Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘The quality of the complaints has improved. Now we have an active response in the edgelands. More anger, more subversion than I’ve seen in decades. Thatcher brought about the punk moment. Nude Labour have midwifed the 2012 apocalypse.’

  The London offered by Télérama was a pop version of that design classic, Harry Beck’s Underground map, with Charles Saatchi as the destination hub in the west and ‘Peter’ Doherty in the east. The significant geographical zones are: Hackney, Brixton, Chelsea, Kilburn, Notting Hill, Ilford, Paddington, Charing Cross Road. Ian Teh wanted me to point him in the direction of images that would do justice to my reinvigorated borough. A problematic assignment.

  Teh moved lightly and easily, it was hard to know if he was a stranger in this place or if, holding back, he wanted to see it through my eyes. This was 1 April, the Day of Fools in the City, the G20 shindig: an economic summit confronted by protestors. Climate camps had been attempted in Bishopsgate and squats invaded by police enforcers. I decided not to walk down there, as a witness, on the assumption that the morning would pass off peacefully and that the dramas would come, with the usual kettling, thuggery and violence, later in the day; when boredom, frustration and a warped sense of entitlement let unidentified paramilitaries off the leash.

  The photographer concurred. ‘Nothing to shoot,’ he said, unwilling to compete with the massed cameras of the men in Plexiglas helmets, snoops in blacked-out vans. Image-harvesting is the favoured security technique: watch and wait, gather evidence for retrospective action. But the obsessive practice of recording an event, as it is happening, or before it happens, incubates paranoia. There is always the requirement to justify budget. Demonstrations, as the G20 battle proved, are simply image wars. Robotic surveillance footage in real time. Directed portraiture of potential malefactors, frozen headshots of figures isolated from the seething mob, is a process as deluded and obsolete as the taxonomies of criminals, lunatics and sub-humans by Alphonse Bertillon with his ‘Synoptic Table of Facial Expressions for the Purposes of Systematic Identification’ in 1895. Footage, as Pudovkin and the early theorists of film editing knew, can be organized to create guilt by association. If you are wired to hopped-up American cop-show TV as you sit around the station house, you go out to find it. Eyes bulging, fists bunched, weapons primed. The key actor is the cameraman. The sequence of events leading to the death of the unfortunate newspaper-seller Ian Tomlinson was revealed, not through the sworn statements of officers, or dubious medical reports, but through an accumulation of scatter-footage from the mobile phones of people in the crowd.

  It’s almost impossible now to walk, by back ways, from Shoreditch to Dalston, Hoxton to Victoria Park, without encountering some species of film crew. Blood-splash forensics. Fashion shoot. Soap opera. Certain pubs, certain stretches of towpath, abandoned hospitals, are quotations: ghost milk. Invasive caravans of wardrobe and catering. Hurtful bursts of light. The priestly attendants in puffa-jacket black. The episodes of yawning, aggressive, public boredom.

  I led Teh to a number of the standard Hackney photo opportunities, locations distressed and diminished by over-recording, but he would have none of it. ‘Light’s wrong.’ Most of the characters who turn up, flustered, between commissions, are only too happy to catch a bit of fence, a shimmer of canal, and away. Not this man, not at all: we weren’t even close. He didn’t touch his camera. And he asked no questions. Rather, I interrogated him. He told me about his Chinese coal-mine project, the coking plants at night. Dystopian realism at its most extreme. In a collection called Dark Clouds he demonstrated how the neon flicker and the hard bright surfaces of the Chinese economic miracle were rooted in coal dirt, sweating grey walls, brutally circumscribed lives.

  I offered him, more as a trial shot than anything else, since he was reluctant to reveal any notion of what he was after, the canal bridge where Tony Lambrianou dumped the car keys after the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. You get water-shadows rippling on the curve of bricks. You get the immaculately painted sign for RON’S EELS AND SHELL FISH. (You don’t get Ron himself. His van has probably been declared a health risk; the pubs he serviced are boarded up.) The sign is a commissioned irony, an artwork trading on nostalgia. You get a slab of corrugated fencing: TOWPATH CLOSED. And you get the recent development, Adelaide Wharf, part-occupied and presenting rectangles of furtive electricity, blues, reds, oranges, to contrast with the dying of the afternoon.

