The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  While the millions stacked up, Haggerston Baths paid the price. By the time health and safety issues had been sufficiently resolved to allow Hackney to hand the amenity in Whiston Road over to an agent who solicited expressions of interest from developers – ‘for uses including: leisure, hotel, office, educational, institutional, retail, restaurant (subject to planning)’ – the estimated cost of reopening the Edwardian pool was £30 million (and counting).

  A rare opportunity to investigate the forbidden interior of Haggerston Baths presented itself, when a phone call offered me the chance – ‘right now, leave the house immediately’ – to join a party of dark suits and hardhats who were weighing up the commercial possibilities. Bill Parry-Davies, local solicitor, jazzman, fisherman, activist and keen swimmer, was labouring to restore the Haggerston pool to life. He put together a consortium. He contacted the richest people he knew, the ones with collections they might need space to exhibit and the ones with dreams of cutting-edge bars and restaurants. In fact: anyone with a streak of enlightened altruism prepared to dig deep to ‘burnish their reputation’. They calculated, so he told me, that it would take the redevelopment of the laundry area as a thirty-six-storey block of offices and private residences to pay for a pool. This wasn’t about profit or vanity, tapping the zeitgeist; the plotters expressed a theoretical interest in making the pool available to all. It was never enough to swoon over architectural detail: brass handrails, teak changing cubicles, boxed-in steel arches separated by curved plaster panels. The revived pool would have to pay its way. The customer base would come, beyond heritage buffs, from the colonies of new-build flats along railway and canal; the red-bicycle tribes of Santander, the pre-coffee contortionists of Haggerston Park with their personal trainers.

  Parry-Davies appreciated the fact that the original pool and its coal-fired Lancashire boilers occupied too much space. Plans were drawn up to drop the pool to a lower level, to do clever things to make it as adaptable as a post-Olympic stadium. One way or another, if the proposal succeeded, the pool would be re-opened to the public. To those committed individuals who had carried on the fight for fifteen years.

  It’s like breaking into an Egyptian tomb: catacomb corridors insinuate in every direction, dusty stairs rise towards hidden Howard Carter chambers, cobwebbed offices and storage spaces. There are utilitarian grey tubs, the remnant of the second-class female baths, calling up archival footage of suburban lunatic asylums with cold-water hoses. The swimming pool is drained and the three high windows towards which I used to swim in my laboured crawl, as through a flooded cathedral, before breaststroking back, were covered over. Natural light is excluded in favour of sanctioned municipal entropy. Haggerston Baths is another of those decommissioned non-places kept in a persistent vegetative state, like the gothic sprawl of the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road. While spiders knit their sticky nets. And shivering phantoms stand before empty mirrors in tiled washrooms where thick taps leak coal dust.

  Location-promiscuous film crews exploit the creep of suspended animation, the unreachable lives, the echoing emptiness of cellars and toilet stalls, for YouTube bits invoking Tarkovsky, for fashion shoots and music promos. It is only reasonable that tribes of squatters, sensitive to the spirit of derelict places, occupy buildings dedicated to social improvement – from which society has been ruthlessly excluded. Haggerston Baths, on this hardhat tour, is so far from how it struck me on my last visit before the padlocked doors and the fateful announcement that I began to mistrust my own memory. Did I ever bathe here? Am I confusing episodes with other bathhouses in other parts of London or Dublin? Research suggests that the male slipper baths were removed between 1962 and 1964 to make way for a gym.

  We never entered through the twinned doors, male and female, on Whiston Road. The front elevation, in a style known as ‘Wren Revival’, was too grand for the traffic ditch the road had become. Paying customers climbed a few steps to a new entrance on the west side, aware of the hissing steam from the laundry, the looming chimney stack. I came with my children. They learned to swim, with bribes for achieved distances, and years of self-confident feats of diving and underwater retrieval ahead. The clapped-out changing rooms and dribbling showers took nothing away from the experience of a community asset within a short stroll of our house. On wet afternoons, when I didn’t fancy walking, I detoured to Haggerston Baths for an equally valid immersion in the matter of London. Amniotic reverie. Drift. Reverse evolution. I met people I hadn’t seen in years, time-managers between episodes of childcare, enthusiasts with relish for a resource that had outlasted its permissions. Those meandering lengths, before the era of roped-off fast lanes, were a chlorine meditation, puckering the skin and opening the swimmer to an enhanced connection with locality. This building, along with associated libraries, hospitals, street markets, struggled to justify its continued existence in the coming era of leisure as a billable outcome.

