I’ve mentioned Iain Sinclair on here before I think. He’s a fine writer and his painstaking documentation of the complex layers and strands of London history and culture is something of great interest to me. The parts of London he most often writes about are the parts where I have my roots. The places I came from and frequently return to. I have a slightly uneasy love/hate relationship with the capital and it’s something that crops up in my work now and then if you look out for it.
Sinclair's latest book - Ghost Milk : Calling Time on the Grand Project - focuses on the River Lea Valley and the 2012 Olympic site. A " scorching 400 page diatribe...a literary polemic, full of dazzling phrases and angry denunciation". The site of the Olympic project is a place I knew very well. Marshgate Lane, Pudding Mill Lane, The Promenade and the toxic canals that dissected them. This is where I once rode my bike and climbed along the sewage pipes just as my father had done years before me. As an adult I frequently went back just to walk and draw and take photographs. It was perhaps the last real inner city wilderness and it was a place I felt very close to. Now it has been literally ring-fenced as the old fabric is swept away to make room for the shining gewgaw of the 2012 Olympic Games.
I could go on at length but better to read Sinclair.
"We are all suckling on this new chemical, this ghost milk, this substance that buffers between the old dream of London that I have and the computer generated, perfected, hard edged dream where nothing is what it looks like".
Ghost Milk will be available from 07/07/2011.
I love the images you have chosen - and the book sounds very interesting, particularly resonant as each time I've travelled into the Liverpool Street in the last few years I've seen the huge changes at the Olympic site unfold - now way beyond any earlier recognition. To my shame I've never read any Sinclair, but somebody also mentioned 'Lights Out For The Territory' to me - so perhaps I should take a look at both?
ReplyDeleteTheres something about urban wildernesses that make it worthwhile living in a city - or maybe I'm misremembering the fun i used to have on 'bomb sites' (never knew how many really were....) White Chapel, Scarlet Tracings is an interesting Iain Sinclair book....the lead character is apparently heavily and recognisably based on Reg King, the singer with The Action in his later days as an antiquarian book hunter
ReplyDeleteThanks C. Like the late Roger Deakin, Iain Sinclair is definitely one my 'good guys' and well worth checking out. I must admit that part of me is curious about what the place will eventually look like. The canal network is unique and with the right vision a bit of redevelopment could have made an extraordinary place. But I suspect that what we'll end up with will be more of the same off-the-peg, lowest tender regeneration that is 'transforming' cities up and down the country.
ReplyDeleteHi Bel Mondo. Yes, I remember bomb sites as well and I love urban wilderness but such is the grab for land and development I can't really think of any left now (suggestions welcome of course). Guess I'll just have to head for Detroit...
What a brilliant term: Ghost Milk. Thanks for the introduction to Iain Sinclair. Perhaps it comes from age and viewing the past through rose coloured glasses, but new developments always seem to lack the soul of what's gone before, or maybe it is us who gives a place its soul through our interactions and subsequent memories of it....
ReplyDeleteHi Rob: yeah, I wish I had thought of it. Yes, with advancing years the old spectacles do tend to get rosier and rosier it's true. But what I get fed up with is not new development per se - which can be exciting and refreshing - but too much of it (in this country at least, though I suspect it's much the same around the world) is driven mainly by the desire for large profits and very little else.
ReplyDeleteAgreed! And your suspicions are correct. Vancouver went through the experience for last years Winter Olympics, and while there were some excellent infrastructure initiatives (of great benefit to a young city), tax-payers were left holding the bag after the city took over housing projects for the games (lots of finger pointing involved between developers, bureaucrats and councillors), and is now selling them off to recoup what costs they can. Ah, such is life...
ReplyDelete"lots of finger pointing involved between developers, bureaucrats and councillors" - haha the same old story. And we fall for it time after time!
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