The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with whom they are in open competition. They smuggle plywood constructions under concrete stairs, in those awkward angles left over by architects who haven’t had time to find an elegant solution to a problem. There are bivouacs, where people are free to rest, write, eat, sleep, disguised by black paint and a padlock. They look like any other workman’s hut, within the dead zones of some of the most secure and spooked enclaves in the City of London. With so much random construction work in progress, who will notice another hide or yurt shaped from standard building-site materials? There is an invisible army of occupation, an informal network providing free accommodation without direct confrontation, without the battles faced by squatters or Occupy campers alongside St Paul’s. The hut I visited with Bradley Garrett was still in play when I passed two months later.

  Now, as I move around, I notice more and more of these unlicensed shelters, often parasitical on the chaos of development. Huts in places where you expect to find them. All you need is a sticker for VolkerHighways (Considerate Constructors). Plywood boxes assembled around potential basement excavations that will never be undertaken. There are answers to the housing crisis: the crisis is money and manipulation, artificially boosted prices. Profit. Equity. Inheritance. The city is emptying into investment shells and towers engineered from stolen credit cards.

  The Garrett huts have no windows. They are Reichian orgone accumulators bombarding you with atoms. Good spaces in which to hibernate, or crash, but hard for living. The empty towers control view. Up there on the fifty-second floor, you can’t help witnessing the incoming waves of the future. As Mike Davis said, in the Preface to the 2006 reissue of City of Quartz, he anticipated: ‘Moments, ripe with paradox and non-linearity, when previously separate currents of history suddenly converge with profoundly unpredictable results.’

  When I took an early swim after my night in Shangri-La, the only other participants loosed themselves, very tentatively, from couches where they might have spent the hours of darkness. They seemed to be rounding off a heavy night and not greeting the rising sun over Tower Bridge and Canary Wharf. The man who looked like a slightly hungover and less twinkly Russell Brand – and who might well have been him – watched his companion, a slim girl in a black bikini, enter the water. To test it, over a couple of lengths, on his behalf.

  I waited my turn. I tried to calculate where the shadow of the Shard would fall. And I knew that place. I had walked there with Bradley Garrett, telling him about how I’d been challenged by security, on the slithery grey surface outside our seat of local governance, City Hall, for the crime of talking to a recording device in public. Which struck me as a severe reaction, when the high walkways of City Hall, with the backdrop of the river, were nothing but scenic platforms for recorded interviews. It was an extraordinary evening when Boris Johnson did not present himself, shovelling back his golden fringe, on the 6.30pm London news. My interviewer put away his kit. He didn’t have the energy to argue his case. He told me that his father, who had been in haberdashery, was once called to make a sales pitch to Irvine Sellar in his Carnaby Street incarnation, before the great entrepreneur found his métier in property. Sellar received him lying full-length on a couch, like a Roman provincial governor waiting for the next peeled grape.

  If the Shard collapsed and fell in a straight line, I calculated that it would fracture the new cancer block of Guy’s Hospital and spread its splinters as far as a park with a singular atmosphere. Restoration work was in progress and there was, currently, no access to Angel Path. But the freshly pointed wall, propped up by locally-sourced tombstones, had a heritage plaque recalling the site of the Marshalsea, the debtors’ prison.

  The collegiate atmosphere of this sinister den, with its respectable quarters for the well-connected and slum conditions for those who could pay nothing, was vividly described by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit. And painstakingly recreated, at the height of the Thatcherite period, by Christine Edzard in a two-part film version. Now the park has been rescued from its obscurity and rebranded as the ‘Crossbones’ Garden of Remembrance.

  The Marshalsea was way ahead of its time, a privatised operation. Its failings were the failings we are hearing about on every news bulletin. The governors and turnkeys bought their positions and turned them to profit. Starving prisoners died in conditions of hideous overcrowding. Courts of enquiry stalled, leading to new trials and larger fees for the lawyers. What was prophetic about the scheme was the understanding that even debt, even the most wretched depths of human hopelessness, can be spun and presented as a workable solution. Taking those miscreants with no respect for the sanctity of fiscal obligation, the natural rights of property, off the street. And out of sight. Giving their care to the smartest bidder, the least worst option.

