The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  I return by way of Stratford International – which involves a compulsory detour through the labyrinth of the Westfield superstore. At last, at the conclusion of my Thames Estuary tour, I find images of Lady Thatcher: a strategic window display in Waterstones. The Iron Lady by John Campbell. Thatcherism: A Graphic Guide. Shoppers, marching to the beat of piped muzak, do not pause. Throwaway bundles of the London Evening Standard, with the flag-draped coffin, have been crammed into a silver bin, along with polystyrene coffee cups, crisp packets and energy drinks. The headline in the Hackney Gazette, as I plod home, is not Thatcher-related, even though it sounds as if it ought to be. It’s local and ordinary, another tale of failing services, burdensome bureaucracy: BODY LOCKED IN MORGUE FOR WEEKS.

  Such fortuitous ironies were always noticed by Patrick Wright. He had, as he demonstrated on the walks we took in the high Thatcherite days, an eye for the telling detail, the coming horror anticipated in the crack of a paving stone or a vanished telephone kiosk. A Journey through Ruins, conjured from a couple of hundred yards between his home on St Philip’s Road and the Dalston Lane bus stop (or bus queue), reached out to the world at large. His polemic, or curse on the corruptions of locality, was dedicated to ‘Lady Margaret Thatcher’. The woman who had done so much to inspire silenced poets and cultural historians.

  Way back in 1991, Wright used the Hackney Gazette, as I did, for divination. In a report on the hubristic plans by a bankrupt council for a lavish upgrading of Hackney Town Hall, the Dalston pundit heard the elephantine shudder of much heavier footsteps, the apotheosis of Donald Trump. In the shameless marble floors and ‘curved glass walls’, Wright recognised an elective affinity with the retail atrium at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He also recognised the moral vacuum at the heart of this ‘King of Bullshit’. Trump was ‘a smudged deadbeat left over from the Reagan era… and propped up in a temporary kind of way by ailing US and Japanese banks that couldn’t afford to let him expire completely’. The Master Builder, the post-truth artist of the deal, was a permatanned bagpipe held in place by weight of hair. ‘I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got much more than I’ll ever need.’ All this trumpeting inflatable was waiting for was the invention of worldwide social media, slavish followers hungry for the latest jab of his thumb.

  Insane ambitions, as Wright demonstrated, were hiding in full sight. Commentators sneered, it could never happen. ‘If Trump was in the White House which, he was rash enough to hint in those undiminished days, he might well be before too long, he would follow the example of Presidents Reagan and Harding, and look for astrological anchorage in the stars.’ The big man appreciated, like a true Mafioso, that ‘you can trust family in a way that you can never trust anyone else.’ You can rob a country blind and they’ll still vote you into power, your kin and your billionaire cohorts. Wind the story right back and it ‘eventually delivers us onto the steps of Hackney Town Hall’.

  ABSOLUTELY BARKING

  I met Chris Currell, our friendly neighbourhood estate agent (and art collector), outside the shell of Haggerston Baths, after the tour of inspection by potential investors rounded up by Bill Parry-Davies. Nothing, as yet, has come of that initiative. The building is still in secure limbo, while the improvers circle and calculate. And make their pitches to the council. And Swimmers Lane is still PRIVATE and battened at either end by slate artworks, minor megaliths of incomprehension.

  Chris said that he’d seen me on the street – he was an early morning dog-walker – but we’d never stopped to chat. Then one morning, this brisk and personable operator appeared on my doorstep. We receive courtesy cards most days, instructing us to sell up, cash in, get out. I didn’t expect a home visit from the man, a foot in the door. But this was merely social. One of the artists in whom Chris was interested was Ceri Richards. He owned a few good pieces. I had written something about Richards and the painter loomed large in my memoir, Black Apples of Gower. I was invited to view the Currell collection and to take part in a Hackney cultural soirée promoting the book. Such opportunities were rare. Conversation darted and flickered across all sorts of theoretical social divides. Stereotypes never conform to the narratives you lay on them. I knew that Anne Currell, CEO of Currell Residential, had been the inspiration for the conversion of the modernist nurses’ wing of the German Hospital, off Graham Road, into private apartments. I had visited one of them. And witnessed how a new kind of community – artists and artisans with funds to invest – was emerging. I didn’t appreciate that Anne had a special interest in this kind of property. She had been a nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital for eight years, before the management situation deteriorated to the point where she felt that she had to change career, public service to private enterprise, by becoming a sales negotiator for Hotblack Desiato, the estate agents based on Upper Street, Islington. Currell Residential emerged from that beginning, before tracking money (and energy) to the east. Offices, hung with tapestries by Grayson Perry and others, were established on Kingsland Road and close to Victoria Park.

