Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Read online

  By the Same Author

  FICTION

  White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Downriver

  Radon Daughters

  Slow Chocolate Autopsy (with Dave McKean)

  Landor’s Tower White Goods

  Dining on Stones

  DOCUMENTARY

  The Kodak Mantra Diaries

  Lights Out for the Territory

  Liquid City (with Marc Atkins)

  Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein)

  Crash (on Cronenberg/Ballard fi lm)

  Dark‐Lanthorns

  Sorry Meniscus

  London Orbital: A Walk around the M25

  The Verbals (interview with Kevin Jackson)

  Edge of the Orison

  London: City of Disappearances (editor)

  POETRY

  Back Garden Poems

  Muscat’s Würm

  The Birth Rug

  Lud Heat

  Suicide Bridge

  Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems

  Jack Elam’s Other Eye

  Penguin Modern Poets 10

  The Ebbing of the Kraft

  Conductors of Chaos (editor)

  Saddling the Rabbit

  The Firewall: Selected Poems

  Buried at Sea

  Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

  A Confidential Report

  IAIN SINCLAIR

  With original prints and drawings by

  OONA GRIMES

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2009

  Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2009

  Prints and drawings copyright © Oona Grimes, 2009

  The Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193099-2

  i.m. Bill Griffiths, Ian Breakwell, Paul Burwell

  Contents

  THE CYCLE

  London Fields

  This Property

  Down from Highgate thro’ Hackney

  PARK BARBERS

  Gore Road

  Charlotte Street

  Lauriston Road

  ASYLUM

  De Beauvoir Road

  WASTE

  Rain on the Pavements (and Hair)

  Middleton Road

  Kingsland Waste

  The Flycatcher of Graham Road

  Conrad’s Monkey

  Dalston Lane

  The German Hospital

  DOMESTIC EXOTIC

  Albion Drive

  The Triangle

  Stonebridge Estate

  Queensbridge Road

  Holly Street

  St Philip’s Road

  Dalston Lane

  BRITISH SOUNDS

  Mare Street

  Millfields

  Kingsland High Street

  Shacklewell Lane

  Sympathy for the Devil

  Montague Road

  Eleanor Road

  Empire

  MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS

  Victoria Park

  Hobo’s Relics

  Hackney Hospital

  The Circuit of Morning

  Chisenhale Road

  Golden Lane

  Stewart Home

  The Mole Man

  Vyner Street

  Swanny

  SCRIBES AND WITNESSES

  Will Self

  Ken Worpole and Alexander Baron

  Oona Grimes, Dr John Dee and Moby‐Dick

  Nigel Fountain and Marc Karlin

  Douglas Lyne and Henry Cohen

  WICK AND FLAME

  The Lord Napier

  Jock McFadyen

  Old Ford

  Hackney Brook

  The Blue Fence

  Acknowledgements

  THE CYCLE

  Geography is destiny.

  – James Ellroy

  London Fields

  We are the rubbish, outmoded and unrequired. Dumped on wet pavings and left there for weeks, in the expectation of becoming art objects, a baleful warning. Nobody pays me to do this. It is my own choice, to identify with detritus in a place that has declared war on unconvinced recyclers while erecting expensive memorials to the absence of memory. This is a borough that has dedicated itself to obliterating the meaning of shame.

  I am coming west off the avenue, under a canopy of London plane trees old enough to appear in sepia postcards: coming home, at the end of an afternoon walk. Councils of sleek crows. Magpies imitating road drills. It’s a habit I can’t break, the habit of Hackney: writing and walking, thirty years in one house. Thirty years of misreading the signs, making fictions: with a bounce in the step, cartilage audibly complaining, like the electric coffee‐grinder our children remember. And we have forgotten. Five miles of canal bank, Victoria Park, heights of Homerton; running over the day’s work, half‐noticing revisions in the fabric of things. But returning always, as light fails, to the same kitchen, a meal in preparation. The undervalued dispensation of domestic life.

  Lines of trees outrank us, their bulk is astonishing. Skins encrusted with witness: patches of green over grey, over fleshy orange. Scars, carcinogenic lumps. Hawser roots suck at dirt. The avenues have been set, as we discover from old maps, in strict patterns, an arcane geometry. Aisles of grappling Neo‐Romantic branches. A blood meadow: London Fields. Public ground for the fattening of herds and flocks, Norfolk geese, before they are driven, by very particular routes, to Smithfield slaughter. Chartered markets service drovers, incomers. They exist to peddle plunder and to fleece the unwary.

