Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Richard Essex, as a matter of convenience, used Centerprise. When I was in the October Housing Co-op we had our meetings there, this weird community bookshop. Richard could have got an address from the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel but he wanted to steer clear of the anarchist association. You might get purged if you weren’t a pure Kropotkinist anarchist. Centerprise was a little less sectarian.

  The London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter was distributed to my mailing list, about 2,000 copies. It was easy to get rid of stuff then. Compendium Bookshop was still going in Camden Town. Centerprise was tied in to a whole network. A network that involved news of housing, flats, squats. Which brings me to the Beck Road thing and Genesis P-Orridge.

  Genesis was very insecure. I made it clear I thought what he did wasn’t fantastic. He was more of a conduit for ideas than anything else. A whole series of people lived in 50 Beck Road. When Genesis and Cosey Fanni Tutti moved in, some of the others got an advance from a record company and moved out. Genesis set up the Templar Psychic Youth. He moved some of his followers into Beck Road and provided free lodging if they spent eighty hours a week working in his mail-order business. Genesis would get mad because I put up a Church of Sub-Genius poster. He’d rip it down because the acolytes were not supposed to be into anyone but him. He’s now had a sex-change operation.

  A guy called Nick Abrahams moved in. Nick is notorious. He’s a really great video-maker. He’s done a lot of camera-work and editing for Jeremy Deller. Nick moved to 50 Beck Road with this guy, Barry Smith. They opened the cupboard under the stairs and pulled out a hand grenade. They thought, ‘Oh yeah, whatever.’ And threw all these carrier bags on top of it. They said, ‘It’s just a replica.’

  Years later, the couple who ran the Chef ’s House, art dealers down in Shoreditch, bought the house. They found the hand grenade. It had been there since Genesis. They called the bomb squad. The grenade turned out to be live. It was detonated in a controlled explosion. There was a dentist’s chair. Stacks of records in the basement, waiting to be shipped out. ‘The Death Factory’ was what they called it. Another weird side of Hackney.

  *

  I don’t know how people live in London any more. When I was in the October Co-op, living in Manor Road, it was a massive house. I was waiting to join the co-op, so I said I’d go into this house that a girl who was schizophrenic was living in. She’d set fire to part of the house. I was desperate to find somewhere, anywhere. She did paintings that were just dots. She flipped out on an LSD trip. She didn’t understand about electricity. You’d explain to her about power stations and power lines and she’d go, like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’

  She flipped out and vanished before I moved in. So I was living in this house that she had wrecked. The toilets weren’t working. There wasn’t any water. This was when you still had public toilets in front of the graveyard, Abney Park. It goes nuts up there at Hallowe’en: Satanists, gays, cottaging. You’d see cops waiting at the gates.

  For the first two months I lived in that house if I wanted a shit I literally had to walk down to the graveyard toilets. Now you couldn’t do that, the toilets are not there. You’d have to shit in the street or in the bushes, taking your chances with the gays.

  There had been other people in the house, but when this girl freaked out they all left. Later they drifted back. For a time I had this huge house to myself. For months. One of the drifters, this guy Brian, wanted to save money. There was no bill on the gas, although the electricity was metered. Nobody had done anything about the utilities, they would just be on. People wouldn’t be paying for them. Brian was going nuts if we boiled the kettle. He was trying to save up money to pay the deposit he needed. His whole life was based around getting a mortgage on a house in Brockley. We all thought this was pretty hilarious. Who wants to go to Brockley? Brian would go absolutely bonkers if he saw us using the electric kettle, we could use gas for free. He was right. That’s the saddest thing. We should all have been sticking to gas.

  I used to go to those funny local shops, like Jewish delicatessens. I’d be looking at stuff and thinking, ‘What on earth is that?’ I don’t even know what I’m looking at. It costs 30p, I wonder what it is?

  Gentrification was already coming in, 1985, although Stoke Newington was still very rough. You could see the health-food freaks, the twee book-shops, the retro-clothes boutiques establishing a presence on Church Street. The feta-cheese footprint. Ha!

  When the monologue was suspended, Home in mid-rant, by the café man sweeping away our plates and mugs, dusting the Christie portraits, I posed the same questions I put to all the interviewees.

