The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘What rough circle in our language / has brought us back to here?’ Those are Stephen’s words in his memorial tribute, ‘For My Friend, Max Sebald’. The Spitalfields poet paces the cell of his studio ‘mewling’ a name – and summoning another room in Norwich. A room ‘full of photographs’, in which his friend, the beloved academic, keeps his ‘realm looked after by trees’.

  We were accompanied that afternoon by another London poet, and by a young and engaged rabbi. The Talmudic scholar provided the history lesson, dates and details. He confirmed the integrity of this hidden garden. And the Mile End community it once served. The spectre of development, as ever, was hovering. But the rabbi explained that the earth in which a Jew is interred belongs to that man and to his family forever. Until the trump of judgement.

  If any material object sits comfortably in Velho, Old Cemetery, it is Stephen’s rucksack. Retrieved from Austerlitz, it was returned, this afternoon, to the road. The poet’s trailing lavender scarf is precisely the colour of the flowers dividing the grey slabs of the burial ground at Queen Mary College. A crown of silver hair is wool to his neck. The vein at the right temple pulses like a worm of the Thames.

  ‘These last weeks I have been writing you postcards in my head.’ The canvas womb of the rucksack has weathered another walk. Its neck is tied with twine, hooped around a padded leather collar like something on a mountain mule.

  ‘Max, I am listening,’ Stephen says, letting ellipses play out… Implying continuity, the distance still to be travelled.

  FINDING DIGGING FOR VICTORY

  DIGGING FOR VICTORY

  ‘Es WAR ERDE IN IHNEN, und / sie gruben,’ wrote Paul Celan in Die Niemandsrose (1963). ‘THERE WAS EARTH INSIDE THEM, and / they dug.’ And with those words I felt the scratch of curved claws against the distended drum of the belly. Earth calls to earth. But the earth I pictured, when I employed that disquieting quotation in a book of poems published in 1973, was ballast in the intestines of a deranged European archaeologist, sunstruck in the desert, uncovering a Sumerian ziggurat, deciphering cuneiform tablets. Or that earth was hardbaked and red in Yucatán, with the giant poet Charles Olson, sweating and striding, fingering Mayan shards, to provoke a spark of inspiration to carry him forward. The earth was inside them, certainly, but it was not here. It was never London. We had allotments beside railways and canals, poisoned land in recovery. Modest gardens waiting on the next grand project: oblivion. ‘They tear up the earth,’ I said, ‘searching for their fathers.’

  And again they dig and the earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down, through the tidy lawn of a former rectory, close to the heart of the village settlement on the banks of the buried Hackney Brook. This private garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a wall of weathered brick. The periscope thrust of the square tower is all that remains of the borough’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a sixteenth-century revision of the thirteenth-century church founded by the Knights of St John.

  The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about. It takes them four days to complete the shaft. And this is achieved without any of the tortured grinding and screeching, the gouging that attends uncivil engineering projects that carve so recklessly through tarmac and concrete, the heavy clay of this loudly regenerated fiefdom. And down, down again, through the pipes and wires of utility companies who treat their cone-protected pits as art installations organised to impede traffic, to block junctions and towpaths for confidently announced, but frequently revised, allocations for months or years. As a many-tongued militia in yellow tabards retreat to their all-day breakfasts and tabloid-insulated Portakabins. Easy to believe that Mare Street and Morning Lane have been rebranded as VolkerHighways (Considerate Constructors).

  The noise! The din those improvers make. The decibels of patronising signs. The notices that appear in advance of demolition. The defining political requirement of our era is the art of getting your apology in first. And often. Letting the world know that you are sorry about being sorry. Wet-eyed, stiff-lipped on the cusp of another upwardly-mobile resignation. There is not a plugged Victorian sewage pipe without a headline boast. Not a dustcart without a grandiose statement of intent. Utilities are billboards. The propaganda of signage is funded by ratepayers like all those ‘free’ newspapers clogging our letterboxes. Ecology of excess. Slow death of meaningful language. Lies like lies.

