The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  Adjoa is a mature student at the University of Kent. She grew up on a Tottenham estate, before relocating upstream to Chiswick. She couldn’t believe that this was still London. The release of a certain kind of pressure was extreme. She floated. She moved in a different way. Then she returned. Her work, in a more sophisticated digital form, was much like my own: image-gleaning, wandering, assembling, sticking to the territory. Where would it go? What did it mean? I couldn’t help her. I never learned when or where to stop, every small advance was another digression. London was overloaded, collapsing under the weight of memory.

  LIFE IN THE UK TEST. ENGLISH LANGUAGE CENTRE. GENERAL ENGLISH. ACADEMIC ENGLISH. BUSINESS ENGLISH. LIFE IN THE UK COURSE. With reserved parking for JJ Rhatigan & Company.

  An impressive High Road building dedicated to processing applications, getting you through the barbed wire of bureaucracy. LEARN ENGLISH IN QUARTER OF THE TIME.

  This used to be the desperate freelance poet’s trade, teaching English as a second language in Tottenham and Walthamstow. But times have changed, the language game is now a high street business, a funded operation. An investment. With more clients every season.

  I’m on the curve of Broad Lane to Ferry Lane and feeling the pull of the marshes, an oily breeze, smelling of burnt rags and comfrey, from ruffled reservoirs. The Tottenham Hale Retail Park, colonising a strategic bend in the road, thickens that sensation of being trapped in the gutter of the map, heading into some off-highway wilderness with fresh brown fields to exploit. Subsequent research discovered that visitors to the Retail Park stayed, on average, between twenty minutes and an hour. Some, intimidated by security barriers, looked as if they had taken up permanent residence, camping in skips, feeding on throwouts. Others, presumably, were permitted one glance at the promised land before being bounced.

  A skeletal sail, or single wing torn from a giant corvine, guards the entrance. It is badged like the denim jacket of Peter Blake with come-ons for Argos, Next, Costa Coffee, Halfords (where insurers allow you to choose a replacement for a stolen bike), JD, Poundworld, O2, Carphone Warehouse, Burger King, Carpet Right, Lidl, TK Maxx, Currys PC World, B&Q, and all those enterprises so attractive to rioters.

  Parked at the perimeter of this potential excitement is a double-decker bus with open doors. The bodywork is embellished with a smiling black girl and an encouraging slogan: MEETYOURFUTURE. More Trumpery has been laid on for this day of days. The stalled Tottenham Hale transport could be the Teflon Don’s campaign vehicle: HIRE AN APPRENTICE. They did. And we must live with the reality TV consequences. DIGITAL FUTURES. CREATIVE EQUALS.

  A post-architectural malapropism of stunted tower blocks in playdough colours, buttressed by failing shops and offensive artworks, has been left to expire on the hard shoulder like radioactive roadkill. Ferry Lane is such an evocative name. I stopped, from time to time, at the Ferry Boat Inn on my way from a single room in Hampstead to my classes at the South-West Essex Technical College and School of Art in Walthamstow; back in the Sixties, my first real London job. Ferry Lane was a broad causeway. Essex was another country guarded by water.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Martin said. ‘The light is running out.’

  ‘Hang on. One more thing. And it’s important.’

  On winter days in Camden Passage, you feared for Martin’s physical wellbeing.You could hear his bones chime in the wind. The pale glow of a cigarette was his only source of warmth. His nose dripped steadily. Those emphatic, medieval eyebrows were lightly frosted. But a charm I couldn’t define – courtesy of address, aborted rock-legend status – drew them all in: top-dollar dealers from Covent Garden, Savile Row and California, paper-addicted postmen, actors, punks, public eccentrics, Jimmy Page, Michael Moorcock, Marianne Faithfull, Barry Humphries, mildewed weirdo collectors of single titles, shy Irish builders with a thing for William Faulkner and a rubber-band roll of cash-money, smooth villains, chipped saints, mystics, undead 1890s decadents, old men of the suburbs, married women, infants setting themselves up to deal in Baedeker guidebooks. He fulfilled some strange need: the outsider/insider with the keys to the celestial library.

  ‘Are we ever going to make Barking? I feel like I’ve laid my neck on all the sleepers between here and Gospel Oak.’

  Martin knew that there were no bookshops in Barking Riverside. And nothing wretched enough to qualify as junk.

