Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  WICK AND FLAME

  Since when did divine thunderbolts go falling on Hackney?

  – Paula Rego

  The Lord Napier

  Jock was quite disturbed that the old bill had not been around to see him. About the murder. The fatal stabbing of the jogger, Margaret Muller, in Victoria Park. Especially with his house so close to the police station. Not that he had any fresh evidence to offer, no sightings during his afternoon walks, his bicycle excursions down the canal path. The only park assassin within Jock’s immediate circle was his dog, the ex‐Hackney Wick greyhound. This beast, so preternaturally calm in the studio, his rug in the corner, reverted to type when confronted with squirrels. Jock’s hound was the only way of keeping the bushy‐tailed vermin population within limits. The snapping of spines, the tossing of Nutkin in powerful jaws, was not a popular spectacle with card‐carrying greens and homeward munching infants.

  ‘I was her tutor for fuck’s sake,’ Jock said. ‘A Vicky Park regular. If they don’t interview me, who are they questioning?’

  It was Bosun, a dog from Grove Road, who found the body. ‘Forty stab wounds. Margaret died in my neighbour’s arms.’

  We met in Jock’s industrial unit, among the stripped‐down bikes, the stacked canvases, the totemic hare that toast‐rack‐ribbed hounds chased around the Wick stadium: the famous electric rabbit that no greyhound ever caught. Jock acquired it from among the sea of rubbish photographed by Stephen Gill during the last days of the boot fair, before the Olympic shutdown. Either there or from eBay: Jock scavenged compulsively, as he worked, ate, listened to the radio.

  WE BUY GOLD. WE SELL BOXES.

  Among the threatening shadows hanging over Hackney Wick, its storage facilities, cafés, communes, junk yards, tyre mountains, messianic warehouse chapels, were capitalized notices, wired to chainlink fences between compulsory‐purchase orders: the alchemy of ruin. We buy gold from the teeth of the dead. We sell cardboard boxes for cremations. But who are we?

  Jock was about to fulfil his fantasy, a night out at the Lord Napier. We had heard about these sessions from Timothy Soar, the architectural photographer. Tim would be in the old pub, undoubtedly; he would want to pay his respects to another discontinued artist, Stevie Dola. I felt that I was trespassing on Nigel Fountain’s Guardian turf: every chapter an obituary, for people and places, loved by their own, meaningless to the world at large. Brian Catling composed the tribute to Dola for the Independent and made a good job of it. The astonishing details of those last years, when we had drifted out of touch, could now be pieced together from the variant accounts of Catling and McFadyen.

  Dola and Soar: you could not imagine a more ill‐matched pair in habits or art practice. They came together through a love of this doomed landscape, the magical island of Hackney Wick. Soar has a white cube, close to the railway, a controlled space cleaner than any hospital. He lodges comfortably, behind a secure gate, in the company of the dying industries with their dazzling sparks, their eternal grinding: white vans, hoists, fork‐lifts. Dola was an invisible: post‐squat, pre‐oblivion. Soar ground his own coffee, worked with assistants, filed his prints in steel cabinets. Dola’s Scottish breakfast came in bottles from the Russian supermarket: whisky and milk chocolate, cold potatoes and peanut butter. The conjunction of such lives was possible only in the limbo before demolition, security fences, insurance fires. Newts and allotment holders to be offered alternative accommodation.

  The small irony here was that Tim Soar got his living from making the new buildings of Stratford City, the only active element in the Olympic smokescreen, look good. A cool eye on hot money. Within the Lionworks studio, frozen architectural prints were presented, lit from above, like a choir of icons. Tim told Jock about the sessions in the Lord Napier, a squatted pub spray‐painted by Sweet Toof, Cyclops and their associates. Lock‐ins for Wick irregulars: waifs and strays, Poles, Russians, anybody outside the system. Thirsty young women with no food in their bellies. Men rarely exposed to daylight.

