Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  The initial procedure is successfully undertaken and I’m called to fetch Anna home. There will be a further, more serious operation at a later date.

  Joseph Priestley, the natural philosopher who gave his name to the ward, was a Hackney man. Author of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (2 vols., 1774–7). So Sheila Rowbotham told me, his house was part of her historic walk. A local mob, enraged by the scientist’s notions on free will, the libertarian principles that had him nominated as a citizen of the French Republic, broke down his door and – as at John Dee’s Mortlake residence so many years before – burnt his books, his precious manuscripts, his instruments. They did not appreciate, perhaps, that there is no better way to ensure transit through time than by reducing cumbersome volumes to essence. The raging pyres of fascists only confirmed the potency of the word. Inky symbols reconfigure and make their own shapes in cloying smoke. New sentences, as Danny Folgate knew and I was to discover, spread themselves across the topography of London, catching on the most unlikely fences, oversmearing walls.

  ‘Eric Spencer!’

  When Anna was back, in her own bed, the name came to her. A little white boy, reception class in Daubeney: ‘all over the place’. Eric was the hospital porter pushing her gurney. He had ambitions, he said. He was going to try for a paramedic.

  Chisenhale Road

  A classic Hackney scam: no money spent, large boast. I sat on the bench, upwind of the unravelling ranter, the one tearing his free newspaper into smaller and smaller segments: and I laughed aloud. How do you solve the problem of vanishing gardeners? When Renchi worked in Victoria Park, and I was at King George’s Fields in Mile End, we were part of a substantial team. We set out, mob-handed, to keep school fields neat, to tend graveyards and Hawksmoor churches. Now plant technicians from elsewhere arrive like hit squads, do their thing: as if they were laying carpets.

  WILDLIFE AREA. THIS AREA HAS BEEN LEFT UNCUT TO ENCOURAGE BIODIVERSITY. THIS WILL ATTRACT ALL SORTS OF INSECTS, BUTTERFLIES AND NESTING BIRDS.

  Brilliant! Certified walk-leaders will be able to point out the sanctioned wilderness, a substitute for edge-lands lost to Olympic bulldozers, as they show old and obese citizens how to put one foot in front of the other, according to the leaflet. The notion is a winner, we could export it, make notices to stick on dumped cars, landfill mounds, empty hospitals: wildlife area. If you can’t rent your meadow as a caravan park for a film unit, peddle it to City Hall.

  Anna, sent home on the afternoon of her operation, made a complete recovery. It took months of phone calls, repeat visits, dates set and unset, to get it done. The surgeons were excellent, the nurses efficient and cheerful under the impossible stress of a collapsing system, which was organized for the benefit of bureaucrats and accountants. At one point, my wife got through the preliminaries, the pre-med, and – lying in calm resolution on the trolley, waiting to be wheeled through – was told that the operation was off: more tests needed, steroid boosts. But she made it; returned to our early-morning circuit, the old routines. Then she packed her bags and bought her airline tickets.

  I was walking alone because Anna was in America, visiting our daughter. And granddaughter. I couldn’t, for many reasons, break away from the problems of a book that seemed to be approaching some kind of resolution. Either that or I had lost it completely: I saw signs everywhere, paintmarks that predicted the outline of future buildings or pronounced a sentence of death. Yellow arrows, blue circles. I carried a photocopy of Hobo Sickert’s Grail sheet – which I compared with spray-splatters in the doorways of condemned snooker halls. Television ghosts playing through the night in the empty bar of the Albion pub in Goldsmiths Row. Slogans on T-shirts. Or the way a bus driver’s teeth were set as he reluctantly allowed me to board the 253, which passed Arthur Machen’s former chambers near Gray’s Inn Road.

  I decided to investigate Danny Folgate’s Victoria Park leyline, to carry on from the point where we left it. There might, at worst, be a path of illumination, relief from the energy-swallowing black hole of Hackney. The taped voices echoing in my sleep.

  The ironwork scrolls of the Royal Gates, the crowned globes, parodied drawings on Masonic cards in Hobo’s collection, his trunk of curiosities. Reflected in the dark depths of the Royal Inn on the Park, these symbols of majesty came into conflict with a wreath of thorns, a Catholic prompt. A reminder of the heritage of Lauriston Road that Neil Murger was so keen to promote in the Charlotte Street restaurant. A return to the territory of his childhood, at a period when the BBC was collapsing around him, was impossible. There was nothing left to plunder but the archive of rock’n’roll memories, the grainy romance of suicided idols. Vanished writers: Alexander Baron, Roland Camberton and the ones without names.

