Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Adlard, in his short essay, speaks of Blake walking, in a single day, ‘up to forty miles in the environs of London’. But Jerusalem is not the record of a gruelling hike, it is the heartbeat of a ‘mental traveller’. Los, Blake’s solar daemon, blazes like a comet. He maps energies, not in the robotic voice of a Sat Nav system, but with rhythms of blood; pulsing, hammering, driven onwards.

  ‘Approaching Stepney from the direction of Hackney,’ Adlard wrote, ‘Los with his globe would have walked down Globe Street and Globe Lane, past Globe Place, Globe House and an inn called the Globe. The route today is known as Globe Road.’ And the inn, the New Globe, is just one of a number in this area with a Hollow Earth design on its signboard. Jock McFadyen’s realist painting of the pub was used on the cover of Ed Glinert’s East End Chronicles: Three Hundred Years of Mystery and Mayhem.

  What Adlard struggles with is a topography that detours east to Stratford, before heading down to the Isle of Dogs. It strikes me that Los is not following the money but predicting its swinish rush on unexploited brownfield sites: Docklands and the future Stratford City, with its Olympic rings and satellite parks. ‘All the tendernesses of the soul cast forth as filth & mire.’ Towers of hungry capital ‘builded in Jerusalem’s eastern gate’. To dominate and divide.

  Of stones and rocks, he took his way, for human form was none;

  And thus he spoke, looking on Albion’s City with many tears . . .

  Stratford was no accidental station on this Silverlink itinerary.

  But Adlard is puzzled; finding no mention of ‘Old Stratford’ on any map of the period, he delves into the London and Provincial New Commercial Directory for 1827–8, issued by Poe and Co. In which Old Ford is described as ‘a small village pleasantly situated on the banks of the River Lea’. The directory also mentions ‘an immense artificial mound or hill’, another Silbury or Beckton Alp, from the summit of which, Adlard glosses, ‘Los might have viewed to advantage the London he was combing’.

  A vision without boundaries. Outside time. And not, certainly not, the limited prospect of pre‐Olympic mud offered to the privileged few, from Holden Point, the twenty‐one‐storey Stratford tower block: where a fit and vulpine Lord Coe throws back the silken linings of his deep‐blue jacket, like a fallen angel, to offer this virtual world, its mounds and stadia, to investors prepared to mortgage a city’s future on the demolition and ransacking of a mythical past.

  Hackney Brook

  The story was contracting around itself. It was futile to try to stay ahead of the enclosures. There was nothing to do but invite as many witnesses as possible to accompany me on pedestrian circuits of the Olympic site. They came with their own baggage: Andrew Kötting’s projected swan voyage, Robert Macfarlane’s passion for climbing trees, Stephen Gill’s kayak and bicycle odysseys. Cycling in Hackney, so heavily promoted, had reached the critical stage in its inevitable progress towards being as much of an urban pestilence as the motor car. I don’t mean hooded pavement jackals cruising for unguarded shoulder bags. Or lights‐jumping speedsters ploughing through bus queues to shave a couple of seconds from their run to the City. Or even that twilight hour on the canal, when drug casuals coincide with power‐pumping Dockland drones returning to their new waterside hutches.

  ASSAULT. ON WED 7TH MARCH A MALE CYCLIST WAS ASSAULTED AND PUSHED INTO THE CANAL. CAN YOU HELP US?

  I mean the incident I witnessed on London Fields. A Broadway Market mother, gypsyish in Bolivian poncho, with the right number of children, apple‐fed, unpolluted by E‐numbers, crossed an invisible cycle path, twenty yards ahead of a helmeted artist who must have been hitting 30mph as he swerved through dog walkers and potential clients of the play park.

  Cuntwankeryoublindstupidbitchdickhead . . .

  An hysterical exchange with no physical outlet. Shocked kids. Half‐dismounted cyclist, fists pumping. Woman swearing and stamping as he decides to take off. Road rage has trickled down to the recycling classes. There will be knife fights in the street over blue bins with the wrong category of potato peel.

  I agreed to walk down the canal, to the condemned allotments and on to old Stratford, with a group of students. The hook being that one of them was a direct descendant of Thomas De Quincey. They loped along, chatting quietly among themselves, never picking up a sketchbook or making a note. Once in a while, if there was a quaint alignment of pylons, the view of a poisoned creek that suggested the headwaters of the Orinoco, they might indulge in a digital transfer.