  ‘Wait,’ I insisted. ‘I can’t let my gross bit about that railside development looking like roadkill pass without qualification. I’ve just realised that Mark Duggan was invited to step from the boxed-in car and shot, Operation Trident, at that precise spot, Ferry Lane. He was coming back over the causeway from Walthamstow, in possession of a recently acquired BBM Bruni Model 92 handgun, a blank-firing replica. After that everything is up in the air. The police treated the minicab driver with their usual courtesy, spreadeagled in the dirt, sworn at. “Don’t look, don’t look,” they kept shouting. The gun migrated, in some never explained way, over a fence into the long grass. Don’t look. Don’t see. Don’t remember. Don’t tell. The event, right here, was the trigger, the source and fountain of the Tottenham riots.’

  Walthamstow was much changed and I had to push on, hard, to make my late-morning appointment. On Blackhorse Road I registered an entire window of the Oxfam shop given over to martial glorification: war memoirs, zap-a-Nazi comics, neutralised weaponry. Lifting a camera was a provocation. A station beggar at Walthamstow Queen’s Road lurched towards me. ‘I just want to ask a question, one simple fucking question. One question.’ With peripheral vision, I had already watched him track an Asian woman, loaded down with shopping from the market; he circled her, physically blocking and nudging as she tried to pick up the pace. ‘One fucking question. One question.’

  This was a bad moment. After Trump, the dispiriting trudge in the slipstream of an inoperative railway, the killing of Mark Duggan, a return to the sorrows of Walthamstow, and my sense of hopelessness in confronting opposed factions in a city stretched to breaking point, with the gated quarters of the entitled surrounded by homeless mad-men raging for pennies, dredged up unsuspected reserves of bile. I had a question of my own as the substance-abusing self-medicator snarled and spat.

  ‘Do you want me to drive the point of my umbrella into the juice of your eyeball?’

  The psychopathology was alarming. And it could have happened. Hard-Brexit London was defined by such out-of-character atrocities. A previously mild-mannered, quietly inebriated underground film-maker, affronted on an all-night bus by ordinary chip-chucking juveniles, stabbed one of them in the thigh. To salve this redline metropolitan fever, I walked very slowly and deliberately through the High Street Market. An Asian shopkeeper was cursing an African woman who tried to bargain for a dog’s bath in pink plastic. He punched the bottom repeatedly to prove its strength. She smiled and waited. She had won. He wrestled the tray from her grasp, spitting on the notes she held out. She waited. He took them and wiped them with a rag, before they went into his pocket. He raged as she walked away.

  At the Palmerston Road crossing, where FEVAR GRAFFITI is asserting his copyright, there is a grinning skull and crossbones with the inscription LONDON BAD. This badness has eaten into my soul. I blamed it on the umbrella, which I had not unfurled, even at the most biblical passages of the morning deluge. I dislike umbrellas, seeing them, even now, as symbols of a prefect’s authority in an English public school. Umbrellas are a discourtesy and a menace. Their bearers and brandishers walk around, insulated in little domed shelters, private tents, poking out the eyes of innocent pedestrians. What is so wrong with getting wet?

  Perhaps the umbrella had a voice of its own? I clicked along, taking pleasure from driving the metallic point into London dirt, using it as a ski pole. Scratching curses. There is no comfort to be found in charitable exchanges, given or withheld. Sentiment had me digging into my pockets for gentlemen of the road with an oblique way of asking, as if they were doing you a favour with a generous spray of whisky breath.Whic
h, in a sense, they were, by invoking Mayhew and Dickens. Beckett’s tramping scarecrows. But I was prejudiced against appeals, from a pavement nest, based around the ownership of some subdued dog. Or the cruel professionalism of the doped and sagging infant. Otherwise, donations were offered according to the mood of the moment: awkwardness and regret, whichever way it went. Shame always. Waifs on platforms. Crazy girls who catch you in an Overground compartment with speed-freak nonsense about evil lovers, expulsion from Shadwell flats, cancer taxis to hospitals. Too much detail. Even when true. Too much to absorb. No dole of silver coins for chippy operators – SPARECHANGEFORFOODPLEASE – staking out new Ginger Line halts with beakers and chat. And no sponsorship for the robotic ones who thank you and bless your day with such wounding irony.

