Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  The high-frequency hum, at the threshold of actual torture, hit me as I stepped into the street. A door that wouldn’t shut properly in the flats. It moaned, day and night, its whine disguised by council carts boasting of moving backwards, drills breaking up recently laid paving slabs. The road was trenched with cosmetic excavations and water was off.

  ‘Another post strike?’ I said to Harriet. Who was standing expectantly at her gate.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  I was due nine small payments for talks delivered, broadsheet hackwork, days in the Fens trying to recite the salient details of a Norwich School painting as a conceptual exercise. ‘New accounting procedures, sorry. The commissioner is no longer with us.’ Promised cheques adrift in the postal system. Where they will remain. Indefinitely.

  SEX CHANGE WOMAN STEALS HUMAN SKULL. BENEFIT FRAUD VOODOO MUM JAILED.

  The current Gazette teasers on boards outside the Turkish mini-mart. Clues in a surrealist crossword?

  I remembered what the Parkholme Road painter Edward Calvert said to Hannah Linnell, when he was showing her one of his works. ‘These are God’s fields, this is God’s brook.’ Folgate was right. It was time I returned to geography.

  When Danny typed a letter, I could hear his voice, I could feel his breath on my neck. I could analyse the italics, the capitals, the passages highlighted in blue. Emails took more time. They were composed by an Enigma machine. Random circumflexes. An auto-da-fé procession of inquisitors in pointed hats.

  I made out, with difficulty, that Danny would be ‘very pleased to demonstrate the Victoria Park leyline detected by L-rods’. He did not know where it terminated but he had the instinct that it might prove to be the continuation of ‘a line discovered in Poplar’.

  Danny’s Romford letter of 23/2/2004 was more forthcoming: ‘My present main project regarding dowsing concerns Tunbridge Wells, which is a neglected Pre-historic landscape of major importance! I hope YOU have found dowsing to be a useful tool, Iain? If you like, I can show you a genuine energy line in Victoria Park, which gives off heat! YOU CAN ACTUALLY FEEL IT!’

  As indeed I could, under Danny’s instruction. Pass through the gates, into the principality of the trees, and you sense the urban burden slipping away; your stride lengthens, cleaner air. Marc Karlin, so Patrick Wright told me, when he interviewed him for radio, spoke of socialism as a ‘lead raincoat’ he could never shrug off. Banished to the Goodge Place bunker, Karlin was doomed to enact the role of moral conscience of documentary film-making, the scapegoat who made works designed not to be seen.

  I had the same feeling about Jock McFadyen: whose studio I passed, shutters up, as I hurried towards my rendezvous with Danny. Jock was well on the way to becoming the last painter in the world, nominating sites marked for demolition. And exhibiting them in deserted car showrooms on Cambridge Heath Road.

  Jock’s unit was somewhere to store his collection of Volvos, racing bikes, spare parts. With unsold canvases from the last thirty years. Unshaven, hair curled to collar, Jock looks the part, the role to which he had always aspired: motor mechanic. Painting is a nuisance hobby to pay the bills. The radio reverberated in that space as it does in all railway-arch garages. Jock spoke, when I mentioned John Minton’s Mare Street dustwrapper for Roland Camberton’s novel, of an earlier, 1937, version of the same scene: by an artist he respected, Lawrence Gowing.

  ‘Gowing was born over a draper’s shop in Mare Street, before going on to become Slade professor. And knight of the realm.’

  1982: Gowing’s mentor, William Coldstream, asked him where he lived.

  ‘Hackney.’

  ‘I always fall asleep on the no. 8 and wake up at Hackney Wick. Where is Hackney Wick? What’s it for?’

  The Wick was where Jock felt we might talk. He was happy to let me tape his memories – on condition that I joined him for an evening’s drinking and debauch in a club he’d heard about, tickets only: squatters, Russians, travellers, lost girls. A burnt-out pub. On the Olympic frontline. Where, at the point of dissolution, anything goes.

  Jock poured oil into the cannibalized Volvo. I helped him load the trailer with scrambling bikes for the trip to one of his other properties, a converted bar in a Normandy village. We gave the new paintings a cursory glance: McFadyen had taken a block of pink flats from the canal and transposed them on an estuary landscape, where they could stand alone; tiny figures moving about the roof, wondering where London has gone.