  Stewart knew nothing about Roland Camberton. No paperback version of Rain on the Pavements had found its way to Hackney Wick. But he would mention the title to his mate John King, author of The Football Factory, a man who was performing a useful service by reissuing classic London fiction in well-made editions. First they would have to locate Camberton’s heirs or executors.

  The Four Aces Club in Dalston Lane was before Stewart’s time and he had avoided its successor, Labyrinth. I spoke about rumours of secular shamanism, ecstatic drumming, initiates led through candlelit tunnels into the second level of the Hollow Earth. He shook his head, sadly, but scribbled a note on the back of a menu. My ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ material, I felt sure, would be surfacing in a stapled Stewart Home booklet before I made it back to Albion Drive.

  Swanny, miraculously, did ring a bell.

  ‘I was on terms with a girl who worked as a nurse in the Homerton Hospital. She was living with a couple of ex-medical students on Chatsworth Road. Their windows were broken constantly. She moved down to one of those estates by the Lea. You couldn’t get a taxi driver to take you up there. I was always walking across Millfields Recreation Ground at three in the morning. She rutted like a monkey, but talked too much. I refused to stay the night. She bit. Pointed ivory teeth. Probably a vampire.’

  The nurse mentioned Swanny. He wasn’t kicked out for drugs, that was a given, the surgeons were cranked up most of the time. It was something quite innocent and unfortunate, sex. With a dead body. She couldn’t recall the details. Now he was a vagrant ministering to vagrants, in return for booze.

  In fact, going down to Beck Road yesterday, after dropping off some new titles in Broadway Market, Home thought he saw Swanny, who had been pointed out to him several times by the nurse, drinking at the table, bottom end of London Fields. He collected glasses, so it was reported, in the Victory on Vyner Street.

  Best of all was the Mole Man connection. Stewart offered me the email address of Mark Pawson, a graphic artist who, as a student, had lived in William Lyttle’s house in Mortimer Road. Stewart visited him there, frequently.

  ‘Oh yes, I met the Mole Man. What happened was, the wife and daughter disappeared. But he was always friendly to me. I’d ring on the door and he’d let me in. He started digging shortly after his wife went missing. I think he told Mark to leave.’

  Chris Petit once said that Julie Christie did the thing that annoyed him most about actresses from the 1960s: she flicked her eyes as she gazed into the face of the person on the other side of the camera. The one standing in for Alan Bates or Omar Sharif. Rapid movement to pantomime intensity, it pissed him off. He advocated doing nothing, with intent. German women understood the principle. Hands in coat pockets. Lips buttoned. ‘Stare out of the car window,’ he would instruct. ‘And think of Hamburg.’

  The frozen-blue irises of Julie Christie, spirit of Hackney, followed us to the door of the steamy café.

  The Mole Man

  How much would it cost? Cashmoney.

  Over the weeks, as the chasm outside my door widened – I moved the car down into Albion Square, and moved it again to make room for the film crew shooting Ashes to Ashes – I established friendly, mug-of-tea relations with the odd man out, the native member of the clancydocwra mob, the one from Sligo. He tipped me the wink when the water was going to be cut off. But could he be pe
rsuaded to moonlight with his drill, to open up the buried vault, the arched chamber beneath our kitchen? For a bribe, a small wad, I wanted to undo my earlier mistake: to recover the thing that was no longer there. Research suggested that a Hackney under-class, like the troglodytes of Edinburgh’s Old Town, burrowed into abandoned cellars, squatted swimming pools, hid out in sewage pipes, nuclear bunkers and mine shafts. Many of the daylight-spurning invisibles, up in Scotland, were Irish labourers.

