Publishers Weekly - October 30, 2017

Iain Sinclair and his wife, Anna, bought their East London house in 1968 for £ 3,000. At that time, it had an outdoor toilet, and baths involved heating water on the stove and filling a tin tub. Many of the surrounding properties were both uninhabited and uninhabitable. Those that were occupied housed the working-class white Britons known as East Enders, along with a smattering of artists and bohemians like the Sinclairs. Today, Sinclair refers to his street as Millionaires’ Row, a symbol of changes to his beloved city that he finds alarming.

Sinclair, of Scottish heritage, grew up in a small town in Wales and went to college in Dublin. But his life and work are inextricably linked to London, a city whose history, landscape, and culture are subjects he has pursued through poems, novels, films, and, most famously, half a dozen works of impressionistic nonfiction, beginning with 1996’s Lights Out for the Territory. An avid walker, he has organized his perambulations around the M25 ring road (2002’s London Orbital), the site of the 2012 London Olympics (2012’s Ghost Milk), and the Overground rail system (2015’s London Overground), as well as his home borough of Hackney (2008’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire). But now, as the title of his new book, The Last London (Oneworld, Jan. 2018) intimates, Sinclair says he feels that he has nothing more to say about the city in which he has lived and written for almost half a century.

Why is he leaving behind the source of his ongoing creative inspiration? Sinclair explains that the city has undergone such dramatic changes in recent years that to him it is now, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, an “unreal city,” transformed into “a construct ever more fictional.” His understanding of London has always been grounded in a “difficult architecture of books,” whereas to write about the city today, he claims, he would need “a fast-twitch, in-the-now consciousness,” because the landscape is changing so quickly and so dramatically, and its transformation is erasing those traces of an older city that persisted over centuries.

When Sinclair first came to London in the 1960s, he says, it was still possible to find “portals back in time”: there were still parts of the city that were “quite Dickensian”— where heaps of rubble from WWII bomb damage remained, cars were few, and many houses, such as his own, still lacked indoor toilets. In his first novel, 1987’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, a group of book dealers in modern East London are drawn into the anxieties of the Victorian city with its cholera outbreaks and the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper.