The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  People don’t like pigeons, Will Self said, because we never see the young, the cute ones on Countryfile calendars. ‘No fluffy little pigeon chicks or hatchlings to arouse our sentimental feelings.’ But we don’t need to see the prey on this fishing trip, we can smell their dens from the other side of the road: burnt marzipan in diesel soup. Marsh gas trapped in the bones of a plague pit. Stephen has the clothes, the camera and the whippy rod. But he’s forgotten his surgical facemask. The reluctant subjects of his ethnographic survey into sexual habits are the feral pigeons who have infested these arches since the coming of the railways. They have seen the days of trading in exotic animals, imported lion cubs, parrots, monkeys, come and go.

  The enchantment of the area derives from the Victorian invasion by canals and railways: secret caves among the brick arches for dealers, hucksters, illegitimates. Stephen is honouring the private life of the much-maligned, shit-endorsed pigeon colonies; spectral coops within the ironwork of railway bridges. Birds are London’s dead souls nesting on stalagmites, on conical mounds of their own droppings. Aeons of acid waste eating into metal. We have never observed these creatures in such enclosed settings: so defenceless, taken by stealth. They are ruffled, agitated by the shock of the harsh white flash. The avian portraits, over which Stephen has limited control, are pure revelation. They chart previously unrecorded Bethnal Green life, one of those tiny pockets of origin left outside the intrusion of surveillance systems.

  Breeding pens, high above the cars, stash fresh eggs among spikes laid out to frustrate potential landing strips. Prison eugenics in a rusting iron vault. Pigeons are a swaggering underclass hopping around on diseased feet and too few legs. They operate best as a mob, holding off bother-boy corvines who try to muscle in on the confetti trails of stale white bread lobbed out by mad old women, emerging from insecure flats, and pretending that the crumbs are nothing to do with them. A leak of body waste it would be unmannerly to mention.

  Pedestrians, mostly Asian, heading through the tunnel, notice the image-fisher, but elect to leave him alone, without comment. The long pole wavers. Stephen stands among the cars, he raids. Traffic swerves. He counts aloud, his camera is primed: ‘One. Two. Three…’

  After twelve seconds, the flash detonates. Stephen is shooting blind. He won’t know what he’s got until he makes the print. The birds explode in an aggrieved fury of wings. They circle, swoop, settle on the roof of new flats erected where the Kray family home used to stand in Vallance Road. Such souls as managed to transmigrate from these original terraces, interior lives as tribal as the birds, have been reborn into a secondary existence in pigeon purgatory.

  A fledgling, fallen from the nest, pink of belly, thrashes on a ledge, unable to take flight; but unwilling to fall to the ground. The demented creature is trapped in Sisyphean torment. Nothing to be done. Down on the pavement or pulped under the tyres of a white van.

  In soft focus, the birds cohabit with their own dead in a space that is both larder and crèche. A ledge on which thick nests of twigs are frosted in white droppings. This is a final colony from which the tenants have not yet been unhoused by power hoses. A use has been found, at last, for Boris Johnson’s expensively acquired water canons.

  But the strangest aspect of Stephen’s pigeon séance is that nobody challenges us: two men poking a long silver rod under a railway bridge. A rod with a camera attachment. And a brutal flash (the kind that conspiracy theorists claim blinded Princess Di’s driver in the underpass). In our surveillance city, where image-making is always suspect, if not criminal – ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ – fishing for pigeon portraits passes without comment. Until a local matron, dog on a string, approaches. ‘You’re doing it all wrong, gentlemen. You’ll never get rid of the bastards that way. I’ve lived here thirty years and I’ve tried everything. They still crap on my head every time I set foot on the street. Those pigeons, they think they fucking own the place.’

  When we’d finished our day’s fishing, Stephen carried his pouch back to the studio. In the dark room he would discover what he had caught with his camera on the end of a rod. Rivets like steel eggs. Nests like crowns of thorn for a heretic messiah. Subtle blues and greys of metal and feather. The domestic life of birds in crannies under railways.

