Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  A stately midfielder coming up to retirement, an Orient regular, gave me my local nickname: Ossie. Watching him, his unhurried control, the way the game flowed through him even when he seemed to be standing still, I understood that I would never master this discipline. Thanks to the period sideburns, my approximate size and the position in which I lurked on the field, the fact that I was wearing a Chelsea T‐shirt (not because I supported them, the shirts were a nice blue colour and were being knocked out for 50p on the Waste), he christened me Ossie. ‘Man on, Ossie. Man on. Give it and go, my son.’ I was flattered by the connection with the King’s Road wide boy, the roistering legend, Peter Osgood. But my team‐mates never got it. They thought he meant ‘Aussie’. Which made perfect sense, the way I spoke. The freakishness of our shabby clothes. Renchi, who also turned out, became ‘the other Aussie’. Rough football on London Fields lasted until the dawn of the Thatcher era, when the spirit turned ugly: on‐field fights, endless bickering, obscenities, playacting, appeals to a referee who was no longer there.

  I helped Jock to pack up his effects and I drove him out to a new estate, beyond the motorway: a clean, safe, mustard‐brick unit, with excellent parking space for the car he didn’t own. He was twenty miles closer to Scotland. And he should, I told him in parting, console himself with that thought. Without his tribal football games, Hackney was no longer Hackney. It was like the rest of the world, up for grabs.

  Patrick returned to Hackney, in May 2006, from his Cambridgeshire village: just for the day. Old niggles about royalties, editors, commissioners were now serious. Ever the financial realist, he had worked the changes so often, in terms of agents and publishers, that he would soon be back with the gang who launched his original career. ‘I take oblique approaches, not out of perversity,’ he wrote to the chairman of the firm dragging their heels over his latest epic (demanding the return of a sizeable advance), ‘but because they enable me to cast unexpectedly revealing light on apparently familiar realities, and thereby to free my subject matter from the grip of ideological orthodoxy.’

  Our approach to Dalston Lane was certainly oblique. I asked Patrick to lead me to Blair’s Hackney property: 59 Mapledene Road. I had checked the electoral register. Blair (Anthony), Booth (Cherie) and Booth (Lyndsey) were all lodged, for the period 1980–86, on an upwardly mobile street – which looked west towards the undemolished towers of the Holly Street Estate and east towards London Fields (squatted swimming pool and discontinued football pitch). Cherie’s sister, Lyndsey, was born in Hackney, in 1956, at a time when her father, the actor Tony Booth, was sleeping and drinking in Stoke Newington. Blair (Anthony), the man without convictions, had been asked by Neil Kinnock to see what he could find out about financial scandals in the City. The task was, as Tony Booth remarked, ‘the lowest rung on the political ladder’. But Scouse family was family. He offered help, by way of old contacts, thus allowing his son‐in‐law to become righteously indignant about irregularities in the matter of undeclared donations to party funds. And the way peerages were dished out to crooks like Robert Maxwell. Blair learnt the actorly trick of puffing up his tail feathers like a coot on the canal, to signal that he was on the attack. He was sharing an office, very much the junior partner, with a brooding Scot called Gordon Brown. Brown networked, relentlessly. Blair came home to the family in Hackney.

  ‘So why did they leave?’ I asked.

  ‘The usual,’ Patrick said. ‘After the fifth burglary we get nervous about putting our key in the lock. Cherie, who was the real politician, was doing her thing in the free legal advice centre. While she was haranguing the old bill about their treatment of one of her clients, the same guy was turning over the Mapledene gaff. A neighbour, an executive at London Weekend, had to physically restrain her. She was trying to nut the thief who was in the grip of two or three unusually prompt coppers.’

  We rambled on to the George, a nostalgic reprise of the period when Patrick was working on A Journey through Ruins. I asked him if I could tape his memories of life in Hackney. As I pressed the record button, it flashed into my mind that Blair fitted my arbitrary pattern: he lived within 440 yards of Albion Drive.

