The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  The Wilson tank, like the one into which I was about to plunge, was a concept pool, around which visitors moved like catwalk models and talked in whispers. There was the unspoken fear of baptism into some malign sect, part Trump, part Swedenborg, part DC Comics, for which the Shangri-La supplicants with their iced water communions, their bitter splashes of espresso, were as yet unprepared. Blind angels of the city. Floating upside down over the clouds, the smoke and sweat of labour. What if this tower was all a trick, an illusion, and we plunged straight into the sewers?

  Was this brilliant blue lozenge really the highest swim in Europe? What about the nineteen floors (53–72) of ‘exclusive residences’ rumoured to be on offer from £30 to £50 million a pop? One of the more outrageous selling points is a promised ‘clear day’ vision of the North Sea fishing fleet, forty-four miles downriver from the pyramid lighthouse. Some of the private baths on the upper decks look competition-sized in promotional photographs. Wet rooms are like clearings in a tropical forest. There are marble foot basins in which you’d be tempted to take a few strokes. But the essence of the infinity pool as the lid and crown of the Shangri-La, the detail that sets it apart from that cocktail-bar tub on the modest elevation of the private members’ club at Shoreditch House, is the way it merges seamlessly with its surroundings. At Shangri-La ticket prices, the least a swimmer can expect is the illusion of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London. Like a saint in some quattrocento triptych.

  The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels dividing the spread of the city far below into a series of moving pictures. Pictures from which the privileged swimmer, or the sybarite with orange-flavoured iced water, is detached. Infinity, as a concept, is better appreciated fifty-two floors down, back on the street, waiting for the 149 bus. Here, the tapering mass of the Shard, a blue grid on a grey day, intimidates. It’s like staring against the sun down an endless railway track or the roped lane of an Olympic pool stretching towards glory. A thuggish wind buffets and bends humbled clients sheltering against a wall while they wait for the Edmonton bus to ease forward, to let them on. The driver is busy texting.

  Renzo Piano talks about London’s river and the way his signature tower must breathe like a sail. The architect has reduced all that weight – construction traffic, tedious budget meetings, hoses spitting out concrete, drills, controlled explosions – to a tensile skein of captured light with the virtual city tattooed on its skin. He sketches this conceit on a napkin in a fancy Berlin restaurant. His patron approves. Piano has the life-enhanced, skinny-bearded, dressed-down charm that can be read as a form of integrity: the Jeremy Corbyn schtick.

  When Piano presented the defaced napkin to the original Shard developer, Irvine Sellar, it was a Picasso moment. A free lunch paid in full. The doodle became a sanctified relic, framed and featured in proud documentaries. The Italian, a remote viewer of London’s historic fabric, was never inhibited by modesty. He allowed that St Paul’s, as realised by Christopher Wren, was ‘a radical intervention’. The domed church expressed ‘the spirit of change and inventiveness that drives great cities’. It was even, in its primitive way, a precursor to the Shard. ‘I believe that the new tower will not disturb its stateliness,’ Piano said. ‘They are breathing the same air, sharing the same atmosphere; they are nurtured at the same source.’

  It is certainly true that, gazing up from the 149 bus stop beside London Bridge station, the outline of the backlit needle of the Shard makes teasing reference to the slender steeple of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, soaring above the Georgian roofs of Spitalfields. But Piano’s tower is non-denominational, a steeple without a church. The prong advocates no doctrine beyond its own presence. ‘Symbols are dangerous’, Piano stated. The Shard plays at being unfinished, open to the winds. It offers itself as a hostage to copywriters. It invites promiscuous similes. ‘Like a sixteenth-century pinnacle or the mast top of a very tall ship.’ It absorbs unfocused horizontal energies, to become a new kind of city; secure, supplied with shops, offices, restaurants and residential pods. The Shard is an Umbrian hill town hidden inside a medicine cabinet of mirrors.

