Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  I sold the Victoria Park flat for twenty‐two grand. I made seven grand on it in a very short space of time. I got an Acme house for the next eight years. The paintings were changing.

  I tried the pubs around the park. I’d sit there, not knowing anyone, feeling totally pissed off. Drinking slow pints and thinking: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Feeling fucking miserable. I was young. I used to drink and drive in those days. I used to get in my yellow car and drive down to the pubs I knew in Bow, in the days when I was happy. I went to the Five Bells & Blade Bone, by Limehouse Church – which I started! I started the artists going in there. Before me it was just Czech car thieves and tarts, a real dive.

  I’d go every night, the Blade Bone. I got to know the landlord. A Scottish family ran the pub. I told all my friends to stop going to the pub on Flamborough Street, off Salmon Lane. A nice Young’s house. I wanted to frequent the Blade Bone, I liked the shape of the bar. I would go there at eleven o’clock at night. I wouldn’t bother to sit through an entire evening. I’d do the art openings, up west, practically every night. I was single and looking for romance.

  Sometimes I’d be sitting in the Caprice with patrons, famous names, the movers. Then I’d rush back to the Five Bells in Limehouse, tap on the window, and drink until three in the morning. Get up late, start work. Like living in Berlin, I suppose.

  I was still in Hackney, but my studio was in Turner’s Road, a short walk from the Blade Bone. Around 1986 I started making proper money. I was earning fifty grand a year. I had a gallery in Cork Street. But I was living in a dump. I had sixty grand in the Abbey National and I didn’t own any property. I didn’t know what to do with the money. I didn’t have a clue about investments.

  In 1989 I bought a flat in Edinburgh. A year later, I bought a little house in Grove Road, Bethnal Green. That year I met Susie Honeyman, who moved in with me. We got married. Much later, in another recession, I got into the Roman Road development with Piers Gough. The recession of ’93 was really bad. Everybody was facing repossession. When my daughter, Annie, was born, we were totally skint. Susie was doing teaching. I wasn’t selling anything, I didn’t have a studio. The market came back in ’95. I learnt about using property to survive. It’s just another form of banking. I bought a bigger flat in Edinburgh.

  I’d never, up to that point, drawn money against any of my properties. Well, I did sell the place I developed with Piers Gough. We didn’t make any profit on that, we got ripped off. We made a paper profit of fifty grand. Capital gains took 40 per cent. We made a small loss. A negative project, but a steep learning curve. A fucking scary moment, actually. We faced selling the house.

  I was with Agnew’s in Bond Street. Agnew’s were the first dealers to show Bacon. That’s where I had the show of my new realist paintings. One show. Lots of reviews, a little money.

  I cut the tape when we passed the pathway where Margaret Muller was attacked, between the rose garden and the children’s adventure playground. It was clear, when you walked it, that this was the direct route into Victoria Park from Hackney Wick – where Muller, like so many other students and artists, lived. There was only one exit from the island, the impacted community tucked against the back rivers and the A102, the Blackwall Tunnel Approach.

  When we stood on the bridge, logging the KILL MATTHEW BARNEY sticker, Jock pointed out the embankment where his pantomime horse lamented the invention of the motor car. ‘I’m not a libidinous shooter,’ he said. ‘I’d rather save my bullets. If I do decide to do a Matthew Barney painting, I’ll need one of your snaps.’

  ‘Strange thing,’ I muttered, pointing to the Top o’ the Morning pub. The plaque for the first Railway Murder. ‘The man arrested for the lethal assault on Thomas Briggs was called Müller. Franz Müller.’

  Limehouse, on the southern horizon, was the favoured destination for Jock’s nocturnal drives. This was the ramp where he skidded, half‐cut, out of Hackney, back towards the grotesques who haunted his early paintings: bow‐legged strippers, porcupine junkies, rutting dogs.

  ‘How well did you know David Widgery?’

  Widgery was my doctor. I went to the Gill Street Health Centre, where he was in practice with four others. He called out my name and I went in. He said, ‘Oh, it’s Jock McFadyen. I’ll have you. I like to have all the artists.’ I was quite flattered that a doctor would know what I did. I had been painting these pictures of Hawksmoor churches and the general neighbourhood. Widgery was alive to things. When Susie came on the scene, he was made up. He was a big Mekons fan. He loved punk. He was a rock’n’roll person. And a mad socialist. From a posh background.