  It was immediately evident to the Parry-Davies reconnaissance party that Edwardian gothic had been improved by twenty-first-century defacements by the expelled squatters. The drained pool, some of its tiles chipped out, was rimmed with comic book skulls, acidhouse signatures, tribal tags and post-political slogans. Quorums of hardhats, fingers to lips, contemplated the enormity of the renovation. Chilled speech bubbles leaked from their mouths. Street codes of the vanished denizens of the last London.

  Windows were veiled in gauze. Furniture and machine parts from the earlier regime were adapted for use by the freeloading clients of this beat hotel. Dark passages were snowed in white powder. Cellars with massive, rusting boilers offered a covert terrain as an alternative to the conspicuous visibility of the Shard. Comments were not filed on tactfully provided cards. They were chalked, sprayed or scraped on the walls. DEATH SEX IS FOR LIFE NOT JUST FOR XMAS! LSD. LIZARD NATION. A PLACE WHERE SKATERS, JUNKIES & ARTISTS CAN EXCELL IN. Schematic heads look like Polaroid passports for Charles Manson. This was a building in which it was easy to lose your shadow. A carbolic depository for unclaimed memories. A museum in which time festered.

  The party of potential rescuers split up. In hushed groups, they nodded over some trophied talisman from another era. Their whispers carved the heavy silence. They left footprints in the dust. It would be a great thing to bring the pool back to life, but it would not be this pool. And the tribes who had occupied the sealed and suspended building were dispersed and disbanded. There was no legislation to sanction their trespass. The outcry for new housing was the necessity of keeping builders and property developers in business. I wondered if the economic dip in China would have some benefit for the London property market, all those empty tower blocks in Stratford, the speculative purchases. Parry-Davies explained that it would have the opposite effect. With the stock market in trouble, the Chinese would want more bricks and mortar in a safe and welcoming city.

  Anna sat up all night in our Shard suite looking at London. There would never be another chance. A few hours camped on the fifty-second floor was the holiday I’d been promising for ten years. I stood beside her waiting for the sun to rise over Rotherhithe, and remembering how it felt to be trapped, with no idea what was going on, on the road far below, in the madness of the great spike’s launch.

  A firework orgy of bands, champagne and Hollywood searchlight beams announced a new order for new money. Old London had fallen. The transient mob was ecstatic. We were gridlocked in a small car on Borough High Street, trying to get back to Hackney, after an ill-advised excursion to a bookshop in Denmark Hill. There is a toll for crossing the river. The Shard was a lighthouse flashing a brash runway of fiscal opportunity deep into Kent.

  Underdressed young people, decanted from pubs and offices, were choking the narrow pavements. This was a VE night tribute bonanza for all the wars they’d missed or experienced on iPad. Royalty should have been down here, joining the conga, incognito, mingling with the lowlife mob, like Prince Hal in Eastcheap. The crowd were genuflecting, raising their arms in
spontaneous salute of strange lights in the sky. The Martian tripods had landed! And turned to ice.

  Some came running, trying to get closer to the incident: the wailing ambulances, the cordon of police forced out of their cars. A meteor was arcing to its own fiery destruction or ours. Ever since a hosepipe ban was announced, the heavens had opened: sheets of barcode rain. Tonight, after acceptable sacrifices, the sky gods relented. A steady London drizzle, no thunder and lightning.

  Our car leaked. My feet squelched on the pedals. Girls in short white raincoats and young men, stripped to the waist, raced through the throng. Boris bikes ploughed into the festive crowd like Boudicca’s chariots. Basque anarchists smashed beer bottles and shoved them under the wheels of stretch limos packed with hen parties from Bromley. Cab drivers guillotined their electric windows to curse the stupidity of the human race. As coke-couriers heading for the City jumped out and dodged into the mob, to frustrate racing meters, redline fares. It was a night of obscenities.