  Catling’s obituary for Dola spoke of his early involvement with a ‘multimedia urban‐junk‐and‐pyrotechnics percussion trio’. The final retreat to Hackney Wick was a sort of homecoming, the artist moving out of the gallery and into the source material of his performance pieces. Boundaries dissolved. Whenever he had cash‐money, Stevie took to the water. He was a skilled pilot. I have seen him, so drunk he had to be strapped to the wheel, easing his battered craft, a Lowestoft tugboat, through the narrowest and most deceptive channels between sandbanks. He dredged for maritime detritus and sounded it, teasing rhythms from murky water, the pluck of sediment; barely perceptible vibrations of tarry ropes, echoes within anchored barges, decommissioned lighters. He staged lethal firework displays, crawling up chimneys with cans of petrol on his back, a potential holocaust. It was inevitable therefore that when fire‐raising became a valued craft in the edge‐lands, a tool of the economy, Dola was hired by shady developers and impatient strategic planners. Remember the headlines? INFERNO. RAZING OF AN OLYMPIC TORCH. ‘Fire engulfs an empty warehouse on site of Olympic Park as giant cloud of smoke is seen from across the capital.’

  Flush with dirty money, Dola recognized himself as being in the same business as Tim Soar: making the best of the worst of it. From Springfield Park Marina, south along the banks of the Lea, rough sleepers took to bushes and scrub woods, tumbledown sheds, allotments, cold concrete bunkers. They had been moving out of Hackney, to narrowboats and engineless cruisers, from the poll‐tax days. Now impossible rents, empty apartment blocks, increased mooring fees, social clearances, drove them deeper into the under‐growth. Into derelict Hackney Wick pubs like the Napier.

  The story of Dola’s last years was horrible. He found an abandoned boathouse, a rowing club that had been closed down while the site was tactfully redeveloped for Olympic kayak racing: a proposition discreetly shelved when the toxicity of the water was discovered. Bill Parry‐Davies, who came along to the wake in the Napier, with several other members of the Boas Society, told me what had been happening behind the security fences.

  There is documentary evidence of radioactive material, used in the manufacture of luminous watch dials, at two burials on the Olympic Park. The Clays Lane Estate was owned by the Lea Valley Park Authority, they had a cycle track there. A 1980s estate, with student accommodation. There was concern when the contractors started boring deep holes on the site. This was done, we believe, to detect what was actually under there.

  I applied for legal aid and was refused, twice. The first application was turned down on the basis that so many people could be affected, the dispersal of radioactivity was so widespread. Even though my client lived right alongside the boreholes, the fact that he could suffer serious injury was not deemed sufficient.

  I adopted other tactics. I got a letter back saying that because the Olympic Park was a national project of strategic significance, it was unlikely that the court would grant an injunction.

  The nature of radioactive material is that it only becomes dangerous once it’s been disturbed. Once you release it into the air, as dust, it becomes a major problem. And that is what they were doing: on a daily basis. They decided to ring‐fence the entire site. Then, at the end of last year, they undertook tests on the run‐off into the River Lea. They found levels of thorium in the water.

  W. S. Atkins, the engineering company, considered that it was possible that the thorium had dispersed along the water table, south‐south‐west – which is where the Clays Lane Estate is. And the cycle track. Thorium is ductile and malleable, it’s used as a source of nuclear energy. You get a coating of it on sunlamps or on vacuum‐tube filament coatings. When they found the run‐off in the Lea, not at dangerous levels, it was enough to confirm the engineers’ prediction of what could happen. The effect being that the entire Olympic Park is contaminated with thorium at water‐table level.

  This is quite a major consideration, when you don’t know the concentrations or the amounts in the ground. And
when the mayor, Ken Livingstone, is saying: ‘We’re going to get all the money back, because we’re going to sell the land.’ Which they will not be able to do, unless they clear the whole thing: a huge undertaking. There are strong parallels with the Millennium Dome fiasco. But, politically, this is on a much grander scale.

  There wasn’t any control over the burial of radioactive substances until 1963. They gave the dirty industries a two‐year window to dispose of the stuff. The Environment Agency report says that it’s likely there is radioactive material buried in several places on the Olympic site. We can detect it. It was fortuitous that whoever buried the stuff lost it in the cesspits of the old houses. Nobody is going to go near that, are they?

  The reason why they’ve gone ahead with the digging on the Clays Lane Estate, despite the risk to tenants, is that there is such political pressure to finalize the budget for the Olympics. They sent the bulldozers right in.