  A posh leftie, basically. There’s a lot of that about. Susie was charmed by him. And he was very taken with her. He said, ‘I remember going to see the Mekons when they were being supported by the Clash.’ The Mekons were now obscure and the Clash part of rock history. Widgery liked to champion the underdogs. Whether it was single‐parent Asian claimants or forgotten punk groups.

  I read his book, which I thought was so clunky: Some Lives! It started well, down Mare Street, on top of a bus. He hears a conversation with a black girl. I thought: ‘He’s got the images going.’ Then it descends into sixth‐form socialism, maundering on about injustice and how rickets has been eradicated. I got so bored with it. Eye‐wateringly dull.

  Painters work in private. You wouldn’t get beyond the first couple of hours if you thought like Widgery. You’re sitting there with a cup of tea and Radio 4, day after day. You hope for rain, because you don’t want to be stuck inside if it’s not raining. A shitty life, really. Being a professional painter.

  One night in the Five Bells, Frank McLaughlin – who is ten years younger than me – said that he’d got a letter from the Gill Street Health Centre. It said: ‘Now that you are thirty, we advise you to come in and have a full test for liver function, cholesterol.’ Frank said, ‘Fuck it, I’ve got to go round for these tests.’ He was from Northern Ireland. I was saying, ‘Let me see that. I’m with fucking Gill Street and I’m thirty‐eight. Why haven’t I got one?’

  I went round to see Widgery. ‘Why can’t you check me out, doc?’

  He said, ‘You must have slipped through the net. Is there anything in particular you’re worried about?’

  I said, ‘Well, there’s my drinking.’

  I must have reeled off what was, for him, a modest amount: five or six pints a night, with a couple of Scotches to get me ready for bed.

  He made notes about units. He said, ‘You could piss in this bottle if you want to.’ He went through the motions. Then, when I met Nick Fox, another doctor, the Labour Party candidate, I got the full story on Widgery. Fox was a young guy in his forties, he used to campaign for Peter Shore. He was shafted, they wanted Oona King in there, a babe.

  I was chatting to Nick, shortly after Widgery died, about the drinking thing. He laughed. Widgery was a complete alcoholic. He’d also had polio. He was a friend of Ian Dury. Widgery said to Dury, ‘You’re a spastic and I’m a spastic. Let’s form a club. Club foot, ha!’ To be empowered. They wrote this song together, a sort of anthem for spastics.

  He had a posh voice, Widgery. He was my doctor, an authority figure. The previous quack, the one before Widgery, died of AIDS. I can’t remember when that was. I think I’d already moved into the London Fields studio, by the railway. There is only one other artist around, John Davies. The Chinese are taking over, the noodle people, they’ve got three units now.

  My place used to be a garage. They did gearboxes. They were smuggling drugs, cocaine. They would take all the gears out. All the cogs. They filled the shells with cocaine. You’d get hundreds of thousands of pounds of powder in each gearbox. They were caught because the customs officers realized that the gearboxes were too light.

  When I arrived here, arrest warrants were all over the floor, a carpet of paper. There were bars across the toilet windows, excellent locks. A steel door. I thought, ‘We’re fine for security.’ There was a false wall with holes
punched in it, plasterboard cavities.

  I bought the place, cash down. I can store anything, art, bikes, cars. Storage and recycling is the name of the game. I’m going to vote fucking Green Party next time. I’m becoming phobic about anything that has to be thrown away.

  My new paintings, the A13 and the Olympic Park, are faction. What I liked about Kojak, Telly Savalas, he’d be running along with a gun, diving through a door: and it really would be the Bronx. Not a studio. That car with the wheels off – it’s true! They haven’t invented the car. They may have kicked the panels in, roughed it up a little. But it’s an actual Lincoln, a Cadillac, a Buick.

  That fusion of the observed and the non‐observed, the accidental, is what I strive for. I wouldn’t dream of taking a landscape straight. My graffiti is real but it doesn’t come from here. I’ll borrow it from another section of the towpath and patch the world together in an original configuration. To bring you closer to the truth.

