Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Bill Parry‐Davies was fearful of the way Hackney would trouser its windfall from the developers and squander it on vanity projects. ‘The forces of darkness are indeed enveloping us,’ he told me. ‘The City Corporation and Hammerton, the major developers, are seeking to redefine the northern boundary of Mammon. They have planned a tsunami of demolitions and tower blocks. The shadows will extend as far as the Regent’s Canal. Hackney’s Planning Department have not made public their study into sunlight deprivation. This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that the council own the land on which the first fifty‐one‐storey tower will be built. Hackney stands to receive around £10 million in “planning gain” money. The sale proceeds won’t be reinvested to benefit Shoreditch, they are already earmarked for the council’s £45‐million Town Hall extension.’

  Will’s spindly roll‐ups give way to a pipe when we breakfast in Shepherdess Walk. The fantastic topography of a Self novel is honourably researched and grows from a foundation of books, reports from edge‐land legmen, conversations with connected cabbies. And a London life, from childhood, criss‐crossing the Thames, roaming the Hampstead heights: interrogating horror. Scratching the membrane that conceals the pit. He sniffs. He blows his nose, paper napkin crumpled in tin ashtray. Mephitic boils bubble under placid Formica, bacon sandwiches bite back. Delving into nineteenth‐century science fiction, speculative literature, the romance of English downland pastoralism, is Self ’s chosen method for admonishing the willed stupidity of the contemporary scene. How he continues to push through his highly wrought fictional constructs, while operating, with considerable vim, in the disposable media world, is a mystery into which I should not enquire. None of my business, obviously. But the question lingers, unresolved.

  In Old Street Will’s mobile tweets for the first time, against the cacophony of the roundabout: ‘I’m walking in the City.’ But outside its walls, in the zone of Bedlams and archery grounds, rancid pubs, rotten vegetables, dead cinemas. The Standard, for whom he is on a retainer, want a piece, like now, for tonight. Their attitude is: undecided. Don’t go too hard at the Olympics. Not yet. See how the deal pans out. A steady drip‐feed of niggles, toxic‐waste discoveries, soaring budgets, lost allotments, financial advantage to Lord Coe: nothing major, nothing that plays against support for disadvantaged London youth.

  The Statesman calls next: a promise from Will to do a thousand words when he gets home. Acoustic twitterings are absorbed into the general Old Street microclimate of madhouse memories, power‐hikers ranting to themselves, blank‐eyed office drones wired to electronic pacemakers. A cakewalk of catatonics using broad pavements like escalators; eating, chatting, applying lip salve as they move. Picking noses, fingering hot buttons.

  Passing at last through Dalston Junction, Will’s ghetto of the inconvenient dead, he remembers visiting the Four Aces Club in the squatting era. But that was another country and its traces are gone. He undertook long, five‐day hikes with his father through the West Country, Taunton to Lyme Regis. All of that is vivid still. The father’s loose flannels, his thin belt. The knapsack known as a sacheverell.

  Stoke Newington Green (with its nonconformist heritage). Clissold Park. Blackstock Road junkshops with war toys Will isn’t going to buy for his son (not at £8 for an aircraft carrier): we push forward at a brisk pace, the story is out ahead, shifting and revising as the horizon retreats. I can’t resist a strange little book by H. Kaner, plucked from the glass‐fronted cupboard: People of the Twilight. Self‐published in Llandudno, 1946. And what a weird tale that proves to be, transportation to an interior molecular world, germ wars, flying ships, interspecies romance.

  Describing his fellow excursionist Antony Gormley, as he hurled himself at a perimeter fence around a firing range near Foulness, Will says: ‘There are no barriers for him between inside and outside.’

  Finsbury Park is a green wall confronted by anonymous small hotels. At Stamford Hill, Self bristles and fumes; he is violently agitated by the Hasidic community, long black coats in cramped shops. He is writing about London as a drowned ship. A thought that carries us down to the Marshes, the Lea, the endgame of Hackney Wick: travellers, wrecking yards, studios under sentence of death. Under such wide skies, standing on the bridge over the rushing A115, we reach agreement: we will walk again.

  Will’s piece appears before we fix a date to track Danny Folgate’s leyline down towards the river.

