Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  The day I told you about, when I was driving my car down the wrong side of the road, after hearing about the death of my comrades in prison, was near the Lesney’s Factory. A big road across Hackney Wick. I was completely calm, the car gave me security. I thought I could just keep going, drive away. I could escape. It was a stupid idea. The car gave me confidence in terms of my body. I had physical breakdowns. I felt completely exhausted. I used to go and sleep in the park. I began to build myself up again. I had endured some shocking experiences.

  When I was let out of prison, in Germany, to go to hospital, I was sick. I didn’t want to escape but I knew that I must do it. Otherwise they would put me back in prison. The public memory is all about Ulrike Meinhof, because she is so famous. She was in prison, in Cologne, after me. The treatment we received is still criticized. Every other part of our period of imprisonment, so they say, was champagne and strawberries. All shit, bad propaganda. About Ossendorf Prison in Cologne, where I broke down completely, they still say: ‘I hope the authorities keep this up.’

  I was in the silent wing. A new building, a new prison. The wing wasn’t yet used. I was the only one, nobody would walk through there. I was there for four months, Meinhof was there for seven months. I was twenty‐three years old, I couldn’t believe what was happening.

  The deaths of all those Red Army Faction people in prison are a mix of everything. I think they killed themselves. Not Meinhof, the other ones. They say it was a plot. They made it look like they were killed. The whole thing is incredible. The story goes on, it sells. The state is only interested in keeping power. Left and right are coming together. Like here. Both your parties are conservative. The people are nice but England is completely conservative. Everything is property, everything. Terrifying.

  I didn’t have anything, directly, to do with the Angry Brigade – not when I was in London Fields. I heard there was one guy around Broadway Market, a communicator. He had a child with a woman there. John Barker was in prison at that time. I never met those guys. I knew the people around them, the Hackney people.

  I took no photographs during my period in London. No, wait. That’s not true. There were some pictures – because my girlfriend of that time was with me, walking in Greenwich Park. We made some photographs. I always did make photographs. I had a camera, yeah. Probably I did have a camera. I had one when I felt secure enough. I lived, for the last months before I was arrested, in Bow. A friend of mine was a photographer called Carlos. I won’t tell you his other name. He took some stuff. We went out in East London to make photographs – but only of cars, Fords. Ha! I think Carlos had a dark room, an improvised dark room. It would be nice to have those pictures.

  I have the photographs I made in Paris. Photography and picture editing were important to me. I came back much later, after they’d sent me back to prison, to work in Canary Wharf. For the Independent. That was 2000. When I was finished with prison, I went to Hamburg and studied film. With a German film‐maker, Heke Sander. I worked with new magazines. I worked a lot with Magnum. These magazines wanted English style, American style. I made lots of connections in England. I understood why English photography is so interesting: it is in the imperialist tradition. The Germans are very narrow‐minded, yeah? I worked for nine years and then the Wall came down. The magazine in Berlin folded. You had to be young to work in Germany. And I was getting to be fifty.

  I had ex‐partners here in London. I came back to London to look for somebody I had known in the 1970s. That’s how I ended up at the Independent. Then, a week later, they heard who I was. The shitty press, down in the bottom there, tried to make a splash of it. The English are very clever. They bash you, but they’re also proud to have you. I gave only one interview. To the Independent. Out of loyalty. It was such a fantastic paper, a fantastic experience. I was only there for half a year. They said, ‘Do mention that you worked for us.’ Ha! In Germany they would go hundreds of miles to stay away from you.

  People now are more aware of an archive. An archive has a value. It’s a thing about history. History is a business. In England you have heritage. You have so much media. Most people take their history from commercial outlets. Others take their work more seriously, they try to gather up all the evidence you find, in objects, in images and recordings.

  Isn’t age important here? Don’t the ones who give commissions say, ‘Please, we only want young people. Innocents who are not tainted by history or memory. Save them from books and the old lies of unreliable witnesses.’

  A good day to walk south down the Lea path, with Astrid Proll, in the footsteps of the Will Self circumambulation. She was prepared to revisit the Matchbox Toy Factory, which still survived: a block building on Homerton Road, overseeing access to Hackney Marshes. In our earlier lives we were all here, all out of place: Proll, in dungarees, a boy‐girl on the assembly line, producing miniature blue‐grey Mercedes 450 SEL models of the cars she used in her freebooting autobahn days; Anna taking her Millfields infant class out on the Marshes; and myself, under those epic skies, painting grids of white lines like a demented Nahuatl. The Lesney operation began further upstream, in Edmonton, as an industrial die‐casting company based in the Rifleman pub, an adjunct to the BSA weapons facility. In 1947 they were invited to make parts for toy guns, but the real breakthrough came in 1953 with their matchbox‐sized replica of the Coronation coach.