  Cat and Mutton Bridge? The view towards the gas-holders? Not worth breaking our stride, for even a moment. Development spasms in Broadway Market and along the canal were discreet, sensitively achieved, when compared with what Teh had witnessed in pre-Olympic Beijing, the banishments to remote tower blocks in gaps between orbital motorways. Communities based around courtyards, teeming with noise and life, were dispersed. One example of the old way was left, as heritage for tourists. Teh met an old man who travelled back, every week, to sit in the street, in the space where his former home had once stood. The new stadiums were unused. They had served their propaganda purpose.

  Not one shot had been taken. This was becoming interesting. I was pushed to go beyond the story I had been peddling so long, stones stamped flat by repetition. There was a sentence in a piece I’d written for the London Review of Books about how the Victorian cobbles near the canal survived because we never developed a revolutionary class angry enough to tear them out, to smash the windows of council offices and police stations. The editors, passing no comment, cut the whole thing.

  A cyclist, coming out of the canal-bridge café where they mended punctures and served ethical coffee, was heading south towards the City protests. ‘Basically, they’ve put all their eggs in the carbon-trading basket,’ he said. To a slim blonde girl in black bodysuit, trotting off to London Fields, a spotted-Dalmatian accessory at her heels.

  The thing Teh noticed, coming to Beijing from London, was that security around the Olympic Stadium was far more lax. The Chinese were less anxious about cameras, passes and papers. He was not searched with the same frequency. In the evening, he found a themed comedy restaurant, where local schoolteachers and tourists mingled, wearing Mao masks and having a good time, unmolested.

  By taking the decision to walk down a street I barely knew, I blundered into what Teh needed. Later, examining prints from Dark Clouds, I understood why Wharf Place triggered an immediate response. The Malaysian-born photographer liked the trick of diminishing perspective, a domesticated avenue closed off with a monster cooling tower. The eastern horizon of Wharf Place was end-stopped by skeletal gas-holders. I was positioned, mid-street, like one of the ‘shadowy figures out of science fiction’ critics located in Teh’s portfolio. He was a ghost hunter, nudging those on the point of disappearance against backdrops of dying industries, soulless architecture. Manifestations of transition, decay, impermanence, took his fancy. The twenty-storey tower block that emerges, overnight, from a swamped paddy field. The titles of Teh’s shows underline a fascination with entropy: ‘The Vanishing: Altered Landscapes and Displaced Lives on the Yangtze River’, ‘Noctambulations’, ‘Blackpool Weekend’. From Blackpool it’s a small step to Morecambe Bay and the deleted footprints of the drowned cockle pickers. Teh has been described by Christian Caujolle as ‘a curious flâneur who searches China for elements of his identity and roots’.

  Ada Place, a nondescript tributary on the Hackney border was a set which, being unvisited, had much to offer. It is always more revealing to investigate the out-takes of regeneration, cul-de-sacs excised from the story. GLASS CUT TO SIZE was the boast of a bygone era. Roll-up shutters were dressed with five padlocks in a vertical line. Ian Teh didn’t need to ask; I stood beside the wavy metal curtain while the portrait that went into the magazine was framed. Bald man in blue shirt, at attention, beside a locked door, so tall that it goes out of the frame.

  Comment voyez-vous le futur de Londres?

  Je suis pessimiste: Londres s’enfonce dans les dettes et les projects de
développement inutiles … Je ne suis pas porteur d’espoir, vous voyez, mais à mon âge on ne réinvente pas la résistance, et on ne change pas sa manière de vivre.

  This unresolved hinterland, between canal, gas-holders, and half-built flats, was the perfect ground for our casual encounter. The real dramas of the day, blood, bruises, death, were happening elsewhere. Here was an ordinary absence of the kind that is often to be found within earshot of battle. Cardboard box factories closed down, council agencies with bright blue walls newly opened for business. A gaunt Lithuanian church heavy with flowers. A traffic island called ‘The Oval’ in the middle of nothing. A squatted, emptied, re-squatted hulk, choked in ivy. A coach garage. A wall cartoon, now vanished, not by Banksy, but one of his imitators. A stencilled angel, dying, or slumped over an anvil monument. In the angel’s left hand is a startling red rose.

