Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘I was walking through the church gardens and I thought I saw someone standing up in the walled garden area,’ he said.

  ‘At first, I didn’t think it was a dead body, but as I got closer I could see a man had tied himself to a rope.’

  The married father‐of‐four was on his way to Mare Street to catch a bus to Islington for his morning shift.

  An inquest was opened and adjourned at Poplar coroner’s court.

  It was a month before I discovered that the hanged man had a name. And that name was: Kaporal. A thrice‐divorced, fifty‐six‐year‐old father‐of‐none. Late of Herne Hill and St‐Malo. A freelance writer/producer with no known Hackney connections and no previous interest in horticulture. The self‐strangled (as it appeared) Kaporal had become his own tarot. His research files were incomplete, his fee unearned. The ‘final solution’, promised in a recent telephone conversation (in the hope of a supplementary cash payment), would never be delivered. A pity. I wanted an excuse to check out the sleuth’s favourite boozer, the Victory in Vyner Street.

  Honouring my former employee’s methods, should I file the cutting under ‘Pest Control’, ‘Dumped Rubbish’, ‘Hackney Mortuary’, or ‘Whistleblower Hotline’?

  Kingsland High Street

  Gareth’s second email, following hard on the heels of the first, reconvened our meet from 1.30 p.m. at the vegetarian Buddhist café on Globe Road, near Roman Road, to the Turkish place, Sömine, on Kingsland High Street (old Ermine Street), just up from the Rio: 1 sharp. But Gareth didn’t do sharp. In the privilege of waiting for his appearance – he texted to let me know he was on the bus, from Hoxton, running ten minutes late – I could reabsorb the novelty of street energies, the chain of Turkish restaurants and walk‐in canteens, the wholesalers of hair‐revision products, the formerly Jewish tailors now modelling thin white suits and rip‐off Americana, oversize T‐shirts with branded slogans. One of the waiters from Sömine patrolled the pavement, while at the back of the restaurant women rolled out pancakes, deftly, rapidly, dividing them into squares, minute portions that were folded into sweet cakes. The recommendation from Time Out brought in a few Stoke Newington book‐reading solitaries to swell the steady stream of local Turkish workers.

  Gareth – Gareth Evans – had never carried much weight, now he seemed on the point of immediate physical dissolution: the speed at which he moved between events, open‐screen discussions, the floating of festivals, in and out of Europe, late‐night radio, arriving slightly after the final second, hustling down the aisle, child in tow, bounding on to the stage, flicking back Jesus‐hair, launching into his introduction. On the beat, never faltering. John Berger, Chris Marker. A memorial tribute to Marc Karlin. The passionate outrush of words: in the foreknowledge that the scene was almost over, he was trading in ghosts and echoes. Emails, pouring out from one of the many office‐stops he made in a complicated week – cultural listings, childcare, Hackney, Hammersmith – concluded with a tag from one of the German poets, Heine, Celan.

  The man was a memory of himself. He occupied no space at the table. If he swallowed a grain of rice it would drop straight through a digestive system too preoccupied to deal with such trivia.

  On the south coast, strolling towards Hastings Old Town, I ran into Gareth, pushing his son, shocked to be on a brief holiday: staying in the house of the absent film‐maker Andrew Kötting. Serene exhaustion. The muscles required to smile, how do they work? Gareth was active everywhere. Confident that the present crisis would slide over the horizon like a black ship, one of those silhouetted oil tankers. At all costs, keep the dialogue open.

  ‘Soup and a glass of tap water,’ he said.

  I marvelled that he could absorb so much; even the rich air – bubbling beans, pulses and meats, honeyed tea – was too potent. He was dizzy from the concentration of our talk, the books and DVDs pulled from his satchel: Douglas Woolf (‘If there were only one reader left in the world, I would write to that one as lovingly as I do now’), William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard. Interviews: drowned worlds, drought worlds, the impossible future. Gareth was facing expulsion from Hackney, a shift of operations: cheaper printers, a film festival in the Czech Republic. Reverse immigration. We get the builders, painters and decorators to sleep under the plane trees of London Fields, in the bushes of Victoria Park; they get the countercultural activists. The blind film‐makers, the dumb poets. The patrons of Turkish cafés.