  Anna was safely out of it in America. While she was in the Charing Cross Hospital, after Farne’s birth, I took the opportunity to film a beggars’ banquet (out of Buñuel’s Viridiana), in exactly this kitchen space. Which was then a corridor and a potential child’s bedroom. Brian Catling was involved: making-up and dressing the assorted freaks and outpatients, cooking with maggots. The orgy went on for hours, it was the most extravagant scene I ever shot. And the probable conclusion to the cycle of diary films. Unfortunately, in my excitement at eventually bringing the entire cast together in one place, poets, dowsers, junkies, nurses, accountants, I left the camera on auto-exposure instead of making an f-stop adjustment for the shadowy and subtle lighting I’d worked so long to achieve. The resulting footage was so dark that it was unreadable, black within black. A triumph: we were free to remember the ritual as it should have been, recall untainted by the cruel evidence of actual viewings.

  The walls, painted by Catling, were covered with occult symbols, Enochian tables and quotations from H. P. Lovecraft’s imagined grimoire, the Necronomicon. Swine creatures crawled from the pit of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland: at the point where our own secret cellar had been enclosed. All of this in screaming fire-hydrant scarlet gloss. Which came through, despite many layers of calming eggshell white, year after year, until the old bathroom wall was knocked down by the Irish cowboys making a crisis out of a minor drama.

  The whole episode was reported to Anna, as soon as she was safely back with the baby, by the old folk on the balcony of the flats, the ones who watched every move I made. But now visible traces of excavation could be explained away as safety tests in advance of a serious kitchen rethink. A generous gesture, on my part, to welcome her home from Washington.

  It could wait. Clancydocwra would be there for months, carving into rubbled clay, the compliant skin of Hackney. Mark Pawson, Stewart Home’s friend, was cycling over to Hoxton, the shop with artists’ books, to deliver a consignment of badges. He said that we could meet in the café next door.

  My son William and his mates declared an interest in the Mole Man. From the earliest period when his activities were made public, they took photographs of placards with Mole Man references. They collected newspaper reports and rumours, constructing a mythology around the burrower’s fictive status. I was sensitive to the fact that, in recording an interview, I might spoil their fun: by disinterring some sorry human fact like the pauper’s death of David Rodinsky, revealed by Rachel Lichtenstein’s remorseless detective work.

  One of these youths, Rowland, lived in Beck Road. He appeared in that dynamic mural in Dalston Lane, the Mexican Day of the Dead procession of Hackney’s vanquished utopians. His father, who died before the project could be completed, was the artist responsible. Rowland, I believe, helped touch in the final details of what now stood as a memorial to the spirit of the demolished Labyrinth on the other side of the road.

  Anna rang from New York. For most of our time together, she dreamt of America, of being on a certain street near Grand Central Station; the smell, the noise, it was tangible. The closest she came, bags packed to accompany me on a reading tour, was 9/11: our flight was booked for the following morning. Evil news found her in the hairdresser’s chair. I was in the City, looking for Marmite and Frank Cooper’s Original Oxford Marmalade to carry to Texas, when I saw them pouring out of banks and offices. But now Anna was actually there, the dreams changed; every night the same thing. She stood on her remembered spot, breathing a sigh of contentment, but terrified that she could never come back. Her suitcase was filled with bricks, it was much too heavy to lift.

  A bike like Stewart Home’s. Pawson reminded me of the book-runner Driffield. He was cycle-fit and a little red in the face. He offered me a choice of enamelled badge. He did HOMES FOR ALL. And aerial views: CAN YOU SEE YOUR HOUSE? Pretty neat. I settled for DIS-INFO-TAINMENT. Which seemed to be the territory we were covering. Mark recalled his days with the Mole Man as an initiation into the quiddity of London.

  I came to university in 1982, the City University. The first year I stayed at the hall of residence, very near Moorgate Station, Bunhill Row. The second year I lived in Dalston, Mortimer Road. William Lyttle, the so-called Mole Man, was my landlord.

  It was the first time I’d ever had to look for rented accommodation. I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t know what rented houses were like. Mortimer Road didn’t seem that odd to me.

  I was sharing with a friend from my home town, Lymm in Cheshire. She was a music student. The house actually had a piano in it. That was the selling point.

  We went round to see the room. The landlord had been doing it up. It was wallpapered with newspaper. Unpainted newspaper. Which was a bit strange. Obviously, the whole scheme was bodged, home-done. William said, ‘I’ll paint it over if you like.’ So it was painted, but you could still see the newspaper.