  Walking home to Hackney from Stephen’s own nest and private place, with all those processed layers of light, the rescued objects and boxed archives, still playing in the sump of my crocodile brain, I washed up against a well-intentioned obstacle that I recognised as a public artwork. The level of collaboration between promoter and commissioned artisan achieved an over-loud political correctness that cancelled itself out; waiting for the years of neglect to break it down to a condition where it was worth a second glance. Even a photograph of record.

  In Weavers Field, as so often with these interventions, local school kids have been brought in on the act. They have been invited to invent upbeat slogans, which will then be baked into interlocking bricks. A chorus of voices around a spindly sculptural dance symbolising everything implied in the park’s title. I transcribed some of the messages immortalised on the rosy bricks.

  GIVE US MORE TO LIVE FOR THAN WAR. PEACE. ART. NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD INDEED IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER DOES.

  We had been talking about bricks. The relationship with baked clay and text goes back so far: to Mesopotamia, to shards lovingly preserved and displayed in the great museums. Stephen is a committed scavenger. And what he finds and uses, carries home from his expeditions, is neatly boxed and labelled as future evidence. I think his practice is exemplary, the way he strives to allow place an equal share in every photographic project he undertakes.

  Before I left the studio, he showed me a box filled with pieces of brick, conglomerates, rocks with chipped edges. We’ll return to that story. Everything in the new CGI London, in Olympicopolis, denies stone, mistreats wood, spurns the sloppy mud and dribble of poisoned creeks. It is time, no doubt, for a period of pyschogeology, navigating by glacial erratics dropped behind municipal flats, the hunks of Cornish granite exposed in parks made from demolished terraces. The stones are beginning to sing. Thick lips of kerbs exert a powerful magnetism, twisting the blade of the compass, like that moment in Moby-Dick when lightning strikes and the ship sails against the advice of its fallible instruments. We are coming back, so misdirected by electronic gizmos and information overloads, to the stone core within ourselves; ice memories, diamonds in the blood.

  Stephen spoke of bricks made from the residue of the Beckton Sewage Works; human waste being used, as in the first settlements on Thames marshland, to pad the walls that contain us. First London: silt, straw, smoke, shit.

  I remembered my own fetish for picking out tide-smoothed pieces of brick on the foreshore, in Wapping or East Tilbury, London bricks with lettering, broken alphabets. And, like a kneeling child again, trying to make sentences from the traces of vanished buildings.

  All of which is a long way around to arrive in the streets of Hackney at the time of the riots in August 2011. Stephen Gill is so deeply embedded in mapping and recording that he felt obliged, as a moral duty, to document the event in some way. But he struggled to avoid a reflex response. You could identify in news reports such a relish for apocalypse. An ecstatic acknowledgement that the fires and trashed cars and supermarket sweeps were the perfect pre-Olympic trailer. Those confused souls, TV journalists, parachuted into Tottenham war zones to provide reportage, stood stiffly at their posts, while all around them danced the children of the estates, tweeting and twittering and teasing the action on. Flames seemed to run by some malicious instinct right down the fuse of the Overground Line, from Dalston Junction to a veteran furniture store in Croydon. End of the line.

  A harvest of stones was gathered by pram and bicycle. Stephen toured the aftermath of the riot zone, in Clarence Road and Narrow Way, and by broader sweeps through the territory, like an urban archaeologist evaluating axe
heads and grapeshot, picking up chunks of rock that had bounced off police cars and fondling them for bruises. Tenderly, he transported the relics to his studio, where they could be afforded the dignity of forensic examination. He logged each exhibit with a microscopic high-definition lens. At which point the bricks and chunks of projectile were revealed as lunar landscapes; surfaces seething with lichen clusters, plasma stains and violent fissures.

  The history of small wars – and these riots, overheated by new technologies, were a minor manifestation of regular seasonal friction – is told through a photographic interrogation of spent bullets and shells recovered from the battlefield. Every one of these bricks has a narrative. Some of them were recovered by Gill, after he had noted, from his laptop screen, the trajectory of flight picked up in a news report. Sections of garden wall and pressure-cracked flagstones were pressed into service at a moment of social upheaval. Gill’s prints restore gravitas. They are a truer portrait of the crowd atomised into individual units for judgement and retribution than that ugly parade of smudged surveillance mugshots in the tabloids.