  Rock gardens made from rubble were neatly bordered by the curved tops of nameless gravestones. There were poignant clusters of aniseed herbs and sharp-leaved stonecrops. And paths of crushed green glass crafted to invoke the bed of a mountain stream. Under the shade of an enormous London plane tree, and pillowed by a set of torpedo tombs, a number of rough-sleepers were cocooned in body bags, folded arms covering hurt eyes against daylight. Surrounded on all sides by high buildings and improved brickwork, the Marshalsea still functioned like the open yard of the prison. Groups of men, in hushed conversation, occupied different benches.

  It was the prong of the Shard, looming over the cranes of lesser construction sites, that looked anachronistic and absurd. When Renzo Piano’s folly shatters and is replaced by something bigger and brighter, the wooden benches and the people perched on them will still be here.

  VOICE OF THE HUTS

  The last London is a lost London, a city of fracture and disappearance. I set out early one morning, with notebook and pocket camera, to map the emerging favela of huts. I mean those secret places – riverside shacks, containers, empty packing cases – where urban explorer collectives have established their hides. Two things became clear very quickly. There were many more of these alternative free-Airbnb accommodations than I’d previously suspected. And they weren’t all operated by Bradley L Garrett and his crew. The germ of the idea was out there now and it was spreading fast, facilitated by technologies I scorned or misunderstood: fractal worlds beyond the reach of my Nokia duncephone.

  My crudely assembled chart, very much like the one I produced, many years ago, for the alignment of Hawksmoor churches, was outflanked before it began. All this stuff was already available on YouTube and a dozen apps. Streamed with ads for Santander bikes, MYRUN TECHNOGYM (the intelligent home treadmill) and WALK LONDON MAYFAIR VELVET STUDDED LOAFERS. I spotted one cod-psychogeographical plan of Hackney, contrived from mystical pentagrams and triangles, emblazoned on the rear flank of a silver hire car, right over the petrol-flap.

  How to tell pirate shacks from the legitimate ones that appeared in new places every morning? On the flat roofs of developments frozen in limbo. In the front gardens of Victorian houses divided into units where neighbours are strangers. On wasteground that might once have been school allotments. How to separate the cabins of urban explorers from those of council-sanctioned, road-digging invaders? This was the beauty of the scheme: the huts were identical.

  Everywhere I looked, potential hideaways were revealed. I marked down four definites and three possibles in the City, in close proximity to anonymous block-buildings from the 1950s or ’60s, their survival dependent on Secret State affiliations: phone-tapping operations, redirection of post, immigration filters sifting the dubious identity papers of money-market cooks and cleaners. The windows of these buildings were dirty and unreadable, entrances dim and protected by policed barriers. Angles of approach were covered by banks of surveillance cameras. But an orange jumpsuit and a yellow hardhat gave the hut-builders a free pass. For recreation, they climbed to the top of the latest towers and swung in the breeze from giant cranes, watching drones swirl and mob in intricate patterns like starlings co
ming to roost.

  Seven crosses in the City, three in Bethnal Green, two in Shoreditch and eleven in Hackney. The squatted nexus around Corbridge Crescent, the railway-bridge camp, the narrowboats with pirate flags, felt like a good place to start. But it was all too obvious. There were shelters. There were squats. And anarchists with busy stencils: IF YOU WORK FOR A LIVING, WHY DO YOU KILL YOURSELF WORKING. RIP. But no visible or invisible stopover shacks. The canalside container suburb was so tight that I passed a young black man raging at the locked gate, tapping his security code, yelling and whistling, to gain access to his expensive shared desk.

