The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  I told Andrew about Matthew Beaumont’s talk in the shop on Kingsland Road, a destination now more remote to us than Greenland. When Matthew was describing nightwalking as a resurrection, I thought he was saying: ‘red erection’. Which conjured rushes of blood to counter the body’s somatic slump into midnight hibernation. The first questioner from the bookshop audience said that he was frequently woken in the early hours, in the square where he lived, by birds imitating mobile phones.

  We float through Brixton in a state of enchantment, avoiding the mistakes of the daylight circuit. Something substantial and mysterious is drawing us on. Approaching Denmark Hill, I trip over a twig, or black feather, and take a full-length fall: a weightless slowmotion dive into the paving slabs. Exhilaration. With no grazes, bruises, twists or collateral bumps. The ground is a rubber mat. And through the medium of this headlong plunge, the hospital appears.

  Andrew recalls Marta, the Polish policewoman who saved his life on the Old Kent Road. They subsequently bonded. Bleeding out, traumatised, loaded with drugs, the accident victim was brought here in an ambulance to be reassembled from his constituent parts. And to begin the long slow road to recovery, the climb from the black hole.

  On the first railway walk, we circled this building, musing on the way that King’s College Hospital dominated the hill. Now, clammy with night and loaded with bulging rucksacks, we tipped straight through the automatic doors, so that Andrew could avail himself of the excellent toilet facilities. After which, massively eased, spruced, disinfected, we wander corridors like the battlements of Elsinore, swimming through CCTV footage of deserted halls and fretfully drowsing wards of drugged pain. And we went unchallenged for an exhaustive tour of the history of Andrew’s rescue and his subsequent health reviews.

  We had entered from the west, in the folds of the night. We exited, as Andrew said, ‘lighter and vaguely refreshed’, on the eastern side, in a daze of anticipation ahead of the rising sun. The hedges and houses were recovering their firm outlines. Andrew, clipping a GoPro camera to his forehead, became a recording Cyclops, resurrected and red-erectioned for the downhill surge towards his essential memory grounds.

  My Nokia duncephone shrills its dawn chorus like a bird in the pocket. Anna is horrified to find we are still on the wrong side of the river, surfing Peckham Rye. Andrew speaks of his shotgun, a freshly dug grave somewhere in a forest in the Pyrenees. Bury me upright, he said, inside a tall tree.

  I know that we’re almost home when I see the latest notice in Bethnal Green: NO COFFEE STORED OVERNIGHT. Authentic East London artisans, in the days of build and bodge, were concerned about tool kits left in the van. Now ram-raiders have their predatory eyes on the barista game: coffee is the new gold. Anna told me, on the phone, that she was shocked by a radio report talking about bands of ‘feral urchins’ terrorising estates. Kids of the age she used to teach are hardened drug mules. ‘Feral urchins’ was lifted straight out of Oliver Twist. Dickens relocated his criminous rookeries from the heart of Whitechapel to Saffron Hill.

  To my overstimulated senses, this home stretch is as hysterical as the slowburn high of a chunk of enriched cannabisresin chocolate cake. Language has been terminally perverted. A series of ‘designated smoking areas’ leads to a corridor of capitalised oxymorons on the approach to Shoreditch station. FREE CASH… IMPERIAL EQUITY… CITY SHEEPSKINS… RESPONSIBLE GAMBLING… TAPAS REVOLUTION… PROPER HAMBURGER… SAINSBURY’S LOCAL: outside which, as ever, a square of pavement is warmed by a humble beggar. A fellow nightwalker, bristling of beard, dribbling with rage, exposed to the harshness of the new day, punches his companion as she tries to move away from him. ‘I’m doing that, you fucking cow. I’m doing that. I’m fucking doing that.’

  ***

  The ultimate detour is to Haggerston Park – where, as predicted, the Vegetative Buddha incubates a bench. We have rushed headlong at the city. He is slumped, retracted. Alone. He enjoys the benediction of virgin light playing across the slick green grass. He pulls his hood down over his eyes. Andrew, GoPro blinking, makes a pass. And both men, according to their means, are undone.

  ‘Too frightful,’ Andrew said. ‘My mind was awash with bigoted misunderstanding. I became sadder than ever. I wandered past this human wreck, pondering his stench, the inflamed legs and ill-fitting shoes. A kind of sleeping sickness was holding him together. One last London exhalation of breath: 10.48am and time for bed.’