  On London Bridge, couples were splayed in the road, simulating, or actually performing, acts of frenzied coitus, excused by the communal delirium of the occasion. Japanese visitors in slick retro styles from Brick Lane crossed and recrossed the metal river of stalled traffic to frame the best selfies. They called out in high, excited voices. Fist-phones became torches, burning brands. This was a frost fair or a public execution. The last London as a Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens grope sponsored by oligarchs and arms dealers. A flash mob, texting and tweeting, experienced the show in boosted miniature. Connoisseurs of alternate realities.

  ‘It’s got nothing on Blackpool Illuminations,’ Anna said, displaying a prejudice for her birthplace. But this was more like Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Total derangement of the senses. Pendant que les fonds publics s’écoulent en fêtes de fraternité, il sonne une cloche de feu rose dans les nuages.

  Bells of fire ringing in the clouds. New spectres of modernity, only modern ‘because all standards of taste have been avoided’. Last London of a stillborn millennium. Railways. Hotels. River. L’acropole officielle outré les conceptions de la barbarie moderne les plus colossales. Wealthy passerines framed in their high windows are shot down by this street boy and his lover.

  The City of London police are blinded by a blizzard of cameras and illuminated phones. In those fondly-recalled Thatcher days of primitive surveillance systems, I was regularly pulled for the crime of photographing the recording systems that were photographing me. Tonight the checkpoint bullies, drooping under the weight of weaponry, are subdued, overwhelmed, shuffling along with eyes down, as if prospecting for dropped coins. The cops are behaving like bouncers on overtime. They are grabbing minor celebs by the collar and throwing them into the Shard to dress the party at the end of time.

  Hemmed in by the crush – abandoned cars, psychosexual perversity on all sides, screams, blood, wine, hysterical laughter – I thought I could catch dissenting voices coming from the Resonance FM sweatbox studio on Borough High Street, where they kept windows open to make interviews sound more authentic, with ambient street noise and the odd ambulance shrieking towards Guy’s. We were stuck in our pod right alongside that unnecessary management sign: STOP WALKING, START WORKING.

  The car radio was still alive, part of the raging acoustic surf below the Götterdämmerung of coloured lights splintering Renzo Piano’s giant sail. BBC Radio 4’s arts correspondent was attempting to glamorise this circus of the damned with an eyewitness report. Like Ed Murrow among the smoking rubble of a dockside warehouse.

  ‘I’m standing under a great wall of glass. If like me you suffer from vertigo, stay away. Only faith is keeping this thing up there.’

  Then he cued the Peter Ackroyd pre-record. Mellifluous, and with a becoming lisp, Ackroyd made his pitch. ‘Admirable! This aspiring, grandiose, almost greedy building aptly fulfils the conditions of London’s growth.’

  Cancerous. Contagious. Out of control.

  The Shard was an inverted V for Vendetta symbol dwarfing cathedral, hospital and station. The ice dagger was an astral flightpath narrowing to some remote and scarcely imaginable point: the furthest horizon of the possible.

  In my nearside driving mirror I watched as bands of green leaked across the light-polluted sky. Ackroyd, who exploited this district in his first novel, The Great Fire of London, was well qualified to mark the moment. In 1982 he had written: ‘Tim turned towards the river, as if for relief. But it had become brilliant and fiery, taking on the shape and quickness of the flame… Eventually, legends were to grow around it. It was popularly believed to have been a visitation, a prophecy of more terrible things to come.’

  After the publication of his novel Hawksmoor in 1985, Ackroyd took Melvyn Bragg (and an accompanying TV crew) to inspect the white stone pyramid in the grounds of St Anne’s in Limehouse. The Shard was only the latest clone of that coded memorial, now pushed to the point of absurdity. The launch party at London Bridge celebrated the promotion of an antiquated Masonic symbol into the dizzying post-truth world. And the neutralising, by public exposure, of London’s occult geometry. Towers along the banks of the Thames formed strange geometric figures, random signifiers of a culture that it will take a thousand years to interpret.