  ‘Eighty per cent of the Arts Council’s budget has been cut,’ Gareth said, ‘to make a gesture at plugging the Olympic debt. Our magazine, Vertigo, will have to close in September. They’ve withdrawn our £17,000 grant. I tried to persuade various publishers to take on an anthology: Godard, Marker, Herzog, DeLillo, Keiller, Kötting. Editors were interested, the reps turned them down flat. You can get away with best‐of lists or celebrity directors with plenty of nice illustrations, otherwise it’s a dog. It’s hopeless.’

  Gareth’s film magazine had previously been run by Marc Karlin. With Chris Petit and Emma Matthews, his editor of choice, I worked on a film called The Falconer in Marc’s cutting rooms, an office block near Goodge Street. Walking in from Hackney, no matter how early, I would find Karlin already in the smoke‐stabilized basement. Mounds of back numbers of Vertigo, French books, unpublished typescripts, films that would never happen: a lair. For a somewhat shaggy, bearlike, interior presence. A man who had swallowed and absorbed his younger self, the guerrilla documentarist in the heroic production stills from another era. Marc prowled, he challenged, he hovered in doorways. He talked about Paris. His breathing was laboured on the stairs. It was a problem now – Marc had a film on Milton in pre‐production – to secure the necessary medical insurance. Taking a transatlantic flight would be a major adventure. He had deserted Hackney years ago; news I brought, in the dust of my boots, was from a place he no longer recognized. Names he preferred to forget.

  Gareth’s estrangement from Time Out, where he had been busy for years, was symbolized by the way seventy boxes of books and impossible‐to‐find DVDs, rare interviews, were dumped, without warning, in skips: landfill. Much of his working library vanished before he could redistribute it – as he had furnished me with photographs by Astrid Proll, with films of Hackney tower blocks under water, a piratical resistance to the Olympic enclosures. By October, Gareth would be out of work, all the part‐time employment that swallowed his waking hours would be gone. He had the lovely notion of starting his own press, on the proceeds of his share of a flat sale. He would commission the likes of DeLillo and Berger and operate out of Prague. The books would be plain, crafted, fit for the pocket; on the model of the early Divers Press publications put out by Robert Creeley on the island of Mallorca.

  Douglas Woolf ’s first novel was published by the Divers Press. I remember the excitement when he walked into Compendium Books in Camden Town and set down a box containing copies of that fabulous rarity, the original edition of The Hypocritic Days. ‘Get rid of these, I can’t carry them round any longer.’ Mike Hart jumped to the phone, the tribes descended from all quarters, single copies were swallowed up within a few hours, dealers took the rest.

  ‘One never does quite lose hope,’ Creeley says in his introduction to the Woolf book Gareth gave me.

  Compendium, victim of market forces, folded in the 1990s. Nobody now would ride the Silverlink version of the North London Line, from Dalston‐Kingsland to Camden Town, for pleasure. A cattle‐truck of sanctioned discourtesies and electronic babble.

  Woolf dies. Mike Hart gets a hungry cancer. And is gone. Along with those he did so much to promote, the faces from the Compendium readings: doors open to traffic, the burger‐leather‐dope‐drink‐diesel reek of the High Street. Ed Dorn. Kathy Acker. Derek Raymond. The living faces Marc Karlin noticed on the monitor screen in his cutting room, as Petit re‐filmed them, interrogating mortality, were no longer to be encountered on London streets.

  Howard Barker, whose theatre group was administered from Northwold Road in Hack
ney, would also be losing his funding. So Gareth informed me. ‘International reputations mean nothing to them.’ Barker’s company, the Wrestling School, had toured new work for years. But all that was over. The Olympic enclosures were an effective cultural defoliant, an Agent Orange of edge‐land jungles, marking out the flight path to dinosaur rock acts in O2, the rebranded Millennium Dome. The future is orange. The future is orange shields screwed across the blind windows of empty properties, antisocial housing.

  I listened to everything Gareth said. And I watched too. The women on their dais rolling vast pancakes. Glasses of brown tea, sugar lumps on decorated saucers. My vegetable stew, today’s favoured number on the laminated card, was superb. We ate: or I ate, while Gareth, barely pausing in his surge across London, ignored the tray of breads and extras. The whole deal for not much more than a fiver. In the quality of what was available, the slick way the operation was run, Hackney has gained so much from its accidental status as somewhere favourable to immigrants. I was refreshed and ready for a walk down Shacklewell Lane, where I had arranged to visit the house of a local painter, Dan Dixon‐Spain. Dan was doing up a barber shop once occupied by Lew Lessen, a man who had cut the hair of Walter Sickert. This was a connection I was eager to explore.