  I swam at the golden hour. There were softly-spoken barriers and checkpoints at every stage of my ascent towards the high pool. You come off the street, away from the fumes of stalled buses, the repressed waves of anger and frustration, and into this otherness of uniformed security that is both courteous and judgemental. You are bowed through to the metal cabinet where inappropriate baggage is checked for explosives. At the reception desk, thirty-four floors up, you must present your passport. The right credit status, the digital information that moves you to the new level, is never accessible on screen. The induction process acts like a Zen filter, fine-tuning anxiety and inoculating the unwary before the next stage of enlightenment in this attempt at a Tibetan lamasery out of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. A copy of Hilton’s 1933 romance, newly printed in Singapore and cased in a leather binder, is left beside every kingsize bed. Immense picture books furnish the ledges of the reception area: Theme Hotels, Beijing, Impressionism.

  Many of the investors waiting patiently for admittance to the restaurant, like dazed motorway supplicants at a Happy Eater, are Chinese. News of the market blip on the Shanghai Composite Index has not inhibited them. In fact, the Shangri-La feels like an upmarket Chinese dormitory. I knew that flats in Dalston Lane developments and Olympicopolis were being bought, offplan, twelve at a time, by Beijing investors who never intended to set foot in them. They preferred the Shard with its easy access to the Thames and the major heritage sites where they posed, in full rig, for wedding photographs. Treating London as a set, a designer shopping village, they were at home. We were the tourists.

  As Jeremy Prynne points out in his Paris Review interview, the Mao Zedong style of Marxism is no longer ‘part of the intellectual world of the Chinese’. And Western cultural bricoleurs of the Sixties, such as the Jean-Luc Godard of La Chinoise, have moved on to fresh fields. Although it is still possible, I like to believe, that hardcore Maoist cadres have chosen to destroy capitalism from the inside, by buying London and leaving it empty.

  Those who successfully pass through their electronic induction at Shangri-La enter a low-lit and flatteringly mirrored lift. It is a confessional booth for narcissists, the quilted anteroom for an audience with a heretic pope. No fellow traveller will meet your eye. The usual laundry removers and cleaners are never seen. There is none of the brittle bonhomie of a Premier Inn; excursionists sharing the achievement of making it safely to ground in a shuddering tin box. In the Shard, if you have the right card to swipe, you are one of us. Business-class transit to the pool in the sky.

  At the end of a baffled corridor, beyond the viewpoint bar where many are gathered to see and be seen, and the almost deserted gym with a single female cyclist, is another checkpoint to be negotiated before the powerful door guarding the pool swings open. Areas at both ends are dressed with sofas, small round tables, and minor sculptural mistakes that will never be noticed. An attendant informs me that the pool must close to swimmers at 8pm, when a disguised panel, like the door in a condemned cell, will slide back to give access to the overspill from Gong, the ‘cinnabar inspired’, dragon-red cocktail bar and champagne lounge.

  The man in the clean white T-shirt, working a broom, preparing the gleaming floor for twilight drinkers, is happy to exchange pleasantries about the pool, the view and his own exposure to these things. But he is not permitted, at any time, early or after hours, to enter the sacred water. He is polite about my enquiry, but it makes no sense. Reflex affirmation defines his occupation. ‘Yes, sir. Of course. Whatever you say.’ Industrial action takes the form of handing me a fluffy towel. And commending the temperature of the water, chill taken off, nothing too soupy or soporific: perfectly calculated for out of the body bliss.

  Can I carry off the decadence? With sentimental memories of rusty Welsh rivulets in the mining valleys
and municipal chlorine tanks in refrigerated tile sheds. The abandoned lidos of a long lifetime stretch back through the polio-defying 1950s to coal-powdered, Bristol Channel beaches still being cleared of barbed wire and mines.

  There is no resistance in this water. A few easy strokes carry me, buoyant with borrowed status, to the turn. Floating is a natural response. I paddle to the window. The ‘infinity pool’ illusion, the dissolution of the membrane between interior and exterior, is interrupted by the rounded lip on which you can hook an elbow while you fail to come to terms with the enormity of the view.

  The gutters that framed public swimming pools were known as ‘scum troughs’. The architect Alfred WS Cross, in Public Baths and Wash-Houses – a treatise on their planning, design, arrangement and fitting, published in 1906, described how a glazed stoneware scum trough could double as a grab-rail and a device for collecting ‘floating impurities’ from the agitated surface. The trough at the deep end should be a few inches lower than the troughs along the sides and at the shallow end. I remembered those impurities very well, sodden cigarette stubs and corn plasters seesawing gently in a tired yellow wash.