  Cities can be mapped by missing cobblestones: Paris in ’68, London at the burning of Newgate Prison, Budapest, Belfast, Prague. Streets are dug up in displays of reverse archaeology. The stones redistribute themselves, flying through the air like Magritte’s loaves, towards the wall of Plexiglas shields and visored helmets. If you can’t trust those mobile-phone snatches of women leaping from flaming buildings or street actors brandishing their swag, the bricks in a box are naked evidence. We can be grateful to Stephen Gill for finding a way to animate the riots so modestly, without prurience or the politician’s boast that he alone has the solution. No recipes on his desk, only rocks.

  John Minton’s 1951 cover drawing for Roland Camberton’s Hackney novel, Rain on the Pavements, takes the same view of Mare Street offered by eye-in-the-sky helicopter coverage of the riots. But there is one striking difference. Minton’s aggrieved marchers, holding up political placards, are heading for the right place to lodge their protest: the old Town Hall. The 2011 consumerist communards converge on JD Sports, on betting shops and windows featuring widescreen televisions and designer handbags. Camberton’s ambition, like that of Stephen Gill, was to know every stick and stone of the borough. The contemporary flash mob, like those grand-project promoters and offshore property collectors, want to tear the borough down, to remake the world as a future ruin, a tabula rasa undisturbed by previous history. Gill’s portraits of stones, grey and self-contained, are a telling record of this episode.

  In Weavers Fields I sat on a bench, facing south, my back set to the noise of the riots. I tried to think about nothing. To empty it all out. But the irritation was still there. The voices of unsponsored oral historians offering chapters of their fragmenting lives as they race through the park, almost colliding with other ranters, jabbering into the cold air.

  ‘I turn out my pockets. If I find a monkey, I’m going straight to Heathrow and buying two tickets to Bolivia. And a fucking big camera.’

  ‘Reluctantly, we’re going to have to say “no” to that. You’d better stick it out, John. It’s going to take proper money. I want to see landscape on my desk. There are huge numbers of jobs available in London. The company will change a lot over the next year. You can’t master the same costume when you’re in a different culture.’

  ‘I got a job today, mum, property development.’

  FREE BREAKFAST FOR BIKES

  ‘Free breakfast for cyclists! Free breakfast for cyclists!’

  The jived-up T-shirt gang at the stall, hopping from foot to foot like incontinent missionaries, waving plastic water bottles and making threats with bowls of green apples, have been accredited to offer the bounty of the earth to the indifferent swarm of cyclists on the blacktop perimeter of what used to be London Fields. This is a council initiative. There is a well-staffed office dedicated to cycle politics, to getting the world to mount and ride. They want to convert the lumpen masses of Hackney – and the impulse is messianic – to a velodrome of committed athletes streaming to their Pilates classes and shared desks through an obstacle course of branded recycling bins and flagstone revisions by Volker Highways (Considerate Constructors).

  ‘Free breakfast for cyclists!’

  The Mayor of London is in complete agreement. Cycling is Zen. Cycling is holy. Cycling is the answer to everything. To this end, Will Norman, coincidentally a global partnership director at Nike, has been appointed cycling commissioner. He will work with Transport for London (Every Journey Matters) to invest £770 million on new cycling infrastructure. Mr Norman said: ‘Cycling can play a transformational role in improving our health and happiness, and building better communities for everyone.’

  ‘Free breakfast for cyclists!’

  And, by implication: nothing for the rest of you. Not a crust for pedestrians, elderly ramblers without affiliation, sniffers of the chemically boosted and sadly mortal strip of wildflower meadow.

  ‘Free breakfast for cyclists!’

  Free breakfast: if you agree to sign on, become a positive statistic. And, by the way, while you are at it, there are other forms – no matter if you are just passing through, dowsing an app trail – to confirm your approval of proposed road schemes, green-route cycle paths barring other forms of traffic, throwing more work to favoured contractors: Volker Highways (Considerate Constructors).

  When they are not hawking fruit like Mexicans working a roadblock, the dedicated friends of the bicycle are covering the Broadway Market exit of London Fields, harvesting signatures from the slowing peloton. ‘Does it matter that we live in Kentish Town or Archway?’ Not one jot. Have an apple, a free pen. Anyone in possession of a legitimate bicycle belongs to Hackney.