  I’ve grown quite fond, lately, of that sculpture, a civic intervention, at the south‐east corner of the Fields, near the drinkers’ table; across from Sheep Lane and Beck Road, where the official‐unofficial artists live. The professional alcoholics, out at first light, string dogs and blue bags, act as courtiers to a lifeless Pearly King and Queen; who sit, silent witnesses to so much agitation and hallucinatory folly. Crowned with bowler hats, eyes made red, they offer dishes of fruit from generous laps. A frozen tide encloses them, sea‐pebbles, pebbledash. Mosaic altars have been decorated by schoolkids: lobsters, flying fish, crabs. In beds of lavender. Buddhas of the city, the statues
survive, untargeted by fundamentalists, iconoclasts. The oracular indifference of this rounded couple is a virtue. They are assembled from chips and splinters of bright tile: reconstituted damage. The ruins of demolished terraces, which once ran to the edge of the Fields, have formed themselves into twinned, male and female, votive presences. They are authentically regal, divinely righteous, impervious to bribes or flattery. And they have adapted, graciously, to where they are, among rippling concrete dunes, troughs of hardy perennials, a backdrop of public housing. A small flock of grey sheep attend them, backs mossy with velvet. The whole tableau, its origins obscure, is being quietly absorbed into nature: ‘economic migrants from an Antoni Gaudí theme park’. As a visiting, over‐bright student said to me.

  Going west, I dodge through the stutter of evening traffic and into Shrubland Road, at the point where it splits off into Albion Drive. A French culture pundit, digital camera in hand, tracking across from the nearest Underground station – which is not so near – was excited by the faded sign hanging outside the doomed public house, the Havelock. Plenty of Hackney old‐timers, I discover as I conduct interviews for this book, navigate their memory‐terrain by way of pubs. Do you remember? Being on first‐name terms with the vampire landlady? Crowblack fright wig, purple talons, heavy gold manacles on thin wrist. Villainies of yesteryear: smoked ghosts propping up afternoon bars, sentimental about dead gangsters, shoplifting grannies. Holloway Nan. Shirley Pitts. Or revived literary societies in back rooms? Politics, conspiracies, pool. The Havelock is an anachronism. The coalfire fug, dirty glasses and recidivist linoleum. These old brown boozers are London fictions in embryo, waiting for the right ventriloquist: Patrick Hamilton, Derek Raymond, T. S. Eliot. Listening is also writing. First the pubs, then the petrol stations: they are declared redundant.

  Havelock, the face on the board, is now insulted by accidental tower blocks, an opportunistic sprawl of human storage facilities. By new natives, Catholics, Muslims. In life, he was a Bible‐beating Baptist. ‘Deeply religious, a stern disciplinarian,’ so they say. A baronet, India hand. Afghan campaign of 1839–40. The first Punjab War. He commanded a division in the Persian expedition of 1856–7. Before dying of dysentery. Which might offer a clue as to the origin of the pub sign that fascinates the Frenchman – who shows me his digital capture, demanding an explanation.

  There are two Havelocks: on one side a white man in dress uniform, braids and buckles; and on the other, a black version of the same, the negative of the original print. This is like some anticolonial voodoo icon out of Haiti. That’s what the Frenchman thinks. Havelock, the unbending officer of empire, revenger of Afghan outrages, blacks up to confront Hackney’s shanty‐town sprawl. Bowels excavated, he is white as a worm. Erased from history. A man forgotten. And a pub that is about to become a minor property speculation: aspirational flats with slender, bicycle‐decorated balconies and an ecologically approved deficiency in parking space.

  There is no sense of regeneration here. Thank god. Not yet. Business as usual. Cornershop steel‐shuttered like Belfast and bristling with handwritten warnings to schoolkids. Hooded chemical brokers start young. And finish young too, many of them. But with old faces, fixed, incapable of registering surprise. Urban planners have tossed off a traffic‐calming zone, a low brick enclosure where citizens can shoot the breeze, coming together, informally, to debate the issues of the day. A tub of mud functions as repository for bright cans and yellow cartons with mouths agape like rat traps modelled in soft cheese. There is a buzz about this end of Shrubland Road, the mid‐Victorian real‐estate speculation by a relative of Cecil Rhodes. Terraces knocked up fast to the design of a man called Catling. The local authorities, back then, waived planning permissions, amputated portions of common land, the fringe of London Fields, and covered the ground with reefs of private housing. Albion does drive. The suburban pretension of that title is fully justified. A through‐route fairground ride of humps and potholes that allows the statutory authorities to have it both ways: a cash cow of parking fines, road taxes, congestion charges and a method of crippling motor vehicles by neglect of the surfaces on which they are forced to operate.

  Taking the right fork, into Albion Drive, brings me under the scratchy abundance of a fig tree that overhangs the pavement, heavy with sour‐green grenades, polyps, empurpled fruit testicles. As twilight footsteps pad closer, ever closer, I suck the nectars, relishing pointless fecundity. In Hackney, we walk in a constant audition of sound, safe in the membrane of previous experience: the bad thing has not happened. Not yet, never. We are still here, still around; we must have made the right decision, crossed the road at the optimum time, avoided eye contact, jumped back from the kerb before the siren‐screaming cop car rocketed over the humpbacked bridge. Motorcyclists slow significantly, sizing up our bags, checking on mobile‐phone activity. Cycle bandits, out of nowhere, are at our shoulder. They nudge. Blade carving through straps. This is nothing, a toll on the privilege of living here; a community charge that sometimes, infrequently, steps over the mark: death. No longer a name on the electoral register, a statistic.