  Before I spoiled the surface, the Shangri-La pool was immaculate. The water was that profound ocean-blue achieved at Hastings in Swan Lake, the inches-deep concrete pond with the plastic swan pedalos, by extreme chemical means. Here it was a trick of underwater spotlights and shimmering aquamarine tesserae separated by thin white threads: to mimic the effect of Caribbean sand. The water was so pure that it wasn’t like water at all. It reminded me of the elixir in which they keep tropical fish at Charterhouse Aquatics, beneath the arches of the London Overground railway in Haggerston. ‘Surface impurities’ are mopped up and eliminated by motors disguised as sponges or clumps of weed. In the Shangri-La pool there are no floating impurities of any kind. Apart from myself. My shape, my noise.

  This is the place to sell your soul. A floatation tank of total sensory abandonment. I relish every second I am allowed to spend in this magical substance. I plough from end to end, under the low, wave-patterned ceiling, passing through the lines of dark bars from the shadows of supporting pillars, as a red sun drops behind the picture windows of the espresso lounge.

  I climb out, chastened by my failure to properly engage with the panoramic sweep of our grey-white boneyard city. Watchers are watching watchers from other high windows and viewing galleries. Riverview flats are performance suites for tourists circumnavigating the tenth floor of the Tate Modern extension. Somebody has left a large, wet, lipstick kiss over Southwark. A red mouth is chewing up the blocks that are not yet fully engorged towers. It is swallowing cranes like so many broken toothpicks. Down there on Borough High Street, I can identify the outline of St George the Martyr, a church with its heritage role to play, as shelter for the excluded nocturnal wanderers of Little Dorrit.

  A couple of days before my encounter with the mysteries of Shangri-La, I was invited to inspect another swimming pool, a little closer to home, at Whiston Road. In February 2000 a notice of temporary closure, for reasons of health and safety, was fixed to the padlocked doors of Haggerston Baths. I remember my annoyance, towel roll under arm, clutch of ice at the heart, after too many previous confirmations of just how accommodating that ‘temporary’ qualification could be. Schoolchildren arriving for their weekly session were turned away. They would never return. The site of their school, Laburnum, would be teleported into the contemporary world as a launch platform for the Bridge Academy (A Bridge to Your Future), which opened for business in 2007. The Academy is sponsored by UBS (Together we can find an Answer), a financial services operation based in Switzerland. As the world’s largest manager of private wealth assets, UBS (Your Goal, Our Solution) suffered heavy losses during the subprime mortgage crisis. But the Academy (A Bridge to Your Future) thrives. And affects everything around it.

  A former Laburnam pupil, a City accountant called Erol Kagan, who still lives in the area, felt the pain when his old school was demolished. ‘One day it was there and the next it wasn’t. I saw a bell tower standing in the rubble. I don’t know how it got there, or where it went.’

  The Bridge Academy (A Bridge to Your Future), like the Shard, is an alien invader inflated by entitlement. The Shard is about being taller than anything else in London, but mean as a lancet, while the Bridge Academy (A Bridge to Your Future) is a bulbous plankribbed nest, an infolded mass crushed into a space barely capable of tolerating its presumption. The central section is under permanent plastic wraps. It looks, from the far side of the Regent’s Canal, like a garden toy that nobody can figure out how to assemble.

  Erol Kagan recalled his visits to the local pool. ‘As a kid I used to go for a wash to Haggerston Baths. Now they’re closed, locked up. No baths, no laundry, no gym. No swimming. The building looks derelict. They have let it decay.’

  Health and safety issues have kept the Whiston Road building in limbo for fifteen years; enchanted in a suspension of cobwebs, rusted shower units and slipper baths dressed in a shroud of fine grey dust. Through dim corridors, ghosts search for the pre-war EXIT sign and a directional finger stencilled on cold white tiles.