  ‘I imagine my work,’ Teh said, ‘as a series of short films made out of stills. I want to encourage the viewer to take the narrative beyond the limits of my frame.’

  After this excursion – the photographer drifted off, job done, before I noticed he had gone – I looked at familiar things from a different angle. I didn’t walk home along the towpath, but on the road beside it. I took time to peep inside the iron foundry and to investigate the little tangled gardens at the back of the solitary row of cottages.

  In Broadway Market, I stopped to restick a notice that had drooped from the wall, to press down the sticky hinges: ‘Learn Chinese With A Private Tutor’. Rain-warped colour images, crudely printed text. There were little strips you could tear off with the contact details for Grace. I think I might just do that, contact Grace, as my preparation for a journey that will never happen. Beijing emerging out of Hackney Wick. Hackney councillors drinking toasts in the Forbidden City. A DVD from the Film Shop in Broadway Market: a Chinese remake of De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief offering ‘a strong political statement about the corrupting power of capitalism’.

  Retribution

  As soon as I put the phone down, and still in shock, I knew that my Hackney book would benefit from a deluge of council-inspired publicity. The poor librarian deputed to give me the bad news kept insisting that it was not her fault, there was nothing she could do, orders from above. My first reaction was relief: one less promotional outing to prepare and deliver, more time to write. This gig came under the heading of duty, as any trek to Stoke Newington must. Church Street is so reasonable, so well stocked with righteous organic outlets and historical traces, that it is unendurable. There is an excellent bookshop on Stoke Newington High Street. I’d be performing there, close to the pub, with an audience you could rely on to be engaged and lively to the point of falling-down drunk. You have some great conversations, with German incomers, walking home after Stokie events, as they interrogate you about where the famous Dalston lesbian quarter is to be found. Where are the fashionistas of the moment? Is that Gilbert or George marching towards the kebab house?

  The library people were doing their best to inspire readers and writers by initiating a series of events, to prove that the culture of this place grew out of a long and honourable tradition of debate and dissent. Inherited awkwardness. Work produced in the teeth of neglect, incomprehension, yawning indifference. Daniel Defoe endured a session in the stocks. Edgar Allan Poe recovered from the nightmare of a Stoke Newington education by inventing American Gothic and drinking himself to death. I got off lightly. Being barred from Stoke Newington is like landing on the get-out-of-gaol card in Monopoly. I had been there before, in a hall at the back of the building, talking about neglected Hackney authors: Roland Camberton, Alexander Baron and the rest. Now I was one of them, promoted to the status of non-person. I took it as a tribute, after all this time, to be thought worthy of being invited to leave the premises. It’s a tough act to get yourself banned these days and I had pulled it off three months before my book was even published.

  ‘So sorry. The launch is off. You’ve dissed the Olympics.’

  My docu-novel closed with the erection of the blue fence around the Olympic Park. It’s true that the shadow of the grand project hung over the borough and the backstory, but the impetus was personal: how I came to be here, why I stayed. What qualities were particular to Hackney and why were they worth celebrating? The council censors were gifted with second sight. Anticipating slights before they had been delivered, they got their retaliation in first.

  Kim Wright, corporate director of community services, a woman charged with ‘improving the quality of life for all’, ordered the library to withdraw my invitation. As public relations go this was a disaster. If the launch in the Stoke Newington Library had taken place, there would have been around thirty people present. A plastic beaker of publisher-sponsored plonk, some discussion of local issues. Reference made to the fact that, just down the road in the council offices, a wall of surveillance screens in a secure basement was monitoring the renegade comings and goings of the citizens of Hackney. With some of the funding for this Orwellian system coming straight out of library funds and the rest from council tax. ‘At the forefront of directorate thinking,’ says Wright’s mission statement, ‘is the maximizing of the many opportunities presented by the 2012 Olympics.’