  When I ran into Chris and his dog heading south towards Haggerston Park, he confirmed what I had already suspected: the future of our stretched city was Barking. Barking was the where next for the dispossessed of Hackney. Walthamstow, they said, was already played out. Tottenham still too edgy. Margate was discussed. Whitstable gone. And Dagenham – a personal favourite – only attracted more adventurous spirits like Bill Drummond. The Currell Group was opening a new office, pumping investment into granaries and warehouses on the banks of the Roding. The ancient abbey town of Barking was the future terminus of another spur of London Overground; diverting from the loop, the orbital circuit, at Gospel Oak. And therefore twinned neatly with Croydon. It was a walk I would, one day, have to take.

  The new mayor Sadiq Khan, dissociating himself from Boris Johnson’s follies, his grotesque overspend on the conversion of the Olympic Stadium, his Thames Estuary airport scheme, decided that Barking was the next Barcelona. Khan signalled his approval of the building of 10,000 new homes in a zone to be called ‘Barking Riverside’. Here was another widely promoted edgeland conversion: questionable historic exoskeletons, decommissioned industries, stumps of retail opportunism and misconceived public art. And all of it feeding into an outwardly-mobile, river-sniffing reservation of promenades and wildlife reserves with a spanking new marina.

  And this at the very moment when long-established operators and occupiers at the Gallions Point Marina at Beckton were being evicted by the Mayor of London’s office, and granted seven days to remove all property, in order to facilitate a thrusting enterprise zone for ‘international business’. A zone commensurate with the pretensions of the City Airport and ExCel Exhibition Centre.

  ‘They will have to take my lifeless body out of here,’ said Leigh-Jane Miller, who runs the doomed ‘Moorings and Hard Standing’ with her father, Eric.

  I picked the right day for my Barking walk: 9th November 2016. Bulletins confirmed that Donald Trump was going to get it. Rain was strafing the pavements. And the news from Croydon was awful. Those tram lines I crossed with Stephen Watts, symbols of regeneration, led to a derailment, with seven deaths and many more injured. The driver took a sharp turn too fast. Previous warnings had been set aside.

  Property development by way of railway fever has been around for a long time. In 1907 WC Berwick Sayers published an account of ‘The Old Croydon Tram-Road, Canal, and Railway’ in The Home Counties Magazine. A bill was passed in 1834 authorising the construction of the London to Birmingham Railway, along with a lesser bill promoted by the London and Croydon Railway Company. One of the provisions of the Croydon bill was that the company should purchase an unproductive canal and construct a line along its bed. It was always about speed and money and a brighter future when the work was done. Canals set aside for tramlines and trams for railways that could make the push to Brighton. Tooley Street to West Croydon: ‘The London and Croydon Company did not pay very much attention to the comfort of its passeng
ers. The carriages were invariably jolting four-wheelers, divided into three compartments, one first-class, two second.’ These commuters, on their daily grind between city and suburb, regularly featured in crimes investigated by Sherlock Holmes.

  The Quarterly Review of 1836, concerned about trains travelling at excessive speeds of twenty miles an hour, denounced the project as ‘a visionary scheme unworthy of notice’. An experiment was made with an ‘Atmospheric Railway’, operating with a long cast-iron tube laid between the lines. One end of the tube was open to the air and the other was fitted to a pump. ‘The speed attained on the atmospheric railway was enormous. From Forest Hill to Croydon, a distance of 5¼ miles was accomplished in 2 min. 47 sec., a speed exceeding 100 miles an hour, and on slopes this was much exceeded. Passengers have likened the sensation of travelling in the trains to that of falling from a height.’ Croydon owed her status, Berwick Sayers concludes, to the railways that served her. ‘Sanitate crescamus – By health we grow great – is the motto of the town; but given a healthy site and people intelligent enough to develop it, we must look for the most powerful factors in making that healthy position known and accessible to the railways.’

  Soon after we returned from our Ginger Line walk to the home of Stephen’s grandfather, I read about a series of Halloween knife attacks in Croydon, leaving several men in hospital and one dead. Later there would be an unprovoked mob assault on a Kurdish refugee at a bus stop. But the most affecting news for me, and it came from so many sources, the range of this man’s contacts was astonishing, was the death of the fabled rock guitarist, my former colleague in the used-book trade, Martin Stone.

