert Murdoch’s jackals – for a suitable bung. Wetting the beak, as the Sicilians have it.

  A pair of mallards stalked a solitary swan. The police presence imported a frisson of traditional excitement to Victorian cobbles over which the rudely expelled cyclists now bumped. News crews arrived later that day, when they discovered the identity of the floater, the butchered woman: Gemma McCluskie. In the first years of the new millennium, McCluskie played the part of Kerry Skinner in ‘more than thirty’ episodes of the EastEnders soap opera. A local woman, living close to Columbia Market, she found herself taking up a position on sets derived from actual Hackney buildings and quiet residential squares.

  The last known photograph of McCluskie has her in bright yellow, arm raised in the camera-clutching mime, like a swan’s neck, while she records the opening ceremony for the £650-million upgrade of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. Gemma was a woman of modest stature, an inch short of five foot, according to postmortem statistics. In agency snaps, with her long dark hair and holiday-tanned skin, the actress has a challenged Native American aspect.

  You might question, finding McCluskie’s head circled, what this event was all about. Others in that close-packed hospital crowd have their arms held high in a shared digital salute. We cannot identify the object or the person who excites their attention. You have to wonder why the photographer is making a record of the attendees, the charity mob. But the white aureole around McCluskie’s head is a halo of bad news not a beatification.

  A new morning with the taste of Hackney in the mouth: sticky lime secretions, musk of mature fox faeces, curtain-filtered bacon sizzle. I was striking south towards Haggerston Park when my sleepwalker’s reflex route was interrupted by a previously uncollected figure. On the shaded side of the road, I caught the pungent drift of this man’s ripeness, the London miles he had walked, early or overnight, as he headed north on a raised pavement polished by the rising sun. Here, if I was feeling romantic, was a prop
hecy of my alternative future. The harder path not yet taken. Twilight days of tramping in search of mislaid selves, stories uncompleted, forgotten friends.

  The man sported a red wool cap. There was a nautical tilt to his stance, as if he had been discharged, cast off by HMS Haggerston Park for the crime of premature motion. The park gates were not yet unlocked and the Vegetative Buddha had not taken his place on the bench. There was, if I insisted on it, a significant connection between the two men: the one who was frozen to his place like an ice-rimed ghost from Shackleton’s open boat, and the other, the mutineer or ancient mariner, roaming the city in quest of an audience.

  I saw this new lurching pedestrian, advancing at pace, as my own photographic negative. Where I was bleached in sand-coloured shirt and lightweight trousers, he favoured a many-layered, all-weather outfit. He was insulated in a black coat cinched with a brown leather belt. Beneath the ankle-length garment, inherited not scavenged, and carried off with effortless ritz, was a layer of dirty leather with a monkish hood. The man’s feet were sockless but shod in very experienced trainers. He tweezered an unlit cigarette in his outstretched right hand like a pedagogue’s chalk stub, ready to scatter the blackberry drift of reluctant Academy pupils, kids busy with their electronic devices slouching straight into the traffic. In the belief that these gizmos conferred a magical immunity from damage, a personal force field that flowed out ahead of them. Like that immortality, all too often withdrawn, of being young and foolish.

  The new walker on this patch had my attention. There was a lineage I was too quick to project on him: by way of Thomas De Quincey, Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens and Jack London. Outsiders shuffling from generation to generation as provocations for the tapeworm of interlinked London narratives. ‘Life rewritten by life,’ as B. Catling has it in The Erstwhile. Reluctant tellers of tales to blue uniforms in green rooms. False witnesses. My fetish was to believe that these men and women, randomly encountered, belonged to an older order of the city. They were not citizens of Olympicopolis. The vagrant walkers were disenfranchised and proud of it. Olympicopolis, on the banks of the River Lea, was defined as a space where no ghosts could settle.