Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  THE MAYOR’S A FOOL. SAVE OUR SCHOOL.

  Find the dog and you find Jock. He says that he never recognizes people, even his closest friends or family, because he has been trained, by many years painting the figure, to borrow relevant body parts from the mirror. Everybody, in the end, is a version of Jock McFadyen. Or his dog. Even the women. Especially the women. Either Jock’s nose, ears, the slightly quizzical uplift of the right eyebrow, the powderpuff aureole of rusty hair, the tilted grin. Or: the greyhound’s aristocratic Hanoverian snout.

  Jock was a compulsive wanderer, on the prowl for imagery, graphic demonstrations of blight. The exploitable glamour of urban entropy. But he was a victim of the gears of time: tick tick tick. His first question to any fresh acquaintance, especially another artist or writer, was: ‘How old are you?’ (Meaning: how many years, months, hours before I look as rough as that?)

  ‘Not a day goes by,’ he told me, ‘when I don’t think about money. It should be the first concern for any serious painter. When to shape the next move, when to trade up. I made a horrible mistake with that Roman Road development, the one with Piers Gough, but I got out of it in the end.’

  Hackney suited us both. As displaced Celts, at home nowhere on this earth, we stood apart: witnessing, with cynical detachment, the mess the English had made of it, the way they allowed Edinburgh advocates and Calvinist fanatics from north of the border to destroy the established structure from within. Taking the old enemy into ruinous foreign wars, economic adventurism and social deprivation. A lingering revenge for Culloden Moor was being eaten very cold.

  The greyhound seemed keen to move off in the direction of the promised Lido. I’d already had a glimpse inside. Some chemical in the suspiciously brilliant water must be attractive to dogs. A random pack, all shapes and sizes, gathered, howling, by the automatic doors. Causing the mechanism to malfunction. Heavy panels slid open and shut as the canine mob approached and retreated. Security staff massed to keep them out. A randy terrier, ducking beneath the radar, made it. I followed him in. A pool attendant, promising that the venue would open on time, for one day, gilt‐card dignitaries only, let me through: in the belief that the invading dog belonged to me. By now, high on chlorine fumes and the erotic nip of blue dye, the creature had plunged, pedalling its short legs in thin air, into the virgin water. Where it circled, holding its snout aloft: a furry toy with a supercharged battery. The staff were wholly occupied with keeping the other beasts out; waving their arms, spreading their legs, as the automatic doors hissed and clumped.

  Terrier secured and expelled, I was allowed to spend a few minutes in contemplation of the patterns the wind made in this expensive rectangle of Hackney water. The Lido was going to work: for dogs. And as a quiet place of meditation and melancholy, somewhere to brood on loss. I could do whatever I wanted, the man said, except take a photograph. Hackney had a total embargo on unapproved imagery. They were spending a lot of money on illusions of the absolute, computer‐generated visions of sites we would never be permitted to visit. The virtual utopia we had exchanged for the pain of the past. The zone we can never control.

  Empire

  From somewhere illegal, on the roof of the Hackney Empire, Ron Ark tilted his camera down towards the steps of the Town Hall. Towards the dirty white block with its flags, balconies and trapped fossils. His film, in part sponsored by those he intended to mock, was called Empire. An ironic back reference to Andy Warhol’s autistic masterwork: the steady stare that strips the Empire State Building of its flesh, dressing it in seductively grainy fug. A monolithic candle on a hazy afternoon in July 1964. Warhol’s subversive crew, the poet Gerard Malanga and film‐diarist Jonas Mekas, took up their watching post in the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time‐Life Building. Warhol barely touched the camera. ‘He wanted the machine to make the art for him,’ Malanga reported. This was the Factory Man’s first film with sync sound. The sound of light choking: into an afterlife of non‐specific celebrity. Waiting for King Kong’s hairy paw.

  Locked off, shooting for the length of a three‐minute reel, on the hour, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Ark had a nice record of empty steps; of cleaners leaving, bureaucrats arriving, supplicants scurrying after death certificates and birth registers. He had smokers, casual encounters, wedding parties. He had me, limping alongside a bicycle, bumping into the visiting writer Nigel Fountain. Who, it turned out, had just resigned from the board of the revived Hackney Empire. Fountain spent too many hours staring, through a rain‐beaded window, at the Soviet hulk of the Town Hall, while other business was discussed. There comes a point, he did not mention this as a factor in his decision, when the life and noise and stink of music hall becomes parodic, approved from above, patronized in the wrong sense. Conspicuous charity gigs glorying in their incompetence. Russian clowns whose virtuosity transcended cultural barriers, supposedly. Jazzed‐up Shakespeare.