  A greyhound exerciser exploited a gap in the fence around the Burdett-Coutts memorial. I followed. A fifty-eight-foot needlepoint tapping into the subterranean energy stream. A dry fountain in red granite. Curling above the entrance was a Latin inscription, which I brought home for translation: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is.’ What was behind the locked door, inside the chamber, beneath the ground?

  Cherubs, noses eaten away, mouths black, raised chubby arms in semaphore salute. Vestigial wings would never get them off the ground. Yet they were poised for flight down Danny’s line, southeast towards the sewage outflow, Beckton and the river. One pudge squatted above a honey-coloured smear. There was a black hole beside his right foot, from which drowsy wasps emerged. To stagger and die. The slab bearing the obese cherub’s weight was an altar, a speckled kneeling-block. Puffy cheeks were sprayed in red: CRIME IN LONDON.

  As I walked towards Gun Markers’ Gate, Danny’s energy line bifurcated: the true path was a curving exit towards the Thames. ‘The thing you’re after,’ as the poet Charles Olson said, ‘may lie around the bend.’ But this other, the ruler-straight insistence, seduced by the vulgar pyramid at the summit of the Canary Wharf Tower, was a false note. An occulted act of will to confuse innocent eyes. Danny knew when to leave well alone, opt for a cup of tea.

  A miracle of light under the canal bridge revealed layers of sand and gravel, blue cans degrading into an aluminium reef. Here was where the great carp of Hackney basked, a solitary fish, last of his tribe. My walks, at the right hour of the afternoon, sought out this oracular presence: with little success. On one occasion, my way was blocked by a policewoman. Her companion was rolling out the blue-and-white tape. ‘We hope it’s a dog.’ He pointed to a white bundle bobbing against the lock gates. The steepling fall of water.

  After Three Colts Bridge, cutting back to recover alignment, I found myself in Chisenhale Road. The Spitfire propeller factory and the present gallery where Rachel Whiteread showed her frosty Ghost. The cast of an Archway room with the heat taken out. I climbed the front steps of a particular house, calculating the point through which the line of force would pass. I felt a shiver: unknowingly, I had entered a dead man’s photograph. A negative strip recovered from Tate Britain: Window Cleaner’s Funeral.

  It was a money thing to help fund the Hackney book. I agreed to trawl the archive of the Hyman Keitman Research Centre, attempting to locate some object or image that might provoke a few thousand words for an in-house magazine.

  The archive was compelling and depressing. I began wanting revelations, the glittering bones of lost or submerged worlds. Preserved street furniture of a blitzed Whitechapel. The memory-detritus of Sidney Kirsh, let us say, heaped in a warehouse: the inscrutable in quest of narrative. But the Tate archive does not advocate that kind of exuberance. Stealth, silence, walls sliding back to expose steel shelves, catacombs of labelled boxes. Buff folders in which the dead write, so tenderly, to the dead. ‘God! That I were walking down the river with you now.’

  All our biographies, in the end, are so much reprieved paper, sticky-stiff paintbrushes, red-letter bills, invitations to events we didn’t attend. The Tate alcoves hide documents from which scholars are invited to tease out future
projects: you must be interrogated, postmortem, or you will fade like an inscription in sandstone, erased by the city’s indifferent weather.

  I travelled to Millbank with a private agenda: did the archive hold any of Hackney’s secrets? The curator showed me lists of paintings by amateurs and enthusiasts. The great Dalston Lane paintings of Leon Kossoff were on the other side of the river in secure vaults. He was fortunate that many of his works were in transit when the Momart storage facility went up in flames.

  Window Cleaner’s Funeral. The title caught my eye. A sequence of four stills in negative. An unrecorded English Hitchcock? Some East London fragment edited out of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Gondola cars. Neighbours huddled on the pavement. High-angle viewpoint. The fact that these images are in negative make this event mysterious and unstable. The chemical process, a charm against extinction, is incomplete.

  ‘In the midst of death we are in life,’ scribbled the photographer: a certain Nigel Henderson.

