Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  I accept a large coffee from Driff, he was always generous. And I rush off to Anna’s sister’s house to borrow a mini‐disc recorder. I might never coincide with the wandering book‐runner again. I wanted some evidence of his dealings with Hackney. He was starved of company and eager to talk.

  I used to wake up quite often, when I had the room overlooking the German Hospital, at two or three in the morning. I used to go to the bagel shop. I used to have two cream‐cheese bagels – with another two which I gave to L, when she woke up. At eight or nine o’clock. I would also get a lovely chocolate muffin. The lady behind the counter in Ridley Road, as soon as she spotted me, started bagging up the bagels. I might also have a slice of apple strudel.

  Anyway, one Friday night/Saturday morning, I went there about three o’clock. There used to be all these black kids from the nightclubs, when they’d been thrown out. It was very, very heavy. I could see there were two groups. Everybody milling around and nobody ordering. Nobody wanted to be first. I thought, ‘Fuck this for a laugh.’ I marched straight up to the counter. I could see the lady was terrified. I said, ‘Could I have two cream‐cheese bagels and a chocolate muffin?’

  When I was handing the notes over the counter, I saw that there was a knife, right across my throat. It looked like a machete! There was another guy on the other side with his blade. They were about to butcher each other. All the people in the place began cheering. They thought I’d done it on purpose. It was short‐sightedness. Anything but bravery. I would have run a mile.

  My friend’s daughter, the girl from Ritson Road, worked in that shop. She couldn’t stand it more than two days. Because of the dirt. She said the only way they could keep it clean was by setting cockroaches to wipe out other cockroaches. There were some really strange ladies working there.

  It was hideous that market, Ridley Road. And the station, Dalston‐Kingsland. There were rats running up the grassy knoll by the platform. I complained to the guy in the ticket office. He said, ‘What do you expect me to do about it?’ I said, ‘I expect you to complain on my behalf.’ I got a volley of abuse.

  Another morning, setting out for the bagel shop, I saw these rats scurrying into the lock‐ups. I couldn’t get the council to do anything, so I wrote a letter to the Hackney Gazette. ‘Are you aware of the rats in Kingsland Road? I wouldn’t complain but the rats own two premises in Ridley Road. Are they paying full council tax? They must be very rich.’

  They published the letter. An official came round. They discovered that the premises, which backed on to where we lived, belonged to the council themselves. They couldn’t do anything about this plague. One part of the council was not allowed to bring legislation against another. But they did exterminate the rats.

  I hated Ridley Road. When I went to the bagel shop, I had to zigzag all the way through the market, avoiding the reek of all those butcher’s shops with their hooks of rotting meat. They smelt. They made me ill.

  One night I was coming back along Kingsland Road, it was snowing. I think I’d come from the City. The snow stopped. There was a car parked right opposite the Waste. As I got close to it, I could see it was a bloke and a woman, having an altercation. Not only an altercation. By the time I came alongside, he was strangling her.

  I didn’t know what to do. I knocked on the window and said, ‘Can I help you?’ The man wouldn’t let go of the lady’s throat. She said, ‘Fuck off, you nosey old cunt.’ She was cursing me. It was always a very, very strange area. You never knew when you should interfere.

  The odd thing about living in Hackney is that everybody is so entrenched. You’ve got working‐class people for whom all the others are interlopers. You had black people for whom whites were interlopers. You had middle‐class people about whom all the others agreed: get rid of them. It was ten different Hackneys, nothing overlapped.

  It was a very class‐conscious area. I thought Hackney was the poorest borough in Britain. They boasted about it. They were always brandishing the statistics: ‘The poorest borough in Britain.’ I’ve been to places a lot poorer. I went once to the outskirts of Hull. It’s embarrassing to go into charity shops there. People are buying secondhand knickers that are falling apart. You wouldn’t see that in Hackney. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s middle‐class people who use the Oxfam shop in Kingsland Road. It’s their department store, better than John Lewis.

  I ate out all the time. I went out to get my breakfast. I went to a café. I’m putting on weight like mad these days, because I eat at home. I now have a 40‐inch waist, 42‐inch shoulder, 17‐inch collar. This is overweight, technically. I can’t afford to eat out.

