The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  Laying a hand on the cold monument, I try to anticipate the Overground spur to Barking in the way that Martin Stone would thread bookshop to bookshop, to locked room, to private house, to suicided collector, right across the city, across continents. He called it the ‘Vine’. Pluck one fat grape and the next will make itself known. There is no Blackhorse Road without the lived experience of Harringay Green Lanes. A book hunt, like a deep-topography détournement, is about continuity, harvesting contour lines, paying adequate attention to signs and signatures. If Barking, or Barking Riverside, is indeed the golden reservation on the River Roding, it must reveal itself, in homeopathic doses, as I follow the curve of the silent railway.

  What did the promoters of this El Dorado of the A13 promise?

  The Barking Boathouse is a unique riverside arts venue, at the heart of the emerging Ice House Quarter, featuring exhibition/café space, the terrace and riverside studios. A beautiful location for a fashion or film shoot, or simply a place to chill out and relax by the river. Discounts available for certain entrepreneurial ‘start ups’ or emerging creative talent. This is an area of historic and cultural significance, being home to Barking Abbey (Ruins), Abbey Green, Town Quay (Short Blue Fishing Heritage) and the historic Granary and Malthouse Buildings.

  They had the history (in tatters) and they were getting the railway. Tim Burrows, in the Guardian, said: ‘Barking Riverside has a decent case for being the most isolated place to live in London.’ A great location for mystics and desert saints. Why spoil it by letting the world in, the expelled of Hackney? The Riverside promoters, trying to attract settlers to this desolate colony on the site of a former power station, dangled the promise of a tram link to the centre of Barking.

  The rain was unrelenting. Main roads were clogged with a sclerotic agitation of fume-exhaling vans and cars dodging wet cyclists, some of them cushioned by a matching set of helmeted babes, looking like polychromatic airbags, on their way to the crèche, the holding pen. But once you stepped across the ribbon of commuter traffic, progress was steady. Here was a comfortable land, with artisan coffee outlets, gentle ascents and windows in which poets left capitalised messages.

  HAPPINESS: AND WHAT YOU DO WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT / CAN CHANGE THE WAY YOU FEEL / JUST DO YOUR BEST AND SMILE A LOT / YOU’LL KEEP AN EVEN KEEL.

  On Junction Road a plaster chef, with deeply furrowed brow, did his best to stay upbeat, raising a thumb against the weather, the cars denied access to the southbound A1, and a cyclone of bad news from across the Atlantic. I narrowly avoided being rammed into the window of a barber shop by a skidding invalid carriage piloted by a woman in blue wellington boots whose sightline was completely obscured by a rainbow-defaced pink umbrella.

  Where aspirant Scottish politicians, especially those fortunate enough to live in London, bag their Highland Munros, mountains over 3,000 feet, I collected rain-smeared snapshots of non-functioning London Overground stations. Upper Holloway was a holding pen of secure fences and orange Trumpsuits of aggrieved workers waiting on wet-weather gear approved by Health and Safety. Hands in pockets, bearded and booted, they smoked roll-ups on the pavement, blocking passage to a notice boasting (against all evidence) that shops and businesses are open as usual. If you can get to them around the perpetual Crossrail burrowing. The Overground is a dead track, all the way to Barking. IMPROVEMENTS UNDER WAY. COMPLETION BY FEBRUARY 2017. Meanwhile: detours, bus promises.

  The London Overground branch from Gospel Oak to Barking was conceptual, a theoretical boost to property values: there were no actual trains. The long delay in service felt like class action, as if Hampstead liberals from the moral high ground were not yet prepared to cohabit with darkest Essex. The line was ‘closed for improvements’ in June 2016 and these improvements would not be delivered before February 2017. If it all went well. (And it didn’t.) If there were no more problems. (And there were.) The upgrade was budgeted at £130 million. Overhead cables could not be fitted to incorrectly designed masts. Piledrivers smashed through sewage pipes in Walthamstow. Construction materials were not delivered on time, while gangs were kept waiting. TfL (Every Journey Matters) asked for a grovelling apology from Network Rail (Delivering for our Customers). Network Rail (Delivering for our Customers) feuded with the Department of Transport (Putting Passengers First). The Department of Transport (Putting Passengers First) demanded a public enquiry. And another million in compensation. They are all minded to initiate a robust plan and a major review, with pretty blue bottles of spring water, artisan coffee and ethically sourced bread rolls, into what went wrong. And how many more meetings and discussions, claims and counter claims, should be held to carry the work forward, to make life better for all of us.