  The original halls were grim and Sickert‐unlovely; packed, ripe, dripping, overdressed. Fear‐auditions. Reflex drifts of the mob, inward from the street: as if a trapdoor had opened on a candelabra‐lit antechamber of hell. Now the long bar was restored, the sofas, the tables at the rear – where it was possible, even necessary, to lounge, keeping your distance from the figures on the stage, while admiring the Moorish scarlet and gold of the restored interior. A politically correct bordello of the senses.

  Fountain was very taken with the state of the theatre when he first encountered it in the late 1970s, its degradation as a bingo hall. In misted panels he found engraved words alluding to the pretensions of an imperial past: ‘Grand Circle’, ‘Upper Circle’, ‘Fauteuil’. Armchair. That was the clincher that brought him into contact with the group working to resurrect the absurdity of a Hackney Empire. A gaudy kitsch palace, won back from Mecca, to set alongside the functional austerity of the Town Hall.

  Hackney: capital of schizophrenia. Circus, song, pantomime, drink, libidinous excess: the rose‐red folly of the theatre. Silent corridors, watchful security, stern portraits of forgotten dignitaries: the contiguous Town Hall. And, within the belly of that municipal fortress, another theatre, a bear garden: the council’s debating chamber. Where populace howls at elected representatives. Where showmen perform. Where rival managements scheme and plot and whisper, fouling their corners, like hyenas marking territory.

  It was agreed that Fountain, journalist, author of a brisk Hackney novel, Days Like These, would give me an interview. Having heard so much about the Montague Road collective from Sheila Rowbotham and Juliet Ash, knowing Marc Karlin in his last days, in the basement beneath the Goodge Place cutting room, I felt that I also knew Nigel: as a character, a projection. The one who survived. He presented me, as we parted, with a recent book which he said had already disappeared: Lost Empires (The Phenomenon of Theatres Past, Present & Future). The monochrome cover was a metropolitan nocturne, an Empire seen through stuttering traffic. Rain‐slicked Hitchcock cabs, papersellers, men in flat caps, street urchins.

  What Ron Ark proposed was to overlay his surveillance footage of the Town Hall, even the sequences when the steps were deserted, with an absurdist monologue, describing the events and interactions of the day. He pretends that the Town Hall is a hotel (a French conceit). A magnet for plotting businessmen, property sharks, bent politicians. A hideaway for illicit lovers enjoying an extended lunch break: this works well, when Fountain and Sinclair, with intervening bicycle, worn and avuncular figures of a certain age and gravitas, are pitched as thief and punter, arguing over the price of a set of contraband wheels. The way Fountain shifts his weight, jumps back, and the way I lean so heavily on the bicycle’s seat, stroke the handlebars. When a group of officials comes tumbling out at the end of the day, Ark flags it as a bomb warning: revolution by the underclass of Hackney, those who will never be able to afford a room in this opulent establishment.

  In reality, I was sniffing around the fringes of a building that had no purpose beyond making me feel uncomfortable: because I would
soon have to return, to deliver a talk to art honchos, civic dignitaries and the usual freeloaders, in celebration of the Chambers Bequest. Alexander Chambers, of 54 Palatine Road, a man of means, a scavenger, had willed his large and eccentric collection to ‘the former Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington’. Which had been absorbed into Hackney.

  The bequest was a nuisance, paintings of variable quality, curious objects, to be catalogued, stored, exhibited. The best that could be said of this stuff was that it gave employment to an emerging human type, the conceptual curator. Bureaucrats schooled to replace unreliable and indigent artists. Professional explainers: even when there was nothing to explain. The Chambers Collection was unfit to view, but it couldn’t be sold off at auction or dumped in a car‐boot sale at the Hackney Wick Stadium. There would have to be a parody of a commemorative dinner, with real councillors in robes and chains, real food and a compliant dummy, bought for a few pounds, to deliver the entertainment. I was elected: probably by default. And, eager to have an opportunity to get inside this building, without having to pay a fine or a parking ticket, I accepted.