  In a way, this beating the bounds of a single borough was a highly contrived exercise. At ground level Hackney exhibits no coherence, or unity. But looked at another way, our circuit represented a synecdoche: taking a part of the great conurbation for its whole. Moving through time as well as space, we espied William Blake’s decaying tomb as well as the diamond mullions of Thirties suburbia; the 21st‐century ‘wharf’ developments beside the Regent’s Canal – each with its tacky accretion of eco‐planking – together with aspirational, 19th‐century ironwork in Victoria Park.

  However, it wasn’t until we stood on the grey‐green football pitches of Hackney Marsh and looked south to where the brutalist skyline of Canary Wharf thumped the low cloud cover that I realized we were looking at the future. For here, in among rusty oil bowsers and light industrial huggermugger, is where Tony, Gordon, Tessa, Seb, Ken and all their yea‐saying, log‐rolling confrères, are intent on building the New Jerusalem of the 2012 London Olympics.

  Another walk, towards the Thames, allows us to stretch in pastoral delirium, to chase the benediction of Danny’s invisible line. Will is sensibly equipped with floppy hat, blue T‐shirt, long shorts. When he stops to buy plastic water, I snap him against today’s headlines: armed drug addict jailed. shorts ban in heatwave. After a twelve‐year gap, Self tells me that he has interviewed J. G. Ballard for the second time. About the compulsive journalism, Ballard is upbeat and dismissive of cant: ‘Do more, Will. Do as much as you can.’ In this sticky urban summer, Self sleeps on a Thatcher schedule, four hours a night. Twice as long as the now manic Gordon Brown. Who has been driven mad, stuttering, jaw‐thrusting, air‐gargling, by having to live in a world with no past, no viable future, and an infinitely fixable back story.

  In the excellent café of the hangar‐sized Woolworths, alongside Beckton Alp, I take out my pocket‐recorder.

  The whole Olympic Park, the regeneration of this part of London, is doomed. It seems to me to have no more forward logic than the original development of the city itself. So when we stand on top of Beckton Alp and we see a slice, a gnomon of retail parks flung down at the base of it, we also notice a queered sports field. This is an idea of America imposed on human topography that is so much older and more ancient, confused and anarchic. It has the air of imposture. I don’t think the Jim Ballard territory of the M4/M3/M25 corridor can be imported across London. The lines of force, as revealed by your dowser friend, are negated. The shit‐river we walked along, the arsenic mountain: the whole atmosphere is toxic. It’s distempered. And, frankly, I don’t buy it.

  This is a quintessentially English vision. It isn’t postmodernism. The English never really got to Modernism. It happened too early, it’s been forgotten. This is a hinterland of a hinterland. People are being drawn out of the city towards it. It’s about legibility.

  This landscape reminds me very much of developments in upstate New York. But it’s very nice here in Woolworths, the coffee place has a solidity. It’s an antique. You can feel yourself travelling back to the Woolworths of the 1950s. There is a lovely smiling couple over your shoulder. They’re so happy. And well‐upholstered. Comfortable with themselves.

  This is a happy mart. A clearance outlet. So it’s already being run down. My grandfather’s job, in the States, in the Depression, was to shut stores down. He was an asset‐stripper in the 1920s, after the Wall Street Crash. That’s what he did. In a sense he was far in advance of conceptual artists like Michael Landy. He was doing it for real. That is what is now happening here.

  The atmosphere outside, in this hea
t, is toxic as hell. Kenyan distance runners are going to be falling by the wayside as they attempt to breathe the foul air. This is the colon of London, really.

  After that circumnavigation of Hackney, I felt as if we had been traversing a widening gyre. Having completed the circuit, I realized that it had been a very interesting exercise. The route imposes a centripetal force, pulling you out still further. In other words, Hackney was defined as an absence. And the London beyond it was therefore a more graspable presence. And in defining this presence, as it were, within the walls of Hackney, Hackney itself becomes apprehensible. So our walk did work.

  I was surprised by that, actually. I was very sceptical initially. It is something you could only achieve in an ambulatory context. It needed to be genuinely periphrastic in that way. I suppose the major line that interested me, the one I was picking up, was the Jewish community. I don’t like frummers. I don’t like any people who try and arrest time in the name of the supernatural.

