The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  Unravelling riddles, treating street names and street furniture, marks on walls, aerosol revisions to hoardings, found fragments, objects or lists or letters, sodden playing cards, as pages torn from a lost book, identifies London as a detective story. A story with unlimited chapters and no resolution. The point being to find the inspiration for the next journey, a new beginning. Another shot at redemption.

  The Society of St Margaret was founded by John Mason Neale with the aim of providing prayer and charity for the marginalised, the invisibles of the city. The Dunloe Centre, occupying part of the Priory building, offers ‘Destitution Services’. Notices in English and Polish highlight a weekly ‘drop-in’ for the homeless. The ‘Refugee Council’ declares an interest. Perhaps the man on the bench comes from here? We impose connections in a futile attempt to find meaning in a maelstrom of possibilities. ‘Come and enjoy an afternoon of prayers and quiet reflection’, says a notice on the door of the Priory. But not now: ‘No service this week. Sisters holiday.’ Where do they go? The solitary walkers of a certain age tapping out the bounds of their obscure ministry.

  When Haggerston Park was a mere proposal, the latest ‘green lung’ promoted against post-war blight, a garden seeded from demolished terraces, the Reverend HA Wilson of St Augustine’s church, across the road from the Priory, opposed the scheme. He felt very strongly that the neighbourhood needed housing, not a park arranged like a boat. Sixty years later, the church has no vicar or social mission. Shoreditch beards wheel their bicycles to the door, in order to service their start-ups in a building dedicated to new digital theologies. The church loomed on the edge of the park, adapting to use as a performance space, a bar, a restaurant, a gallery, while the Children’s Hospital on the other side of Goldsmith’s Row was boarded up, in video limbo, waiting on the right development package.

  I heard that a group of eight stained-glass windows designed by Margaret Rope had been commissioned for St Augustine’s church. They were completed and installed between 1931 and 1947. The Gentle Author, who blogs on ‘Spitalfields Life’, a diary of place and persons, hymns the windows as ‘sublime works… depicting both saints of legend and residents of Haggerston with equal religious intensity’. I was persuaded by this notion, that figures encountered on streets, benches, canal paths, could be part of a submerged tradition, sanctified eccentricity; the crafting of lives into brilliantly coloured icons, actual icons, a focus for devotion, not the abasement of the term as applied to vanity-architecture stumps that have been around for five minutes, or any valiant British athlete who staggers on to the Olympic podium, to weep as required through the national anthem.

  ‘Miracles enacted in a recognisable East End environment,’ says the Gentle Author. Margaret Rope’s windows recover the scatter of London saints, names we barely notice on local landmarks. She transports their legendary deeds into the preoccupied streets of Hackney, Shoreditch and Whitechapel. St Leonard of Noblac was the patron saint of prisoners, especially chained prisoners held in severe duress in pits or lightless dungeons. In later life he retreated to the forest as a hermit, where some of those freed by his miraculous intervention sought out his den, to hang their manacles and chains on the sheltering branches. Noblac, trading on its association with Leonard, became a halt in the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela.

  It is said that there are 177 churches dedicated to the saint, but George Dance’s hypodermic spire at Shoreditch got the right man for its dedicatee: a parish of career criminals, hustlers, weekend ravers and paid-up professionals of violence. Out of the devastation of the V2 rockets, the City bomb sites, the tenements of Hoxton, poured the ghosted biographies of sharply-suited Cockney villains: petty pilfering from ruined homes and factories, scrapmetal in prams, old man on the run from the military police, deserted mum with heart of gold; could-have-been-a-contender boxing, protection rackets in the dance halls and markets, playing crazy (and meaning it) to avoid National Service, glasshouse to madhouse; gangland affiliations (and treacheries) among warring brothers, fitted up by Old Bill, the Scrubs, Parkhurst, and a comfortable afterlife smoothing over tall tales for bent coppers and gullible media groupies. Among many others, in the shadow of St Leonard’s spire, the Frankish saint lent his name to Leonard John ‘Lenny’ McLean of Hoxton: on-the-cobbles bruiser, doorman enforcer, author, television presenter, small businessman and blacksuit pallbearer at celebrity funerals in Bethnal Green. ‘The hardest man in Britain.’

