Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Golden Lane

  Stewart Home had been beaten with a brick. Or so I’d heard from a very unreliable source, a Frenchman in transit to Los Angeles, where he had managed to parlay a casual interest in the arts, connections with literary festivals that never quite happened, into an appointment as Cultural Attaché to the Slide Area. He was still breathing, Stewart. Discharged from hospital and floating free, scurrying around town in search of a roof for the night. He could carry a few dents, his skull was strong and many miles of furious cycling, distributing Neoist leaflets, Situationist squibs, acid satires and porn-fuelled polemics, kept him fit. If marginally bow-legged. The whole episode would be recycled as fiction, within hours, if it did not already read like a paragraph he had penned many times before. Self-cannibalism, Home insisted, was the lynchpin of any career dedicated to that impossible proposition: paid publication. (With a modicum of fame, fortune and the love of numerous good women thrown in. A London perch from which to operate.)

  Just when I needed him, his particular and peculiar expertise in the back story of Hackney’s subterranean sects, Stewart went off radar. He had taken the decision, after the attack by a gang of street kids from the estate where he had lived with a previous partner, to shift his operations to the virtual world by way of a dozen or so websites. All dedicated to sustaining the myth of the alternative way: existence as a nest of interlinked scams and conspiracies for which he, Stewart Home, held the golden key.

  Shortly before my computer gave out and its internet connection vanished, scrambled by the effort of decoding a communication from Danny Folgate, I received an email from the stewarthomesociety, detailing the assault the former skinhead had suffered.

  I was beaten about the face and head with concrete and bricks and kicked a lot by a gang of about twenty teenagers who were masked up. They were trying to mug my mobile phone but they didn’t get it. I kept getting up no matter how many times I was hit. I know who the gang are. I also know where they do and don’t like going, so I escaped by way of Old Bethnal Green Road, then towards Charles Dickens House (where they prefer to avoid other gangs and parents). From there I went down to Bethnal Green Road, coming out by Tesco.

  I’m okay. The hospital said it may take several weeks to settle down, but there are no serious problems, and the short term memory loss I’ve got should clear up (so hopefully when I next see you I’ll be able to recognize you!).

  What really annoyed me is that the assault took place right outside the Million Miles An Hour Gallery in Old Bethnal Green Road and people I know saw exactly what was going on and did nothing. There were fifty to a hundred people in the gallery, if someone had shouted and they’d come running out, I would have been hit a lot less.

  The people in the gallery claim to have been too stoned to know if it was an actual attack or a performance act I had arranged. ‘Brilliant, Stewart,’ they said. ‘So convincing, the blood and stuff. And the way you kept crawling down the road with cars skidding around. Slow Death, Pure Mania or what?’ One guy said he did suspect something unpleasant might be happening but couldn’t help, he was deaf.

  The kids who did this are sick. They love masking up. When my son was a bit more than a year old they threw a lighted firework in his buggy. I was really sad seeing the way a lot of the adult Bengalis on the estate were afraid of them, but I was never slow about telling them to piss off when they were being a nuisance on the stairwell of my block.

  Many years of wandering London, constructing energy charts of the points at which songlines, spirals, vortices, drovers’ ways, pilgrim paths, lost rivers, intersect with the sacred geometry of leys, churches, markets, conical mounds, carried me to one place: the Golden Lane Estate on the edge of the Barbican. Call it the golden section of the psychogeographers, a Corbusier-influenced utopian development risen from a blitzed wasteground and snatched away from public ownership by the alchemy of freemarket capital. The property values of these slender, functional, ultimately urban flats were leaping by the month. So much so that Chris Petit, whose late career was about denial and abdication, moving house in preference to launching a new project, nominated Golden Lane as the perfect hideaway for an era of decommissioning and invisibility. Like Home he experimented with parenting, using a lively child as a good reason to re-explore the banks of the Thames, the alleys and shady squares of a deserted weekend city. Not-writing, not-filming, he asserted, was a serious vocation. The daily passage between nursery school and Waitrose brought with it a new engagement with place, with working mothers, freelance chemical entrepreneurs tugging pit bulls – and the area of London where Shakespeare lodged, John Milton was married and William Blake buried.