  The street markets are failing. It’s always the council. Every time a stall‐holder drops out, there are fewer stalls – and they put up the rent. They don’t want a market. Kingsland Road is a chartered market. The council can’t get rid of it.

  You know Dalston Lane? The bit your friend Patrick Wright did his book about? I used to do better there than down the Waste. On the left‐hand side, going east, there was a shop that sold basins and sanitary ware. I found wonderful books there. An open‐air yard. With another junkshop on the corner. They didn’t open very often. Then a mad lady who used to work for the Daily Mirror tried a bookshop on Sandringham Road. I used to do quite well in there.

  I don’t enjoy my urban expeditions now, when I’m on the bike: all those cameras watching me. It never used to happen in Hackney. I was more integrated. I don’t see anybody, these days, going round scavenging the streets. I’m only allowed two items a day. I made that rule. I usually find my items on the way to the newsagent in the morning. The poor man, he can’t work me out. I buy all these papers. First thing. I look unbelievably scruffy, unshaved. One day I turned up with an enormous Art Deco silver rack under my arm. I give him a wad of cash for newspapers. The dichotomy is too much.

  I had my bicycle stolen down there, but never in Hackney.

  I have lost seven bikes outside my house. The first day I moved, the bike was locked at the back wheel. It wasn’t locked to the railings. Sometimes I forget. Bang! Gone. The last time it was two bikes at once. I now have three locks on each machine. I have a Marin bicycle. The best there is. They come from Marin County. They’re built for dealing with the mountains, going up and down. I paid extra for this bike. It doesn’t have the Marin name. It looks like a wreck. When I took it to the shop, the guy started to clean it up for me. I said, ‘Don’t do that. We don’t want them to think this is a good bike.’ I have another beautiful Marin that I have to keep indoors. A work of art. I hang it on the wall, where the water tank is, look at it when I’m lying in bed and can’t sleep. Waiting for the light.

  Joseph Conrad, shocked into fatherhood, presented with the yowling Boris, his first son, made this pronouncement: ‘He looks like a monkey.’ Acknowledging perhaps that his abandoned familiar, the red‐faced marmoset, had returned to haunt him: a future man, true son of his father, who would outstrip him in debt. Begging letters. War wounds. Madness. Boris would serve time, after one minor fiscal crisis, in Wormwood Scrubs. A monkey‐soul in an English cage.

  With the passage of years, the constant, energy‐sapping changes of property, Conrad’s mask bit harder into thinning flesh. Hugh Walpole, one of the last of the surrogate sons, visiting the great writer in his perch outside Canterbury, found him much as expected: raw‐nerved, coughing. ‘J. C. much worse – shrivelling up, looks like an old monkey and does nothing all day.’

  Jessie, the pillow‐wife, munched chocolates in the night, composed a cookbook, and blew up to twenty stone. Barely able to walk, she let the surgeons shave bone, drawing the line only when Sir Robert Jones suggested replacing her kneecap with that of an ape.

  Dalston Lane

  It’s an accident which buildings survive (not as themselves) and which are erased as effectively as the houses of serial killers: Fred West in Gloucester, Reginald Christie in Notting Hill. The police station in Dalston Lane is no longer a police station, although th
e rind of memory, of deaths in custody, sobbing victims of crime, hangs on, infecting dull red bricks. Cape House Accommodation, it says. ‘If someone is not on duty when you arrive please allow approximately fifteen minutes for the guard to finish his patrol of the building.’ The public library, never very inviting, remains. A permanent book sale. Reinforced by exclamation points. collect YOUR FREE I HACKNEY BADGE HERE!!!