  Sadiq Khan, our Mayor, said that unless £32 billion was provided by Government for Crossrail 2 (Connecting Jobs, Homes and Opportunities), London would grind to a halt. Long queues, desperate to save a few minutes in getting to Birmingham, would spill on to the streets around Euston and gridlock Underground platforms.

  On Fairbridge Road, now soaring in value, thanks to its Overground proximity, I barely recognise the house that Chris Petit managed to flog before it slid down the embankment onto the tracks. This was where we edited – or brewed coffee, fetched chocolate biscuits, while Emma Matthews edited – two films for Channel 4. Chris spent much of the day, when he wasn’t reshooting my flickering 8mm footage from the bare wall, or shaking his head and sighing over the latest assemblage, on the phone to estate agents, solicitors, potential purchasers. He said that his career was about making the right moves in the property market, squeezing a book or at worst a script out of every address in his drift across North London. Fairbridge Road was as close to Hackney as he wanted to come. Peter Stanford, visiting the director on behalf of the Independent on Sunday, described the house as: ‘an oddly utilitarian home in an industrial unit.’

  I photographed the revised borderline bunker in its metallic grey finish, with the container-stack makeover that Petit would certainly approve. The property right alongside his former studio was now CARWORKS GARAGE: SERVICE, REPAIR, BRAKES, MOT. Petit plotted a Warhol factory, shutters closed against daylight, commissions flooding in. But the Fairbridge Road address soon declined into an embassy of inconvenience in which the filmmaker, unravelling CIA conspiracies or making complicated connections to Nazi bankers, became a self-immolated Julian Asange with rescued charity-shop jackets and piercing eyes. An Edward Snowden, services rendered, banged up in Moscow, staring at a railway going nowhere.

  ‘He is a man,’ Stanford wrote, ‘who enjoys living in the seedier parts of London, who is fascinated as a filmmaker by people on the cultural margins, and who is pessimistic about the direction his industry is taking… Petit is very much the observer, charting worlds of which he himself is not a part.’

  The carpet boys on the other side of the road, the chancers who provided Chris with many hours of innocent entertainment, as they ducked and dived, were still in the game. The director used to watch from behind his shutters with the detached gaze of a hungrier Maigret, small cigar instead of pipe. Chronologically arranged shelves of Simenon first editions offered a clue, probably false, to Petit’s bleak philosophy of life. But the rest of the opportunistic retail concerns of earlier times, and the parking spots favoured by dealers, were swept away for a delicatessen. A stencilled Jesus, baring his breast to reveal a scarlet anarchist tattoo, holds a finger to his lips. Say nothing. Feel nothing. Move on.

  ***

  Crouch Hill was a drowning village, soon to be given the kiss of life by the orange Trumpsuits standing motionless on the steps behind the inevitable blue fence. A suspended station as a staging post to nowhere. The most striking feature is a heritage dairy, with scenes of waggoners and milkmaids in a bucolic England: GRAZING, MILKING, COOLING. PRESENT DAY DELIVERY. Under the city, Welsh cows. Economic migrants.

  There are vans of bored electricians, putting on time, lodged on every bridge across the railway. I have no difficulty in following the t
racks, even without the wail of trains. One of the bridges on Stapleton Hall Road is a beautiful mass of Pre-Raphaelite ivy and creepers, the vegetable world swallowing the arch of old brick.

  On Sunday, 16th July 1944, a V-1 flying bomb hit Granville Road, killing fifteen people. ‘Their purpose was terror,’ says the Peace Garden board. Two young girls, ribbons in their hair, movements synchronised, are dancing on a bald strip of grass in the front garden of a prefab.