  Martin had roots in Croydon. He was a child of the South London suburbs. He did his time in the John Whitgift School for Boys. Doubtless, there is a scrolled photograph somewhere, like the one Stephen Watts produced, showing Martin, before the varieties of Fu-Manchu moustache, the beads and beret, as a scrubbed lad in a blazer (and customised Slim Jim tie). With contacts in the local folk scene, meeting Dave and Jo Ann Kelly, hanging out in pubs, clubs and dives, beginning to scope bookshops, junkshops, street markets, Martin swerved higher education for a gig with the Croydon Advertiser. ‘I wanted to be Muddy Waters. Instead, I was covering the Women’s Institute donkey derby for seven quid a week.’

  The spirit of Martin was with me that trumped November day, as preordained drizzle washed the slopes of Parliament Hill: the tumulus, the omphalos and its invocation of a mythic democracy. Many of our conversations, as I drove the scholar-magician on another insane quest, were about ley lines, Albigensians; Golden Dawn conspiracies melting into parallel literatures of the lost and reforgotten. Every redeyed expedition with Martin followed the same template: false trail, wrecked car, strip-search, Prevention of Terrorism challenge. White lines on tattered black briefcase. But it always turned out well in the end; another hit, another buried hoard to be evaluated and dispersed, converted into powdered energy – as Martin’s nostrils flared, his nose ran, and those ancient unforgiving eyes lasered through walls. He laughed until he coughed. His smoky, kippered voice enchanted dealers and friends, as the anecdotes, never self-serving, spilled and spooled. Mr Stone was modest, but he knew his worth.

  The man can’t be contained in a couple of digressive paragraphs, he should be a book. But then he already is. My first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, opened with Martin at the roadside, throwing up. ‘Nicholas Lane, excarnate, hands on severely angled knees, stared out across the dim and featureless landscape…’ Without Martin, there would have been no novel. The man never searched, he found. I could not have written a single paragraph without the conviction that certain characters – we are lucky if they cross our path, if we recognise them – are self-created, sliding through this life, many lives, linking unfinished or never-quite-composed stories. Before they drop back into the friable paper where earlier authors tried to fix them. Such men leave a magnesium flare in rumours that grow up around sightings. In gossip. In aborted 3am telephone calls. They are glimpsed in a Cecil Court shop, at a street protest in Paris, a poetry reading in Wales, on a train. In movement between provisional destinations. Their greatest gift is knowing when to disappear.

  Martin had to be heavily sedated, coshed into a coma, before you could get him on a plane. He liked trains. He liked Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris. He toyed with the notion of setting himself up in the Midi: pink suit, drainpipe trousers, in the sunshine. Bringing his friends, Mike and Linda Moorcock, along for company, for book talk. Making music.

  A true European, and no respecter of borders, Martin never abandoned that part of him that was Croydon. And that’s what, newly dead, translated to a better country, he was telling me as I set out for Barking. The election of Donald Trump was the point beyond which he didn’t want to travel. Trump’s trumpeting, his meaningless visibility, his compulsive Tourette’s tweeting, was the contrary of Martin’s measured respect for the printed word and the structure of a sentence or musical phrase. The creatures of Trump’s court were spooks of antisocial media, dripping poison into the veins of the internet. Martin was that person you can never contact, until he walks into your shop, and out of it into another universe. He was off-grid before there was a grid.

  I picked up books from my shelves with Martin Stone’s pencilled pricings, books that had survived all my cullings and clearouts. A first edition of In Parenthesis by David Jones in grey dustwrapper. I couldn’t afford it at the time, now I couldn’t afford to be without it. Jeremy Reed, a friend and admirer of the spectral dealer, told me how Martin supplied him with the rarities he required for works in progress. And how he wouldn’t charge, or would seriously undercharge, a poet.

  What else? A handsomely bound limited edition of Axel by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. With a preface by WB Yeats. And a loosely inserted letter from Æ (George Russell). Such golden decadence: Martin laid his weekly treasures on a grubby cloth, for the vultures (myself among them) crowding his table. The bills and scribbles tucked among uncut pages are still to be interpreted. ‘The ceremony,’ Yeats wrote, ‘of some secret Order wherein my generation had been initiated.’

  As had Martin. I never would be. I was left with the books, the physical objects. They came from the stall in Camden Passage, those two. The last slim volume was all I managed to retrieve when Martin, for a brief period, tried to be a shopkeeper, with premises conveniently close to King’s Cross station. He was never there. Frantic dealers paced outside all night, hoping to catch him if he stopped off to change suitcases.