  I came back to England in ’79. By ’81 I was living in a flat in Clapton. I bought a flat for £21,000. I knew about Hackney. I knew the east was where to go. I already knew people who lived there. I’d met people in the Polytechnic world.

  Clapton was all right. I’d met Claire, my wife. We stayed there for a year. Then we moved to Stoke Newington. I was there with Richard North. When people like Neal Ascherson started writing newspaper articles about Hackney, they came to me, or to North. Obviously people had been settling in the area for generations, some of them authentic bohemian geezers who drank too much. Stoke Newington was already East Islington. The question was whether it would ever get to the top of the hill – or whether it would keep falling back. I think when we were there it was still undecided. We stayed for four or five years. Then we needed more space and we moved here, to St Philip’s Road, purely because the house was bigger and cheaper. What was good about Stoke Newington was that it was still a lower‐middle‐class mixed area. There were those incidents you get in these parts of the city. You’re lucky if people spend time not raping and mugging each other. If you are Mr Patel, so to speak, running a corner shop, you do not get hit with iron bars.

  St Philip’s Road was somewhere you could afford to buy a house on a fairly insecure salary. My first mortgage came from some weird building society I found in Westminster. I got it despite the fact that I didn’t have a job. Then, later, I was with Claire and it was a bit easier, she was a medical student.

  When we moved here, this was known as the Mayfair of Hackney. The street where the pub is, where we’re drinking now, Parkholme Road, was considered fairly grand. The corner up there, of Dalston Lane, was called Lebon’s, nobody knows that now. There is a forgotten East End topography. The houses in the area were mostly redbrick, Edwardian and late Victorian. There was subsidence, so the earlier ones fell down.

  When we moved in there were a lot of people who were basically hippies who had come when no money was required, when you could literally write a cheque and buy a house. We didn’t buy on the main drag, on Parkholme Road, we bought on a street behind it. We had a pleasant situation and it worked well for us. We had kids growing up. I was upstairs working, so I was around. I used to go off into town by way of Dalston Lane. When I was writing, I used to write a lot about what I saw on the streets: disintegrating bus queues, forms of tolerance and intolerance.

  You were free. You could make your own way. We got on well with the basically working‐class Hackney dwellers who were still living here. There were fewer of them than there had been. But they were still around. I remember once looking out of the window to see this rather stern man taking a picture. I thought he was casing the joint, that he was going to rob us. I went out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He turned out to be an Australian who had grown up in this house in the 1930s. He said that he couldn’t believe how much the road had changed. He had the usual complaint: too many coloured faces. He explained that his father was an insurance company representative. He had a patch to work when this was a lower‐middle‐class, upwardly striving area.

  This was a place of Jewish dispersal. The writer Emanuel Litvinoff’s trajectory was from Jewish Whitechapel to a succession of flats on Mare Street and Sandringham Road. Leon Kossoff worked here. He had a studio near the railway. The elderly Jewish couple opposite us were always fussing about the state of the area. And their son, who was obviously gay, found the whole situation difficult.

  This is not the East End. This is the first move out of the East End. If you look at the Mapledene area, the houses that are now so smartened up, you see a story that has happened often before, in the 1860s and 1840s. Then, because of the smoke and smog of the City, clerks and the better‐paid workers head off to the next place up the line. There is a perpetual sense of settlement and displacement. The Jewish couple
opposite us felt that they hadn’t done the right thing in coming here.

  The other oddity about St Philip’s Road is that it houses two or three Montserrat families. That made it Montserrat‐in‐London, there are so few of them here. They went through the experience of the volcano that wiped out the place they came from and left them stranded in Hackney.

  I wrote my first book, On Living in an Old Country, in the Stoke Newington Library. It had everything I needed. The local markets were quite good. We used that market in Ridley Road all the time. The supermarkets hadn’t broken into the area. I remember when Dalston Cross, the shopping centre, was constructed. Ridley Road still had sandwich shops. A quite Jewish focus. Also substantial African and West Indian stalls and businesses. The dynamics of the place were to do with waves of coming and going. That was the reality.