  Dixon‐Spain had been making portraits of traders in Ridley Road Market and showing them on hoardings. Shacklewell Lane, right across the road from where we were sitting, was a long‐established border, a footpath and a route for commercial traffic between the villages of Dalston and Hackney. Ermine Street ran north, on one side of the Lane, while the Hackney Brook remained a potent memory‐trace, away to the east.

  We were in the cutting room, mid‐morning, when there was a commotion on the stairs. Marc Karlin had collapsed, a heart attack. They came quickly from the hospital, it was just around the corner. The ambulance men, with that smell of scorched hair, applied their pads: repeatedly. Marc was lying in an awkward position: as if attempting, for the last time, to crawl up a slippery ladder of books and proof copies. To escape his fate.

  We were walking back from the Goodge Street Pret A Manger with our lunchbreak sandwiches and coffees, discussing cuts and revisions, when the news was confirmed: Marc had been declared dead in the ambulance. Tongue too heavy for his mouth.

  Chris Petit, the realist, had been waiting for this. There was nothing whatsoever to be done. But guilt sticks: nothing written, no eyewitness account, can live up to the complex network of circumstances and motives that surround it. You are never quite where you think you are. Sudden death gives life a sharper edge.

  Karlin’s spectacles had come off in the fall, one lens had dropped out. I picked it up, held it between thumb and first finger: in the crab‐claw grip of the recidivist smoker. An act of homage. I hadn’t smoked for years. Then I stared through the milky optic at the mess of the bereaved basement.

  Shacklewell Lane

  There are mornings in the city when the light is so persuasive, the foxy smell of earth, fetid garden plots, unmanaged hedges, that you have to keep walking: you turn your back on home, walk away. Ballard speaks of a period in the early 1970s, after he’d lost his driving licence, when he was forced to walk, but never further than the immediate horizon for a man of his height. ‘In effect, I was living on this planet a mile wide,’ he said. ‘My whole universe just shrank. I never fully recovered from this.’

  Paolo Cash, my next‐door neighbour, the former footballer (Portsmouth, Colchester, Dagenham and Redbridge), present stall‐holder in Roman Road, doing the Knowledge (for years), was kitted out in zips and buckles to ride his motorbike (L‐plates) to Borehamwood – ‘about forty‐five minutes’ – for a day’s work as a supporting artist on Holby City. We chat. He tells me how, through football, he learnt to read situation and character, fast. He’s done EastEnders. ‘Twelve million people see me leaning against that bar in the Queen Vic, Iain. This is for real. I ain’t gonna mess about. When I went up for it, they told me what the part was: “leery lad”. That’s acting, mate. To be yourself.’

  Shacklewell Lane: the wealth of history in that name. Oswald Mosley ranting his racist bile outside a synagogue (now Turkish Islam Funeral Services). A golden dome. Foundation stone set by the Hon. Charles Rothschild. Great houses where the wealthiest families in the borough turned City loot into bricks and mortar: the Herons, Rowes, Tyssens. The ones who are still remembered. Tyssen was the school on Stamford Hill where Anna finally got the measure of the job. I watched 8mm diary film of a boy called Clifford narrating the pop‐eyed adventure of his recent activities. I watched Renchi shepherding the kids into Springfield Park, little girls clambering over him. Anna, in minidress, is sprinting after one who takes off down the slope: such footage, these days, could only be shown in court. The children are scattered adults in their mid forties. They recognize Anna at bus stops.

  Shacklewell House, now demolished, dominated this sad scrap of green; an iron‐fenced junkie refuge with a lichen‐crusted war memorial. Sir Thomas More visited Shacklewell House on many occasions, his daughter Cecilia married Giles Heron – whose ward‐ship the financially astute More had purchased. Heron, something of a wild boy, was accused of depredations of ‘vert and venison’ (knocking off deer in Epping Forest). He got away, thanks to contacts at court, with a royal pardon. In 1539, accused, as all who ventured into the orbit of Tudor princelings eventually were, of treason, he was executed in the Tower. The estate held, as Herons gave way to Rowes (City merchants, lord mayors) – until the last of the line, Henry, in rags and tatters, became a beggar on the parish in 1706. Hackney treated him to a new outfit, without the obligation to wear a pauper’s badge; they allowed him 2s 6d a week on which to subsist.