  The Secret of Mont-Ségur by Raymond Escholier and Maurice Gardelle: £5 (less discount). I haven’t got around to reading it. ‘After the war he was able to return, and piece by piece, from letters and diaries, from court records and by word of mouth, he put together the story of this girl and her ill-fated search for the treasure of the Cathars, the lost Gospel of St John, the Book of Love.’ One day, perhaps. Andrew Kötting has a hut in the shadow of Mont-Ségur. This may be his project, Martin’s posthumous gift. That’s how it works. We move the books around. We facilitate, leaving the dealers with just enough to keep them on the road, telling their tales, dragging their suitcases.

  ‘Who in their right mind would seek asylum in Croydon?’ A good question from Shena Mackay in her 2003 novel, Heligoland. And my proof that books picked up at random – in this case, a groaning table outside a seafront shop in Hastings – can act as oracular support for a rackety superstructure. End-of-the-line Croydon, aspiring city of enterprise, balances end-of-the-line heritage sump Barking.

  One of Mackay’s characters, like Stephen Watts, feels the need, way ahead of the advent of alien-fearing, wall-building Trump, to visit Lunar House, the Home Office headquarters of the Immigration and Nationality Directive. An independent entity, at the limits of London’s imagination, is where asylum seekers are condemned to queue and wait.‘Supplicants of various nationalities stand or crouch, supported by handmade placards pasted with photocopied documents and photographs. Every picture tells a s
tory but nobody pauses to read. Inside, some fifteen miles of shelving sag beneath the weight of 200,000 case files bulging with a backlog of heartbreak, lies and truths lost in the translation.’

  TRUMPPENCE: the electoral placards said. Fraudulent coinage. Like Bitcoins. And just as sinister. Chump change. Money that isn’t money. The bouffant Don was in his pomp, the Hierophant from the Tarot deck, making a show of conciliatory interviews, before gathering his spooky cabal around him, those hardshell ladies and the scrubbed pro-life death addicts, and really letting rip. The boss Apprentice had nailed the big throne. The archive groper had his fat fingers, legitimately, in every pie. While Martin Stone, the invisible bookman with his candle of hermetic knowledge, was gone.

  ‘Sham fight, strenuous competition and struggle of the search after riches and fortune,’ said the key to the Tarot. ‘A card of gold, gain, opulence. Reversed: litigation, disputes, trickery, contradiction.’ Mirror of Donald. Mirror on the wall.

  ‘The World’s Most Popular Free Newspaper’, Metro, had nothing to say about any of this. Trumped by royalty.

  HARRY: YES, MEG IS MY GIRLFRIEND (NOW JUST LEAVE HER ALONE). LET ME SERVE LIFE IN THE UK: SEX KILLER BANKER’S PLEA TO HONG KONG COURT. GREAT WESTERN RAIL LINE COSTS SPIRAL TO £5.6bn. LEAVE’S ‘LIES’ NO WORSE THAN REMAIN’S.VIP SEX RING WITNESS WAS NOT CREDIBLE, POLICE ADMIT.

  The Overground shuttle to Gospel Oak was as packed and steaming as the old freebie North London Line. There was an uninhibited redistribution of dripping viral threads; full-frontal sputum exchanges, Grindr intimacies wet-coughed down the back of the neck. An excited Hoxton beard was calling his partner with urgent smartphone updates. ‘I feel the world’s kind of ended tonight, but whatever… Heh! Heh! Apocalyptic, yes! See you tonight if we’re still here. Heh! Heh!’

  Back with the Ginger Line, negotiating a rustle of chittering schoolgirls in green anoraks, parakeets jostling on wet stairs and mobbing narrow pavements, I broke away to align myself on Parliament Hill. Certain tramped paths were evident, but I could not take them. EO Gordon, in Prehistoric London, Its Mounds and Circles (1914), says: ‘The Llandin – Parliament Hill – is the largest, loftiest and most imposing of the four prehistoric “Gorsedds of Great Seats” of the Metropolis.’ London clay rising to sandy loam. A traditional place of assembly. ‘On the north-eastern slope is a stone monument on which an inscription states that here public speaking is allowed.’ On the morning of Trump’s triumph, we have no public. They are keeping to their beds. Even the dogs have been turned to stone. A petrified Labrador retriever guards a green shack known as The Mutt Hut (‘because they’re woof it’). Junked coffee beakers, among a quilt of rusty leaves, pretending to be mushrooms.