  A WISE MAN TURNS CHANCE INTO GOOD FORTUNE. So the artist (or collective) known as RIP sprayed on the wall beside the Empress Coaches yard. WHATEVER YOU’RE THINKING THINK BIGGER. Local developers obviously agreed with this sentiment. They were about to tear down the gothic ruin to give us something much bigger and louder. On the other bank of the canal, in Andrews Road, THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER VILLAINS AND ARTISTS left their boast in full view, around a skull and crossbones design. This corner of the neighbourhood was resolute in its determination to be part of a graphic novel.

  As Jarett Kobek points out in i hate the internet (2016), comic books are the loam from which a world-devouring monster grew. For many of the new Londoners there is no other point of reference, no better authority than this self-cannibalising reductive form. ‘The business practices of the American comic-book industry have colonised Twenty-First Century life. They are the tune to which we all dance,’ Kobek wrote. ‘The internet, and the multinational conglomerates which rule it, have reduced everyone to the worst possible fate. We have become nothing more than comic-book artists, churning out content for enormous monoliths that refuse to pay us the value of our work.’

  And in just this way, the anarchists of Corbridge Crescent have processed village entropy into one giant comic book. Urban wanderers, flâneurs with tenure, private income or book commissions, feel free to sample, copy or blog these scripted walls and back alleys, on a daily basis. Sometimes collections of spraygun murals and stencilled graffiti, made over months, are turned into indie publications with laminated covers: hip graphic novellas stolen from the work of anonymous others, with no permission fees to be paid. The theft of content fits neatly inside Kobek’s model of comic-book capitalism.

  THE ALBION SAILS ON COURSE. Black script on white wall. The spill-zone around Corbridge Crescent, the painted devil heads and hybrid monsters, the bare-breasted pin-ups from naughtier times mouthing Situationist slogans, are captured and made fit for purpose by film crews and television set-dressers, lighting technicians and catering caravans, responding to dissent as: exploitable edge.

  LOADED WITH/ MEMORIES/ I WAS NOT AFRAID/ TO SET OFF/ AN ADVENTURE/ ANY MORE.

  14 November 2016: the words I copied into my notebook yesterday are painted over with white undercoat, so that professionals can create rebellion suitable for television. For example: a Warholist head of Che Guevara – CHE GAY – inflated to cover an entire wall, with fake yelps about eating the rich to replace the groundwork of RIP and the Secret Society of Super Villains and Artists. NO PIGS.

  The coaches from the garage, Empress of London, have to be relocated, clogging up streets where parking has been suspended, giving the council a double hit: the charge on residents, who are not getting what they paid for, and the levy on the film company.Win, win! Health and Safety demands that the production commandeers an ambulance, to be kept in the yard of the emptied coach park, in case one of the precious stars trips on a wrecked staircase in the preserved ruin.

  The outlaw in his shack on the ledge by the canal sleeps through the entire fuss. He learnt his lesson after the first Immigration Enforcement raid. Now his shelter looks like the detritus of a lumberyard. Like the reassembled aftermath of a Cornelia Parker explosion. To mark the approach of Halloween and the yawning of graves, a young boy cycles uncertainly to school, in the wake of his mother, wearing a silver skull-mask. Welcome to comic world, Hackney. At the base of the image swamp we find the sinister clown: child-catcher, grinning molester. The public joke, the big-haired politician who dissolves into the Joker © DC Comics. ‘The principal products of the comic-book industry,’ Jarett Kobek said, ‘were 32-page monthly pamphlets containing drawings of gargantuan-breasted women… Most of the industry’s output was subtle pornography for the mentally backward.’

  Extinguish fire with petrol. One of the latest Andrews Road defacements is a poster: SILENT BILL MUSE WANTED. Silence against the noise of imagery? The meditation of a hooded man sitting all day on a bench? Or another who dreams the fading city through all the hours of daylight in an Arsenal-branded sleeping bag? ‘Be silent in that solitude,’ said Edgar Allan Poe. Let them come. The restless spirits of the dead are ‘in death around thee’.