  TRANSFORMING WASTE

  INVESTING TO IMPROVE OUR STREETS

  BUILT TO OUTPERFORM

  WORKING FOR A BETTER TOMORROW

  INVESTING IN THE WALKING ENVIRONMENT

  PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST

  CREATING SPACE TO INSPIRE

  JUST ENOUGH IS MORE

  OUR PROPERTY KNOWLEDGE GIVES YOU POWER

  TURNING IDEAS INTO BUSINESS

  TRANSFORMING AND RESTORING LIVES

  A HOME FOR EVERYONE

  WORLD LEADER IN PAINTBALL

  THIEVES BEWARE:

  WORKING IN PARTNERSHIP WITH HACKNEY

  COUNCIL

  OWN A PIECE OF EAST LONDON HERITAGE

  CCTV CAMERAS INSTALLED FOR THE PURPOSE

  OF CRIME

  DELIVERING GOOD DECISIONS

  INVESTING IN COMPETITIVENESS

  IMPOSSIBILITY IS NOTHING

  HACKNEY IS MORE INTERESTING THAN

  HISTORY

  Ears plugged, gaze averted, the rectory lawn-despoilers launch their modest project at the summer solstice; before returning every single grain of soil, with willing volunteers, in October. This Hole is an action, not a budgetary solicitation. Not a plea for sponsorship. It’s not for charity.

  A filmmaker who went down into the pit spoke of being condemned to fall asleep every night to the clatter of helicopters ‘circling the milky sky of Hackney’. She relished, by contrast, the silence of the burrow, and the ‘damp, perfumed scent’ of living earth. Here was an embrace that baffled all the sirens, the screams and shattered glass, keeping her safe. ‘I felt cradled by this bare soil,’ Chiara Ambrosio told me. ‘Contained and absorbed by a place of origin and convergence.’

  When the skin of the world is so overdrawn with competing narratives, shrill boasts hung from every blue fence, plastered over buses and police cars, there is an understandable impulse to go underground. Oligarchs and over-compensated money-market raiders, Premier League footballers and their agents, have burrowed under Chelsea and Kensington for generations, commissioning Dr No swimming pools, cinemas, and state of the art gymnasia. These windowless sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are as remote from the experience of ordinary consumers as the CGI facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. What could be more empowering than to contemplate an immaculate rectangle of water, a 3-D David Hockney ripple never to be violated by a thrash of ticket-purchasing recreationalists? Neighbours, lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity, might well bleat about the noise, dust and damage to their foundations: it doesn’t signify. Trump off, peasants. Money means power. Bad. Very bad.

  Without fanfare, and with no shame, the domestic mining fetish arrived in Hackney. I visited Wilberforce Road, an avenue running south from Finsbury Park. This is a transitional zone of large mid-Victorian properties rationalised into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret. And a choice of uninviting hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, preying on the bruised desperation of addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbbed with the thump of earth-shuddering excavations.

  Here is a rising street with estate agents boosting achieved selling prices and stimulating the neurotic impulse to treat a home as a vulnerable asset. The canny speculator must be alert for the optimum moment to cash in the chips. In late 2014, three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1,666 per month.

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sp; Inspired by a febrile vision of progress, householders dig like moles. There are seven basement excavations in progress. Wilberforce Road is unlisted and schemes for enlarging properties are waved through in the mistaken belief that more housing units are being created. Specialist earth-removers mask their activities behind grey plywood shields. Which prove to be the ideal surface for yelps of protest: NO EXCAVATION! TEN MORE YEARS. NO MORE EXCAVATING IN WILBERFORCE. It is claimed by protesters that mining operations can last for anything between two and eight years. Giant compressors thunder. Security guards – bored, edgy, poorly rewarded and waiting for that tap on the shoulder from immigration enforcers – lurk in the shadows, warning off snooping photographers. Rear elevations have been torn from properties and cavernous pits revealed. Disturbed rats are moving out. Plagues of mice take up new quarters in the flats of the unambitious. The fashion for digging moves across the borough with viral enthusiasm. More holes, more dust, more grey security sheds. After the first deep-trenching, they all go down.

