Author Profile
Of course, London has
undergone a series of sweeping
changes since Sinclair
arrived—from the socially and
economically challenging ’70s
to the Thatcher era and Tony
Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” What
Sinclair claims is distinctive
and troubling about the latest
round of changes is that the
guiding force in the city is not
its inhabitants, or even its
political leaders, but rather its
property developers and
buyers. He sees the developers as pricing
more and more people out of London while
transforming it into a place ever less like
other parts of Britain and more like other
increasingly gentrified and touristed
metropolises, such as Barcelona; tiny flats
sell for eye-watering prices, largely to overseas buyers who neither inhabit nor rent
them out but simply hold them as
investments.
Sinclair feels that “civic memory and
cultural memory are now under siege.”
The Shard, a luxury hotel and office
building that is London’s tallest structure, looms over the former site of the
Marshalsea, the debtors’ prison to which
the young Charles Dickens’s father was
confined. Sinclair fears that London’s history—which has provided so much
inspiration to him and to so many other
writers, artists, and musicians—is irrevocably slipping away, along with the
“sense that you could discover things”
just by walking and looking.
While Sinclair blames unrestricted
property development for many of the
changes he most deplores, he also feels
that many Londoners, particularly
younger people, engage very differently
with the urban environment than those
of previous generations. Perhaps unsur-
prisingly, he considers technology to be
responsible for some of these unwelcome
changes, arguing that “the smartphone
has killed agenda-less walking” because
it tethers its user to the virtual rather than
the physical world and makes it much
harder for one to become immersed in his
or her surroundings. As a dedicated
pedestrian, he is not pleased by the dra-
matically increased popularity of urban
cycling; to him, bicycles “wage open war-
fare with flânerie,” forcing walkers off
pavements and disrupting their passage
through the city.
Is there any hope, then, that London
can resist what seems like an unstoppable
tide of property speculation and hyper-
capitalism? Sinclair seems to be of two
minds on this issue. On the one hand,
visiting Munster Square, a shabby corner
of central London as yet untouched by
developers, he fears the advent of “predators
looking to exploit these kinds of places to
make a fast buck” without regard for the
needs and wants of the residents. He is
not convinced that London’s current
demographic has the “energies” necessary
for a “successful resistance,” particularly
as so many people seem to him to exist in
“a completely electronic world.”
Sinclair’s work, however, continues to
offer glimpses of individuals who are lit-
erally and figuratively marginal in the
modern city but continue to exist within
it. As with the man in The Last London
whom Sinclair names the Vegetative
Buddha, who sits unmoving in a public
park near Sinclair’s home, these individ-
uals somehow find a way to withdraw
from London’s present without leaving
it—to “let the city flow through them.”
These people, he claims, “anchor the
city.” Seeing the dispossessed encamped
in a small public park near the Marshalsea
site, he predicts that, when the Shard
“shatters and is replaced by something
bigger and brighter, the wooden benches
and the people perched on them will still
be here.”
Whatever the fate of London, Sinclair
intends that his next work will take him
thousands of miles away. He plans to
write about his great-grandfather, a
Scottish botanist employed in the 1890s
by the Peruvian Corporation of London.
Reading his ancestor’s journals, which
recount in detail his encounters with the
indigenous people of Peru, Sinclair was
amazed to find that “his style is very like
my own.” He plans to travel soon to Latin
America with his daughter, where he will
work to excavate his family’s past, per-
haps much as he has for decades done for
his adopted city. ■
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Natalie Zacek teaches American studies at the
University of Manchester.
Clockwise from l.: The “Buddha” of Haggerston
Park, the Regent’s Canal, anarchist Jesus graffiti