  Driffield’s charity pits have been invited to move on. But the afterburn of that intrepid cultural historian Patrick Wright (too tall for the locality) eddies around the chaotic bus stop: a spectre from St Philip’s Road still very much active, years after the host body has left town. Wright’s A Journey through Ruins: The Last Days of London, published in 1991, is a pertinent account of the microclimate of Dalston Lane, that crookbacked singularity. Even before it went out of print, Wright’s book reversed Joyce’s boast about Ulysses: that an obliterated Dublin could be rebuilt from his words. Patrick’s long‐breathed elegy, delivered by a man who is functioning on one lung, was a blueprint for destruction. He brought attention down on a place that had done its best to cultivate obscurity, as a necessary camouflage. Once a street is noticed, it’s doomed. Endgame squatters, slogans. DALSTON! WHO ASKED U? PROTECTED BY OCCUPATION. Torched terraces. Overlapping, many‐coloured tags. Aerosol signatures on silver roll‐down shutters. Scrofulous rubble held up by flyers for weekend noise events. THIS WORLD IS RULED BY THOSE WHO LIE.

  They said, the ones who make it their business to investigate such things, that there was a direct relationship between properties that applied for conservation status and arson attacks, petrol bombs. Unexplained fires. Moscow methods arrived in town with the first sniff of post‐Soviet money. Russian clubs were opening in the unlikeliest places. We no longer had much to offer in the way of oil and utilities, energy resources, but we had heritage to asset‐strip: Georgian wrecks proud of their status. Dalston Junction, with the promised railway link, would become an extension of the City. A concrete shelf on which anything could be set. A tabula rasa for the fantasies of urban planners.

  Wright had a title for this area: ‘The Undemolished World’. A risky metaphor that was immediately stood on its head: retribution under the hard‐hatted guise of social regeneration. Or, looked at from another perspective, good old‐fashioned railway piracy. Fences. Enclosures. Demolition. Camera poles. Low‐paid mercenaries in yellow tabards tagged by their own radios: hardwired to unseen controllers. Exploited (and often illegal) immigrants are the prisoners of what they guard; living symbols of the melancholy of an occupied city. Night‐stalkers in empty blocks. Screen‐watchers in frontier huts. Catch them at a padlocked gate and they are willing, sometimes, to talk. To offer a glimpse inside the condemned building, before the wrecking crew arrive.

  I took a final look at Labyrinth, the blackened husk of a Victorian theatre. Patrick namechecked it, in a former incarnation, as ‘the New Four Aces Club (the site of occasional shootings and subject of intense Press speculation about the fabled West Indian Yardies)’. A solitary female squatter shivered on the roof. My companion, a Cambridge geography student researching surveillance systems, talked to the inactive‐activists on street‐scavenged sofas. The ones who passed out leaflets. They knew that, one night very soon, the shock troops of capital would kick down the doors. Meanwhile, they rolled thin cigarettes and sipped weak tea. And produced petitions, low‐concept artworks, grids of digital photographs. They were describing a notable thing from another era, a thing which was no longer there: done deal. While councillors had their wrists gently slapped for malpractice. The casting vote, on the sanctioned vandalism, falling to a man who ‘failed to disclose his employment with a government body who had signalled their support for the scheme’.

  DEMOLITION MAN: screamed the Hackney Gazette. ‘Cllr Darren Parker admitted an “error of judgement” by not declaring a personal interest in a proposal to bulldoze one of Hackney’s grandest buildings and build a 19‐storey high rise.’

  The absent‐minded Councillor Parker was subsequently cleared of all blame in this unfortunate affair. But Labyrinth was already part of the yellow dust from which the city of spectacle, computer‐generated, would climb: imaginary towers alongside a steel ladder, the zip‐fastener of the railway linking suburban Dalston to nobody‐quite‐knows‐where. Not Liverpool Street, not now. Peep through the chainlink mesh at acres of inarticulate mud, the residue of all that vibrant life: circus, music hall, cinema, black club, ecstasy barn. An ugly green fence masks naked earth, unseeded by investment, chewed up by earthmovers in anticipation of the first cash crop. London abdicates content in favour of concept. The back story is subverted. The guilty writer energized by these crimes, by rumours. We reminisce about events that never happened: dramas in bagel shops, male‐on‐female violence in cars, street markets where everything was cheap – and the characters required for the next chapter were sitting alongside displays of single shoes and worn‐out scarlet knickers.