  The invitation came at the optimum moment. Having lurched from scandal to scandal – all of them logged and recorded by the late Kaporal – the borough was in financial meltdown. Central government were threatening to take over. Council‐owned properties were crumbling; many, removed from the official register, were ruins, squatted by keepers of wild birds, burrowers, international anarchists without papers or identities. The builders who had taken on the Hackney Empire restoration gig filed for bankruptcy.

  Alexander Henry Chambers, born in 1849 (around the time our house was being built), grew up in Aberdeen, the city of my father’s family. He came to London as a fifteen‐year‐old and enjoyed ‘regular visits to the library’. He worked as a carpenter, then a clerk in the City, made money – and, using it, established the bequest, this municipal curse. Which included ‘Twenty Guineas to provide a NON‐POLITICAL DINNER on the Library Premises in the month of October for the Library Committee plus the Librarian, the Town Clerk and one distinguished visitor to be selected by the Chairman of the Library Committee.’

  Previous distinguished guests at the Chambers feast included Sir George Jones, Sir E. Salter Davies, Sir Alec Martin and Sir Gerald Kelly, society portraitist and president of the Royal Academy. Hackney loves to be patronized. Kelly, initially, declined to travel east: ‘I am a tired old man. I have learnt that to be a guest of honour is a great burden.’ Later, discovering that there were only twenty guests and that the press would be excluded, he relented. But he wouldn’t speak. He munched, gnawed, sipped: mute. But for the rattle of loose teeth, the hard swallow.

  After Kelly, the status of the refusees climbed: Sir Alfred Munnings (otherwise engaged), Winston Churchill (even after the bribe of fifty guineas to purchase one of his daubs). The first of the truly local figures to accept was a commoner: Arnold Wesker. Then Joan Littlewood sailed down the line from the Theatre Royal in Stratford (on the very rim of the future Olympic Park).

  I investigated the collection and noted a pathological inclination towards the pastoral: Sheep on a Common, Three Goats in a Landscape. A student put to studying the holdings, as an exercise, remarked on a picture of ‘a towering, awe‐inspiring, near mountain which appears dark and mysterious, hiding many secrets of bygone ages. In the distance, a house can be observed, probably deserted, but still standing defiantly against wind and weather. Two men are shown, they could be weary travellers seeking rest in the shelter of some bushes. But one of them is pointing, perhaps to the house.’

  Foxed watercolours, obscure objects in a locked room that nobody visited. Chambers, the Stoke Newington working man, maps out a hidden country beneath the bricks and terraces, the half‐remembered landscapes of his journey south; the romance of Scotland before the Clearances, Hackney Downs before enclosures. Lammas land. Travellers’ ponies on traffic islands: the art of Jock McFadyen, years before he was conceived. It was quite unreal, frozen clouds imagined by inhabitants of a hollow earth who had never experienced sunlight. Molemen with no use for eyes. What they imagined is what they saw.

  The objects were frosted by their long imprisonment. Dubious artefacts from which a viable culture would have to be invented. Carved bust of Shakespeare. China Chelsea figure of the poet John Milton (with certificate of authenticity). Ruby‐glass German goblet with inscription. Cigar box with miniature river scene. Small electro head of Julius Caesar. With annotation by Chambers: ‘Made by me when a lad.’ Mahogany carving: bunch of grapes. From the collection of the royal surgeon, Sir William Withey Gull.

  I made notes. And I thought about Roland Camberton’s tribute to the Central Library, how his friend Stanley, aged thirteen, discovered ‘the unabridged and illustrated edition of Ovid’. Then, a few years later, the poems of T. S. Eliot, the works of H. G. Wells and ‘a stout volume called the Handbook of Marxism’. Harold Pinter of Clapton, a celebrant of Hackney through his novel The Dwarfs, is tracked by his biographer, Michael Billington, as he moonlights in Mare Street, avoiding acting classes. The library was: ‘a fountain of life’. ‘He started reading voraciously on his own initiative,’ Billington says, ‘Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, Hemingway . . . Hackney Public Library was an intellectual treasure‐house.’

  A fountain of life: Nigel and his lost Empires. Pinter striding down Narroway towards Mare Street. The mysterious Roland Camberton. Traces of that subterranean stream, the Hackney Brook. Unviewed objects in a cabinet of curiosities: refracted autobiography. Alexander Chambers whispering from his grave in Abney Park: ‘Remember me.’