  You had to buy a ticket to get inside the Napier. Then you braved the set of monster teeth and walked through a pink mouth. Drink was served in chipped mugs. Jock looked disappointed, nothing lurid was going down; no sex traffickers, no truck girls, nobody who looked as if they’d escaped from one of his early paintings. Conversation was muted, lighting low: Stevie Dola’s wake would have astonished the man, it was more like a gallery opening from the old days. Or yet another ‘ongoing, interdisciplinary, interventionist protest’ about the Olympic enclosures. Folk from Clays Lane, the Manor Garden Allotments, the Boas Society, the Lammas Land Defence Committee and the Hackney Marsh User Group calibrated loss with computer presentations, schematic maps, field reports.

  Dola’s ashes sat on the bar in a snowstorm globe, like the one seen in Orson Welles’s expressionist close‐up: the ‘Rosebud’ fall from the dying grasp of Citizen Kane. Stephen Gill’s photographs of the Lower Lea, in its interim period of yellow paint markings and surveyors’ dinghies, played on the wall. A shot of David Cameron and Lord Coe, blue‐suited on a dirt road, raised a derisive cheer. There was a shaggy horse in a field of pylons that seemed to have strayed out of Jock’s painting.

  A young man from Buenos Aires was reading from Hubert Waley’s book about his brother Arthur, the Chinese scholar. ‘More enterprising expeditions took us in an easterly direction, particularly to Lea bridge, where we hired a boat and plied our oars energetically, looking neither to right nor left, so as to avoid seeing the dead cats and dogs which floated near the banks. A puzzled friend once asked Arthur what attracted him about the River Lea, to which he replied that he admired the abrupt way in which London ended there instead of tailing off into suburbs.’

  We joined some women I recognized at a corner table. They were listening to the travel yarns of Dan Dixon‐Spain, the Shacklewell portraitist, who had recently returned to England. I gestured with the recorder. It felt right to get down as much as I could of this event, surely the last of its kind.

  I had a studio in the Wick, in Queen’s Yard, right next to the train station. I took the whole top floor. I did large posters, fifty feet by eight feet. There was one good pub. The Wick felt like a place where big lorries thundered through.

  I remember going to the studio one Sunday morning, to start work. A rave was going on in the warehouse. When I left to go home, ten hours later, people were still sitting in the street. The rave continued for thirty‐six hours.

  I went to the pub when it opened, usually at half‐ten, to get something to eat. All the postmen used to be in there, drinking beer. Along with secondhand car dealers and scrapmetal traders. I bought a van door for my Transit. I worked with a character called Banksy. Did you ever hear of Banksy?

  He commissioned an art sculptor to help with one of his pieces. I met him a few times, but I didn’t know it was him. He was a shrewd guy. I didn’t like that piece at all.

  At first, I found him quite obnoxious, but when I got to know him better, I liked him. He had to maintain the mystique of anonymity. He didn’t want to let anyone know who he was. He was doing a piece called The Rodin Thinker. A copy of Rodin’s figure with a traffic cone on its head, cast in bronze, to be stuck in some square in Soho. Two fingers to the art world.

  He didn’t know who Rodin was or when the original was done. He just picked on this as a famous sculpture. Which I thought was a bit trite. In general, I liked his work. An interesting guy. Two policemen kissing. Banksy was in the Wick, on and off, for a few months. He has a number of people he works with, studios in different places. Generally, I stay away from artists. I like to fill my life with normal people, people who are not self‐obsessed.

  Sarah Wise, the London historian, who had been giving a talk on Arthur Morrison to the Boas Society, was showing a set of drawings to Emily Richardson and Susanna Edwards, the graphic designer. I was astonished to see late‐Victorian steel engravings of Hackney Marshes. We could have walked through these scenes on our way to the Napier. Tents of tattered cloth, greasy bivouacs, buckets heating on improvised brick ovens. ‘You probably know,’ Sarah said, ‘Romanys and didicai gypsies began to come off the road and settle in Hackney, Dalston, Walthamstow and other northeastern suburbs from the 1880s onwards.’

  Thanks to Sarah’s researches, I understood how important the threatened water‐margin of Hackney had always been; an unpoliced, unloved strip where dirty industries could cohabit with travellers, aliens, the electively destitute. A few miles upstream, the peasant‐poet John Clare met his gypsy troop in the forest and decided to risk everything on a long march north: to bring his first love, the inspiration for his poetry, back from the dead.