  In Margaret Rope’s saturated window, St Leonard strikes off the shackles of a bearded vagrant penitent. A red Number 6 double-decker bus pushes north. The spire of Shoreditch Church penetrates a heavenly chamber in which one of the parishioners is taking communion. It’s like that epiphany David Jones remembered in the First War, the furtive vision of a Catholic priest giving the sacrament by candlelight in a barn. In Rope’s Shoreditch window, the ritual is a glimpse of a glimpse from a secret chamber. Her emblematic figures chime with the crusading knights and threatened Pre-Raphaelite maidens Jones drew for illustrated magazines during his period of war service.

  When the Thatcherite realities of the 1980s began to bite, that frontal assault on untidy parts of London weakened by adherence to discredited myths of community, St Augustine’s church in Hackney Road was decommissioned. And Margaret Rope’s coloured windows were removed, replaced by plain glass.

  The Gentle Author visited St Saviour’s Priory where the walking nuns found sanctuary for two of the banished saints, Paul and Margaret. ‘Both glowed with rich colour,’ the blogger reported. Paul’s transformative vision, the whiteout of epileptic seizure, happens beneath the dome of his name church, Christopher Wren’s cathedral on the summit of Ludgate Hill. St Margaret delivers a model of the red-brick priory into the hands of John Mason Neale, the priest who founded the order in 1855. The sisters arrived in Spitalfields from Sussex in 1866 to help with the nursing of victims of the cholera epidemic.

  The six ‘missing’ windows, not required in the new Hackney, found sanctuary in Munster Square, in the crypt of a large church with six active communicants. Searching them out, yet another unplanned London detour, was the price I paid for brooding on a journey inspired by the seated man of Haggerston Park. I was inflicting my dubious projections on his traumatised and unreadable psychopathology.

  I had expected to strike south from the wisteria-bedizened bridge of the Haggerston boat to the river, but that is not what happened. That is not where the benched Buddha wanted me to go. Or where, for the sake of the story, this book, I wanted him to want me to go. He was thawing slowly, wrenched from the ice floes, packed in skins, feeding on his own fat, origin obliterated, floor puddled around him. But his hoarded indifference, his self-sufficient torment, pushed me into an act of reckless literalism: to locate the stain of the window in his stalled consciousness.

  After following the Regent’s Canal to the Islington tunnel, down a twitchy rule of coffee outlets, blocks of balconied flats, warehouse conversions, mosquito swarms of pinging cyclists, I loped downhill towards King’s Cross and the diesel-reef of Euston Road mainline stations.

  Munster Square, never previously visited, had lost its identity papers. It was trapped, without status, in Sickertian gloom, between railway tracks, Regent’s Park and the parallel rat-runs of Albany Street and Hampstead Road.

  Slogging past the stations, buffeted by mad heads-down soliloquists, bruised by invalid carriages, blocked by strings of unlicensed children and dogs, family units confused in tourist hell, deafened by sirens and the yelp and fret of cyclists hammering on white vans or sharing obscenities with U-turning cabbies, I was convinced that the city had reached the limits of human tolerance. We were supposed to be choking on fumes, but the cocktail of familiar pollution fed my frenzy: the cheapest high in town.

  Now the interior spaces, the anonymous hotel rooms of backstreet Euston were much closer to the paralysing melancholy of Sebald, with his maps and timetables, than the brown studies of Walter Sickert – who exposed sagging flesh behin
d heavy curtains, cratered goosefeather mattresses, dead-cigar Sunday afternoon ennui after laboured coitus in rented railside properties, and the unlanced boil of the shrouded sun dying in dirty windows. ‘I think how little we can hold in mind,’ Sebald said, when he found himself, yet again, frozen at a still point among the seething mob on the platform. ‘How everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.’