  My cartographic tour became a quest for silence, somewhere to kill the cortical hum, the tapping and pecking of boney digits on digital screens. I had been transcribing the broken monologues of Overground clients in transit, as they ignored the passing scene, ignored their fellow passengers, and asked for money or time or forgiveness. So? Really? Now I noticed that other playlets, one-sided dialogues were being broadcast from the ticket halls and conversation courts along the interconnected necklace of Ginger Line stations. At Shoreditch, for example, or Highbury and Islington. But not at Haggerston (the plaintive cry of the beggar: Sparechangeforfoodplease). Or at Whitechapel (drowned by Crossrail development).

  At Highbury I was confronted in the ‘profound dull tunnel’ leading to the escalator by a regiment of First War infantrymen marching in silence like ghosts who had found their way home from the trenches in time for vote for a hard Brexit. Their hoarded silence, I later discovered, was an artwork. More Walter Owen – whose strange novella, The Cross of Carl, describes the journey of a Tommy, left for dead after a minor skirmish, being transported by rail to sidings where he will be rendered into pig meat – than Wilfred Owen. ‘I knew that sullen hall.’

  Tin hats progress, unremarked, through a scatter of Highbury commuters ranting on mobile phones. Like a launch party at which everybody is talking loudly and insanely to themselves. And ignoring the product on the walls: those enlarged photographs from the Other World of vagrants, boy soldiers, motel light bulbs, universal graffiti.

  The entrance hall at Whitechapel is disputed territory, trapped between systems, haunted by spectres of sickness and poverty, haunted by progress. Phone babble would be a discourtesy. A ravaged young woman calling herself ‘Bets’ puts the bite on me, while we wait for a delayed District Line connection. Unasked, she describes herself as a smack addict, off for six weeks, trying somehow to make it to the safety of Soho, without hitting Liverpool Street, from which she has been excluded. She lived within the Underground system, the heat, the shelter, but she never mastered its complexities.

  Bets struggled to pull a blanket from her ratty bag. She chewed the blackened quick of her nails. Her teeth were ruined. She said that she wanted the toilet, but then she always felt like that, and wouldn’t bother just now. Her mouth was white and flecked. ‘I won’t come too close,’ she said, cupping a hand for coins. The train was held for a signal. She moved off down the quiet carriage.

  Climb the foothills of privilege if you want respite from the starling-chitter of cell phones. Highgate is good. Putting in time before visiting my dentist, I inspect the bookshelves of the Oxfam shop. And listen to the conversation at the till.

  ‘I saw V for Vendetta last night. DVD. Two pounds. Alan Moore.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Watchmen? You must know Alan Moore? From Hell? Jack the Ripper. Johnny Depp.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘John Hurt. He was Winston Smith in 1984. And now he’s a minister in V for Vendetta. England is a dystopian dictatorship. Alan Moore. Two pounds. I watched it again last night. I’ll bring the DVD in tomorrow.’

  I retreated to Waterlow Park and thought about writers and tennis, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes knocking it ab
out in the days of their friendship. Nobody playing today. Not even that phantom patpat of the deserted courts of Maryon Park in Blow-Up. Highgate honours the silence of the bridled Coleridge. The granite head of Karl Marx. The cushioned footfall of Hush Puppies on the pavement between Oxfam and off-licence. I used to explore reforgotten fiction in the basement of Fisher & Sperr. Now the antiquarian bookshop is an animal clinic. Highgate is a good place for the upmarket dog trade.

  ‘What do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?’ The fit young South African dentist probed.

  ‘Writer.’

  ‘Have I read any of them? What are they about?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Plenty of history there.’

  ‘I saw Julian Barnes coming uphill, right outside your place, in a blue shirt with blue jacket. The writer.’

  ‘Don’t know the name. Is he good?’