  How could I pull it all together for my talk at the Town Hall dinner? The sense of loss: it wasn’t the writers, the ones who used the silence of the library as an echoing pool, it was the artisans, the hobbyists. Amateur scholars from bottling‐plants, boot factories, asylums. It was Jeff Kwinter, a rag‐trade millionaire, who discovered Henry Miller and then John Cowper Powys. And who opened a bookshop, to make his discoveries public, on Regent Street. Who gave employment – for a few months – to the eccentrics and vagabonds of the city. Who lost everything and was crushed, but who hung on, always, to an essential truth: that the Hackney Central Library, six steps up from the street, was a necessary portal. A door to enlightenment.

  The Town Hall, in its pomp, 1934–7: Art Deco detailing, Portland stone. Lanchester and Lodge, the architects. A structure to symbolize a new emphasis on the responsibilities of local government. Three flatbed lorries belonging to H. J. Moyse, demolition contractor of Clapham Road, clear the rubble of a Victorian predecessor. And now, in 2007, £6.4 million (and rising) is being spent on extensions and improvements at the rear, a revised address for council taxes. THORP (‘Town Hall Redevelopment Project’) is the borough’s primary strategic target: air‐conditioned offices, a grand project to dwarf the hubris of the Clissold Leisure Centre fiasco.

  I tried to absorb confusing information as it arrived, daily, through free sheets put out by opposing factions: Hackney Respect (apocalyptic gloom), In Touch: Conservative (crime in the streets), Hackney Today (‘Reaping Olympic Rewards’). I brooded on how writers and artists viewed the threefold markers around which the social life and culture of Hackney had evolved: Town Hall (pinky white), Empire (terracotta, rose) and Central Library (grey as the recollection of a dead sea).

  Take, by way of example, Tom Hunter: the large‐format, high‐definition photographer, with his posed series, Living in Hell (and Other Stories). For Better or Worse, a print made in 2005, dresses the Town Hall steps with rioting figures. Black, funeral‐plumed horses. It’s either a traditional wedding‐party punch‐up or sozzled diners from the Chalmers Bequest being ejected by council bouncers. You don’t have to know, here is a restaging of Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, to appreciate the underlying conceit. The metamorphosis: dark mound into white stone. Architecture provokes action. Buildings are scripts.

  Remember Sebastian Bell
and his self‐published Hackney novel Saddling Mahmoud? Of course not. That 350pp of nicely printed, handsomely bound prose has been reviewed only in specialist publications eager to refute the Hitchcock thesis: that the Hackney Empire had its part to play in the 1935 film of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. It doesn’t matter if Hitchcock’s music hall is a set, the atmosphere is right: displacement, confusion. Conspiracy, flight. Nigel Fountain is another Buchan enthusiast. Days Like These anticipates Bell’s fiction, by sending the protagonist away from the city, into bad weather, a highland landscape borrowed from one of the sombre oils in the Alexander Chambers collection.

  ‘It took days for it to dawn on me,’ Bell wrote. ‘And the dawning hardened when I watched the film’s opening again. The Music Hall in The 39 Steps. It’s not the Hackney Empire at all . . . So it’s obvious, isn’t it? They filmed the interiors in the Hackney Empire and then took all their equipment down the Mile End Road where they found a suitable Music Hall exterior to use. Either that or they mocked the whole thing up in a studio and borrowed a bus to drive through the set.’

  Hitchcock, with his Leytonstone birthplace, the pub stuffed with memorabilia near Wanstead Ponds, the boilerplated head in the courtyard of the Gainsborough Studios development, is a way of defining where Hackney ends. He is intimately associated with trains and borders. Voyeurism, birds massing on telegraph wires. Buchan too, his plots are about getting away, healing the psychic wound in icy streams. Killing stags and birds and fish. Handcuffed European blondes (dubbed or not) in slithering nylons. Conspirators who signal with missing fingers.

  Kaporal’s files were presented as spreadsheets, with phone numbers, copied emails and a pink marker for: ‘They schmooze planning officers: fancy dinners, fancy charity sleb parties, keys to holiday homes in Maldives.’ It was hard not to see Hackney, through the researcher’s eyes, as one enormous, interconnected conspiracy. Like a pulp novel plucked from a carousel at the airport or from the receptionist’s manicured hands at a Holiday Inn in Korea. Then pitched, long‐distance, by Orson Welles, who is trying to borrow $20,000 from Harry Cohn at Columbia, to get costumes out of hock for a Jules Verne musical, by pimping his estranged wife, Rita Hayworth.