  Preoccupied, contained in the dream of place, my harmless excursion, one walk fading into the footprints of the last, ruptures. With the breeze of the savage downward stroke, I swerve just enough to deflect the main force of the blow. Pain is nothing: a caressing slice into the skin of a balding cranium, no cerebellum‐denting impact. It’s a paper cut. Nothing, nothing at the time. A shock, when it happens on safe ground. And at the precise point, Anna later remarks, where paving slabs give way to tarmac, lumpy porridge from an Irish cauldron. Broader avenues, like our immediate neighbour, Middleton Road, domicile of various Hackney councillors, are paved throughout.

  I have been stabbed in the head, that’s all. No ice pick, a kiss. Late afternoon, late autumn. Creatures of the shadows ducking under the radar. My reaction is immediate, instinctive, foolish. I grab for the youth. I think, strange as it seems, that he has stubbed out a light bulb on my naked skull. Lights out. A necessary warning against meditating on pub signs, statuary, cattle trails. My assailant is a justified critic. A guerrilla editor. He’s away, between cars: into the Fields Estate, a warren. Anaemic brickwork with stains of yellow dribble from overflow pipes. Replacement windows that need to be replaced. A blue door. And in this portal, blocking access, the darkness into which my attacker has vanished, I come up against an awkward interference of ASBOs, all shapes and sizes, colours and ages. Unrepentant whites. Pre‐Dagenham. A last hurrah for petty, malicious, lumpen aggravation. But there’s no future in it, indiscriminate violence. Cash crime. They need a business plan, a sponsor. They have not yet been branded by the council as a ‘negative youth affiliation’. Nobody puts them on television without a cellophane carpet of flowers, crucified teddy bears and handwritten poems.

  It’s my own fault, for being visible in my difference, and too ancient to be moving through this place at this hour. My history is all used up. No point, this rush of blood, in grabbing anyone, dishing out unwarranted retribution. Rage is a stupid affliction. A man, a couple of years short of sixty, reverting to jungle‐law slapstick. Idiotic. Insane. Unless it becomes part of a book.

  In the bath, when I washed off the dry blood, I found a delicate residue of eggshell. Some of the shards had to be picked out of the wound with tweezers. The boy, my assailant, had a very unusual method of preparing an omelette. A sharp tap would have done; my skull, weathered by long exposure to Hackney’s microclimate, is hard as a cycle helmet. But I assembled enough of the tiny pieces to establish that the weapon was not organic. No straw‐nested bullet from a farmers’ market. The viscous slime that ran down my collar wasn’t brain matter, just past‐its‐sell‐by yolk.

  Next day I uncovered the background of this apparently meaningless event. The gang were car‐jackers who pelted vehicles, while they made their rat runs down Albion Drive, with eggs. Windscreens were smeared as drivers slowed for the first in the chain of sleeping policemen. Motorists would be t
empted to give chase, while a quick‐handed lad, at the blind side, reached inside to snatch the radio, mobile phone or disability disc. It was my bad luck to chance along at the end of a flat day. These scams have a limited life. It’s pretty tough being a villain in Hackney. There’s too much competition. But the lightbulb moment of the egg on the head was valuable. I knew then, blood and soap and albumen, that it was time to start thinking about the territory where my life had formed and unravelled. It wouldn’t be around much longer.

  And one more thing: as I lifted my head, after the blow, I noticed an owl fluffing out its feathers in the cracked window of a derelict house that nobody had any good reason, as yet, to demolish.

  This Property

  April 2007. You have to start somewhere.

  Anna.

  In bed. Launching into Winter in Madrid by C. J. Sansom. She says she hates it when books open with dates, because you have to remember them, remember where you are. The place, the period. I’m reading Stewart Home, Memphis Underground. It’s one of those slender Jiffy‐bag paperbacks that contain much more than their physical dimensions seem to promise. I recognize a few of the riffs, about Arthur Machen, mystical geometries, pathways out of London. I think I wrote them, but I can’t be sure. In Home everything spirals back on itself in a pathological accounting of bands, books, names, streets. An obsessive reworking of episodes at which I was present, but which I failed to copyright. And even if I did write it, who cares, as the manic Home slashes, grabs, mugs his way through the canon. He has grasped the key mode of contemporary art, theft. Repetition. Keep on saying it until somebody pays you some attention. Only the familiar is familiar.

  I have been working on a Hackney book for a while now, heaping up insane quantities of material, logging interviews without number: forty years. And I haven’t achieved the starting point, that impossible first sentence. The guiding principle was a quote from William Blake: ‘Tho’ obscured, this is the form of the Angelic land.’