  On the wall, where my former dentist used to keep his Turner landscapes and views of Edinburgh, the new man has an Olympic artwork with an upbeat message. As he drilled, I thought about my father’s patient who believed that elements of the Secret State had implanted radio transmissions in his teeth. He was a conscientious objector in the Second War. Brought to London to face a tribunal, a paid assassin pushed him in front of a train. He survived, but sustained damage to his foot that left him with a lifetime battling for compensation. When his strength gave out and he died, he willed my father the foot. It was delivered in a hinged black box like a pygmy coffin.

  The noise that I couldn’t shake off, in teeth, ears, bones, was the soundscrape of dialogue transcribed in spaces outside and alongside stations. No worries, no worries then.

  ***

  THEY’LL BE LIKE REALLY REALLY HAPPY. SHE ADMITS TO BEING A LEZ. BUT THEY’RE SUCH A GREAT COUPLE. MONEY, REALITY. WORLD, HALLUCINATION. IF I HAD A MANIFESTO, I’D HIRE CORBYN TO CARRY IT THROUGH. HE CAN’T BE SHIFTED. HE’S A FORCE OF NATURE. HE’LL WIPE OUT THE LABOUR PARTY.THEY’LL BE LIKE REALLY REALLY HAPPY. I’M NOT RINGING TO BE A FACEBOOK FRIEND. BUT TELL HIM THIS IS WAR. I’M NOT BLAMING YOU. HE CALLS ME ON MY MOBILE. HIS NUMBER IS SPECIAL. MY NUMBER IS SPECIAL. I’M IN THE TRAIN STATION, SHOREDITCH. THEY’LL BE LIKE REALLY REALLY HAPPY. CALL YOU BACK. YOU STOOD UP AND WALKED OUT? THAT WAS GOING TO BE A SUCH GOOD STORY. WAS IT ON FILM 4? THEY’RE ALL REPEATS. DO NOTHING, HE SAID. THINK NOTHING. THIS IS WAR. HIRE CORBYN. HE’LL WIPE OUT THE LABOUR PARTY. WAS IT ON FILM 4? MONEY, REALITY. SECONDHAND BOOKS, LIKE MILITARY? GROSS. KEEP APPLYING, THAT’S GOOD. EVERYONE’S REALLY INTO THAT AESTHETIC NOW. HE’S A FORCE OF NATURE. THE DOCTOR IS SICK TODAY. SHE’S UP AND DOWN. SHE NEEDS TO HAVE RESTART, BASICALLY. I’M GONNA SERIOUSLY PICK THIS GUY’S BRAINS, THEN FUCK HIM OVER. YOU KNOW THEY’RE REVISING THE FOX HUNTING LAWS ON MONDAY. ASK FOR A REFUND ON THE TOILET. I’M NOT BLAMING YOU. IT’S BEEN A VERY SWEET YEAR. I FEEL WORSE THAN YESTERDAY. CALL YOU BACK. I CAN’T FIND THE LETTER WITH THE DATE FOR WHEN YOU PEOPLE ARE COMING. CALL ME BACK. WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO FOR YOUR HONEYMOON? RAPID CITY, IOWA? TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS, NOT SEA LEVEL OR VALUE BASED. THEY’LL BE REALLY REALLY HAPPY. SHE ADMITS TO BEING A LEZ. I LEFT HALF THE HOUSE IN TRUST. I’M ON MY WAY TO THE OVAL. I HAVEN’T GOT ANY OF THE 5%, OVER AND ABOVE. I’D LIKE THAT BACKDATED, TO BE HONEST. HIRE CORBYN. IT’S LIKE DJs AND THAT, BUT IT’S ALSO LIKE A PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION. FUCKING WEIRD. LIKE SEX ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT. BORIS IS BEHIND ALL OF THIS. I’VE BEEN GOING TO THIS OPTICIAN IN COVENT GARDEN. THEY DO GENUINE VINTAGE MODELS. THEY DO SILVER ON THE LENSES. I’M READING GASGOYNE’S A VAGRANT. WHEN I GET HOME IT’S LIKE RELIGIOUS STUDIES. HIRE CORBYN. THIS IS WAR. I’M NOT BLAMING YOU.