  A young woman, long hair almost controlled by a complex arrangement of clips, held up a notice for me to photograph: KEEP OUT JAPANESE KNOTWEED. A racial prejudice supported by severe fencing and the Portakabins of security hirelings in the pay of the various construction companies. Ancient woodland had been rearranged as a ribbon of naked logs. Like a very amateur railway.

  It was Ms De Quincey who understood, precisely, what was required. The unreality of the occasion. The ludicrous amounts of money squandered on this unwanted sports day. No more evidence, please, of the machinery of destruction. No approved edge‐lands surrealism. No rhetoric of protest to confirm our impotence. This person, dressed in a shapeless grey waterproof smock, reached into her purple shoulder‐pouch, and produced a slim booklet on friable yellowing card. Her dark hair and smooth oval features supplied the necessary gravitas. In my photograph her eyes are closed and her faint smile is stern. The rectangular pamphlet was issued by the Collège de Pataphysique and appeared to date from the mysterious year 86. It was credited to Marie Louise Aulard. The document was entitled: Rapport au Tr. Corps des Satrapes sur la Géographie du Néant. An expedition to a place that never existed. A confidential report, at last, from the centre of the Hollow Earth. A real river with an invented pedigree. Future memories disclosed in a theoretical past.

  Ms De Quincey, as we stood beside the security fence, overlooking the costive stream with its banks of illegitimate knotweed, offered a timely reminder that certain life‐sustaining characteristics pass down the DNA spiral through the generations. At Oxford, Professor Catling invited me to look at the work of a group of postgraduate students. One of them, who revealed the inhabitants of a barely visible world, by arranging tableaux of angels and insects, was the great‐granddaughter of Arthur Machen. She brought inscribed first editions of some of the books with her, to further agitate me. Handling the pataphysical guide with care, I realized that it was time to walk away from the weight of all this, to follow the Hackney Brook: to discover, by way of De Quincey and Machen, if the projected curvature of their northwest passage had any relevance to the geography of Hackney.

  Renchi came up from Glastonbury with the restored Pierrot le fou triptych. Inviting him to put himself back into the ecstatic and troubled mindset of the period when he produced these paintings, the mid 1960s, was a large demand, to which he responded: with frowns, smiles, attack. He started spit‐washing the dirt, stroking silver snail‐trails of household gloss. The triptych became the autobiography of an earlier self, a time of visions and elective poverty, confusion and elation. By way of such artefacts, paintings rescued from oblivion, we travel through parallel worlds in which the original acts of creation remain suspended in a perpetual present. I was taking Renchi away from his latest enthusiasm, reworking Blake’s versions of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a set of etchings. A physically demanding process that required the learning of new skills, such as writing in mirror‐script, along with a double reading: of Blake and of Gerda Norvig’s book on this beautiful sequence of twenty‐eight water‐colour drawings.

  A walk to honour the subterranean Hackney Brook was also an opportunity to discuss previous expeditions and perhaps a future collaboration down the northwest passage. Renchi’s daughter, Annie, had a friend who was out of town, a flat in which he could stay. Alice Oller at the German Hospital. I went around there, the evening before we set out, bringing old maps on which to plot the river’s course.

  As we sat on the roof terrace, it was disconcerting to he
ar the introductory thumps of the EastEnders theme drifting up from converted nurses’ quarters – while looking down into the real Fassett Square, through which no cabs moved, and nobody reeled, covered in blood, from a non‐existent pub. In pre‐Olympic Hackney, those territorial markers, the public houses beloved of Socialist Workers, were vanishing; being converted into investment opportunities, revamped as gastro‐lounges, or left alone as blank spaces while the price of land climbed.

  When, on the following morning, we walked through Broadway Market to the canal, I remembered the photograph Anna took, outside the Cat and Mutton, the model for Albert Square’s Queen Vic. I am standing next to my son, William, who is taller, leaner, acceptably unshaven, before he went off to the northern suburbs for a television directors’ course. With the market stalls set out, this urban revival does indeed aspire to the condition of the infamous soap opera: a fake, a fraud, an imposition. The wall of Ada Street, around the corner from the bookshop, is a constantly evolving work of public art. A backdrop for Sweet Toof with his pink gums and grids of teeth, his Russian unorthodox domes, his feathered serpents and bleeding hearts. Today’s message is stark: OUR TIME WILL COME. Thick wrist with clock face and strap: 12.15. A wad of £50 notes in a knuckled Philip Guston fist.