  The line of heat, picking up from the church where I found myself searching for traces of Neil Murger’s Catholic heritage, ran south-east; slicing through the Jewish burial ground, brushing against, without actually violating, the gothic thrust of the Burdett-Coutts memorial fountain. This Aberdeen granite stack was presented to the people of East London by Angela Burdett-Coutts, on 30 June 1862. Ten thousand citizens turned out to witness the ceremony.

  Danny was on to something: hidden springs, suppressed fountains. Water had once gushed out of the people’s park, nineteenth-century maps boast of it. Let the poor and weary drink. They were drawn towards the Burdett-Coutts folly, designed by Henry Darbishire, at a cost of £6,000. Open arches reveal four plump putti riding on dolphins, mature cherubs who drip juice from uncircumcised urns. A meeting place, when the gates in the fence were still open, for young ladies in straw boaters and working gentlemen in short tight jackets, creaking boots.

  It was probable, Folgate conceded, that steps led down as well as up. During the Second War, they held Italian prisoners in tunnels beneath the park, letting them out for exercise at night – when in their pale uniforms they appeared as so many phantoms flitting among the trees. Ghosts who left real infants behind them when they returned home. Ghosts who moonlighted in parkside cafés. Ghosts who opened barber shops and ice-cream parlours. Ghosts who sang operatic arias in secret gardens.

  Constructing the park over Bonner’s Fields, an area notorious for public meetings, meant that a dissenting spirit survived: policed by keepers, special constables, gates. Radicals, suffragettes, Mosley’s blackshirt legions, competed to provoke. To rub shoulders, stamp the ground. In May 1887, the Socialist League demonstrated against the situation in Ireland. Annie Besant, William Morris and Bernard Shaw made speeches. Folgate had to absorb conflicted voices, to tremble with spent passion, arms spread wide, knees bending, heels dug deep: to earth unresolved argument. When the dead were adequately appeased, he took out his Dagenham coat-hangers, his L-rods, to demonstrate the newly discovered line of force.

  ‘This track’s a funny one, Iain. But it’s definitely there. Have a go. Try it yourself. Feel it.’

  A darkman, stripped to the waist, was running through his martial-arts routine on the bandstand. Harming invisibles with spiteful kicks. Rain-clouds massed.

  ‘To search for something lost,’ Folgate said, ‘you hold a photograph of the object in your left hand and the pendulum in your right. Graveyards are very receptive.’

  ‘Can you dowse for things that are no longer there?’

  A cough, a laugh. The zipped green anorak with its bulging pockets gave nothing away. Danny’s hands were large.

  This exercise had run out of puff. We stood under gnarled London plane trees in an epic avenue and considered our tactics in the feverish light of the advancing storm. Sheila Rowbotham’s story of being drenched to the skin, still firmly in mind, called down stinging rain-needles as a form of sympathetic magic.

  Danny suggested adjournment to a café he favoured in Lauriston Road. The territory south of the park, he intimated, was not receptive to dowsing. ‘Too many houses, too much trapped water.’ The energy line, if we stayed with it, was a passage out. And there was still work to be done in town.

  While Danny debated the ruinous price of Lauriston Village tea, I admired an inscribed portrait of a local icon, our version of Catherine Deneuve’s Marianne, symbol of the French Republic: the restored Empress of Hackney, Julie Christie. In jungle fatigues, the actress is being tentatively embraced by the aproned pro
prietor, while stroking a ratty dog. Charming! I suppose my first sighting, as a schoolboy in Cheltenham, of the student Christie in a touring Brecht play, was an intimation, had I only recognized it, of future migration to Hackney. But where we had lodged forty years in one house, Julie floated like a fragrant rumour: from Stoke Newington through the foothills of Highbury to Columbia Road.

  Build the market and she will come. Jane Howe, late of Notting Hill, listened to the voices in the Little Georgia Restaurant (formerly Sir Walter Scott, a canalside pub) and knew the area was crying out for a smart bookshop.

  ‘Banksy does well here but that’s because he’s local. It’s so exciting. It makes me wish I was thirty years younger! The other day I saw someone in the street who was dressed very retro, very 1950s. I thought, she is really going to town in that outfit. Not unusual for Broadway Market you may say, but when she walked into the shop I realized it was Julie Christie!’