  By the time I found myself on Endymion Road, I had lost my sense of direction entirely; railways were criss-crossing on the flank of Finsbury Park. Was this the Endymion of Keats? ‘Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways / Made for our searching.’ Or a novel of railway mania and Chartism by Benjamin Disraeli? Martin Stone could have hunted down first editions with surprising dedications, annotations, inserted letters, mysteries creating further mysteries to keep the story alive. Register that reflex smile of amusement, the cigarette wedged in corner of mouth; the ash caught in his hand and pocketed, as he slides the latest find into his bag and runs for the last train. ‘Ghosts, adieu!’

  I am striding uphill towards Manor Park. It is coming apart. My interior compass is shot. I have to reverse, realign with the future railway at Harringay Green Lanes. Time to get out of the drizzle for a coffee in a Turkish place, where the elevated TV has my neck cracking for more and worse Trumpery. The screen glows like a wall heater about to fuse. And explode. The Apprentice Don is expensively tailored – by Russians? – to disguise the prime junkfood mass. He’s heavy and he ain’t my brother. The man is an obvious plant: the Manchurian candidate is about to become the Manchurian president. He points like Kitchener and parrots his loud lies over the deserted café, where the proprietor is engrossed in problems of his own, headlines in a Turkish newspaper. Airport massacres: sanctioned repression.

  I talked to the empty chair that was Martin Stone. We never paused for breath on runs through Norfolk until the last shop closed in Lowestoft – and even then, sucking hard on another cigarette, and slapping his pockets for coins, Martin would be blagging his way into some private house, waking a retired dealer, a widow, with exquisite courtesy. They never refused him. He brought excitement into their lives. Having previously unrecognised treasures carried away confirmed a certain status on provincial lives promoted, by this nocturnal visitation, into legend.

  In the dark, there would be a pit stop, a petrol halt, a café somewhere like this. Beyond books, we exchanged anecdotes, speculations, libels. Now I told the voiceless spectre of Martin – he couldn’t get away – about the discovery I’d made that morning, thinking about benched vagrants and Hawksmoor churches. London, I said, was activated by exchanges between those who were calm enough, wise enough, dead enough, to sit without moving, and those who tramped, ceaselessly, margin to margin. The group of Hawksmoor churches in East London, I always felt – with Martin, in perpetual motion, questing, finding, selling, living alongside the shell of St George-in-the-East – were fixed points, outside time, anchoring their narrative in blocks of fossil-encrusted Portland stone. But I was wrong. My theories at the time of Lud Heat, deriving from EO Gordon, Alfred Watkins, John Michell, Nigel Pennick, were about lines of force connecting the churches, making patterns, and provoking crimes, rituals, visitations, within an unregistered sphere of influence. What I now understood, in steady rain, on this morning of political madness, tracking an inoperative railway to a place nobody wants to go, is that the walks we are compelled to make are the only story. Walks are autobiography without author.

  I remembered how the impression of the obelisk of St Luke’s, Old Street, stayed with me until I reached Christ Church, Spitalfields, a structure displacing its own volume in my reverie of London. There was a slow cinematic dissolve, moving as I moved. Christ Church began to fade as I passed Martin’s house in Cannon Street Road and saw the tower of St George-in-the-East above the Crown and Dolphin pub. St George was imprinted until I walked through the gates of St Anne’s in Limehouse. This insecure mental picture of the chain of churches, and the impulse to shape walks around them, produced an occulted fiction of place, in the same way that still frames, dragged through a teeth of a projector, give an illusion of movement, reality. The final image, at the end of our journey, is a composite of everything that we have witnessed and absorbed. Stillness and movement are indivisible. Barking is nothing more than the sum of the walk that brings us to its boundary.

  Martin yawned. Martin disappeared. Leaving a faint smell of burning paper.

  This is another country, Green Lanes. After the railway bridge, the Turkish or Kurdish shops are active with private agendas. I’m manoeuvring to get a shot of a mobile phone advertisement made of white bulbs set in blue letters: WALK AND TALK. It’s tricky with rain beads on the lens. And the quiet but persistent solicitation of a station beggar. The first of the day. Because he has interrupted my attempt to take this photograph without bringing the crew out of the shop, I move off, and take the first diversion heading towards South Tottenham. On St Ann’s Road I’m pleased to find that the hospital appears to have survived the culls.