  The consortium responsible for the Shard (once known as the Commerzbank Tower) included, at various stages, the Qatar National Bank, the Qatari Islamic Bank, the Halabi Family Trust, the Nationwide Building Society, and the London-Jewish entrepreneur Irvine Sellar. The New Labour Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott pronounced himself entirely satisfied with the latest imposition on the skyline: ‘The proposed tower is of the highest architectural quality.’ Stability of structure, post 9/11, was the clinching argument in the pitch. And there will be no Westfield Olympicopolis casino here. Shia-compliant financing forbids it.

  I returned to the periphery of the Shard with Bradley L Garrett, author of Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (2013). I asked him to show me how he avoided the £25.95 elevator surcharge by breaking into the construction site. And running, undetected, up seventy floors of the central concrete core, before clambering out on the counterweight of a giant crane to snap a few selfies. To experience the ultimate vision of the sentient city, where everything flows; railways are rivers, and rivers are pulsing veins and arteries. There are no people. The only sound is the wind. The Shard is most itself when it is registered from the one place where it can’t be seen, from the pinnacle of the sail.

  I thought, on a previous expedition, how unlikely and irrelevant to the matter of London the spike of the Shard appeared from grassed mounds where planners are scheming a 900-metre-long elevated park on railway sidings between Peckham Rye and Queens Road Peckham. If I hadn’t stayed for a night in Shangri-La, I wouldn’t have believed that, at about the point where the cloud base circumcised the thrust of the glass tower, people were swimming their leisurely lengths, and basking in their divorce from the complexities of the world outside the window.

  The Shard is an implanted flaw in the eye. It moves as we move, available to dominate every London entry point, to endstop every vista. Even the fee-paying advertisers of Santander bikes are carrying the brand. It is imprinted on the red mud-panel, along with Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Olympicopolis helter-skelter. London icons all. Photographs we are no longer permitted to take. Target architecture. Structures made to be blown apart.

  We leaned on the bridge above the escalators linking London Bridge station and St Thomas Street. It wasn’t quite how Garrett remembered it. He was preoccupied by new projects; a novel of UFOs, ley lines and a 3,000 mile US road trip to hot springs and abandoned mines. And then, closer to home, by guerrilla initiatives in response to the housing situation in London. We compared notes about the catalogue of unoccupied buildings, locked, boarded up, and cast into development limbo. Asylums. Cholera hospitals. Public baths. Schools. Redundant factories. Discontinued industries. Abandoned shopping malls not yet converted to messianic African religions. How many unsponsored wildflowe
r meadows could be found behind corrugated-iron fences? Secret spaces not worth the cost and hassle of security.

  The best time to infiltrate a site, so Garrett said, was shortly before the topping-out ceremony. His associates had no problem with the Shard. They watched the watchman as he left his hut. And they walked straight in through the open door and across to the central staircase.

  It takes longer now, as a site worker or jobbing designer, to get to the levels designated as offices (04–28), than it took Garrett and his urban explorer crew to run up the ladder to the stars. I asked one architect about her experiences fitting out a floor for a company selling desk space. It was quite usual, she said, to wait thirty minutes for a lift. The empty space on which she worked was partitioned into theoretical cubicles and sub-divisions. Some clients want nothing more than that Shard address. They employ a person with a low boredom threshold to sit at a desk, while they never leave the safety of the suburbs. Others run their affairs from Shanghai or Malaysia or Estonia. You can phone through and be connected, as if to a human standing at the window. The office floor is quite deserted, a work in progress. Like an absence on an ordinary failing high street waiting to become a charity shop. But Irvine Sellar continues to endorse the vision of the Shard as ‘a place where people live, work, enjoy themselves’. Renzo Piano wants ‘intensified’ urban experience, a 24-hour vertical city without suburban stretchmarks.

  Bradley Garrett found an exposed ledge, on the rim of the troposphere, on which to commemorate his intrusion. For blogworld publication, notoriety, arrest and trial.

  ***

  The solution to the housing crisis that Garrett and his friends are working on sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’.