  And again the thing about the Jews leaving Stamford Hill, the movement out, the proposed evacuation to Milton Keynes: there is something odd going on. The Hasids don’t care about place – because of course they’re in an endlessly imminent millenarian city. They don’t care where they are, so long as they’ve got their Volvo.

  For me, it’s trans‐generational, Jewish anti‐Semitism. My mother was not comfortable with her Jewishness. It was something she was in flight from. I suppose I’ve inherited that. When I was a kid in Hampstead Garden Suburb, there was an old Polish woman on the corner who never cut her privet hedge. This interwar redbrick detached home was completely overgrown. My mother used to say, ‘It’s because she was in the camps. She thinks if she doesn’t cut her hedge the Nazis won’t come and get her.’ And this was a completely double‐edged fable. It said such a lot. For a start, it was my mother distancing herself from the mad Jew on the corner. Secondly, she wanted to appropriate that paranoia for herself. It was a really uncomfortable position to be in. She was intensely ambivalent about her Jewishness.

  And lied about it! She didn’t lie about her Jewishness, but she understated it in so many ways. I’ve inherited this to a greater degree. I have a ‘white nigger’ thing. People love to flaunt their Jewishness. I’ve been guilty of doing that. The truth of the matter is, I’m not circumcised. I’m not bar‐mitvah’d. I never went to shul. I’m kind of not Jewish. I’m really not Jewish. People say, ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ I say, ‘I’m half‐Jewish.’ They say, ‘Who’s Jewish, your mother or your father?’ ‘My mother.’ They say, ‘Well, you’re Jewish then.’ And I say, ‘No no, that’s something Jews think.’

  In the Hackney context, there is a lot going on: the idea of Jewishness and Hackney. On the one hand you have the Jew who has moved through the borough, as a conduit. And moved on. To sub‐dormitories of Jewishness, Golders Green and Hendon. But the next generation, the ones whose grandparents had come in through the docks, they stick. The grandparents were people of the Pale in Eastern Europe who never made it to the United States. The third generation of acultural Jews have now married out completely. They are barely Jewish any more. Marrying out was easily 50 per cent, twenty years ago.

  The other thing that struck me as we were walking, you spoke about the submerged Hackney Brook and how you would once have found villas, like Marble Hill or Strawberry Hill, along the banks. And one knows, from reading Pepys or Evelyn, that this was indeed the case. But in fact I have to walk with you to see, vividly, that what happened in the nineteenth century, what happened to the dialectic of London, was the final and irrevocable imposition of an east/west divide. In a sense it was a kind of class‐ and ethnic‐cleansing operation, an expulsion of the bourgeoisie from the east.

  I didn’t read the book, because I worried that it would influence me too much, but After London by Richard Jefferies made me think very hard about these topics. One of the ideas in After London is that the lake that has overwhelmed the city is toxic. And this has been so for hundreds of years.

  I was cycling over Vauxhall Bridge and saw all these people standing by the parapet. I got off the bike and walked over. ‘What are you looking at?’ This woman said, ‘That whale.’ I looked down and felt two things. It is a whale. And, secondly, it’s dead. It’s moribund.

  One thinks of the opening shot of A Touch of Evil. When Orson Welles, as the grotesque sheriff, hauls himself out of the car, he is about forty years old and he looks like his own future: unshaven death. An astonishing performance. The longest opening tracking shot in any film. About two and a half minutes. I digress.

  Hackney Town Hall is as moribund as that whale. They are using it for weddings. You can get married in the council chamber. They’ll get Richard Rogers or Norman Foster to build them a new glass bivalve. That’s Hackney, that’s progress.

  Ken Worpole and Alexander Baron

  Whatever else it achieved the Hackney circumnavigation with Will Self focused my attention on a sense of the borough as an organic entity, even when the border outline was created by political surgery and gerrymandering. The completed circuit, with its spurts and stalls, canal path, marshland, reservoir, high street, suburban narcolepsy, oddities such as the Mason with folded regalia leaving a small hotel on the heights of Stamford Hill, activated dormant energies. Opened up fresh fields of enquiry.