  This compulsion to dive beneath the skirts of river terrace deposits, Hackney gravel, shale and mudstone, down through old workings, the slag and clinker of doomed estates and lost theatres, is soon demonstrated by every stratum of society, from City Hall and the major developers, the off-shore speculators hidden behind front companies and proxies, to art collectives and ‘place-hacking’ crews posing for hi-res selfies in Secret State bunkers, sewage outfalls and ghost stations filled with forgotten archives. Subterranea, an uncolonised country of childhood imaginings, is the coming battleground. The epidermis of the city is so heavily policed now, so fretted with electronic babble, so corrupted by a strategic assault on locality, that civilians unable or unwilling to engage in a war they can’t win respond by exploring forbidden depths. A Wellsian subtopia without maps or frontiers.

  The burrowing reflex has a long history in London, as in other cities – Rome, Paris, the Warsaw of Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal, the Vienna of Carol Reed’s The Third Man – dominated by rituals and regulations. When the first Thatcherite towers sprang up in Docklands, and forgotten reaches on the Isle of Dogs agreed to behave as if the fictions of JG Ballard were planning documents, the painter Gavin Jones, working alone, excavated a wartime bunker hidden beneath a mound in a block of council flats in Bow. He disguised the entrance with an upturned boat, ran out electricity cables, and made himself a set of dank studios. He offered one of the four chambers of this Pharaonic tomb to an eccentric urban wanderer – who brought back museum-quality plunder to be fitted into a space that very soon became a single compacted block; a primitive curation in the spirit of Joseph Beuys.

  The taller they stretch vanity towers, the silos of target architecture, the more those condemned to live in the shadows dig and scrape. Underworld is the condition of being resolutely off-grid. It registers as a free state, a pirate liberty, in the way that party-loving hipsters followed cells of the French Resistance into a labyrinth of quarries and catacombs beneath Paris. This is, as idiot interviewees are always mumbling on morning radio, ‘Surreal. Completely surreal.’ Meaning: unusual, but unspectacularly. A surprise.

  An urban dowser called Alan Hayday, retired from the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the vanished Hackney Brook, to a church on the other side of the River Lea. There was evidence, Hayday suggested, of mineral exploitation, speculative mining. He had tapped walls with dowsing rods made from strips of metal recovered from the factory floor.

  Just as estate agents treat the warehouse communalists of Hackney Wick as pilot fish for virgin territory to exploit, so the bureaucrats of progress engineer regime change for land beneath London. The fences around swaggering construction projects in Shoreditch and London Bridge–THE GREATEST LIVING SPACE IN HISTORY, SYNCHRONISING THE WORLD OF COMMERCE, LEVEL 32 SKY LOUNGE & TERRACE – are now aped by grey sheds knocked up to hide the scooping out of bigger and better basements.

  How far down can you go without planning permission? Nobody seems to know. Crossrail’s heavy plant is so expensive, and so comprehensively promoted in approved documentaries, that it can’t be retired to some transport museum in East Acton. Invasive boring is fated to become a permanent feature of London life. The Crossrail blitzkrieg, west to east, tracked by property speculators, boxes the compass. Tunnelling monsters summon up the prehistoric Megalosaurus referenced by Charles Dickens at the dawn of the first railway age for the opening of Bleak House: an ‘elephantine lizard’ waddling up Holborn Hill to die. The beasts are insatiable. They are hungry for the earth inside them. The earth in which they will soon be lost.

  Fracking is the latest invasive wheeze, a US import. Ground war on the home front. When I visited the poet Gary Snyder in Kitkitdizze, his retreat in the Sierra Nevada foothills, he alerted me to the hunger of the frackers. ‘A lot of public land,’ he said, ‘has to be converted, in the most organised fashion, into hundreds and thousands of gas wells. It’s like the original oil era. They’ve tricked a lot of public land by offering inducements that haven’t been followed up on.’

  Our local frackers have their piggy eyes on the Weald Basin, from Kent to Dorset, and after that they’re ready to take on London. Anything that can be talked up as ecologically sound, any quick-fix solution to the energy crisis, is going to receive immediate support from celebrity politicians who will always put green bridges and cable-car rides before the impossible business of troubled hospitals, failing schools and a shortfall in public housing.