  I was writing occasional pieces. I was busy with other work. I couldn’t sit down and construct and research a book in the conventional way. Who cares about that sort of stuff? It’s too laborious. So what I would do is dance about, go to the library, follow hunches. My writing was based on a very fervent reaction against what had happened in critical/cultural circles. Everything was theory, everything was dogma. It was left wing, with endless quotes from people like Althusser. Dreadful stuff! And there was a political culture that said nobody could talk about anybody else without abusing them. That was a part of an intransigent feminism. A man couldn’t write about a woman’s experience. I got myself to a point where I liked picking up fragmentary stories and excavating them: slight, glancing anecdotes. It would be like pulling a piece of string and then seeing what you found when it came out. I wasn’t just searching for evidence, I wanted to use the search itself as a critical/cultural device.

  I was writing at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day. All this commemoration of the Blitz was going on. The Welfare State was disintegrating. The last housing estates were being built. And they were only just better than the dud ones that were being demolished. I subtitled my Dalston Lane book The Last Days of London. There was a sense of endings, tacky endings, infecting that moment.

  So how do I string all this together? I felt: I don’t need to string it together. Other people will do that for me. As for Dalston Lane . . . I’ve been up and down this street five times a day. I took the street as a yardstick and measured it up. I also felt that everything you capture, you fix. I found myself even trying to fix the billboards. When the economy is booming, billboards move very fast. All this flyposting is going on. There were moments at the end of that era when the economy sank into complete inertia and nothing would move. You would find bankrupt estate agents who still had windows full of prices from twenty or fifty years previously. That’s absolutely true. You could find estate agents advertising houses for a tenth or even a hundredth of their value. When you’ve got an area that is not economically buoyed up, it goes into entropy. Broadway Market was the absolute sump of the universe in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was beyond recovery.

  It’s extraordinary to watch when the waves of development roar through, they are so absolutely transforming. The logic is identical to what happened around Parkholme Road at an earlier period. It’s what Stoke Newington went through in the 1980s. And now that whole stretch of the canal beyond Broadway Market is getting the treatment. Water is always the medium of revaluation. Canals made from mercury.

  You always had these corridors of bohemianism and cultural avant‐gardism with middle‐class politeness and bookshops selling Winnie the Pooh. But it’s still astonishing to see the process happening pretty much while you watch, in the time it takes to order a cup of coffee.

  I have a slightly puritanical take on all this, something I felt when I was writing A Journey through Ruins. I thought this New Gothic sensibility, the lifestyle magazines getting off on squalor, was dubious. I didn’t need the occult to be true or false, but as a metaphor it fitted the period. What we had to identify was the language of heritage. The deployment of heritage was part of the process of colonization. But in a way I have a great admiration for historical structures. They shouldn’t be dismissed. Heritage just became a way of moving everything to the surface. Architects did it with façades, meaningless fronts propped up on invisible armatures.

  Dalston Lane

  What Patrick didn’t know, and what I didn’t know then, was that the wood engraver Edward Calvert, William Blake’s friend and disciple, had lived in Parkholme Road. Had lived, lives. Once there, always there: the traces. An underdescribed period in a half‐forgotten artist’s story, the Hackney years: new suburbia, substantial villa with studio space to the rear, land recently enclosed by speculative builders. Calvert’s biographer, Raymond Lister, reports that Edwin Landseer, sculptor of monumental lions, borrowed the Parkholme Road studio while he painted an equestrian portrait. Calvert was offered the job of touching in the human figure, the rider. He refused, much to the annoyance of his wife who cried out: ‘Edward, you will never do anything to make yourself famous.’

  The engraver courted the geographical obscurity in which to indulge his passion for moving books from room to room. He retreated, deep into unknown territory – because it was unknown. The Parkholme Road house was an occupied storage facility. There was enough of a private income, now that he had retired from the sea, to summon the bookbinders. Every volume was stripped of its original paper (or cloth) covering and reshod. The noise of the original colours offended him; he demanded quiet uniformity, mute obedience. Rooms to furnish his books. Tottering stacks were shunted, apartment to apartment, in a never‐ending porterage: the man was not to be easily satisfied. His library was a leathery greatcoat.