  Even if, as Sebald has it, the covert ways between Munster Square and Euston Station were lanced of meaning, the fading flares of extinguished lives gave a lift to my steps. There is a moment, when you least expect it, when some dim tributary, the equivalent of a lost London river, snags your frustration and carries you forward. There was a magnetic pull now between station and park, those grand white properties enhanced by the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen and the sullen green carpets and sticky doorways illuminated by broken-bottled flashbacks of John Healy’s The Grass Arena.Vagrants sprawled in purgatorial exhaustion in tolerated hollows between station and traffic. Hotels of passage, with suspiciously pastoral names, throbbed with sullen and illicit conjunctions. Smokers cupped their cigarettes and waited for death on the pavement. Charities and clinics rubbed along with uninviting cafés. Glass walls reared above the action in a Vorticist geometry of disputed dominance. This was not a suburb or a ghetto. It was a nowhere soon to be asked to explain itself, before being swallowed in the next overbudget utopia, authenticated by a major artwork.

  Unimproved by planners, Munster Square hung on in furtive obscurity, giving shelter, I hoped, to the stained-glass windows from St Augustine’s captured church. My barely formulated ambition was to reunite the windows with the dream of Haggerston. To walk through the stillness of the man on the bench, to ventriloquise his silence. So that, in one flash of surgical intervention, jigsaw fragments of colour would invade the grey fog of catatonic slumber. And, in exchange, something of his integrity, his absorption in the stew of place, would carry to the Munster Square crypt.

  The church is locked. Of course it is. That silence has to be protected. The chill. The damp. The guttered candles. St Mary Magdalene. The Magdalene from the red-brick wall of the Haggerston Priory. The Magdalene of railway hotels. But the gate is open and the steps down to the crypt are not barred. There is nobody at the desk, nobody at the tea bar.

  ‘Three and one, thirty-one. Four and nine, forty-nine. Three and six, thirty-six.’

  A voice from another room.

  ‘Two and eight, twenty-eight.’

  Are they stocktaking? An inventory of chairs? Are they numbering asylum seekers for transit? The crypt is dedicated to the Third Age Project. For once, I’ve come to the right place. A man pads out from the office. He pours tea into mugs that have been lined up along the bar. He knows when to add milk and a generous dole of sugar. Biscuits are counted on to the plate. They have a nice range of leaflets, if your Third Age eyes can bring the print into focus. Old people, inconvenient survivors, are kept below the pavement, under the church. Numbers. Statistics.

  ‘One and seven, seventeen.’

  Zumba Gold exercise for those 50+. It starts early, the Third Age. Third Age Cinema presents: Suffragette. ‘Carey Mulligan is simply astonishing, ditto Helena Bonham Carter. Meryl Streep has a very small cameo role. It is inconceivable to this reviewer that women had to endure such hardships to obtain the right to vote.’ Tactful screening time for those who don’t venture outside after twilight, 2–4pm. ‘£1.00 entrance includes refreshments.’

  Older Men’s Health. Free 6 week summer course. ‘If you complete the course you will get goods to the value of £5.’ Bullet points include: ‘The importance of exercise as you get older. Know your prostate. What are the top 5 causes of early deaths? Foods to avoid if you’re over 65.’

  ‘Biscuit? We can manage one spare.’

  I am, it appears, one of the regular pilgrims who find their way to the crypt to inspect these problematic stained-glass windows. There are as many as two a year, always with notebooks and that air of being quietly gobsmacked. The Margaret Rope windows are exhibited like paintings, not set into the wall. It required some subtlety, the man behind the tea bar told me, to explain to his Third Age members, few of whom were Christian, many of whom abhorred religious iconography, that these things should be considered as paintings hung in a gallery, bright and uplifting decorations. Depictions of London, like postcards: red buses, lads playing cricket, St Paul’s cathedral. Basically all the things you might now fall under suspicion for photographing.

  The bingo session, an ecumenical diversion for multicultural pensioners and prostate-checkers, decanted a shuffle of gamers, in a diminuendo of managed excitement, from an inner chamber. Winners had to be persuaded, prodded forward, to collect their glittering prizes: an Airwick air freshener and an outdated Cadbury’s bar.

  Before the thirsty crowd rushed the cooling mugs of tea and hoovered the plate of biscuits, the genial custodian, perhaps trying to draw me into his flock, outlined something of the history of St Mary Magdalene’s church. There had been two churches in the neighbourhood of Munster Square; pitched battles, fist-fights among the pews. This was formerly a red light district, the church was built where a thriving brothel once stood. Such was the pernicious microclimate of the railway: prostitutes coming down from Birmingham. Irish girls fallen on hard times, fond of a drink. A clergyman with a private income established the foundation. The crypt with its Third Age congregation, all races, all creeds, was the last remnant of the founding vision.