  ‘Free breakfast for cyclists! Free breakfast for cyclists!’

  A 70-year-old black man, tapping along on a silver-topped cane, arrives at the dedicated cycle highway from the direction of Helmsley Place. He pauses, listening out for the rubberised swish of the unbroken morning stream. The Darwinianism of wired pedal pushers with their gaze firmly fixed on a distant horizon. It’s fortunate that he doesn’t qualify for the free breakfast, because he’s never going to make it across the road. Those apples from the sponsored Garden of Eden are out of reach.

  In my early Hackney years, London Fields was a destination for communal football. It is now a zone of transience and approved health routines. It is en route. Or a party rug for weekend balloon sniffers who are not aesthetically affronted by the terrible purple skirts hung from dignified London Plane trees to tell revellers how to conduct a barbecue. Like neck tattoos on a dowager.

  Recreation has been corralled into small neat packages: wire fence, single basketball hoop. For the squeak of rubber on rubber, circle and shoot. Table-tennis slabs providing a tap-tap-tap soundtrack in windblown precincts. The rough sleepers and morning drinkers who used to perch on benches to congratulate each other on making it through another long night have been expelled to the coast.

  London Fields is open on all sides. It has been promoted into a traffic island sandwiched between two active cycle highways; the official one that hurtles past the children’s play park and day nursery, and the leafy aisle of the central avenue for those who want a gentler approach to Broadway Market, dodging and weaving among a drift of joggers wired to bleeping devices like so many near misses from an emergency roadkill unit. Exercise covens of already-fit young women are put through their paces by personal trainers, while redeyed men embellished with knapsacks of child accessories negotiate a passage through dog accompanists making a brave show of waving their poop trowels and colostomy bags. And all of this motion, this life-affirming routine business, is ignored by the gaunt casualties of former times parked on their benches with yesterday’s free newspapers, their scavenged roll-ups and a bit of a book. The odour exchange, skunk, sustainably perfumed sweat, artisan coffee in takeaway beakers, is democratic.

  PEDESTRIAN PRIORITY. CONSIDERATE CYCLISTS WELCOMED. S
trategic post-truth signage greets newcomers to Victoria Park. Where there is still space for old-time benchwarmers, conversational joggers (all languages), and dog people composting open spaces. Even the right kind of walker. Figures are established here for a time, or tolerated as they pass through, nodding at strangers, rollerblading, trancing and exercising. Or being harnessed to drag huge rubber tyres in preparation for Polar porterage: if that is your thing, seeing East London’s silver tarmac as an ice shelf.

  I was heading for the canal when I saw disaster unwrap itself in slow motion. Two young mothers, propped on their bikes, texting and nattering, shushing babes in wicker baskets, did not police the satellite child on two wheels as she circled, wobbled, avoided a jumping dog – ‘he won’t hurt you, babe, he’s only playing’ – to take off, picking up speed, down the gentle ramp. And to splash, in the gap between two parked narrowboats, with barely a ruffle of the surface, into the dark and lifeless water. Where a disembarking cyclist dropped his machine, to grab her by the hair, almost as soon as she slid under the surface. All was well. Nobody screamed.

  The park is a site of elective infantilism: mature adults on psychedelic skateboards bopping to earworm infills, wearing football shorts and romper suits and scooting along with ponytails swishing. One intrepid voyager in a tight black leotard is propelling a paddleboard down the centre of the canal, at something around the pace of a brisk walk: a busy money-market recreationalist looking like a tribesman from the upper reaches of the Amazon. He draws a straight line through the pondweed duvet. It is four years now since I saw an eel, and longer since the last pike loafed under the railway bridge, snacking on small fry and dumped pets.

  ‘Any issues on your side coming in?’

  A couple, in matching designer camouflage, side by side, impervious to the etiquette of towpath survival, rattle towards shared desks in the canalside Portakabin colony, supporting between them a bag stuffed with slim laptops: ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS KEW. Within seconds they are forcibly separated by the first surge of the peloton. The man fumes and trembles on the edge of water. The woman, clinging to the Kew bag, scrapes under overhanging blackberry bushes, pierced by savage thorns.