  I noticed, without having time to carry out a proper survey, the enclave of 1930s modernist flats on the north side of Clissold Park, tucked away in a bask of well‐kept box hedges, ruled lawns and considered plantings; fruit trees, hawthorns, shrubs that avoided the dead hand of municipal uniformity. Here was a garden city oasis, a fragment of some benevolent planner’s dream: Abercrombie’s green London escaped from the drawing board.

  If I had any hope of recovering the untold story of Roland Camberton, it would be through the recorded memories of another Hackney writer of the period, someone like Alexander Baron. But Baron was dead. I had visited his home in Golders Green and spoken to him about his long career, from the novels of wartime to the realist Hackney books, the years in television drama, classic serials. ‘All gone,’ he said. ‘I still work, but I don’t know anybody in publishing these days. They have no idea who I am.’

  The Lowlife, a tale embedded in the Jewish northwest passage, was reprinted as a paperback. I wrote the introduction. Now I returned to my taped interviews from 1992. Had I missed any references to Camberton?

  My parents escaped to Hackney. My mother came from Spitalfields, Hare Marsh. A year after they married, they took one room in Dalston. Dalston is now considered part of the deep East End, but they felt that they’d taken a step up in the world. I was born in Dalston and we continued to live there, very happily, in one room. Until I was six years old.

  When I came back from the war, I had no home. I’d been knocked about a bit and was quite unwell. My imagination was seized by the Hackney area in a way that it hadn’t been when I lived there.

  It was then that the seeds of The Lowlife were planted. I walked about the area a great deal. I would write mostly at night. During the day I spent my time walking the streets. And continued, even after I’d left Hackney, to become a kind of ghost haunting the whole borough. Then gradually there took shape in my mind the idea of a novel, refracting some of the life I had witnessed in my wanderings. I began to see through the eyes of a character who was very much on my mind, who attracted me. And who, like me, had been formed by this place, while remaining something of an outsider.

  In the wider social sense one minor theme in The Lowlife is the way in which the diligent, ordinary Jewish community continued to move on. Having graduated from Whitechapel to Hackney, almost all of them carried on to the north‐west suburbs. The respectable, ordered life they led is one against which my central character, Harryboy Boas, rebels. He would rather remain free – and live in the more turbulent life of post‐war Hackney.

  I was lucky, so far as the East End novel was concerned, that I’d already established myself by writing about othe
r things. When The Lowlife was written, publishers saw my material as droll and rather colourful. The novel was optioned as a movie. At that time Steptoe and Son was a great success on television. Film producers saw Harry H. Corbett as the ideal actor to play Harryboy Boas in a movie version of Hackney. Nothing came of it. I think Corbett died.

  The tapes were interesting, but inconclusive, part of a television commissioning process that was already losing its nerve. The Marc Karlin era at Channel 4 was long over, utopians and Marxists replaced by premature New Labour careerists and neurotics in black shirts whose only strategy was to have no strategy, like ex‐Stasi functionaries reinventing themselves after the Wall came down.

  And no mention of Camberton. Baron, exposed to the once familiar streets, the corrugated fences, fires, feral kids, was a man in shock. Hands in raincoat pockets, collar up against the wind from the east, he blinked behind stern spectacles as he drifted into reverie, letting the ghosts, of which he was now one, return.

  I had been thinking about Ken Worpole when I got the letter. Ken was very much our local scholar in the literature of the lost and a pioneer of oral history. Working lives recorded and turned into booklets. Might Ken have taped Camberton? Or, at worst, made a more substantial transcript with Alexander Baron? The exhibition at the South Bank Centre curated by Worpole and Nick Kimberley in 1986 launched a cult of literary gravedigging: 20,000 Streets under the Sky. The London Novel, 1896–1985. Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife was included: ‘a wonderfully evocative account of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill in the late ’50s’. As was Nigel Fountain’s Days Like These with its punchy strapline: ‘Fascist Terror – Cynical Hack Investigates.’ Nick Kimberley wrote the summary: ‘Revives the figure of the lone individual searching for truth . . . and places him at the heart of radical politics in London. Meetings in pubs, violent confrontation with neo‐fascists, bookshop browsing, all sardonically observed, are linked together by the key bus‐routes on Fountain’s London map, the 38 and the 253.’