  A consortium trading as London Local Energy has applied for permission to bore into the crust, to pump water, chemicals and sand into shale rocks, and to release the gas. ‘We want to light a fire under the debate and we want to make money as well,’ said frackist pundit Nick Grealy.

  The fracturing will start at Harrow and follow a track across town, in the footsteps of Tory grandees such as Winston Churchill, all the way to Downing Street. The gimmick is that urban fracking will be a horizontal manoeuvre, missionary position. Like sliding poker chips across green baize. A blind grope rather than a full-frontal assault. And as for that NIMBY whine about insults to the geophysical mantle, Mr Grealy pointed out that hydraulic fracturing (and the protest shrieks of tree huggers) would present no problem in London suburbs where neighbourly conversation is already drowned by incoming aircraft and the soothing hum of orbital motorways. We can take our chances with contaminated groundwater and a bracing snort of greenhouse gases. Chemical roulette offers a Darwinian edge to life in the metropolis: survive and thrive.

  ‘We should leave no stone unturned,’ Boris Johnson said, ‘in the cause of keeping the lights on in London.’

  This mania for boreholes, at whatever cost, reminded me of a cautionary tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed’. Doyle’s crazed Übermensch scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen as a BBC4 natural, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has ever done before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed… with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own’.

  Challenger’s project begins with a politic falsehood: he says that he is out to prove that there is petroleum under England. Perhaps the frackers have just such a post-truth agenda. Perhaps they believe that entropy can be reversed by a course of acupuncture for sedimentary rocks.

  The professor uses an inherited fortune to construct a model village, after the fashion of Poundbury, the Dorchester Legoland sponsored by the Prince of Wales, as a smokescreen for his penetration of the earth’s core. And it should be noted that the Duchy of Cornwall has already registered mineral rights for all the land under their control, including Poundbury.

  When Challenger’s miners break through the crust and pass the coal measures, an ‘iron dart’ is fired into ‘the nerve ganglion of Old Mother Earth’. With the resulting
howl of ‘a thousand sirens in one… echoing along the whole South Coast’. A savage rent letting out, in one terrifying instant, future blitzkriegs, the chattering skulls of medieval ossuaries, terrorist bomb outrages and the uncapped shame of the refugee camp across the water.

  ‘No sound in history,’ the narrator tells us, ‘has ever equalled the cry of the injured Earth.’ Spectators are drenched in a foul and reeking substance.Volcanoes erupt in Iceland and Sicily. Mexico and Central America suffer the consequences of ‘intense Plutonic indignation’. ‘When the World Screamed’ was published in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash.

  Noises off also inform the launch of the Hole project in the rectory garden. Petrol bombs, breaking glass, stones hurled at cars: the riots of 2011 travelled from Clarence Road, at the northern end of Narrow Way (Mare Street), to the nexus of commercial enterprises, the betting shops that used to be banks around Hackney Central station. Funds provided by central government for regeneration were siphoned into an upmarket shopping hub; factory outlets for Burberry, Aquascutum and Pringle of Scotland, in neighbouring Chatham Place.

  In some unintended way, the Hole became a focus for resistance without slogans. The Church Commissioners, landlords of the property alongside St Augustine’s Tower, took the decision to sell house and garden as a development package, more flats. Windfall revenue would help to fund a community centre for St John’s church. Meanwhile, the existing community living in the Old Rectory would be scattered, house and garden obliterated. Up to the moment of threatened disappearance, few Hackney citizens knew that this bucolic retreat existed.

  On a wet November night in 2014, a month or so after the Hole had been filled in, and before the commune dispersed, I visited the house by invitation of William Bock, who acted as spokesperson for the collective. As might be expected, Will looked pale and convalescent. He hugged himself under a poncho of blankets, drawing up his legs on the sofa, before he launched into his story. The atmosphere of the room, the soft candlelight, the fire, the heavy curtains absorbing and containing outside sound, was familiar, but I hadn’t experienced it in three decades or more. Will had taken the metaphor of the Hole, the maimed biosphere, into his body. He spent the weeks immediately following the conclusion of the archaeological event shuttling backwards and forwards to Homerton Hospital. A stomach abscess and a leaking wound.