  It’s astonishing how a narrow towpath yields so much meaning to so many people. Voices from countless earlier expeditions. Andrew Kötting grabbed my camera, holding it at arm’s length for a double portrait. Which I followed, immediately, by snapping a poster in which a shirtsleeved Tony Blair takes a self‐portrait on his mobile, in front of a wall of apocalyptic oil fires. FALLUJAH LONDON. BOMBS = BOMBS. When we arrived at the courtyard of the Gainsborough Studios, the powerful Kötting, in white vest, leant on the rusted support structure, to stare respectfully at the hieratic head of Alfred Hitchcock. Andrew, close‐cropped, blunt of feature, perfectly reprised the Soviet propaganda look of the revolutionary years. The bald Hitch, through this confrontation, became the Lenin of our defeated inland empire.

  Brought to the point where the Hackney Brook bubbles out into the sluggish river, Kötting was also forced to contemplate the Olympic enclosures on the opposite bank. ‘I believe there is a way of walking and moving through these landscapes,’ he said. ‘The paths are called “desire lines”. It’s where the people win out. And they will win out. They’ll beat a path through. That’s where morphic resonance comes in. The sense of paths being created in bygone times. That is what I find most reassuring. It’ll be interesting to see whether some of those desire lines are moving in parallel with leylines. This will show whether the planners have got things wrong.’

  Noticing Sweet Toof ’s mural, at the Old Ford Lock, a swan that becomes a plan of the river, a direct confrontation of security fences and high walls, Kötting announced that this was ‘the great unexpected moment’. ‘It is almost as if,’ he said, ‘somebody had painted that swan as a little welcoming map, a welcome to our journey. This is where the Hackney Brook joins the Lea, it’s the beginning of the story.’

  The more youthful Robert Macfarlane, purposeful shorts and boots, glinting spectacles, pounced on the Hitchcock effigy and tried to climb inside the giant nose. Like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. The aspect of most interest to Robert was the vegetation; slender silver birches, poking through slats in the mount, formed a sacred grove around the boilerplated Buddha. Macfarlane offered the best example of what Walter Benjamin called ‘botanizing the asphalt’.

  I saw the symbolic head as a memory‐device, an oracular receptacle for myths and legends. Graham Cutts, the silent‐movie director whose assistants ranged from Hitchcock to Douglas Lyne, was the leading light of Gainsborough Pictures. In 1922 he introduced fears of downriver Chinese villainy into London, with his melodrama Cocaine. Matthew Sweet, in Shepperton Babylon, reminds us that Cutts ‘had a reputation for promiscuity as well as tyranny (Islington gossips were particularly fond of recounting the story of how he took two sisters into his dressing room in the course of one lunch break)’. The old studio complex, now a depressed courtyard with an underused gym and listless water features, once specialized in sadomasochistic costume romps and invented jobs for Hungarian exiles. Isidore, one of the five Ostrer brothers who owned the company, paid the rent by working as a dominoes hustler on the train between London and Southend, where he lived with an obliging dance teacher.

  Macfarlane, the age of my son, ripped into this marginal landscape with pen, notebook and sample bags. Through him, I noticed the pathside weeds (soon to be hacked away in a cosmetic makeover). Nests of coots. Patterns in the bark of trees. Coming across a weeping beech, Robert was straight up it, exclaiming loudly over the initials of generations of Hackney lovers carved deep into the trunk and out along the most precarious branches. But the most memorable of Macfarlane’s discoveries came on the path beside the rose garden, as we made for Hackney Wick. He parted a curtain of willow to disclose a white life mask of the murdered Margaret Muller. Staring, through thick foliage, at the fatal spot.

  Back at Old Ford Lock, with Renchi, I watched the white foam of the buried Hackney Brook gush into the darkness of the Lea, like a spill of light travelling across millennia, the afterburn of an extinguished galaxy. Then, invoking Danny Folgate, we set out to retrace the path of the lost stream: which I identified with the suppressed life‐force of the borough. What else were clancydocwra digging for?