  That was the name on the file. Night-flyer, cyclist, maker of masks. I knew something of Henderson, he featured in a remaindered book I’d picked up from a shop beneath the Old Street roundabout. Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties. Henderson (like Ballard) was a friend of Eduardo Paolozzi. He moved to 46 Chisenhale Road in 1945, where he became a compulsive explorer and recorder of East London. And a compiler, as the Tate archive revealed, of shopping lists: ‘Candles, notepaper, methylated spirits, matches, cigarettes, washing powder.’

  Henderson’s ephemera, preserved in cardboard boxes and folders, delivered an unearned intimacy with the artist. I shared the pain when, in wartime, he was separated from his wife, a Bloomsbury person. I skimmed private letters in a flush of shame. The photographic record of pedestrian expeditions from Chisenhale Road proved one thing beyond all doubt: he was ahead of me, every step of the way. And getting it just as wrong, staying resolutely on the blindside of fashion. But shaping an archive to die for: literally. Mortality was the imprimatur of Henderson’s practice – which, in life, seemed restless, neurotic, incomplete.

  ‘I just walked and walked and kept staring at everything. And it occurred to me after a little while that I might try carrying a camera with me, but it wasn’t that I decided to be a photographer,’ he confessed to Judith, his social-worker wife.

  He was accumulating the evidence for a book he would never write, a masterwork conceived as abandoned. Local news, for these damaged outsiders, was overwhelmingly present. But there was too much of it.

  ‘Doreen’s sharp voice is scolding away on the other side of the street. It was Mrs Horn’s turn to sweep the passage mats and scrub the steps . . . There is a rattling clinking subdued rumble of a milk float being pushed along. Very few children about. Now it is wonderfully silent.’

  Photographs of bicycles, bookshops, pubs, cafés, market stalls, railway lines. I re-transcribed notes Henderson made for future poems, the book that would synthesize everything he uncovered: walks, patterns, echoes of earlier artists. The fitful material of this archive was an English equivalent of Walter Benjamin’s Parisian Arcades Project. Both men were exiles, waiting to hazard an uncrossable frontier. They knew there was no end to it, this city of the imagination: layer upon layer, story upon story, until you can crawl no further. You dump the tattered leather case hoping that it will never be found. The roof will lift away. There will be mountains. And fixed stars.

  The collection, in its refusal to take shape, its records of overheard conversations, diary jottings, postcards, sketches, was the precursor of the cult of psychogeography. It was also evident that Henderson had stumbled upon Halley’s theories of the Hollow Earth: the energy lines to entangle future generations of investigators. Folgate, Hobo Sickert, Stewart Home. They would be suckered into unravelling an infinite nest of conspiracies that always led back to the point from which they started: madness.

  Henderson, a troubled man, used to interpreting field patterns during solitary nocturnal flights, stalked Bow, Bethnal Green, Limehouse. He noted the titles of pulp publications seen in the window of S. Lavner, the tobacconist who carried ‘the biggest selection of American Comics in East London’: No Mean City (This Book Will Shock You!), Crime Patrol, Saint, Flirt, Naturist, Photoplay, Blonde Babe. Using a magnifying glass to pore over every detail of this print, I found just what I was looking for: the book-of-the-film of John Huston’s Moby Dick. And the worst wig-beard-putty-nose combination in the history of cinema: Orson Welles in Mr Arkadin (aka Confidential Report).

  All my interests and small discoveries had been rehearsed by Nigel Henderson. ‘I keep being haunted by Arnold Circus – that monstrous bloom,’ he confided to his diary. ‘Here we shall have a beautiful civic centre with flowers and bandstand. Be beautiful damn you!’ In prompts for poems, drawing on the experience of flying over the flat East Anglian countryside, or long bicycle expeditions, he spoke of ‘the weird relics of an abandoned aerodrome, given back to agriculture . . . pylons, ancient diesels and wooden mine wagons on the vast rubbish tip’. He explored the A13, the Thames Estuary: ‘The mythic sweep of the liners, gantries topped by moiling clouds . . . the utility structure pub . . . the colour of the river . . . the mud like toad skin excrement . . . Spew vomit bile . . . Scrambled memories of London.’