  Rested, scoured, coffee-fired, I return to the park: our man has gone. He is never seen again. I was uneasy about his transubstantiation into film, into a written narrative. The Vegetative Buddha set me moving towards the stained-glass window of St Leonard, but these chains of poverty and mental distress were real. And they were not broken. The man was never a myth. His biography is untouched.

  I admired the way that Will Self got his own nightwalk out of London, Stockwell to the North Downs, done and dusted – adventures, mishaps – in three pages. ‘Dawn winkled us out of the woodland,’ he wrote, ‘and we found ourselves blinking by the lychgate of St Leonard’s Church, a little thirteenth-century gem tucked away on the outskirts of Warlingham.’ Self had, inadvertently, identified the alignment between Haggerston Park and the coast. We had dropped the Buddha’s desire line much too soon.

  GUMMED EYES

  ‘A lamp which is near its death-hour.’

  EA Poe

  Whenever I am asked about the flâneuse, I think of Effie Paleologou. In that tragic pause, questions being solicited at the end of a talk or reading, roving microphone manhandled like a dubious sex toy towards the woman with the upraised arm in the back row, I know just what is coming. Sometimes from a visiting American researcher, brandishing Rebecca Solnit or Lauren Elkin, sometimes from a native-born academic, a practitioner suddenly struck by the originality of her challenge: ‘Why are there no women on your walks?’ The tone might be forgiving, query put more in sorrow than in anger. Or it might be regally dismissive of everything that has gone before: no women, no validity to your report. Prejudiced, misogynist, inconsequential: nailed.

  There is no defence. It’s not worth trying, though I sometimes do, to list the women who have informed the journeys I describe. If you look hard enough, they are there; but, most of the time, I’m caught with the same crew of tramping males, painters, filmmakers, photographers and writers (not so many of them), taking time out. And then, from a certain perspective, it does look decadent. Indulgent. Colonialising the environment and the lives of others. The act is made for pleasure, the enrichment of the senses. And I don’t see, even now, too much wrong with that. London walks do not aspire to the pan-European seriousness that Effie Paleologou, for example, brings to her stalking of the image: in cities, along the shore, through liminal places.

  Many of my expeditions, over fifty years, have been made in company with my wife, with Anna. Courtship, companionship: seeing new things through her eyes. Gardens, people, clothes, our own past. A conversation achieved through comfortable silences.

  When I talked about Black Apples of Gower in Cardiff, always an uneasy return for me, never knowing who might hold up a hand, the first question did take me by surprise. It was a good one. I had been banging on about carboniferous limestone pavements, the inhuman power of the rocks, and how, walking from Port Eynon to Rhossili, I abdicated all sense of self: there was no self to stand against the facts of geology. Hackney walks confirmed identity, I was recognised and tolerated by familiar markers. In Wales, I dissolved into the place through which I moved.

  ‘I was interested in what you say. But can you tell me, this book is essentially a love letter to your wife?’

  And it was. A letter which I had to write, but she didn’t have to read. That’s how it worked. There is no obligation to confirm the complete catalogue of those who walk beside you, or those who are you. The voices, the borrowed and subverted memories.

  Effie came to London from Athens, Paris, New York, already fired by her reading of Walter Benjamin. She found her project in walki
ng at night around the purlieus of railway stations and points of transit. There was a Sebaldian colour to the enterprise, well ahead of Austerlitz – a book that she, in some ways, attempted to illustrate before it existed. Her photographs, usually taken at a time when travellers are most vulnerable, most abandoned to the city, were in translation. Like Sebald’s highly crafted prose. They were of England, but not English. They were London. Which is very different. London is multi-tongued, urgent. Cruel. London is everywhere, wide open: exploited and exploiting.

  Liverpool Street station was the heart of Effie’s pictorial essay: fugitive faces framed in window panels on Underground trains and late-night buses. Even those who live here, quite legitimately, look like paperless migrants. The waiting. The stretched hours. The achieved photographic capture is made in competition with a burgeoning net of high-angle surveillance cameras. And then the drifting away into the first places where immigrants would settle: blocks of austere flats viewed from a certain distance, the ring of sodium lights around an artificial football pitch.