  Renchi speaks of his time working as a gardener in Victoria Park, of the paintings he made. It was an era of fractured consciousness, heavy consumption of cannabis‐enriched chocolate cake. Planting and painting were complementary activities. Renchi weeded, dug over, set the semicircular bed, beyond Gore Gate. He took out his sketchbook. A Tibetan monk appeared from the curtain of shrubs, the skirts of Macfarlane’s weeping beech, to mimic Renchi’s gestures. The futility of making a picture of a picture. And then he vanished.

  There were other park memories: a young woman gardener forced to quit the job she loved by remorseless tabloid chauvinism. Stories of war, tunnels, bunkers, bombed terraces. The culling of the small herd of fallow deer.

  The subterranean pressure of the brook was clearly felt as we followed a natural curve, past the Thames Water plant, around Cadogan Terrace, into Wick Road. We are part of the geography, simply that. The villages of Hackney, Dalston, Stoke Newington took shape from the way this bright stream carved through the valley, beneath the heights of Homerton. Mansions, orchards, formal gardens. Industries grew up to exploit a natural feature and, in doing so, they made its defilement and disappearance inevitable.

  Noticing two Hasidic gentlemen, black suits and skullcaps, one blind, white‐sticked, leaning on the arm of the other, Renchi decided to follow them into the cream‐coloured block building with the green windows and prayer scrolls. The rigour of the formal design is contradicted by the bureaucratic insensitivity of the working interior: a social‐security office. Ticket machines for appropriate windows. Racks of forms. That suffocating air of institutionalized inertia, barriers between clients and salaried officials: those who are paid to know as much as, and not a syllable more than, the book requires of them. The maimed, mutilated, ancient, incapacitated, unlanguaged sit on firm chairs or queue to ask the wrong questions. There is no cruelty in the officials, a terrible world‐weariness from having to attend to so many hardluck stories, knowing there is nothing to be done, watching the loud hands of the official clock.

  Renchi persists. They know the type, but are thrown – and finally intrigued – by the nature of his question. ‘Was this once the Berger’s paint factory?’ It was, it was. Enquiries in the backroom confirm it. While we wait I read council leaflets that explain how to walk around the park and how to apply for repatriation. Berger had the reputation of being a benevolent employer. The poet Bill Griffiths, in his Hackney years, worked in a paint factory. The old Hackney Brook flowed through the industrial estate. The business of manufacturing colour, later paint (the strident hues of Renchi’s Pierrot), was brought to this site
from Shadwell in 1780, by Lewis Berger (formerly Steigenberger). A farmhouse was rented in Shepherd’s Lane with fields that ran down to the brook – which was diverted to pass through the factory grounds. By 1890 the old Hackney Brook was covered over and lost; represented by an ornamental water feature which gave a pastoral glint to promotional postcards and posters. The Homerton workers were noted for their long service, although the inevitable sickness consequent on the manufacture of paint, the inhalation of lead fumes, brought a serious strike in 1911. The model employer was denounced for operating ‘sheds of death’. Berger severed the connection with Homerton in 1960, when the operation merged with Jensen & Nicholson and became a public company.

  A linear connection between the industrial firm and the borough was re‐established when John Berger, critic, novelist and painter, paid a visit to his enthusiastic supporter Menzies Tanner in Graham Road. Berger would, in the new millennium, be the subject of a series of celebratory events, films, readings, conversations, curated by Hackney’s dynamic one‐man arts council, Gareth Evans.

  Dowsing the brook along Morning Lane (formerly Money Lane), street people become flotsam carried by the force of the stream they can’t see, the memory of water and the actuality of clay and gravel, the terraces of Homerton. We detour to Sutton House, achieving a sense of what it must have been like to look back down on the unblemished river.

  Right at the mouth of this ancient road, where it snakes behind the decommissioned library (now offering a beer festival), is a Hollow Earth pub, the Globe in Morning Lane. A signboard with northwest‐passage emblems: the navigator Frobisher brandishing Newton’s compasses, a vessel wedged in Arctic ice, a blind search for new oceans. The fleet of solitary ships, unknown to each other, sails on; before running aground above the buried Hackney Brook. The Old Ship on Mare Street is the next craft in this phantom armada of painted Mary Celestes. With Orson Welles as its Ahab.