  Tenants are gradually being dispersed and rehoused. People are being evicted from other places in order to make room for those who have been evicted from Clays Lane. It’s musical chairs. One of the residents told me that to get into the estate, to reach his own property, he had to go through a security barrier and produce ID. It is a police state. Those unfortunates who still live there are woken at five in the morning to find a police and army exercise going on, counter‐terrorist war games, bombs and guns and helicopters, smoke everywhere. Nobody told them this was going to happen.

  In such a climate, when, as Bill says, nobody is going to go near the forbidden zone, Stevie Dola took up voluntary residence. It was a penance for his part in the arson wars. And a retreat, now that his scavenging art was impossible, his boat in dry dock, his wives scattered, into the place he loved more than any other: the urban wilderness.

  He was not alone. Warring tribes were all around him: fixed travellers facing eviction to less desirable sites, roving tinkers in a camp under the motorway bridge, Mad Max biker gangs, latter‐day saints and sinners, ranters, levellers, prophets in bulletproof Mercedes limousines preaching apocalypse and ritual immersion in the algae‐clogged shallows of the Lea and its rust‐red tributaries.

  Dola retreated to his boathouse, his books. At night, he drove without lights across the marshes, the squared‐off football pitches, unmapped dirt roads at the rim of the Olympic Park, super highways that ran out on high bridges that didn’t connect with anything. Drinking, tapes pumping out heartbeat rhythms, he looked at the fuzzy lights through his bird‐streaked windscreen. Distant Canary Wharf winked red. Circling aircraft waited for clearance above Silvertown. The traffic snake, in and out of Essex, never stopped. Convoys rumbled into the Olympic Park, reshaping pyramids of yellow clay.

  Stevie did a bit on the water with the Irish kids, but he was not always in the mood for it. Some days he couldn’t crawl from his bed: even when they smashed his windows and burnt his library. Ugly drunk and sick with the world, weeping, he ran at the mob, out on the marshes – and got one of them, breaking a few bones. Nothing serious enough to justify the reprisal attack, the beating with a metal pole from which he never properly recovered.

  With winter coming on, Stevie Dola, coated and booted, went into hibernation. One of the traveller kids agreed to fetch his whisky from the Russian supermarket: there was still plenty of cash stuffing the pillow. ‘Keep the change, son.’ It might have worked if the boy’s brother hadn’t thought of a way to improve the profit margin: by judicious decanting, cutting the cheap booze with antifreeze. Dola’s punished but resilient system stood up to the insult for a few months. He was partly paralysed, it’s true, sucked into a cocoon of hopeless craving, memory‐flashes, marine replays, vegetative sexuality. ‘The tide re‐seeds the barren shore,’ he whispered. To the screeching gulls, the bottom‐feeders.

  They found him, stiff as a board, one January morning, on the snow‐powdered diamond‐hard ground where the Hackney Stadium had once been. A dog licking his bare, black feet.

  Jock McFadyen

  As we struck east across Victoria Park in the direction of Hackney Wick, Jock told me how he had recovered his memorable edge‐lands painting Horse Lamenting the Invention of the Motor Car. An old girlfriend kept it for years, it went with the minimalist style of the time: a contradiction, a window of bad taste. When she got a better offer and moved on, closer to the river, she left the painting behind. The film‐director Paul Tickell’s daughter took over the lease. Paul helped with transport. With his restless and sharp‐focused eye, he immediately recognized Jock’s missing masterwork.

  ‘It was one of those great moments, London moments,’ McFadyen said. ‘Twelve million people and a random connection. Paul did a piece on me for The Late Show, back in the days when I was getting commissions from the Royal Opera House.’

  ‘He did us all,’ I said. ‘I hear he’s got one‐day‐a‐week teaching now. Some of the kids are bright. None have heard of Performance. And BlowUp is as remote as Homer. He tried to interest Neil Murger in a Hackney night for BBC4: forgotten punk bands, Genesis P‐Orridge, Burroughs in Vyner Street, Orson Welles, the Angry Brigade, Astrid Proll.’

  We both laughed.