  And who were the porters, builders, layers of fires, bedmakers, scullery maids, cooks and housekeepers? Their names are unrecorded. Who – if anyone – modelled for the pastiche‐classical female nudes the ageing Calvert produced? The late paintings that Lister called ‘a sickly sentimentalizing of the ancient world’. Timid rear views shivering with repression. The delicious double‐curves of a moist, full‐cheeked grin. A sacrificial bowl raised in tribute to a louring Grecian sky: when all the gods, animating spirits of wood and stream, have died.

  Calvert’s granddaughter Elizabeth deflates this notion of the garden studio: it was a shed, a barn. The kind of tumbledown wooden structure the area has always favoured, beloved of toads and foxes. Food for hungry rats. Private space, that was what Calvert required: secret chambers hidden behind walls of dummy books, dim caves of seclusion in which to brood on his philosophy of light. Only by its absence, in velvet‐draped windowless cells, was the prismatic essence to be found. The recipe. The equation.

  ‘Light is orange!’ he shrieked, while out walking with Samuel Palmer. In the Parkholme Road wilderness, so recently claimed from open fields, Calvert shaped an altar dedicated to Pan.

  The question remains: did those feet? I have discovered no reference to a visit by William Blake to Hackney. He was gone before Calvert moved to Parkholme Road. It was the faithful wood engraver who followed the visionary London poet to his pauper’s grave in Bunhill Fields on 17 August 1827. To the company of six unremembered others waiting just beyond the Hackney boundary.

  The delicacy of the wood engravings – paradise visions, nymphs, travellers, sacred woods – had already been foreclosed by the time the Calverts migrated to Hackney. But the memory of the precision and clarity of that early achievement becomes a tribute to what his adopted home has given away: to foul‐smelling industries, dank canals, railways, theoretical progress. Thriving orchards uprooted from the slopes above the Hackney Brook. Fields enclosed, hedged and sold to a single proprietor. Factories constructed, exploiting water power, to provide employment for displaced country folk and footsore immigrant labourers. The wood engravings, their ripe apples and honeymoon bedchambers, sheep and cider presses, are a graphic record of loss. Prophetic seizures accessible only at the moment of extinction. The solitary shepherd, staff in hand, journeys after an absence of sheep. Lamb
Lane is a slaughter track. Markets require the death of everything they market. The hunger is insatiable. Paintbrushes from the pelts of bloody beasts. A glue of bones. Canvas stolen from sacks worn by skeletal beggars.

  The white‐bearded Calvert, a beached Mediterranean mariner, favoured pea‐jackets with sharp lapels. His wife, Mary, took the burden of Hackney life, the children, the dirt, the horror of having to deal, on a daily basis, with what is actually there. No rest. No remission. Physical objects overload her dreams, she wakes cold, to the knowledge that it will never be managed. The structure of bricks and mortar in which she is condemned to live grinds away at the mantle of cloth, papery wraps of skin. Calvert paints a youth he no longer possesses. She contemplates the length of ground in which she will be laid

  Overwhelmed, she decamps: to recover breath on the south coast, St Leonards‐on‐Sea, a newly unfashionable projection by the architect James Burton. A mile or so to the west of Hastings, in the county of Sussex. Calvert, done with false horizons, excess light, settled for Paris. And in this unaccustomed release from domesticity, the kindness of ill health, Mary indulged her true vocation: as a painter who didn’t paint.

  ‘I wish,’ she wrote to her absent husband, ‘you would particularly regard the transparency of shadows.’

  But he was meditating on the notion that all paintings are constructed upon a musical basis. He invented codes and tables, angelic dialogues. He would never again pick up a paintbrush.

  Sapphirine. Rubiate. Divine, sacrificial, and ending in blood.

  At a safe distance, across the Channel, Calvert endured intimations of deep truth. The blessing, now that he was no longer there, of Hackney’s rose‐red empire. The paradise he had resigned.