  Proll was a giant in this weird Lilliputian world of tiny ordnance, death‐kit replicas for tots, royal ephemera, German luxury motors and fleets of trucks, cranes, petrol tankers to anticipate the future devastation of Hackney Wick and the creation of the Olympic Park. A cement mixer, a tractor, a bulldozer: these were the first precision models built to reflect a post‐war landscape of rubble and reconstruction. But on my birthday, 11 June, a good few years after that event, in 1992, Lesney was declared bankrupt. Brand names were sold off and distribution switched from the East End to the Far East, Macau. I could, if I had the right temperament, read the span of my life in terms of Matchbox Toys. We both adapted to events in the same place over the same period of time.

  I wanted a photograph of Astrid in front of the factory. She agreed, reluctantly, making minor adjustments to a girlish fringe of hair. I assured her that this snapshot would not appear in my book. I told her about other unlikely personalities filmed in the borough. Jayne Mansfield. Julie Christie. Orson Welles by the Hackney Empire. She said that Moby‐Dick was the only work of fiction read by members of the Red Army Faction. ‘We had no use for novels, but Ulrike Meinhof appreciated this book.’ It provided, as a battered copy passed between the prisoners in Stuttgart‐Stammheim, a source of coded references and alternative identities: Ahab, Starbuck, Queequeg. And Ishmael: who must be Proll herself, the survivor, the teller of the tale. ‘Go and gaze upon the iron emblematic harpoons.’

  As we advanced, deeper into unresolved and unreadable blight, tyre mountains, oil creeks, burnt‐out factories and churches, Astrid perked up. ‘Where is Hackney Wick?’ Over and over. ‘Where is Hackney Wick? I do not understand.’ The map meant nothing. The Wick had no where. The question was redundant. Hackney Wick was a sign on a bombed bus. A loaf of hard mud where a dog track once existed – if we accept the romance of Stephen Gill’s photographs of the vanished market.

  I tried to explain how the violence of the Olympic assault unpicked identity, made everything into a kind of fictional bouillabaisse: heritage myths, untrustworthy documentation, computer‐generated visions. Political wisdom insists that we believe what we are told to believe.

  I was walking down the canal one afternoon, beside Victoria Park, at the point where the Hertford Union branch cuts away to the east. I saw a young woman, pushing a new baby buggy, coming towards me, and I had one of those seizures when the laws of the physical universe by which we navigate fall apart. It was Anna, aged about thirty, in the glow of her moment, slightly tired, heavy‐footed, airing our first child, a daughter. We would meet in the park. I cycled from my gardening job in Limehouse.
But if that transitory, unphotographed incident, fondly misremembered, could be revived: where was I? Now. Are memories absorbed – and released – by place?

  Except, of course, that this was Farne. With her own new fierce daughter. Shaping an afternoon circuit that duplicated, as I explained to her, Danny Folgate’s leyline. A turn around the lake, the southeast path alongside the dry Burdett‐Coutts fountain. The Gun Makers’ Gate exit. The baby is floating‐dreaming as she forms and is formed by her original imprint of grey London skies.

  An allotment in Berlin was a very expensive proposition, Astrid said. Across the little bridge, on the private island of Manor Garden, Proll took photographs of the sheds, plantings, crops that would never be harvested. A melancholy business. We looked through the fence, beyond huts assembled from driftwood and the panels of abandoned cars, at coloured ribbons marking out future stadia, media concessions. Small groups wandered the half‐abandoned plots, hacking through green tangles that would soon be dug up and flattened to become part of a perimeter fence. There was talk of a harbour for craft ferrying tourists into the Olympic Park. Venice by Old Ford. A Venice crying out for its furious Ben Jonson.

  When we were approached by a young German woman, Astrid feared that she had been recognized. ‘This is very unusual. The kids know nothing of our movement. Prada‐Meinhof. Cars, uniforms, music: that is all they understand.’