  ‘Daytime television,’ Petit said, ‘is the final frontier. Our inland empire. There is no finer technology for discovering how the margins have disappeared and everything has collapsed into the middle.’

  The breakthrough came, he explained on the phone (now his principal art practice), when he bumped into Stewart Home at the security gate. They barely recognized one another. Stewart’s short-term memory was malfunctioning and Chris had never seen Home without his strobing Bacofoil suit. Stewart courteously held the door open for the Petit buggy. Both men wondered, in that frozen instant, if it were feasible for two writers to coexist on the same floor of the same block. Especially when Home’s unit, owned by a new partner, an art curator, had more space, a study beneath the stairs.

  The one person who rang Stewart to express sympathy, after the gallery attack, was the writer Tom McCarthy. He’d been at the show but was in deep conversation when the bricking took place. He knew nothing about it, until it became the major talking point at the launch. Another Home triumph, was the general verdict, violence and art in equilibrium. Better than a kung fu DVD. McCarthy also lived in Golden Lane, in a different block, looking west. When Stewart was kicked out by his lover, he stayed from time to time with McCarthy. And he repaid the favour by granting McCarthy a pseudonym in his novel Memphis Underground. He called him ‘Rob McGlynn’.

  ‘When I broke cover, I walked from King’s Cross to Rob McGlynn’s flat on the Golden Lane Estate between Old Street and the Barbican. We sat on Rob’s balcony looking west towards Centrepoint and the Post Office Tower. We drank beer, premium bottled lager from Belgium. McGlynn had only been living in this pad for six months, and he absolutely loved the view.’

  I sat with Petit, trying to make sense of all this, the way moving flats replaced the writing of books as the preferred method for sublimating creativity and taking a stand against what the Boas Society called the ‘Griffin’. Which would be: City Hall, corporate developers, Hackney Council, commissioning editors, online application forms, all politicians and professional bullshitters hiding behind Olympic quangos with fancy initials. Chris was glugging Belgian lager while languidly keying up weather images on his laptop, sampling extracts of films long deleted from the catalogue.

  He gave me, in a weary but beautifully modulated voice that should have earned him a fortune doing adverts for expensive German motors, a taped interview describing his personal ‘northwest passage’; a trajectory that led, flat to villa to flat to impossible mansion, to the Golden Lane Estate. Each new property was a book, film or wife. The point of Petit’s autobiography in juggled mortgages was that he never lived in Hackney. The closest he came was an industrial unit with subsidence problems in Fairbridge Road, N19, near the source, on the lower slopes of Highgate Hill, of the legendary Hackney Brook. Behind metal shutters, we cut a number of films in this minimalist bunker which bore an uncanny resemblance to the set of Macbeth, in an acclaimed production, supposedly taking place in a Russian field hospital or slaughterhouse-kitchen.

  Petit and Home: their lives and movements were mirror images, coinciding at this significant moment in the same block of flats. I would have to save the four-hour Petit tape, fascinating though it was, for another occasion: too much daylight, not enough Hackney. Hampstead, Primrose Hill, Willesden Green, Golders Green, Archway, Bloomsbury: deep cu
ltural traces, but not the story I was after. Home, on the other hand, never really got away; he circled the borough or found himself mired in the thick of it. But how would I contact him?

  Did he share Petit’s vision of a covert existence, writer as spook, third-columnist, always relocating before his cover is blown? The essence of a rather noble career lay in Chris’s ability to subvert the possibility of worldly success by tangling himself, yet again, in the legal and financial complexities of another compulsive flit.