  I was hunting for Swanny, a half‐legendary being, like the Mole Man of Mortimer Road. A doctor, quack, abortionist. Struck off, so they said, removed from the register. Some people confused him with the Revd Swann of the Brotherhood Church. And others with the Dr Swan who dispensed drugs from his surgery at the southern end of Queensbridge Road. A haven for paper‐hangers, punters of bent prescriptions, sob‐story specialists, junkies with ready cash. Waves of addiction swept across London from Swan’s airless flat, which was across the street from the convent with its crucified‐Christ alcove, its bells. Veteran nuns, black‐bag walkers, stalked the neighbourhood, moving at fabric‐burning speed. Up Queensbridge Road and out along the canal towards Victoria Park. Holy crows with shining eyes, bent spines, an unspoken challenge to every slouching wanderer. Faith has its slipstreams.

  Swanny, under a pseudonym, collaborated with William Burroughs in researching an article for The British Journal of Addiction – which was edited by J. Yerbury Dent, the man who supervised Bill’s apomorphine withdrawal‐cure. They decided to celebrate publication, the scrupulous account of beating addiction, with a week‐long brandy‐coke‐speed bender in Hove. In the company of two Algerian boys and a young friend of Ronnie Kray’s from Stamford Hill. The DHSS hotel where they partied, living off non‐existent room service, foil trays and syringes, was an early investment of the south coast property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten. That was the thing about the 1960s, it was just like Hackney: everything collided with everything else. Everybody met everybody. And the liars lived to sell the story. By way of some top‐dollar sharkish agent who didn’t take prisoners.

  Neither the Burroughs connection nor the later association with Alex Trocchi, for whom Swanny stole antiquarian medical tracts from private libraries, was the real hook: not for me. Not now, when every lead had to be traced back to Hackney. Swanny, I discovered, was the probable subject of the last‐known fiction of Roland Camberton: a story he published in an underground magazine, shortly after the death of Julian Maclaren‐Ross. The piece had been commissioned from a dying man – and Camberton, an old friend and older enemy of Maclaren‐Ross, inherited the gig.

  I’ve seen one copy of this mag, in a dealer’s collection, which was not yet catalogued or offered for sale. Martin Stone, knowing of my interest in Camberton, let me examine the piece. I was refused permission to transcribe it or to discuss the content in detail. Camberton might have rented out his name to another hack, it often happened. The swashbuckling vigour of his post‐war style was still there, but the tone was darker. There was no attempt at narrative structure. You could almost believe that Camberton had been drinking with Burroughs, experimenting with a cut‐up technique, splicing in random tape‐recordings from the street.

  Swanny, in Camberton’s fiction, works in the German Hospital. A self‐prescribing addict. Ace surgeon. Plucker of forbidden fruit. Hands trembling, he delivers a healthy son, born after an hysterical night’s struggle, to an orthodox woman from Stamford Hill. The story is fragmented, with bits of radio,
obscene riffs from nursing staff, German/Jewish misunderstandings and eventual grudging respect: before Swanny walks away, in bloody apron, into a new morning.

  That was why I accepted an invitation to talk about London: City of Disappearances to a group who called themselves the Boas Society. They foregathered, once a month, to set Hackney to rights, to debate allotments, threatened theatres, Broadway Market squats: and to demolish, by way of compensation, several crates of cheap wine. I didn’t know if the Boas bit was a Masonic reference or a tribute to Harryboy Boas, the narrator of Alexander Baron’s novel, The Lowlife. But the Society met in the old German Hospital, which had now been converted into private flats. Their declared intention, so they informed me in a rather terse email, was ‘to oppose the Griffin’. The Griffin being the City of London. Its rapacious greed, its sinister network of alliances.

  Gaining entry to the hospital building, meeting local activists such as the solicitor Bill Parry‐Davies, and the clergyman‐author‐chairperson, William Taylor, might turn up useful information on Swanny. The nineteenth‐century medics Benjamin Clarke and William Robinson walked the bounds of our borough, recording, revising, rescuing history. Their published books and articles, stored in local libraries, contrived a soothing fiction, a past of orchards and great houses, clear streams, farms, windmills, dukes, courtiers, poets. Swanny was history, a being who defied documentation: an unresolved challenge. An absence.