  On Hoe Street there is one of those redbrick, many-windowed properties set well back, assertively so, from the vulgar business of the road. Behind iron gates: CAMELOT PROTECTS BY OCCUPATION. Meaning: keep out. Meaning: no occupation by foreign anarchists or housing collectives. This building is already squatted by security. It’s big and it’s empty – and there used to be room around the back for the Portakabins in which classes were held. I saw out my final days as a jobbing Liberal Studies teacher in those kabins. The chaotic freelance miseducation – in which I learnt much more from the students than I had to offer in return – was being upgraded to Polytechnic status; more management-speak, a better class of forms to fill in. I was never paid on time, in any case; there was always a suspect date, a misplaced hour on my pink form. The choice was stark: fulltime accountable employment or labouring in the badlands of opportunism around Stratford. Within a couple of months, I was paying my dues, marked on a grubby yellow card, to the Transport and General Workers Union at Chobham Farm. What I remember now was the journey across the marshes, and how I had to park the battered old Mini facing downhill in Hampstead, hoping the engine would fire before I reached the bottom.

  On High Road Leyton, COMMUNITY PLACE (which looks like another lost cinema) has become an outlet for Ladbrokes. If I was a betting man, I’d put good money on John Rogers appearing, with a grin of welcome, before I hit the future Overground halt at Leyton Midland Road. John was my late-morning appointment. And he was reliable. Even with an off-colour son, now home alone, taking a day out of school. And having to deal with a major white goods delivery. John Rogers was the animating spirit of Leytonstone. When he was in attendance, streets from which I felt a double alienation (theirs and mine) came to life.

  It’s not just the rusty beard, the high dome, the earring he should be wearing (but isn’t): John is Elizabethan, a film-poet, writer/walker from a better time. He has a history of alternative stand-up, alliances with Russell Brand and the deep-topographer Nick Papadimitriou. A history of persistent engagement in the politics of protest, being there, bearing witness. Keeping the record. And posting it. He was good company on a second circuit of London Overground; a series of excursions fitted in between school-delivery and school-collection. It seems that John did most of his own work, writing or editing, at night. He was self-funding, self-starting, a guerrilla documentarist in the great tradition: green anorak, ruined left knee, camera in pocket.

  As soon as we fell into step, my role changed. John was the guide. His book, This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City, dressed this section of my walk in affectionate anecdotes. Bifurcating suburban avenues under plunging skies, access routes to cemeteries, were not overlooked. Nothing was beneath John’s notice. But I was well aware that Leytonstone was an interlude, there would very soon be a parting of the ways. After Wanstead Flats, I would revert to the status of an underlooker, pavement snoop. Locked into fantasies and involuntary flashbacks.

  Hitchcock, Graham Gooch, Jonathan Ross: John conjured familiar faces from these streets, pubs, schools. He put in a call to the artist Patrick Brill (aka Bob and Roberta Smith) with whom he collaborated on films and other projects. Patrick was not at home. Bob and Roberta were not picking up. John explained that Leytonstone really was, for a few years, and for the usual economic reasons, an authentic culture quarter. After openings at the Whitechapel Gallery, all the artists came here to party. The influential filmmaker John Smith operated out of this house. His Black Tower was right there. And look up: a blue plaque for Stuart Freeborn, the ‘godfather of modern make-up design’ and creator of Yoda and Chewbacca of Star Wars fame. Freeborn was referenced by an unfinished mural under the railway. Many of the arches, John was proud to demonstrate, were still oil-puddled concerns, storerooms, small businesses. There was a precise point where organic microbrewers and performance spaces confirmed the emerging railway-slipstream property boom.

  Back on London Fields, on Helmsley Place, John screened London Overground in a pop-up cinema under a railway arch: a neat twist in the evolving story. When trains ran overhead, the sound jumped; so that the yarn about Kilburn pubs Chris Petit finally delivered, after miles of strategic silence, was shredded to nonsense.

  We kneel in the road to locate the subterranean whisper of a lost rivulet, the Philly Brook, once regarded as a flood risk to the putative Olympic Park. I was staring the wrong way, at a giant Stars and Stripes flag, with a miniature eagle perched on supporting pole, loudly trumping from a redbrick terrace, above the only Krypto Security alarm in the street. A satirical 1984 poster of David Cameron with WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, is more potent in tatters. The capitalised phrases could be copied straight from Trump’s prompt card.