  It was at Shacklewell House, an unlucky place, that More’s political downfall (and death) were assured. Unguarded remarks, at a family dinner party, about whores at court: ‘Certain words touching the ladies who surrounded the king’s person.’ The network of informers and whisperers did their business. More’s ward, Giles Heron, took his place as a juror among those who passed judgement on Anne Boleyn.

  The depression peculiar to the curve of this ridge outlived its social decline: warehouses, cafés, barber shops. Poets of the Cambridge diaspora sulked and settled. I met them from time to time, distracted on Kingsland Road, shopping for fruit in Ridley Road: without bags or coins. Wondering where they were and how long they would stay; not working, part‐time teaching, with mysterious sources of income, publishing invisible pamphlets.

  I associated Cecilia Road with music, hymns to St Cecilia’s Day. Now I knew better: the daughter of Sir Thomas, Cecilia, was memorialized as the link between Dalston Lane and Shacklewell Lane. Contemporary musicians moved in. I heard about them from the poet Peter Riley. Who house‐swapped Albion Drive with his Peak District cottage. I asked him to tell me more about the Cambridge poets and musicians, as he had experienced them, in this part of Hackney.

  Dates have always been a headache for me. I know the year in which I was born, but asked how old either of my children is, I’m lost. But this is what I remember about Hackney.

  The ‘free‐improvisation’ experimentalist Derek Bailey (who by the way died last Christmas) lived at 14 Downs Road, just off Hackney Downs. The house was like . . . well there’s a whole book could be written. It was like witnessing a small den from which an absolutely determined persistence emanated, not to compromise in any way the kind of music he’d created, but to doggedly carry on against all the odds, starting and running a small record label, arranging concerts, establishing global connections . . . always knowing that it had to remain small‐scale or perish. I think Hackney had an urban village‐like and backstreet ambience which appealed to him. He would relate rather gleefully the latest murders. There were other improvising musicians in the district or not far away and they had sessions together, usually at his place, and visiting foreign musicians would call there.

  Cecilia Road was a squat occupied for a short time by a percussionist called Roy Ashbury
and others. I just visited a few times and later he disappeared from the scene.

  There was a strong tendency for ex‐Cambridge people to settle on the Hackney side of North London. Martin Thom lived on Shacklewell Lane, in the same house as my friend Ewan Smith. I was often there and it was the only place I ever found any serious or helpful discussion about poetry and everything else – which actually made quite a difference to the course of my career as a writer (people in Cambridge generally keep their traps shut). Also, off the edge of Hackney, there was John Welch (N16). Tom Lowenstein (ditto) and Jeremy Harding (the journalist). And others, not writers or anything like that, forming a little Hackney–Cambridge community.

  What did it feel like? Mainly that this was a zone where a lot of déclassé intellectuals of a fairly unconventional and politically left kind could subsist one way or another, keeping in contact with each other and with Cambridge, among a lot of first‐ and second‐generation immigrants, mostly black or Kurdish, with dope peddlers thick on the pavements after dark. But it wasn’t a left‐bank type of bohemian scene, it was much more intellectually concentrated and uninterested in outlandish lifestyles. It was getting on with stuff.

  They have without exception moved out of Hackney now, though some not very far.

  The characters Riley describes were themselves second generation; the earlier poets, hungrier for the city, less cushioned by their pretensions, gravitated towards Amhurst Road. Tom Raworth wrote about Hackney life – Hackney as an incidental element – in A Serial Biography. This book, with its terse, cynical and freewheeling prose, was a model for both our diary films and the early publications of Albion Village Press. Another poet, the extraordinary Grace Lake, down from Essex University, was also in Amhurst Road, still operating under her original name, Anna Mendelson: an active member of the radical group made infamous as the Angry Brigade. They were at no. 359, a standard Victorian property broken into flats. Very much the setting Alexander Baron used for The Lowlife. Essex was always part of the equation: a bomb at the Ford Motor Company’s Offices at Gant’s Hill, a staging post on the road to Colchester. Communiqués from the Brigade were run off by the same crude technologies that printed small‐press poetry broadsides for the Cambridge squatters.