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.
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Beyond Recognition
Iain Sinclair’s
The Last London
is his final
word on the
city that has
fueled his
imagination for
50 years
BY NATALIE ZACEK
f twr i D in—
bb
e s r fe n m n
ucs sko
. hi v ’s
a e, ae n
i m t dn nn
a t es i t t
h a t eak t o o i
ack er