  Effie was securing her images and carrying them home for meticulous processing into prints that could be exhibited or catalogued. But she avoided direct confrontation. She kept her own identity, as photographer/recorder, out of the story. The anecdotes of misadventure, with discretion, were reserved for her friends. London values, but never rewards, anonymity. Effie explored the existential crisis in what she called ‘the secret life of cities after dark’. She honed the neurotic rasp of concentration brought about by circumnavigating districts lit by the flare of imminent threat. She avoided the crowd, the monad, and waited for the sets to empty. Her sensibility was theatrical.

  Benjamin, Baudelaire and Henry James were cited. Effie spoke about the flâneur as a person, a man, who discovered the city ‘through desultory wandering and a trajectory which catches the transitoriness and ephemerality’. James would be the odd one out in that group, a confirmation of Paleologou’s wide and informed reading among the classics, European and American. The meandering Jamesian sentence, with its internal logic and feline thrust, was an established part of the Greek photographer’s practice: her nocturnal circuits. A feeling for the architecture of James only came to me when I strolled around his Lamb House garden: the pets’ cemetery, the safe distance from a lit window, and the the high wall, the screen of trees separating him from the inquisitive toy-town of Rye. One breath taken. Sit on a bench. Wait. Sigh. Yawn. Compose. Revise.

  I heard about Hastings at night, Effie’s commission to produce the work published as The Front (2000). But this is not Martin Parr: no celebration of performative Englishness, candyfloss quiddity, arcade baroque, uncorseted excursionism, pre-Brexit breakfasts, amusing dogs, fun-fair tattoos. The melancholy mob at the shoreline are putting on time until they are allowed to go home. Significant moments, stopped motion. Effie moves. In such a small town, she is exposed and no longer invisible. They watch her, even as they drink around a fire. The lurkers on the beach ask about the expensive camera kit. They might have tracked her from the station. The mad old ladies with dolls in prams pass her in the narrow streets. She has to brave the subterranean facilities of night cafés. None of these incidents, the signs and scrawls and odours and chat, particular to this place, make it into her essential portfolio.

  That is the purity of the flâneuse: yellow light leaks on a desert of pebbles. The infinitesimal pinprick of the lamp on a nightfishing boat, out in the bay. A stump of fallen tree looking like a hand broken from a giant statue. Real grass lurid as a pool table. Not one whisper in this drugged ghost town from a living, working, wandering human.

  Or so I thought. Anna, examining a print that could have been a production still for Beckett’s Happy Days – reddish gravel or atomic dust, a flattened dune, with broken ladder and bundle of rags – disagreed. She remembered a talk that Effie delivered when she processed a small group of art fanciers around the locations where she made her captures. Anna said that the bundle of rags, that shaggy black lump at the edge of the darkness, the drop edge of yonder, was Effie. Hooded, disguised, dug in. Shapeless and sexless within the rectangular frame.

  Mysterious grey-white forms, like aerial photographs of a bombed city, or ruinously deformed eyeballs held against a sunless sky, appeared on huge hoardings in the development zone around London Bridge station. It was impossible to imagine what product they could be advertising. Except art. The universal fixative for the fallout from a brave project such as the Shard, with its satellite rail and retail parasites.

  Until the area around the decommissioned Royal Docks in Silvertown, that sliver of land between the City Airport, the DLR tracks and open water, is confirmed as a Xerox Shanghai, Chinese investors are making do with views from the Shard; a riverscape of future enterprise more fantastic than the Olympic rebranding of Beijing. Sax Rohmer’s racist tales of opium dens in Limehouse and Fu-Manchu’s global conspiracies are being revenged by London’s cringing solicitation of Chinese wealth and energy. New cities within cities, deregulated, will test the metaphors buried within Sax Rohmer and other sensationalist railway shockers from the last days of the British Empire.

  The vampire green of traffic lights washed the giant London Bridge hoardings with a gothic varnish, before being blooded again. Several pedestrians, manoeuvring to get the most effective iPhone steal from these enigmatic lunar advertisements, came close to being obliterated by a sneaky and ill-conceived cycle lane.

  I was making my way towards a meeting with the photographer responsible for the hoardings, for those gummy eyeballs, the dead grey planets. Effie Paleologou was discussing her work in the chapel at Guy’s Hospital. The old London teaching hospital was establishing a Science Gallery where art and science would ‘collide’: CONNECTING ART, SCIENCE & HEALTH INNOVATIONS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY. A small post-truth exaggeration, from the wrong side of the river, well beyond the City walls, plastered across fences.

  It was the night of All Soul’s Day, 3rd November, and we would follow a Requiem Mass into the chapel. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Miserere nobis. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Miserere nobis. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

  Taking her son to school, venturing through Bethnal Green, going about her business, daily journeys, Old Street, Liverpool Street station, Effie walked with purpose. And she noticed how the places where she was forced to wait, put on time, were saturated with patterns of expelled chewing gum. She was no longer a stalker, she was a stopper. She logged the discriminations of gum with the rigour of a research scientist. She used macro-lenses to inflate the microcosm of splat, stiffened boils ridging the tarmac. Like bits of the inside of a cheek, chewed and expectorated. She bent to the fertile dirt. She was no longer anonymous. She had stopped moving, standing in the shadows, losing herself in the crowd. She was now the spectacle: woman as police officer, council snoop or location hunter. An obstacle, something to be stepped around. While she stooped to her task. ‘The aesthetics of the insignificant,’ she called it.

  The flat world of our city pavements, disregarded by most pedestrians, is revealed, under the obsessive scrutiny of Paleologou, as significant terrain. A carpet of ill-fitting stone slabs, decorated with fast-food detritus, becomes part of the curvature of the universe. The slightest scars – heel scratches, bicycle tracks, spilled blood, yesterday’s vomit, sodden leaves embedded in cracks, ice damage – register a pathology that the qualified witness records and exposes.

  One of Effie’s defining gifts is the ability to work from wherever life chooses to locate her. Or wherever, on impulse, she chooses to locate her life. In the case of the chewing-gum series – Microcosms, 2014 – the geographical limits the photographer decided to impose formed an occult triangle, lines of attraction and repulsion, between three stations: Bethnal Green, Old Street, Liverpool Street. Each of these active hubs had a freighted back-story. Bethnal Green: a wartime disaster with panicked crowds crushed on the stairs. Liverpool Street: a railway cathedral supported by carbonis
ed columns like an iron forest, where involuntary exiles like Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, returned to London. Or where Kindertransport trains delivered so many future orphans. WG Sebald, arriving at Liverpool Street from Norwich, took to these streets in quest of postcards and memory-prompts that he could infiltrate into the crafted pages of his documentary fiction. The German poet used photographs to authenticate events that never quite happened. Paleologou speaks about uncovering an ‘arbitrary cartography’, points of arrival and departure. She is hunting for incidents or materials capable of sustaining her anonymity and, at the same time, confirming the only qualification that will permit her continued London residence: the accumulation of recorded detail making a new map of an old place.

  The prints based on that humblest and most intimate metropolitan pestilence, chewing gum, forge a metaphorical connection, worthy of Bataille, between the bulging pregnancy of the glob on the pavement and the blood-veined eye of the observer. It was a brilliant notion: instead of cataloguing, in the traditional fashion of the dandified flanêur, shop windows, hats, shoes, advertisements, Effie kept her steady gaze on the unscrolled mappa mundi of the London pavement. A monochrome carpet of transience fouled by fossils of gum in patterns like an early star map. As above, so below. There was magic to this exercise. Repetition was part of its charm. From the black spots – in which so much could be read – we can imply a stupendous range of human intercourse.

  There is a sexual tenderness in Effie’s album of oral rejects. Dry mouths have been salved by the sugary-sweet coating around a capsule of rubber. The stain on the pavement is the DNA of a passing stranger who is now brought inside, into the domestic cell of the studio, by the intimate processes of the darkroom. Paleologou compares gum-chewing to eating and kissing. But here is an oral transaction with no nutritional value. Gum is anti-food. It mimics foreplay – nibble, suck, bite – but must not be swallowed. To swallow would be to choke. Gum is prophylactic, a shield against human breath, taste, life. Gum is a wartime US import, a gift of cultural imperialism, thrown from the invader’s tank to the outstretched hands of children. Expanding pink balloons, puffed from lipsticked Lolita mouths, are unscripted speech bubbles from the Trumpist comic of the world.