  John Rogers, the documentary film-maker and activist with whom I have been rewalking the London Overground circuit, lived in the area for a time. He told me that he thought the hospital’s future was threatened. But shrinkage is such a general condition that John’s impulse to support protest might be premature. The hospital, at a safe distance from the centre, was founded in 1890 to deal with the sweats and tremors of an unhealthy city. It was expanded two years later, after a scarlet fever epidemic, as a colony of wooden huts. During the First World War, St Ann’s was requisitioned as a Base Hospital for the American Expeditionary Force. Wards were painted in a restful shade of green and provided with high beds suitable for strong men from Denver, Colorado. Therapeutic plantings were undertaken by a former employee of Kew Gardens.

  As the London population increased and incomers moved into the area, the number of available beds went down. In 1951 there were 756. In 1964, 606. In 1984, 320. In 1993, 246. By April 2001 the freehold ownership and management of the site had been transferred to the Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust. Many of the buildings were empty, others in partial use. Patients had to learn to navigate the tactful spread of the fever hospital.

  A church with a forbidding wooden door has changed allegiance: MOSQUE ENTRANCE IS FROM SUFFOLK ROAD. Where the future Ginger Line, rebranding old tracks, crosses St Ann’s Road, my path is challenged by a much more important route, the Cycle Superhighway. There are few bicycles out here in the dozing suburbs, but distances are flagged in cycle-time. And appropriate cycle destinations: STOKE NEWINGTON 8 mins, THE CITY 25 mins. The City feels like a very remote prospect, a fever dream, removed by the miles required to neutralise contagion. Biological and moral.

  Emerging on Stamford Hill High Road and swinging north is a shift into the past, the deep past of the Great North Road, the way out; first intimations of elsewhere, the excursionism of Izaak Walton on a quest for pleasure, the English pastoral of milkmaids and fishing inns, and the mad tramping of John Clare – and alongside that a rind of memory running back to Stoke Newington, Hackney and the City, our earlier selves, in 1969, walking in the crowd to White Hart Lane, to pay a few coins to stand and watch Tottenham Hotspur confront the hated Leeds United of Bremner and Giles on a sheet of snow. And the noise of splintering glass and the excitement of riot travelling faster than the progress of the railway hidden behind blue boards, set off by the curdled yellow of a parked ambulance with a flashing blue light. Travelling like fire.

  After Green Lanes, Turkish enterprise, men talking on the pavement outside wedding shops and restaurants, the faces labouring with bags on the pavements were mostly black. New communities want to adapt the failing structures of old places. The St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust (StART) aspires to build affordable homes on the site of the hospital, where two-thirds of the land is being sold. Architects commissioned by StART are drawing up plans. ‘It is a
t this point,’ said the Tottenham Community Press, ‘that communities must take it into their own hands to tackle the crisis head-on.’

  In North Tottenham regeneration takes the form of demolishing 1,800 homes. Community groups, as ever, battle to defend the theory and practice of council housing. Estates are wiped from history. And Haringey Council promises (post-truth): ‘Once the Development Vehicle is established in 2017 we will work closely with residents to deliver new homes.’ Meanwhile, demolitions and expulsions continue, shifting cargoes of human landfill to the outer Essex limits, to other counties, dying resorts, Peterborough. ‘It is a tough road they walk, at times lonely,’ writes Adjoa Wiredu, editor of the community paper.

  I met Adjoa, a bright and committed young woman, with a proper sense of the absurdity of bringing a conversation about demolition, social engineering and street art into such a place, in a cellar across the road from Haggerston Overground station: Ginger Line coffee (for me), with an immaculately delivered artisan flourish in the froth. Well worth the wait, while the barista talks sourcing with his disciple. Bare bricks, wooden tables and forms, post-industrial chic, laboratory lighting. Music pitched a decibel below the level of walkout annoyance.