The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  London voices. They are talking to their hands. Between Haggerston and Shoreditch, it’s money: owed, withheld, promised or stolen. It’s property, viewings to be arranged. It’s rehearsals, recces and shoots. It’s meetings in bars. Between Dalston Junction and Highbury, it’s domestic. Grandmothers and minders checking in. Outings to the Olympic Park. Until all the fragments we are forced to share become a single acoustic block. A soundtrack to the view from the window nobody has time or inclination to experience. I’m looking out and listening hard. Certain phrases are imprinted over the Snake Park, the canal, the Geffrye Museum. ‘A weird crow, man.’ ‘Speaking from Tokyo, Major Johnson.’ Small dramas of strangers in transit who allow me to share an unearned and undesired intimacy. ‘As soon as he walked out of the door, I called the Fraud Squad.’

  I’M SO HAPPY I’M NOT DOING THE ‘SPECIALS’ ANYMORE. LOOK AT THEM AND THERE’S NOTHING THERE, MUM. COMING INTO CANONBURY STATION, A BIT LATE. COULD YOU GET ME A LAGER? I TRUST JACKIE’S JUDGEMENT. SO – MY NAME’S SAPPHIRE? PUT YOUR MONEY AWAY. SO IT GOT TO THE POINT WHERE WE WERE GETTING ON EACH OTHER’S NERVES. WE HAVE SOME SPACE FOR A LITTLE WHILE. YOU KNOW CHARLES DICKENS? HE WAS A MAN IN THE VICTORIAN PERIOD. I TRUST JACKIE’S JUDGEMENT. I’M GOING TO HAVE A BIT OF A WARM UP, ‘COS I HAVEN’T STRUCK A BALL IN WEEKS. WE HAD A GOOD DAY IN THE OLYMPIC SWIMMING POOL. LEARNING ENGAGEMENT – WHERE WAS IT? EALING BROADWAY? PUT YOUR MONEY AWAY. THE TURKISH CREW IN HACKNEY. OH YEAH, THE GUY WHO DOES THE BOILER CHECKS IN BRAINTREE. DO I DETECT AN IRISH ACCENT? SO – MY NAME IS SAPPHIRE? IT’S FUNNY. IN SECONDARY SCHOOL, I WAS ONE OF FOUR CHARLOTTES. THEY GET FIRST CLASS ON ALL FLIGHTS. YOU RUNNING WITH MUSIC OR WITHOUT? THANK YOU FOR YOUR EFFORTS, AS EVER. YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS ARE REALLY APPRECIATED. PUT YOUR MONEY AWAY. WE WANT AS MANY YOUNG WOMEN AND FLOWERS AS POSSIBLE. IT’S SHACKLEWELL LANE. SOMEONE OR SOMETHING IS IN THE HOUSE. YOU SAYING YOU MUM CRAZY, YOU SISTER CRAZY, THEY ALL CRAZY? I’M GOING TO PICK UP A FRIDGE NOW FOR A TENNER, INNIT. NO MONEY CAN BE PAID IN BEFORE SEPTEMBER. I GIVE YOU MY CARD. I HAVE MONEY TUCKED AWAY. NO NO. I’M WAITING TO PAY. SAY AGAIN. DO I DETECT AN IRISH ACCENT? SHE NEEDS A RE-START, I THINK. IS MYRICK STILL IN THE OFFICE? HIS PHONE WAS OFF. WHAT APPROACH DO YOU HAVE? DON’T CALL ME EVER AGAIN. I’M JUST GOING TO PICK UP A FRIDGE NOW FOR A TENNER, INNIT. PUT YOUR MONEY AWAY. DON’T CALL ME EVER AGAIN. WE WANT AS MANY YOUNG WOMEN AND FLOWERS AS POSSIBLE.

  PIGEON FISHING

  ‘Unexplained, but not suspicious.’

  Police report on the death of George Michael

  I took up my position and allowed slowly thawing stones to become my throne, while I waited. And waited. I’m not sure what I thought was coming or how long it would take to arrive. The Bethnal Green church portico, with its view across snarling lines of traffic held at the lights of a busy junction, absorbed my token resistance. The virgin morning air was ripe with the poisons on which we feed. It was a good day to go fishing for pigeons.

  The Vegetative Buddha of Haggerston Park had taught me the value of staying still, rooting like a shrub. London needed its specialised witnesses, disaffiliated monks trained in silence. Involuntary momentum has to be bled out of the human machine, along with ambition. That hunger for stories and patterns. Church-sitters are on the far side of this thing: trauma. The worst has already happened. Now they are all waiting. And watching over nodal points. Halfway to becoming statues. Halfway to vanishing into the stone. As unloved as the great tribe of feral pigeons, those shit-machine rats in avian drag. Warm bodies like oil-lamps, vulnerable necks. Pecking mobs force-fed on crusts.