  There followed a brief, intense conversation. A Proll interrogation. Gesche Wuerfel, the visiting artist, had no notion that she was talking to the notorious Astrid Proll. She had attended the talk I gave for Ken Livingstone’s Lower Lea seminar and wanted to keep me up to date with recent work. She handed me her card, a shot of the ruined Cosy Café where I had just snapped Astrid. ‘I am interested in how, over time, the urban fabric changes. In Go for Gold I critically investigate how the Olympic Games 2012 will impact the landscape of the Lower Lea Valley, London.’

  On the sorry mound of the Clays Lane Estate, flags and duvets were draped from upper floors, while ground‐floor windows were sealed with metal shutters. There was a palpable sense of abandonment. The travellers at the foot of the mound faced expulsion. They lurked behind a mesh fence, dogs primed for fools with cameras. The estate, a minor utopia, a community of solitaries, students and young couples achieving a foothold on London, had been disbanded. Many of the flats were already empty. Unwanted white goods were stacked on streets dressed with saplings that would never grow.

  A slow‐cruising car turned in beside one of the shuttered properties. Disembarking, a lean dark‐suited man rummaged for a door key that didn’t fit. His companion, a tall polished blonde in a fur‐trim coat looked around at the panorama of earthworks, fences, pylons. With my overdeveloped sense of drama, I read the situation as: lunch‐hour quickie, a liaison between a council official or Olympic Development Agency manager and some television producer from Sweden, checking out the facilities, discussing a promotional documentary. Over American cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch. Bare mattress on a borrowed bed. Ribbed condoms floating in a bowl that didn’t flush. No water, no electricity. Self‐generated heat. Dying geraniums in a cracked pot.

  ‘That guy,’ Astrid said. ‘I know him from the old days, ’74 or ’75. He hasn’t changed at all, a comrade. With the council? An architect, maybe? He helped my friends in Broadway Market. Houses with mad people, you know? Where they could live together instead of hospitals. Charlie, yeah. Charlie Velasco.’

  I’m sure that’s what she said. But when I asked her to repeat the name, she refused. ‘No. There must be no names before I see and approve your text. There were so many others in those times, like this guy. Like Charlie. He was not so special.’

  On my next walk to Hackney Wick, I ran up against the blue fence. An exclusion zone had been declared. The only way in, now, was by water. Meeting Stephen Gill at Old Ford Lock, we made a slow circuit in an inflatable kayak, witnessing the pylon forests being dismantled, warehouses and small businesses reduced to rubble. Paddling through tunnels of intertwined and overhanging vegetation, we were noticed but unchallenged by work gangs. We understood very well that even this privilege would soon be suspended.

  The walk to the corner shop for an evening paper gets harder every day. The street was deep‐trenched by clancydocwra, the jagged wound protected by red sheep hurdles. Pile‐drivers, under the patronage of Quinn, assaulted the foundations of the school. ‘It won’t take more than eighteen months to two years,’ Pat Rain assured me. ‘I’m buggering off to Ramsgate.’ Shrapnel. Bomb fragments. Mounds of ‘big old bones’. As we stood there, shouting to make ourselves heard, the extended arm of a large digger pushed the top off the birch tree that had stood on this corner for all of our Hackney life.

  The Standard ran a piece about swans being slaughtered on the Olympic site. ‘Piles of carcasses, thought to have been stripped for food, were found at a camp used by Eastern European immigrants. One of the birds was discovered with its wings snapped off, with its bones and feathers next to a tent beside the River Lea.’

  The gossip column was led by an item, timed to coincide with the Princess Diana inquest, claiming that she had held a series of private meetings with Blair and Alastair Campbell in Hackney. They were brokered by someone who was a friend of both parties, Charlie Velasco. A gym acquaintance of the princess from the Harbour Club. ‘They can take a lot away from you,’ Diana is quoted as saying. ‘But they can’t take away your pictures.’

  Proll came back to Albion Drive for a cup of tea. The two Annas, as if this had all been a Brecht play, met. Proll, the false Anna of years on the run, was coming home. She told us that she too had lived for a time on this street. ‘Albion Drive? Yeah yeah.’ The other Anna, my wife, was rebuked for the treasonable act of carrying a tray out into the garden. ‘Why do you do this? You must have a career of your own.’

  When I brought the cups back inside, Anna whispered that she’d had a call from Syd. Who was upset, enraged. In shock. Something about Charlie. All those years. The betrayal. The football trips: a convenient cover. Some woman in Hamburg. The story of their life together a lie.