  The next morning I was on the Today programme with John Humphrys. By that evening, I’d done two television interviews and fielded many calls from the broadsheets. I’d chatted with an instantly concerned Vanessa Feltz. The ‘banned’ book had acquired a momentum that would carry it, even at £20, through six printings.

  The one thing, perhaps the only thing, New Labour did well, was spin. Their legacy was built on it. How could they be so crass? The two institutions to animate the English middle classes, the bloggers and letter-writers, are libraries and allotments. Now the cultural panzers of the Olympics had trashed them both. How could they have got it so wrong? The main players were out of town, lapping up Chinese hospitality, on a fact-finding excursion. Terence Blacker, writing in the Independent, called the library episode ‘censorship Beijing would be proud of’. So the trip to the city of the six orbital motorways wasn’t wasted.

  The Hackney press office took the phone off the hook. They stuck by the favoured New Labour tactic of putting nobody up, saying nothing, denying nothing. Eventually, a statement was released: it was policy that controversial subjects – they mentioned stem-cell research and Afghanistan – could not be discussed on council property. It was a duty of care to see that Hackney libraries remain controversy-free, purged of topics that might inflame the volatile reading groups of Stoke Newington.

  By now the other political parties, sensing a major own goal, were getting in on the act. Munira Mirza, the Director of Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy for the Mayor of London, describing the cancelled launch as a ‘bizarre attack on free speech’, called for the ban to be rescinded. ‘We may not agree with Mr Sinclair’s view of the 2012 Olympics, but we defend his right to express his opinions without fear of censure. The Olympics are strong enough to withstand scrutiny and criticism without Hackney’s heavy-handed tactics.’ The Liberals in Islington, visibly gloating, offered alternative venues, emphasizing their generosity with a battery of hand-squeezing officials and accompanying photographers. In a sense, the council prophecy was fulfilled: for months I was condemned to do nothing except talk about the Olympics, the book I had published totally deformed by its presentation as a social critique.

  Distrust of the politics of mendacity, the suspicion that ugly truths were being concealed behind the Olympic smokescreen, seemed to be confirmed by the absurdity of the library ban: that highly paid officials could spend so much energy on so trivial an affair. One adviser, it emerged, had warned of the consequences of the prohibition, how the media would fall on it. The advice was spurned in the thirst for retribution, making it clear to malcontents and naysayers that they would be up against the wrath of an all-powerful bureaucracy, happy to be in agreement, for once, with central government.

  It took the Hackney C
itizen, an independent, self-funded freesheet, to get to the truth of this affair. Using the Freedom of Information Act, they uncovered a series of emails exposing the pronouncements of the council as misinformation or blatant lies. The ban was directly to do with the Olympics, nothing else. And the decision to implement it, whatever the cost, came from Jules Pipe, the Mayor of Hackney.

  Two journalists, Josh Loeb and Keith Magnum, recovered an email, dated 24 September 2008, from Polly Rance, Head of Media.

  It is clear that we cannot allow the event to go ahead. I have discussed this with the Mayor and his direction was clear.

  He feels, as I do, that we should not host an event on Council premises promoting a book which has an overtly contaversial [sic] and political (albeit non-party) agenda, and actively promotes an opinion which contradicts our aims and values as an organisation – in this case the 2012 games and legacy …

  If pushed we can explain that we do not want it to appear that the Council is in anyway condoning or endorsing the content of Sinclair’s book. I have discussed the PR ramifications of this with Jules Pipe and he is comfortable with this approach … It is a position he would feel comfortable defending.

  The wise ones of Hackney convened a meeting for ‘book-launch risk analysis’. The docu-novel, unread, and as yet months away from publication, is found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics. Unaligned. And therefore controversial. The council’s own decisions, to rip down terraces, vandalize Victorian theatres, construct 52-storey blocks, are not political: they are strategic and never taken without full public consultation, numerous forms on offer, big tents in the park. Before they do precisely what they were always going to do, go with the development package: blitz, banish, build. The dust never settles. Travellers are invited to keep travelling. It is gratifying that, despite the manifold problems facing a sprawling metropolitan borough, with all its cultural diversity, poverty, crime, our councillors can make time for a debate on the tactical implications of cancelling a reading in a Stoke Newington library.