  I tried to read the fossil evidence left by former squatters, human and animal, at the church of St John. And I thought, as so often before, about the poet John Clare, rambling into town, during the slow years of his graveyard existence in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. How he identified his shamanic spot on the porch of All Saints’ Church; tucked away in an alcove, hat at his feet, staring down Gold Street, snatching awkwardly at phrases that would no longer knit. A recorded presence at the civic centre of the market town. A premature heritage piece established by a drawing in which he seems to levitate, hands on thighs, bareheaded in a spill of bounced light.

  Across Cambridge Heath Road, Daniel Mendoza, the bareknuckle Jewish pugilist and author of a classic book on the noble art, had his house on Paradise Row. His mythic blindness, as I stare across the diesel fug, shifts into a softer, pearlier glow than anything electricity can provide. His blue plaque becomes a medal of honour, not a satellite dish.

  At another window, left open against a hot night, above the Salmon and Ball public house, you are never free, once you have seen it, of Jock McFadyen’s painting from 1994. Jock has zeroed in, with the telephoto lens of a tabloid snoop, on a meaty Francis Bacon geezer doing a bit of business on the blower; an instrument which, gripped in that gnarled fist, becomes its rhyming-slang self, a bone.

  Another figure, a concussive negative in a white beard, loiters in the outer darkness of the upstairs room, under a bare bulb. More bulbs, coloured, constellate a flickering sign: MINI CABS. This is a termite operation working the gap between boozer and elevated railway. Under a lovely brain-damaged sky at the end of a long day’s drinking. A golden dazzle of meteor showers before we retch into the gutter.

  McFadyen, at this era, was the paparazzo of blight. He covered the waterfront and much beside, populating his turf with muscular, hoop-legged tarts, drawn from his own mirror image in a leather skirt. Tongue-sharing bombsite lovers chew and tug like James Ensor’s Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring. Ill-matched creatures, beaten by fate, dry hump in condemned doorways, watched by one-eyed dogs. The hobbled horses of Travellers crop the central reservations of arterial roads.

  As the dawn of the new millennium approached, humans disappeared from Jock’s Underground stations, his canal paths and steaming landfill dunes alongside the A13. Place required no auditors. The painter had learnt how to balance repulsion and reality. Even in his colonisation of the upstairs window at the Salmon and Ball, Jock noticed – and we have to notice it too – a gargoyle mask with rubbery features set in a niche among the bricks. This grotesque spirit of place rhymes with the face of the lurker in the room behind the cab dispatcher. And it floats across the traffic to the church porch where I am sitting, victim to the unedited spill of memory and anticipation, the imagery that drowns us when we are not allowed to walk, make notes or move.

  An instinct for upturns in the markets for property and painting kept Jock in play: trading one against the other. When he lifted his camera, I never knew if he was contemplating the acquisition of a chapel or providing the raw material for some huge canvas for the museum trade, the latest warehouse conversion. Our paths sometimes intersected in the afternoon, when Jock was running his dozy, studio-sharing greyhound alongside his bicycle, and I was plodding off, eyes on the ground, in the general direction of the Lea Valley. To be sure it was still there.

  I was conscious, while I waited for my man, the pigeon fisher, of Jock’s house, on the far side of the Museum of Childhood park. The Scottish realist painter, as he described himself, had been in the news. Driven to the edge of madness by the perpetual drone of idling engines, with attendant pollution, from police cars parked on the kerb outside his door, keeping all systems ticking over to support their computers before the next siren chase, Jock stormed out to hammer on metal and rant with enough fervour to get himself arrested and locked up for six hours. As he intended. And into the headlines.

  Today the 63-year-old said he was at his wit’s end. Sometimes there are as many as four police vehicles left unattended with their engines running for periods of an hour and a half, throughout the day, so in effect there is always a police vehicle belting out diesel fumes 24/7 unnecessarily. Mr McFadyen yesterday received an apology from his local station for being handcuffed and finger-printed but police cars on his road are still left running unattended.

  Jock was back in the news. Estate agents were invited to take the tour, with Idris Elba as a neighbour, pro
perty prices were rising fast. A bit of drama is an aphrodisiac.