  The café of Danny’s choice, blessed one rainy afternoon, long ago, by the presence of Christie, was now a shrine. The two famous Christies, I thought, as Folgate’s shadow fell across the table, that’s the story of London: the shift to the east. John Reginald Halliday Christie of Rillington Place (now banished from the map), a figure of inward. DIY decorator, fixer of floorboards. Forever plastering the cold outhouse scullery. Amateur anaesthetist. Embodiment of Rotting Hill. Under a street lamp in belted gabardine. Behind the white stucco and the High Tory gentrification: decaying meat, maggots, coal gas. The old England of fog and noose. Now countered by this vision in khaki, walker of Hackney’s parks and graveyards: Julie Christie. Patron of independent bookshops, street markets, cafés. The radiant future we have left behind.

  From one of the many pockets of his combat jacket, the uniform of the deep topographer, Danny drew out photographs of excavations. A promising gambit. I knew the dowsing expedition was a front, there were darker tales to tell. Rainbeads melted on the greasy window. On afternoons like this I used to take the kids swimming in Whiston Road. The baths, opened in June 1904, cost precisely ten times as much as the Burdett-Coutts fountain. Launched to offer better hygiene and restorative exercise, the Haggerston Pool was closed in 2000, for reasons of ‘health and safety’. And has remained padlocked ever since, a hazard to our moral sensibilities and a serious risk to our notions of civic shame. Danny was not a swimmer.

  Tunnelling operations commenced in Victoria Park, Folgate explained, using the Second War as a cover: flying bombs on Grove Road, factories in Bow making propellers for Spitfires. Trenches roofed with concrete slabs. A catacomb was constructed, near St Mark’s Gate, with six entrances and sixty-one ventilator shafts. It could accommodate 1,386 volunteer mole-people. The Victoria Park Lido, closed after the Great Storm of 1987, was adapted as a source of water for the Fire Service. Much covert burrowing. Interlinked passageways, Danny hinted, were still active. The leyline we had just walked was a crude approximation of an unrecorded highway that lay beneath the turf, veering south-east in the direction of Beckton Alp. Beneath Danny’s throaty whisper I heard the hiss of Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu-Manchu: all London’s tunnels open to the river.

  It’s true that Danny, responsive to my mood, had plenty to say about Sutton House. How all his researches began with the discovery of a mine shaft running towards Leyton and the Marshes. He left me with a photocopy of an article from the Hackney Gazette of 26 September 2003: riddle of the tunnel. Illustrated with a portrait of the grinning Danny, brandishing crossed L-rods.

  The enduring mystery of the secret tunnel beneath Hackney’s Tudor mansion has baffled archaeologists and historians for the last century – but one man thinks he’s solved it.

  Sutton House, built in the 16th century by Sir Ralph Sadleir, is now owned by the National Trust.

  So rumours that a secret tunnel ran beneath it – to help either the house’s royalist owners escape the revolutionary clutches of Oliver Cromwell, or highwayman Dick Turpin evade the law – became exciting folklore.

  In 1990, historian and chairman of the Hackney Society, Mike Grey, discovered what he thought was the entrance to the tunnel. This was later found to be a bricked-over entrance to a well.

  Ten years later, however, evidence of the tunnel’s existence might finally be at hand.

  Danny Folgate is an expert in dowsing, who claims that practitioners can also detect underground cavities.

  ‘The brain picks up information,’ he says. ‘You get a reflex. My rods show you what’s happening.’

  Danny believes the tunnel is much deeper than originally thought. He estimates that it is 20 feet deep and says that is part of the reason why it was not discovered during previous excavations.

  He says dowsing has also enabled him to calculate the width and even the age of the tunnel. He believes it is five feet wide and that it dates back to 1609.

  ‘The width is crucial,’ he says. ‘It helps to distinguish between the tunnel and other underground cavities and streams along the route.’

  ‘Tunnel building was quite fashionable in the 17th century,’ says Danny, ‘and Thomas Sutton, who died in 1611, had the manpower, the equipment and the money to do it.’