  The caption to one of the engravings took my eye: ‘Knife‐Grinder, Hackney Wick’. A service industry tolerated in a place the mercantile bourgeoisie refused to colonize. Nature nudging at brick. Scrub wood for small fires. Rivers cleaned out for profit. A rogue ecology to be celebrated: because it required no approval, no funding. No double‐tongued rhetoric.

  Tapes of Stevie Dola’s underwater Thames recordings were played, creaking anchor chains, hammered keels resounding like whale music. Anya Gris questioned Jock about Margaret Muller. Several of the women were very concerned about the failure of the police to bring their investigations into the Victoria Park assault to a conclusion. There had been a number of failed attempts to assign Muller’s murder to accused killers in other parks and contiguous areas of East London.

  Drug addict Christopher Duncan, 21, was convicted yesterday of bludgeoning 28‐year‐old Jagdip Najran with a baseball bat at his flat in Bethnal Green. Duncan, who was obsessed with rap star Eminem, stuffed 5ft 2in Miss Najran into a suitcase where she bled to death last year. He will now be formally questioned by detectives about the frenzied stabbing of Miss Muller, an artist who was murdered as she jogged through Victoria Park in Hackney.

  It was shameful, a stain on place and people, on investigators and citizens, that the culprit could not be located. The wrong men were brought in: from Clissold Park or territories far beyond the reach of this mindless assassin. There had been further attacks, less frenzied, in the poorly lit and now deserted streets around the Hackney Wick station. But the thrust of security and surveillance was to do with keeping trespassers out, on the ‘safe’ side of the Olympic fence. Repulsing photographers, nuisances.

  A painful story for Jock to recall.

  Margaret Muller was a student of mine at the Slade. She was essentially a life painter, no dreadful pun intended. She painted the figure. She was about twenty‐eight. She wasn’t mature, as a person, although she was six or seven years older than the other students. A postgraduate. She came from Virginia, I think.

  Margaret arrived in London because of the painter Euan Uglow. The man who did the famous nude of Cherie Blair. She worked in the life room on what they call ‘perceptual’ painting. It’s to do with measuring, retinal truth. You paint from the model. This practice grew out of the Euston Road School.

  Some of the students subscribe absolutely to these rules. Margaret wasn’t
one of them. The others were like devout, fundamentalist Muslims. They didn’t look at Sickert. He said he painted in the English style for the French market.

  Institutions are about one personality within them being too powerful. Uglow’s life room was like a school within a school. Closed doors. Margaret was there for Euan. She was not conspicuously talented. Who’s that black man, the Olympic sprinter who failed the drug test? Linford Christie. She painted Linford Christie. Margaret was a non‐fundamentalist member of the life room.

  Then Euan died. That left the room to me. I only did one day a week. For the last year of her time at the Slade, I was teaching Margaret Muller. She left. And then she got a studio at Hackney Wick. There are lots of studios out there, industrial buildings. The Wick is where you find the artists.

  A couple of weeks before Margaret died, I was in the Slade. As I was leaving she called me over. I hadn’t recognized her, she was wearing a woolly hat. And she was wearing two coats. She’d come into the college for some forms. I sat down and had a chat with her. I thought maybe she was one of those rich Americans. She’ll go off to New York and get a studio. But actually she was toughing it in London. She’d done what all the students do. They go to the East End and get a studio that is terminally freezing. They live in that studio, they can’t afford to rent a room as well.

  Here was Margaret in the Slade, so overdressed, wearing all these layers of stuff. Two weeks later, I was in Scotland. When I came back, Susie said, ‘Something terrible has happened. This woman has been murdered in Victoria Park. You’d better sit down. It must be someone you know.’

  And, of course, it was. Dreadful. It left me depressed for about a year. I don’t know if you’re like that, because you’re round and about, all over the place. I’m in two worlds. In Bethnal Green, I live in the ghetto: Mrs Patel, the corner shop. The tube. Woolworths on Bethnal Green Road. A bonny little town. It could be anywhere. It needn’t even be in London. And then there’s the West End. There is no relation between the two places, my two lives. Quite disturbing.