  I asked Jock’s opinion on an offer I’d received, indirectly, from one of Ken Livingstone’s apparatchiks: to give a talk on the River Lea to a pre‐Olympic seminar in Stratford. The whole business was dubious: if you are paid to oppose, you are paid. Period. You are part of the machinery of neutralized dissent, hired to perform as a sanctioned critic. You are recorded, revised. In the brochure. On tape. In cyberspace. Subject to editorial control.

  ‘You refused?’

  ‘Initially.’

  Until Charlie Velasco came in with an offer of lunch in the new pub, by the German Hospital, the Pequod. A set like a Nantucket whaler serviced by dockside barmaids who didn’t have to fake their unfamiliarity with the English language. You perched in tilted cabins, crow’s‐nest eyries and chain lockers: low‐ceilinged, close‐confined, hot but private.

  Anna hated those booths. She was prepared to come along, to hear what was happening with Syd and the children; she often remarked that Charlie and Syd were the only ones from the early days of the communal house, the 8mm diary films, who were still together. Despite their ups and downs. Syd’s intense and demanding work schedule. Charlie’s increasing visibility in places where New Labour interfaced with the arts (celebrity bands in Downing Street, attendance at big football matches England were fated to lose). Being so far ahead of the game, as a world‐travelling footie fan, gave Charlie a major advantage over latecoming Mellor‐types who followed the money. And were never short of a crass tabloid opinion. Uninformed sports punditry was a good career for the politically disgraced, the equivalent of the US lecture circuit for dumped prime ministers. The alternative to post‐prison theology.

  But Anna was not invited. That was made clear. Boys only, work. Charlie brought along a media fixer from City Hall, one of Ken’s seamless and invertebrate salesmen. This character had been trained in Atlanta, back in the Jimmy Carter days. His opening gambit was: ‘I live in Islington with my black boyfriend.’ Why should I care? Somebody has to live in the place. It was Charlie, the Tottenham fanatic, who winced.

  Velasco was as lean and hawkish as he had been thirty years before, with the same enthusiastic grin, the relish for ideas, debate. His companion was more watchful, deputed to road‐test my attitude: would I go too far? He didn’t drink, sitting back, flicking imaginary motes from his sleeve, as we broached the third bottle. He gossiped, within safe limits, about Ken and Lord Coe, the City Hall power‐broker Len Duvall, but no word on Blair.

  ‘Will you do it?’ he said, picking up the bill.

  ‘No way, sorry. I’m preoccupied with a Hackney book.’

  ‘Twenty minutes. Off the cuff. Piece of piss.’

  ‘Paid?’

  ‘Car. Good lunch. Honorarium.’

  I hated that word.

  ‘How much?’

  He glanced at a smirking Charlie who wa
s signing the menu for the barmaid who’d seen him, only that morning, on breakfast TV, playing keepie‐uppies with the Archbishop of York.

  ‘Two grand? Not a lot, I know. Things are tight just now. With the election coming up, the shits are on to everything.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  Passing Sidney Kirsh’s shaded flat, where it all began, I held my pocket‐recorder close to Jock’s chin. It was habitual now, this dredging of memory: houses, work, movement. A city obscured by revelation. The greyhound loped alongside, jaws slack, alert for squirrels. Jock was the mouthpiece for the dog’s more considered soliloquy. His dreams of a saliva‐sodden furry rabbit.

  Victoria Park was my first experience of living in Hackney. Brookfield Road. A very grand house in its own grounds, large garden at the back. You could hear the speedway bikes at the Hackney Stadium, off in the distance. I only went to the stadium for the dog races.

  It was a terrible time, actually. A one‐way street, Victoria Park Road, on your doorstep. You are psychologically someone who gets passed by. It’s like living in the middle of a roundabout. Nobody came to visit me, they couldn’t find it. I was only thirty and fantastically cut off. I’d just split up with my girlfriend. I was a bit down. Stuck in the basement of this gloomy place which I’d bought for fifteen grand. No, make that fifteen and a half.

  I dropped off the property ladder. I couldn’t afford the flat, I sold it. The mortgage was £100 a month. I’d made some money from painting for the first time. I had a good deposit. Then I had a financial crash, early 1980s, when I changed my style of working. I stopped doing schematic pictures and tried realism. The horse painting was transitional. My human figures were all based on people I had seen. I started doing pictures about place.