  But we had been partners in modest subversion long before this; embarking an inflatable kayak, borrowed from the photographer Stephen Gill, for slow raids around the back rivers of the Olympic site. Chains had not yet been set across points of access. It was an Amazonian pilotage, picking our way through curtains of creepers, witnessing the blue flash of a kingfisher, saluting work gangs brought in to bury unsightly pylons.

  Jock came away with a substantial topographic record, manipulated on his own terms, in order to hold in permanent suspension the after-image of doomed industries and dispersed communal enterprises. The paintings played alongside Gill’s Lea Valley elegy, the photographs he curated as Archaeology in Reverse. Yellow lines left by surveyors as outlines for coming media centres, blue fences in progress. All the rituals enacted up to the moment when the temple of the Olympic Stadium began to rise from the ground.

  Stephen, who kept a studio overlooking the railway in Bethnal Green, soon learned what those wide horizons had to teach him: when to move out. And how to haunt the places that haunted him. In his books there is always a cumulative momentum. He is a transient in a place that has lodged in his heart, knowing that, all too soon, he will have to give it up. His Hackney reportage is like a letter to a friend, filled with unexpected detail. Nothing has to be explained, but this is what he saw today. Out-takes can be safely laid aside, catalogued and left for the next adventure in refracted autobiography.

  I was happy to wait on the church porch in Bethnal Green. Perhaps this would be the end of the story. I might have made the successful transition from walker to watcher. Staying where I was, I could trawl back through the mind-movies of my encounters with Stephen Gill. The pleasure I took from the independent books he produced, the unexpected angles of approach he brought to his engagement with Hackney, the marshes and the Lea Valley.

  Our expeditions usually begin at first light. This time, Stephen explained, we would be better to hold off until the worst of the rush hour had burnt itself out. I waited, admiring a procession of those bright red obstacles known as buses. In my unopened notebook I had transcriptions of mad monologues from rear seats on the upper deck. The mobile phone gabble that was so distinct from the money chatter and party gossip of the Overground. The new demographic of hipster Hackney spurned the viral crush of buses, preferring to cycle or take the Ginger Line. Buses were heavy with coughing out-patients, illegals of every stripe, nightworkers, mothers battering for space with double-buggies, old folk hanging on anything they can reach like bats. The words, in English, broken or deranged, were about sleights, insults, withheld benefits. There was also a powerful strain of the occult, the casting of spells, encounters with local demons. Talk had its fists up, ready for the next challenge from snoops and inspectors.

  ‘Gotta ask for a refund for the toilet, man.’

  ‘I feel worse than yesterday. I actually left work already. My piss smells like barley wine.’

  ‘Get the boys down, sort that out? Got it, man! Take photographs before and after we go in. Right!’

  ‘You want money? I give you money. Nobody wants money anymore.’

  ‘He stitched me up and called to tell me the bad news. You’re a horrible man, you are.’

  ‘She’s gutted. And Terry’s gutted. That’s what they’re like down there, innit Mum? That’s what Lennie was saying. I feel bad not talking to him. But for why? I dunno. He’s got that over me as well. All the same, innit? They hang round with each other. They started cracking up in the office. I didn’t grin, Mum. I’m really upset with her.’

  ‘What you in bed for, man? It’s half-past-one. What? No, I won’t deal with that shit. That’s really clever when you’ve got a child. Stupid cow, stupid cow! You should have a job, have prospects, know what I mean? Drift then, drift into sleep. Well, I’m sorry. Back in the forest then. Set fucking fire to it. Don’t be a pansy. Do you want to speak to Little Man?’

  ‘How’s it hanging? I’m waiting for a yes or no. See if I can move into this place. Detox. Have you heard from Yankee? Last time I saw him was at Cousin Tim. Mo? Oh yeah. Ha ha! Moaning Mo! Alright. All good now. I was drunk, innit? Slipped. That’s how good it was. Happy New Year.’

  ‘Can you see a camera? How many bodies in the car, man? You fucking wanker. I’m sorry about this. OK then. Just let me know. Cheers. Goodbye.’

  ‘I find that so much of my energy is directed to someone else’s life. It’s not a question of love. It’s a question of putting myself first. It’s not a problem, but it is a problem. What am I doing? I can say it to you – as a telephone call. But actually implementing that call after I’ve met with Alex… OK, sweetheart. Goodbye goodbye.’

  ‘If you don’t send your kids to school, the policemen come and take them away.’

  ‘They put him in a cell, know what I mean?’

  ‘Where are you? Where you be? Still in hospital, mum? Mum mum, mum?’

  ‘This is a new cheese, my brother. Know what I’m saying? And it’s fluffy as wool.’