  ‘Re property,’ he began, as I settled down with a large mug of coffee, ‘I used it as a way of escaping numerous cul-de-sacs in my life. I worked out pretty early on that I was not hoping to get invited into the warm bath of the enfranchised. Looking back, I should have invested all my efforts in property rather than books or films. You don’t have to pitch property and you don’t have some arsehole reviewing it afterwards in the Guardian. Where I can hardly recall my Irish book, The Psalm Killer, I still retain very strong memories of Haverstock Hill where much of it was written. So, in their way, the itinerary of the properties becomes a record of more tangible achievement than any of the works I have published.’

  When I transcribed the Petit tapes, I found another provocative argument: he saw cinema as infected topography. James Stewart, the Second War bomber pilot, brought Anthony Mann Westerns to ground in East Anglia. A rather crude mural of Audrey Hepburn invoked Chatham. London locations, once caught on celluloid, would never be so innocent again.

  Julie Christie came to Hackney in the 1970s or early 1980s. She had a house in Stoke Newington. Someone I knew went round there. And Warren Beatty turned up to collect his jackets. He’d split up with Christie by then. There was this wardrobe which was full of replicas of the same jacket, a suede jacket like the one he had worn in Shampoo.

  She bought property in Wales. And now has a house somewhere on the southern edge of Hackney, Bethnal Green. I was always curious about her. If you look at those English actors from the 1960s, the big stars, you wonder how she sustained it, in terms of income. She probably didn’t get that much for Doctor Zhivago or Darling. Actors then were like footballers at a later period. Julie would probably have made just enough to stay ahead.

  I remember when I was about to direct my first feature film, Radio On, I thought: it makes sense to try and find somewhere bigger now, while I can still technically claim an income. It was a question of scrutinizing the map. I was never any good at the inner-city thing. I was a child of the suburbs.

  I worked out later that I was stuck in that northwest passage of London for about twenty years, the idea of moving inwards never occurred to me. I looked at Finsbury Park, we checked out a house there. The house wasn’t in great nick. I lost my nerve. I thought, ‘I’ve known people in Finsbury Park and I really don’t like it. They’re never going to get away. Finsbury Park is a black hole.’

  If I had the instinct for literature and film that I have for property, I would be doing quite well. I could have borrowed against my house in Willesden Green to buy something else. It never occurred to me. I almost preferred the state of renting. You’re liberated from the tyranny of taste. It never occurred to me to speculate. I figured I was pretty good at reading the market, slightly ahead of the game. I could guess the right time to sell.

  Fairbridge Road, near Archway, was slightly botched. It was dangerously close to your Hackney force field. I could have crossed the border and vanished. The idea was to be able to use the property as a kind of studio, a factory, to produce a lot more work. But, in a way, I was already stuck with writing those fucking books, the thrillers. The thing I didn’t realize, until I moved there, was that I’d been quite happy working that northwest passage. I knew where everything was, left and right.

  Fairbridge Road didn’t work. Due north you had Crouch End, at the top of the hill. Which I always hated. Finsbury Park, down at the bottom: hated. The Holloway Road was Aguirre, Wrath of God. The ever-burning Styx. You had to do two turns across raging traffic, which I became quite efficient at.

  The other thing that dictated my move was that my son, Robert, was in school at Hampstead. I used to see that old Whitechapel writer, Emanuel Litvinoff, at the school gates. He was well into his seventies by then and had this young boy. I think I first noticed him when he’d fallen out with us, after his experience in our film, The Cardinal and the Corpse. The notion that an author of his stature could be associated with lowlifes, street poets, gangsters like Lambrianou.

  I thought, ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ He never acknowledged me. He stood there looking extremely sour. I don’t know where he lived.

  I worked out that my standard of living, although I was earning quite a lot, because my agent had got me on good contracts for these thrillers, was quite modest. I was doing pretty well on paper. The property portfolio didn’t look too bad, but I was carrying a massive debt. My standard of living took a dive as soon as I moved east. The more money I earned, the worse it got. By the time I’d paid for Robert and the general running of things, there wasn’t much left. I think I had about £8,000 a year to live off. The whole thing about debt became the legacy of the Thatcher era.