  Danny believes the tunnel links two churches. He says it starts in Homerton at the site of the old tower of St John of Hackney church, off Mare Street – formerly St Augustine’s.

  From there the tunnel allegedly runs below Sutton House and along Homerton High Street, beneath Hackney Marshes and New Spitalfields Market to Leyton Parish church by the junction of Goldsmith Road and Church Road in Leyton.

  The Hackney Archive Department have expressed some scepticism, the path of Danny’s tunnel coincides with an old sewerage system.

  Even Danny admits that, for now, his map of the Hackney tunnel is supposition. ‘Unless someone digs into that land, as part of some great public project, which let’s face it will never happen, we won’t get an answer.’

  The article, I noted, with no surprise, was credited to Julie Sinclair. This was the sort of coincidence at which Danny winked, as confirming his thesis: worlds within worlds. Fabric warmed by loving touch, human voices trapped within brickwork, allowed the sensitive dowser a glimpse of a parallel universe.

  ‘Synchronicity,’ he said, sucking at the cold tea, ‘is enlightenment. Quantum mechanics can explain a lot of what common sense tells us is irrational. Everything is connected! Ultimately, we are all one.’

  He wiped a wet mouth with a spotted handkerchief extracted from his poacher’s pocket.

  Now I understood where we were going. And by way of some very old friends: subterranean cities, buried rivers, the Templars of Well Street and Temple Mills. The Great London Conspiracy, a general theory of everything odd, unexplained, recurring, tapped by scholars from Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore to Folgate, played back to a tight cast of characters: Walter Richard Sickert, William Withey Gull, John Netley. Painter, surgeon, coachman. Whitechapel: 1888. Much of the impetus for this global brand of bad karma emanated from a reliably unreliable source: Joseph ‘Hobo’ Sickert, the self-anointed son of Walter. Hobo was a picture restorer, gossip, street character. An associate of Francis Bacon, Dan Farson and the late Ripperologist Stephen Knight (a suborned local press journalist). Hobo was a twinkling mischief-maker, late of Kentish Town.

  Danny, with his friend (and potential successor to Knight), Giscard Plantain de Wyff, had successfully cultivated Hobo’s widow.

  I notice a dusting of freckles on Folgate’s forehead, golden-brown oil spots brought to the surface by weak sunlight. In the glass protecting the Julie Christie photograph, I watched schoolkids mob the bus stop, spill into the road. The café man is smearing red Formica, emptying metal ashtrays, one into another: a good sign. He’ll turf us out before Danny can advance, with long pauses and asthmatic gasps, on the fine print of the latest Ripper narrative. The reworked yarns given out, a sentence at a time, by Joseph Sickert and his colleague, the painter Harry Jonas.

  There is a colour snapshot of Hobo and Jonas, in the street, wit
h an unidentified man. Sickert’s right hand is bandaged. Jonas, in pink shirt and crumpled straw-coloured suit, has all his buttons secured. In Joseph’s flat – and this is the hook – Danny has been shown a trunk of curiosities containing three great treasures. A ruby which can be verified in portraits of the Duke of Clarence. A decorative Japanese box presented to Clarence, her prodigal son, by Queen Victoria. And, best of all, a scrap of folded paper inscribed with broken letters, coded runes, alluding to the secret of the Holy Grail. Its location revealed through a painting on wood, which came into the possession of Hobo Sickert, by unknown means, from Shugborough Hall. The Grail, Danny assured me, was in England. In the keeping of surviving Knights Templar. ‘The biggest mystery of all.’

  Danny requests a slice of chocolate cake to carry home on the train. If Giscard Plantain de Wyff and the widow Sickert agree, I will be permitted to view the treasures and even, perhaps, to make a copy of the inscription on the paper.

  Irresistible. Insane.

  Reeling from hours of exposure to Danny’s monologues, I found myself escaping to the second layer of the hollow earth; an alternate reality in which I was married to Julie Christie. Who, as Sheila Rowbotham informed us, participated in a legendary walk to Sutton House. The Julie Sinclair of the Gazette might then become part of a future in which my mundane biography would be interestingly revised. The only way out, Folgate assured me, was through a scrap of paper in a locked trunk in a flat somewhere I’d never find in North London. Enough. Give it to Julie. Let her finish the book.