  Margaret Rope’s stained-glass windows, present but rarely inspected, were stored in a site that was still a going concern.Valued relics drawing the occasional aesthete or local history buff across town.

  The glassed saints and the buildings with which they were once associated are representatives of another era. Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope, it is said, liked to tease ribbons of text through the leaded panels. Sometimes she hid a tortoise in the undergrowth, her symbol. She was known as ‘Tor’ to distinguish her from the other Margaret, her cousin: Margaret Agnes ‘Marga’ Rope, who was also a glass designer. Both women trained at The Glass House in Fulham. Neither married. Both were established Anglicans who converted to Catholicism. Marga, a dynamic cigar-chomping biker, became a Carmelite nun in 1928.

  Six saints. Six windows that are no longer windows. An enamelled graphic novel of East London particulars moved to another place, taken underground: as into a catacomb. In loving memory of something valuable, lost or suspended.

  Leonard. Augustine. Anne. George. Joseph. Michael. An improving Victorian adventure story with one female. What larks! What good works we brought to the disadvantaged. We put cricket bats into the sticky fingers of the unwashed. There is a very English blend of fantasy about these eye-level windows. Chaucer’s pilgrims handpainted on the rim of a commemorative plate. Our Island Story. We are used to looking up, cricking our necks to catch a pale winter sun flooding colour down the cool stone length of the nave.

  The Rope windows are coded or layered with numbers, symbols and fragments of text. Margaret’s vision of St Leonard’s at Shoreditch has the spire growing like a horn from the curve of the saint’s shoulder. In 1933, when the design was completed, the Number 6 bus started at Aldwych, travelled north up Shoreditch High Street to Hackney Road, and on, by way of Mare Street and Morning Lane, to Hackney Wick. After 1992, the route was altered, like a tribute to L-F Céline’s transgressive London Bridge, to ply between Waterloo and Willesden. Much of the madness of Céline’s London novel happens on the bus, tracking shots of carnivalesque mayhem and riot. A scene into which Rope has inserted her athlete saint, ready to snap chains with his powerful hands.

  PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF FREDERICK HENRY SNOW…FOR SEVENTY YEARS CHORISTER, SERVER, SACRISTAN AT ST BARTHOLOMEW’S & ST AUGUSTINE’S.

  Spectres of Haggerston
etched in stained glass. The Boston Street church becomes a glass factory. The landlord of The Suffolk Arms, according to the Post Office Directory for 1848, was Andrew Motion. By 1938, on the cusp of war, it was a certain Gulliver.

  A man marooned on a bench on the island of the park, where HMS Haggerston rises from the waves in the wake of the whistling V2 rocket. Now sheep graze on the former Boston Street. The church is an extension of the pub. The figures in the coloured window are all white. The pattern of the leading contains a hidden alphabet. A Gothic script. An illuminated manuscript from which cryogenically frozen human figures begin to stir and shiver.

  When the Gentle Author came here, he reported that St George looked ‘like a young athlete straight out of the Repton Boxing Club’. What Ronnie Kray would call ‘a prospect’. There is a homoerotic nullity about the male saints, their features as smooth as marzipan. These are women as denatured men, if only men were nobler (and stupider) than they are. Or women playing men for the enticement of other women. Fluid gender identities make Rope’s muscular Christians into alien visitors to a fabled East London that no longer exists.

  I remember walking the morning circuit of Haggerston Park with my wife, with Anna, who sometimes chose to accompany me. We had been listening for cockcrow from the City Farm and wondering how the animals would be affected by the endless building work from the conversion, floor on floor, of the Children’s Hospital. We noticed how this dreadnaught development by Mettle & Poise flattered the marine pretensions of the park by not only having the displacement of a cruise liner parked in Palermo, but in its promotional copywriting. ‘Shared Ownership.’ ‘Launching Autumn 2016.’ They even had the bottle to call the vessel: THE GARRETT. No more ‘loft-living’, no more poverty chic and trust-fund bohemia. The walls are hung with gigantic photographs of a future arcadia. But check the small print: ‘Computer-generated image of the aerial view of Mettle & Poise is indicative and subject to change.’