  Proll had a way of tilting her head to stare at you. Anna, distracted, sat with us for a moment. We watched thieving squirrels bounce along the old wall, headbutting the last petals from yellow roses. We heard the scream of the door that can’t be shut.

  Acknowledgements

  Hackney, That Rose‐Red Empire is a documentary fiction; where it needs to be true, it is. The fiction of place is dictated by many voices, physical structures without number, the visible and the invisible. I acknowledge them all, even when, especially when, I am unaware of their existence. This is a story of fallible memory, inaccurate or inventive transcriptions, hard‐earned prejudices, false starts and accidental epiphanies. ‘I live underneath/ the light of day,’ said the poet Charles Olson. ‘And the rosy red is gone.’

  The Hackney bibliography is large and I have trawled it recklessly, but I must credit, in particular, the books that became characters in my book: The Lowlife by Alexander Baron (London, 1963); Saddling Mahmoud by Sebastian Bell (Ware, Herts., 2005); Rain on the Pavements by Roland Camberton (London, 1951); Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington by Benjamin Clarke (London, 1894); Days Like These by Nigel Fountain (London, 1985); Hackney Wick by Stephen Gill (London, 2005); Memphis Underground by Stewart Home (London, 2007); Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen (London, 1975); The Dwarfs by Harold Pinter (London, 1990); Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties by Sheila Rowbotham (London, 2001); How the Dead Live by Will Self (London, 2000); Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands ... by David Standish (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Mr Arkadin by Orson Welles (London, 1956); Some Lives!: A GP’s East End by David Widgery (London, 1991); A Journey through Ruins: The Last Days of London by Patrick Wright (London, 1991).

  For permission to quote from copyright material, I would like to thank: Juliet Ash for Some Lives!; J. G. Ballard for The Drought (London, 1965);
Mrs Alexander Baron (and the Harvill Press) for The Lowlife; Claire Camberton for Rain on the Pavements; Jennifer Dorn; Stewart Home for Memphis Underground; Astrid Proll for Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67–77 (Zurich, 1998); Alasdair Reid for Saddling Mahmoud; Michael Rosen; Will Self; Matthew Sweet; Patrick Wright for A Journey through Ruins. And the Hackney Gazette, that fountain of inspiration.

  Thanks for their time to all those who submitted themselves to recorded interviews: Juliet Ash, Alexander Baron, Dr Peter Bruggen, Claire Camberton, Dan Dixon‐Spain, Driffield, Nigel Fountain, Stephen Gill, Darwood Grace, Anya Gris, Stewart Home, Ann Jameson, Erol Kagan, Sidney Kirsh, Andrew Kötting, Tony Lambrianou, Rachel Lichtenstein, Douglas Lyne, Jock McFadyen, Mimi Mollica, Norman Palmer, Bill Parry‐Davies, Mark Pawson, Chris Petit, Rob Petit, Astrid Proll, Emily Richardson, Peter Riley, Sheila Rowbotham, Will Self, Timothy Soar, ‘Swanny’ (Dr Swann), Marina Warner, Ken Worpole, Patrick Wright. With special thanks to the late Mr Kirsh, my guide to the memory‐grounds of old Hackney. And thanks to the others whose tapes, for strategic reasons of geography or narrative construction, could not be fitted into this project.

  Anna Sinclair was a valued prompt, co‐walker, researcher. Farne, William and Madeleine Sinclair, co‐opted at various points into this adventure, suffered the experience with a good grace. Stephen Gill was a reservoir of images and a fellow traveller of edge‐lands. The drawings and etchings of Oona Grimes were a moral map by which I navigated. Others who were generous in so many ways and who deserve better than the inadequate accounting of this tale include: Tom Baker, Renchi Bicknell, Darryl Biggs, Brian Catling, Sydney R. Davies, Judith Earnshaw, Susanna Edwards, Gareth Evans, Edna Gorman (Sickert), Alan Hayday, Timothy Hyman, Nicholas Johnson, Joe Kerr, John King, Robert Macfarlane, John Matheson, Emma Matthews, Charlie Mitten, Clare O’Driscoll, Ivan Pawle, John Sergeant, Paul Smith, Susan Stenger, Paul Tickell, Anthony Wall, Adrian Whittaker, Sarah Wise, Michael Witt.