  What I thought about Fairbridge Road, that it was a mental space, turned out very differently. As a physical space it was never practical. Everything for me has been conditioned by my upbringing in what Robin Cook would call ‘army quarters’.

  Now on the Golden Lane Estate, there is no storage, no space at all. The work has to arrange itself around the property. The days of constructing complex thrillers are over. The nature of my work will change radically, it already has. Whatever I do has to squeeze into the gap between school delivery and school pick-up, the daily excursion to Waitrose.

  Property got easier as my career got harder. I realized – which had never been part of my intention – that property always fed into career. By the time we arrived at Golden Lane, fiction and documentary were absolutely intertwined. I was inhabiting out-takes from The Falconer, our film about Peter Whitehead. I was meeting projections at every turn. Thank god the one who turned up on my doorstep was Stewart Home and not Whitehead himself.

  Stewart was pushing his bike out of the front door and he, very politely, held it open for the buggy. I thought: ‘Stewart Home!’ He was a bit shocked as well. You could see him saying to himself, ‘Can this corridor take more than one writer?’ But, like me, he’s moving away from print and on to the net.

  Part of coming to Golden Lane was about reducing the outgoings. The thinking was: ‘How much can you owe?’ Now it is more like, ‘What is the least amount of money one needs to keep the game in play?’

  I have thought about shifting entirely into property. We’re going to have to sit here for a while. If I bought another property in this block, I could still claim this place, for something like four years, as my main residence. And so reduce capital gains.

  I think Peter Whitehead’s canniest move, apart from acquiring a bunker in Clerkenwell, was that he knew how to use his social connections. He always retained his film footage through those years shooting documentaries or making pop promos. He’s able to present himself as the English Pennebaker. He shot Pink Floyd. It’s the nostalgia card. Everyone has shot a Rolling Stones film that couldn’t be released. So Charlie is my Darling puts Whitehead on a par with Robert Frank and Cocksucker Blues. Nobody has seen either of them. You are forced to assume that there is a controversial quality to the material.

  Of course Whitehead had his Julie Christie moment in Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. Did they have a thing? Must have, I suppose. Standard Whitehead practice.

  Marc Karlin wasn’t that different from Whitehead, when you think about it. He can do French. Karlin’s mother was French. Like Whitehead he was bilingual. Didn’t Whitehead translate Alphaville? Karlin had his Paris connections too, he was certainly close to Chris Marker.

  Marc was quite a political film-maker. At the beginning he was involved with various film co-operatives. He made things lik
e Nightcleaners. His work came out of the spirit of ’68. I didn’t really know him at that time. Strikes were always being organized. Marc had the reputation of being a political speaker and a firebrand. Time Out, where I was film editor, was looked on as rather commercial and suspect. It wasn’t until we started cutting The Falconer in Marc’s place, off Goodge Street, that I got to appreciate him.

  I think he founded the magazine Vertigo. He picked up the funding to run that basement and the suite of cutting rooms. I don’t think he owned the property. But, on the other hand, he – or his partner – or both together – owned a very fine house, just up from the Arsenal Football Stadium. Which is also, I’m pretty sure, where Julie Christie used to have a property. After she left Stoke Newington.

  Marc was a passionate Arsenal supporter, which didn’t quite sit with the man I knew.

  There was a strong, radical, puritanical tradition in English film-making. It was vociferous and influential, out of all proportion to its achievements. Some of those people ended up with considerable power in the early days of Channel 4. I remember Radio On being regarded with suspicion, as being insufficiently political. To the point where Channel 4 had the rights to show it and never did. I’m afraid that if it was a choice between programmatic political cinema and Hammer horror, there wouldn’t be any contest. Break out the fangs, bring back Fu-Manchu.

  Marc represented a passing spirit. He struggled on, heroically, beyond his time, in the face of changing values. Everything those people had worked for, people like Keith Griffiths and John Ellis, vanished before their eyes. When push came to shove, Channel 4 were pretty quick to sell out. To the point where, twenty years later, there is no independent film production.