  Coming east in 1968 and moving into a terraced property on the other side of the canal, Haggerston Baths became a feature of my life. Neighbourhood loyalties evolved around certain pubs and convenient bathhouses. On weeks when there were no opportunities to visit the flats of better-provided friends, we luxuriated in the deep tubs at Whiston Road. Soap and towel supplied. Or so I choose, in deep folds of sentiment, to recall. Thinking perhaps of vagrant episodes in mainline stations, breakfast at Victoria and on to the Tate and the river.

  There were 91 individual slipper baths and a 60-stall washhouse. But there was no topping up of bathwater, no time to read a book. You hauled yourself out before the attendant rapped on your door. Suicides in Hackney tubs were not unknown. Haggerston Baths, with its soft red brick laid in English bonds, its Portland stone dressing, was a marker for the territory, from the 90-foot chimney stack for coal-fired boilers to the golden galleon that caught the wind as a weathervane. This craft was a trusted symbol of locality by which those staggering home from a cluster of pubs could safely navigate. Ships on swimming pool weathervanes and pub signs confirmed London’s claim to be a world port. But the tarnished galleon on Whiston Road was empty, its immigrants dispersed. Thrown into the indifferent sea.

  The story of Haggerston Baths is covered in a generously illustrated book by Dr Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis: Great Lengths: The historic indoor swimming pools of Britain (2009). Delving into archive, travelling the length of the country, the authors demonstrate how provision of swimming pools made a very real difference to the quality of life in impoverished inner city and industrial areas. But utopianism went out of fashion, that era of green-lung parks and chilly lidos. All such fripperies were swept aside by the realpolitik of Thatcher and the millennial boosterism of Blair and the New Labour spinners.

  Alfred Cross, who argued in his 1906 treatise for the employment of specialist architects rather than borough engineers, won the commission for Haggerston Baths. The foundation stone was laid on 18th March 1903. The official opening was on 25th June 1904. Simon Inglis tells us how EJ Wakeling, vice-chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Wash Houses Committee, enlivened the occasion by plunging into the pool and swimming a 100-foot length underwater. Alderman Wakeling’s name, along with those of the builders and the architect, can still be read, in chipped and partly erased form on a stone tablet.

  Haggerston Baths, this prime specimen of Edwardian baroque, is suffering; windows are sealed with black panels, points of potential access are defaced with razor wire and surveillance cameras.Warnings have been placed in six languages. The furnace-bright orange of the brickwork, in its pomp like the confident colour of London Overground, is dirty, dulled by neglect. The imperial swagger of heraldic carvings, lions and unicorns above the separate entrances for males and females, is diminished. Between a set of twinned Roman Ionic colum
ns there is still a recessed central loggia for dignitaries to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. But no crowds are coming.

  Purple fuses of buddleia burst through the protective fence on the mockingly named SWIMMERS LANE (PRIVATE ROAD). The school-kids who were turned away at the time of the temporary closure are now in their mid-twenties. And they have never swum another stroke in this building. The Bridge Academy (A Bridge to Your Future) has no pool. But it does control the football pitches and tennis courts of Haggerston Park. They have bought public realm.

  At the time of the Haggerston Baths closure, the estimated cost of renovation was £300,000. Small change in the light of future projects, but Hackney didn’t have it. The council were in a hole and looking for deals with private developers. So they did what they have always done best, they obfuscated. They were economical with the truth and spendthrift with mendacity. They allowed pool campaigners to take the heat out of protest by putting their energies into proposals and alternative solutions. Promises were dangled and withdrawn. There was a lottery-heavy grand project on the horizon in Stoke Newington, the catastrophically mismanaged Clissold Leisure Centre.

  ‘The wrong building at the wrong time in the wrong place,’ Ken Worpole, of the Clissold Users Group, told the critic Jonathan Glancey. The architects were based in Manchester. It was a pattern repeated so many times, through Hackney education and social services: the appointment of high-salaried advisers from elsewhere, shadowy corporate multitaskers on maxi salaries. There was a bias towards smothering the nuisance of locality in public meetings and consultations. The proposed Clissold Leisure Centre, a smart CGI pitch in the post-architectural airport style that fits hospital, Ideas Store or new university, didn’t work. The building leaked: from fancy roof, from glass walls retaining fetid water, from cracks in the squash courts, from warped floors. The budget was haemophiliac. It bled out. Clissold Leisure Centre opened, closed for major remediation, opened again.