  John turns back at the edge of Wanstead Flats. He identifies a broad avenue of sweet chestnuts, one of the radials of Wanstead House, originally planted by another John, Evelyn, on the instructions of Sir Josiah Child. The avenue is now a ride for local hackers, heading northeast, coming away from a twinned pair of tower blocks with unimpeded views of grasslands, ponds and traffic. An old woman on the seventh floor whistles up foxes. John told me how much he relished these wide-open spaces. And he advised on my best route: shadow the railway, down Dames Road to Wanstead Park.

  Evelyn’s prophetic words came back, reverberated: ‘London was, and is no more.’

  The push was on. A chain gang in orange Trumpsuits and hardhats were labouring, behind mesh barriers, to bring the decrepit railway bridge on-stream. I stopped for a coffee, left my unopened umbrella hooked behind my chair, and had to double back to collect it. I was well out of my knowledge and granular London light was going fast.

  Forest Gate, previously little more than a rumour to me, a place where several of the Chobham Farm migrant workers lodged, was now resurrected as an established arboreal tributary. Hampton Road, flirting against the railway, and sandwiched by cemeteries, had a certain period grandeur. Detached villas and double-fronted houses were not downgraded into flats. Neat plantings kept quiet pavements apart from decorative porches and purple splashes of stained glass. When the Forest Gate developer Archibald Cameron Corbett laid out the Woodgrange Estate in 1892, he was giving away family units for £530 leasehold. With the opening of the Ginger Line service from Gospel Oak to Barking, the better Hampton Road properties will be trading at close to a million.

  I stuck with the railway as far as I could; the streets were empty, shops were putting up their shutters, and I could hear in the distance the menacing roar of the elevated road. I knew that a major barrier was coming and I had no idea how to cross it. There is a buffer of municipal grass, dog-compost meadowland, playing fields on which nobody plays, before you are thrown against the unavoidable fact of the motorway. And, beyond that, the river: the Roding. I had hit a wall of sound – the A406, South Woodford to Barking Relief Road, becoming the North Circular – as unforgiving as Berlin or some other city divided against itself. I was more comfortable here, and less myself, the supposed narrator, than anywhere I had passed through that day.

  Geography solicited the bite of the collaged samizdat pamphlets put out by the artist Laura Oldfield Ford. The ones that I found, from time to time, on ledges in concrete pillboxes, among
empty bottles under broken benches, in some opportunist breezeblock café serving bean soup. A late-romanticism of ruins delivered with punk-vortex energy, Ford’s Savage Messiah echoed the title of HS Ede’s biography of the farouche young sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at Neuville-Saint-Vaast in the First War.

  ‘Ghosts, revenants, memories haunting the fabric. London gripped in security cordons. A day out looking for projects on a recently evacuated and bombed out suburb,’ Ford wrote in her chapbook for 2015. Long solitary walks, looping, shaping their own logic, brought grunge traces of vanished communities to the surface.

  We found ourselves, in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 circus, ‘debating’ the Olympic legacy with a decorated oarsman, who was considering which major charity he would front, and a broadsheet sports scribe (with obvious investment in the continuing show). The audience in Cheltenham, patriotic to a fault, turned – audibly, visibly – into a pack of ravening wolves, a lynch mob. Ford, who had lived and worked for years on the ground under discussion, came close to being assaulted.

  Only bicycles are permitted under the railway bridge. On the far side, terraces are threatened by road and railway. Along the impenetrable mesh fence, suspect cars, with boots open, are parked up for obvious deals between hooded men. There is no attempt at disguising what is going on. It’s as blatant as the character on the train from Hackney Downs to Ponders End, a few months back, unwrapping a gun for sale.

  I know it won’t work but I follow a footpath under the motorway, through an open gate into an abandoned mushroom farm. The lights from tower-block windows of estates on the ragged fringe of Barking are a teasing illusion.

  Watson Avenue should lead onto a footbridge to the better place, the solution to London’s housing problems. THE PROTECTOR GROUP. MONITORED CCTV. PRIORITY POLICE RESPONSE. A panoramic edgeland vista: pylon, gasholder, single white goalpost, coarse grass the colour of pissed undergarments. Those too. Shredded on razorwire. Sky pressing like black insurance-scam smoke. An unexplained grey box that bleeps and flashes. Six lanes of traffic. Failed barriers to prevent the dumping of industrial waste. I love it. And there is a bridge over the road. I should make Barking before they put the lights out. For good.