  My room was a big, regular, rectangular space. Looking out on Mortimer Road. There were three floors and then the basement. The floors were let out in various combinations. At the back was a little private area. William had done it all himself.

  I got the feeling that he’d been there for ages. He wasn’t very talkative. But when you met him for the first time, he used to introduce himself as ‘Mr William’. On the phone he used that version of his name, ‘Mr William’. But, very quickly, he slid back to ‘Bill’. There had been a wife and a daughter at some point. I know that because there used to be a fair amount of mail for them. I assume, from the names, it was a wife and daughter. We speculated about their fate. Especially when William started digging.

  I used to get a lot of mail, I was involved with mail art. I would be down at the door first thing in the morning. I would rush down and there would always be a stack of post. I’d lay out William’s mail on the steps, all the letters for his wife and daughter.

  We were on the first floor. There were some guys in another flat. There was a spare room and occasionally Bill would have people to stay. He advertised rooms to let even when the house was full.

  The guys next door were at the LSE, London School of Economics. The girls upstairs were at King’s College. He wanted someone in the spare room, so that they could share our kitchen. We went: ‘No!’ It was tiny, that room. Where the bed was positioned, the wall overlapped it. There was a dark hole into which you were supposed to put your feet.

  I think the rent was £25 a week. Quite cheap at the time. We paid cash. William would appear in the room. He had his own key and he would just walk in. He often did that when he knew I was out. And my friend was at home. She had her room at the back. William would open the door and shout. He knew I wasn’t there. We stayed a year. Towards the end William had this digger, a mechanical digger.

  He built this – how can I describe it? – structure. It was half-dug out of the earth, a bit of a concrete dome over the top. The digger was right there in the garden. The garden was accessible from the Mortimer Road side. The house was like the prow of a boat, at the point where two roads meet. William would occasionally move the digger. There was just enough space to contain it in his concrete igloo. He would fire the machine up. Everyone called him Catweazle, because he looked like Catweazle, the television character. He hadn’t achieved Mole Man status, not then.

  He was Irish. But age was difficult, he was such a wiry thing. He had short fuzzy hair, it was always grey. We never knew if it was dust or if he actually had grey hair. It could have been either, he was always tinkering, building, digging holes.

  I went home f
or the summer. But, because I got such a quantity of mail art, I called at Mortimer Road as soon as I returned to London in September. To ask if there was any post for me. Bill might have saved it. He just about recognized me. He came out of the front door. ‘I think there were a few things this morning.’ And he opened the dustbin and pulled out sacks of letters. The bin was packed solid. He gave me a couple of pieces of mail, but as they had already been binned I didn’t bother.

  After that I used to see him at the Vallance Road boot fair, the one where the car auction used to be. It was a site that was developed for Sainsbury’s, a little car park. He never acknowledged me. I nodded but he never looked in my direction. He had a tiny, light blue Triumph push-bike. He pushed it all the way round the boot sale. He was looking for tools, secondhand nails.

  I don’t recall seeing William down Kingsland Waste. There were plenty of tools to be found on the Waste at that time. It was my Saturday-morning routine. I would do the market, take everything back to Mortimer Road, then go to Ridley Road. I was looking for junky toys, collage stuff, stamps, stickers, weird books, bits of clothes. I was going for cheap stuff rather than anything specialized or collectable. There was a guy who had lots of cheap Trojan records, compilations, all the ska stuff. He always had the brand-new ones, he obviously had a connection. The Waste was very, very local, it wasn’t one of those places you felt had been picked over by collectors.

  Hackney Wick too, I lived up there. When I was living in Dalston I would have been nineteen. I collected more and more stuff off the streets, out of markets. I wasn’t much of an explorer.

  Dalston was my introduction to the East End. We did a few things in the area. The bagel shop, a couple of pubs, the Sussex, the Mortimer. A real spit-and-sawdust place, very wide open. A little stage, a piano player. Old guy. He had two stacks of music. And he would play all night, pick up the next sheet, play it, put it down on the other pile. He never turned round. He drank Guinness. Someone would buy him a pint of Guinness and put it on the spot, the wet ring on top of the piano. No acknowledgement, he never looked up. That was the routine. Occasionally people sang.