  I became convinced that Henderson, with his maps and over-scribbled charts, the photographs and pictures cut from Surrealist magazines, had located Danny Folgate’s leyline: the green passage. ‘There is a rampart of bald grasses bonded by rushing spikes,’ he wrote, ‘running south-east across the roofs of Eastern London towards the Sewage Outfall Works of Barking.’ He investigated, by bicycle, and discovered ‘a cathedral of black bones where, through pigeon-coloured atmosphere, light percolates . . . Agents of Destruction, Agents of Revelation . . . Water. Fire. Air.’

  Then there was the box of photographic negatives: Window Cleaner’s Funeral. Henderson stood exactly where I am standing, the same porch, up the steps from Chisenhale Road; to record in four surviving images the funeral of a neighbour. Breaking that taboo. And preserving the evidence.

  A thin crowd gathers, across from the pub which is no longer a pub. A convoy of gleaming motors with windows to make the dead man proud: his occupation was his status. Flowers on the roof of the hearse. Dustbin lids. Iron railings. At the east end of the street, a tall crane swings into view: the blitzed city rebuilding itself, anticipating the future of canalside apartments, Olympic parks.

  A child, two doors down, notices the photographer, turns to face him; it’s over, the illusion of invisibility. ‘A vigorous movement,’ Henderson noted, ‘a sudden emotion and I feel as if I’m trembling on the brink of life and death.’

  The positive prints, if they were made, eluded the Tate Britain archive. Leaving the integrity of the original episode unviolated.

  I was putting the letters, catalogues, fetishistic mask photographs back into their folders, when I noticed a bizarre misspelling: ‘collo-quay of Gulls’. Was it a mistake? Henderson was making one of his lists. ‘A plaint of curlews. A scold of rooks. A scandal of star-lings.’ Why was the word ‘Gulls’ capitalized? Still under the influence of Hobo Sickert’s Masonic conspiracies, I thought of Sir William Withey Gull, a figure who haunted my first novel. One of the Gulls of Thorpe-le-Soken. William’s father was a wharfinger who shipped agricultural produce to London. He navigated the back rivers. He died of cholera.

  Nigel Henderson, at the finish, left Bow. Brian Catling came across him, once or twice, a civilized and reserved tutor at the Norwich School of Art. A man whose career, despite his artistic and social connections, the respect in which he was held by his peers, never quite happened.

  Judith Stephen, Henderson’s wife, was a relation of Virginia Woolf – and of the unfortunate J. K. Stephen, misogynistic verse-maker and Ripper suspect. A man who died in the same Northampton asylum as a far greater poet, John Clare. Judith inherited a house, at the water’s edge, not far from Colchester (where her husband sometimes taught). The house was
at Thorpe-le-Soken. And the reason I recognized the final photograph in the green folder was that I had taken it, or a version of it, when I was researching William Gull and his antecedents. Henderson died in the Essex village where I began my attempt at writing fiction. Or allowing books to take their shape from accidental discoveries, random images laid out, in any order, on a table.

  The sequence of negatives that made up the record of the Chisenhale Road funeral led directly into the single positive print: a dark house by a muddy creek, a tipped boat, a bare tree. The landscape I had been invited to memorize in the Lincoln gallery. The picture I would never be able to forget.

  There was also a letter in Henderson’s Thorpe-le-Soken file. ‘I have the good fortune to live in a house which has grown out of a barn which straddles a dyke which is part of a containing system of creeks, man-made cuttings and quays in advance decay.’

  The address is Gull’s address: Landermere Quay.

  The place coded within Henderson’s curious formulation: ‘collo-quay’. The photograph, in its luminous darkness, its stately menace, could have been a frame from something by the Quay Twins. My daughter Farne worked on the production side of a television version of Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, which had been shot in the strange mansion where the Twins set one of their films, Institute Benjamenta. Farne’s new home, on the other side of the railway from Chisenhale Road, was in perfect alignment with the Henderson ley. And, beyond that, with a churchyard in which I recorded the names of sea captains who made enough money to set themselves up in Tredegar Square. And on again, in a fugue of disbelief, past the old snooker club where another pair of near-rhyming twins, the Krays, got their start in the compulsory life-assurance business: the profession of violence. To a grassy mound in an obscure block of council flats where, seventeen years earlier, the painter Gavin Jones excavated a wartime bunker, his secret studio and labyrinth, storehouse of snail paintings, and entrance to the underworld.