  ‘She was an absolute fucking alcoholic drug addict waster. They trapped her into disclosing it. I was like, shit. It wasn’t up to me. So fucking terrible. So there.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit, man. I don’t give a fucking shit, man. That’s all shit. I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a fucking shit. That’s shit, man. I don’t give a shit.’

  The new Stagecoach buses parade in packs, showing off their NOT IN SERVICE destination windows. They stall, eager for shade, under the railway bridge, shuddering slightly like overbred racehorses.

  ‘I love the blue of Bethnal Green bridges, the way it’s disappearing.’

  Stephen Gill.

  Gill’s art – and I regarded him as a major resource, a master of territory – is about a state of mesmerised attention so concentrated that it has to be called love. Love as righteous anger. Love as notice, alert to flaws, follies, bureaucratic impositions. He catalogues the proudly mundane: junked betting slips, cans of energy drinks and albums of wedding photographs. Hackney couples, in a scavenged set of prints that he acquired, are taking their first married kiss. Domesticated vampires rigid in stiff clothes, more suitable to a funeral, airfixed hair, are swooning to bite, submit, endorse. A heartbreakingly poignant portfolio of engagement in pinched times. Hackney Kiss, Gill called the book. It was published by the Archive for Modern Conflict. 9,000 negatives purchased, blind, on eBay.

  ‘All the images were made by one person,’ Gill said. ‘But since the negatives passed from hand to hand, no one is sure who the photographer is.’

  Brave Hackney citizens are marrying and remarrying in the grey years after the Second World War. Cakes like maquettes for icing-sugar tower blocks. Like models of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the front elevation in Spitalfields; disparate architectural blocks flirting with collapse. Crittall windows. Tired lace curtains. Jewish pennants. Fringed shades on standing lamps. That tragic cigarette in the bride-groom’s trailing hand. Boot-polish hair. The clock at five-past-three on the sideboard, next to the bottle of port. Fancy mirrors. Exotic wallpaper. The porthole of a squat Coronation TV set looking like a primitive microwave. On the wall, earlier couples are frozen into their frames. There are more dead floral tributes on long tables than on the coffin lid of a Kray funeral in Chingford Mount.

  But Stephen is always positive. Take away his camera and he’ll draw on his eyeballs with a felt-tip pen.

  ‘Years of sunlight went into making that texture of ironwork,’ he said, looking across the road. ‘The blue has faded so beautifully.’

  Stephen is one of the few people to appreciate old railway bridges as bridges. Portals to the next zone of London. He needs to let the first frenzy of traffic play out, because he’ll be standing right in the middle of the road poking a long pole into crannies under a succession of railway bridges. And there are many bridges, many feathers, many fallen nests along our tarmac riverbank.

  We walk west.


  My guide is dressed as an urban fisherman: soft blue hat with no flies in the band, blue jacket, loose trousers, heavy boots. He is carrying a bulging bag and a silver pole. He calls a halt where Collingwood Street emerges from Three Colts Lane.

  ‘Look at that,’ Stephen said.

  The arched roof of the road tunnel under the railway is scored with claw marks, yellow-orange striations revealing the original glow of the bricks beneath generations of thick grey sludge-varnish.

  ‘Overloaded vans heading south to the scrapyards.’

  White goods heaped on numerous Transits have gouged at the curve of the low ceiling. The lane going north is untouched. Stephen is a connoisseur of pigeon habitats, but this bridge doesn’t answer. It is not a promising spot to begin our fishing. The photographer knows all the secrets of the silver stream of the railway. A hunter-gatherer of images.

  On our walk from Cambridge Heath Road, Gill pointed out the warehouse where he had kept a studio for many years; the grotto from which he launched his dawn raids on disputed landscapes. The former inhabitants had been priced out, then expelled: radical printers, painters, performance artists and invisibles. Even the junkies shooting up in the metal box of the lift had left for Hastings.

  ‘I could watch the trains from my window. I could cycle up the Lea Valley. I could work all night in the darkroom. Then make a coffee. Go for a wash to York Hall.’

  The silver fishing pole is extended. Stephen is satisfied with this new pitch, the pool of light under the second bridge.

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Can you feel it?’

  The ripple and shudder of the Stansted Express. Planks tremble. Girders sigh. Now the fishing pole looks like the prosthetic arm of some manic soundman trying to trap the yawn of expanding metal joists. Gill purchased it, so he told me, in a hardware shop on Hackney Road. The telescopic pole is intended for use by window-cleaners. Stephen has adapted it for his camera.