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Iain Sinclairs narration for Transit, created
from interviews with him by Emily Richardson.
Reproduced with kind permission of Iain Sinclair.
Thanks to Rosa Richardson for the transcription.
Screen One
Images of London and the labyrinth are interconnected. The great Argentinean
writer Borges always spoke of London as being a labyrinth and I remember
quite vividly a film called London Labyrinth that my friend Chris Petit
made in the 1990s which was entirely assembled from found footage, on
the notion that you could wander the city, pick up scraps here there and
everywhere and assemble them, and the city would become an organic whole,
but also a secret. Because everything in London plays back to this Manichean
duality of darkness and light. The temple of Mithras which was on the
banks of the river Walbrook was transported to be a ruin in front of a
banking corporation: this is the idea of something that is beneath the
pavements, something dark and sacrificial - and above it, floating, a
layer of golden light. And so if you go into some zone of the city like
Smithfield, still with its dark and bloody history, there’s a layer
beneath the ground which would prompt you to undertake a difficult and
dangerous journey. The best symbol of this was Michael Ayrton’s
sculpture of the Minotaur which stood very nearby in Postman’s Park,
on a little grassy knoll...
...and I saw Lea Bridge Road as being a passage between life and death,
walking up there is interminable.
One end, the Clapton end, is one of the most dangerous – supposedly
- spots on the planet, endless killings outside the black clubs. Harold
Pinter grew up around there so it has another cultural history as well.
At the far end of this endless road, you have Wanstead, with its sinister
hospital and its themed Alfred Hitchcock pub. Across the road are the
ponds and among little bits of wood on the other shore you’ll find
a flight of escaped parrots, so it’s like a kind of Douanier Rousseau
fantasy. I think that the road has an ancient and magical quality to it,
both of frustration and of liberation, in that you know you’re finally
beginning to escape London and make your way on to this outer road system,
and you can escape the gravity of the city....
The nature of things is that the original labyrinth is underground,
that sacrificial virgins or whatever are brought to this place and they
wander about through the tunnels until they confront the Minotaur: it’s
either a sacrifice to the Minotaur or it’s a sacrifice to consciousness
and something is revealed and the society goes on. That kind of underground
myth then becomes a ritual enacted in the streets, a pantomime based on
themes that are dark and subterranean. When the myth is challenge, it
goes back underground and so the cycles go round and around and around.
We all believe that there are patterns and structures beneath London and
that occasionally they are revealed and if it’s not known then you
can imagine it to be whatever you want it to be. We drift and float –
I’m looking at this fish beside me – that’s the way
we go around these streets. Once you get out of the car you are not so
much walking as being walked by the roads. They have become rivers, you
swim. Or you drown.
The way the energies operate is that there always has to be a market,
an open space into which things flow from other places, before they are
taken away. And beside that a hospital in which the damaged and the injured
are removed, so that they can recover and go through these processes again.
Then a church. The three things are the nature of London: that’s
the essential triptych of London life and in every case all of these things
are threatened. London is like a system of tectonic plates, nothing actually
disappears, it just breaks up slightly and drifts off. But the symbol
of the Beast, the bull-like creature, can turn very sour and trample everything
underfoot if it’s not approached in the correct way. The bull becomes
the bulldozer. It’s like a great mouth chewing up the City of Mammon.
These towers are just hung curtains of glass that can be revised into
anything and the more we go up the more we lose the essential and original
spirit that was hidden in chambers beneath but is also related to buildings
above. Now you hack out the foundations of things and if it happens to
reveal a medieval church or a monastery or a burial ground, that’s
rapidly photographed and tidied away. It’s not left there. The ground
itself becomes starved of meaning and it gets thinner and thinner and
thinner as time goes on – anti-labyrinthine.
What’s happening in terms of development at the moment is that
there’s a virtual picture of London, a
computer-generated version which is how the developers and politicians
operate. Before anything happens,
you are presented with a perfect version of it – as with the Millennium
Dome: something beautiful but equally impossible. And that is set against
what can’t be seen, which is the real mystery and worth of London,
which is something that has to be discovered, particularly by walking
or navigating in circular patterns back on yourself, going back on your
own traces, digging and repeatedly digging. And it takes years and years
to get to it. Meaning has to be earned, as against meaning being offered
and floated in front of you like a magic screen which is never actually
achieved. And all it means is that you go through a hinterland wilderness
of roads you can’t go down, privatised estates, gated communities,
CCTV cameras – all of that crap swallows you up and also takes you
away from the essential nature of the place, which is human spirit in
conversation with itself and with others and ways of life that are harsh
but rewarding – all of that is swept away...
Screen Two
I think that the nature of London itself is that you simply do not penetrate,
and when you do penetrate in one area it only leads you into another and
another and another, a whole series of mirrors and cellars. It goes back
to the original myths of the founding of London. There are two ways you
can read London, either the forensic way, the way an archaeologist or
a scientist would pick at the ground when the city is being dug up to
discover some fossil or bone, and from that assume a particular way of
life and build up from the dust a city that could be assembled into a
museum: a version of what a city might be. And there’s the other
side which is the ‘dream’ of London, a literal dream when
you float backwards until you sense a foundation which is London as the
new Troy: that after the destruction of Troy a particular group of people
flee the Mediterranean and arrive up the Thames and found a new city.
The new city being Troy has to be protected against the threat of outside,
and they build a series of passageways and secret ways and particular
ways of transit – and this still exists. People respond to that
as a metaphor. It’s always been there.
The notion is that the east will become the place of wealth and the
generation of wealth, a future in which to live. The grand David Beckham
palaces are, although north of London, are in Essex - which is defined
as the east. A compass bearing towards which we should aspire. The new
Versailles palaces of celebrity culture are definitely out there in the
east. The Russian oligarchs have moved south into Surrey and Kent. The
west is beginning to feel a bit archaic. Artists and filmmakers are drawn
to particular sites, not so much for the film they are making, which is
only a smokescreen, but to make these journeys. The important thing is
actually the passage through which they go, and the heightened attention
and nervousness of that passage, not the product that they bring back:
that is only a so-near-pale Xerox representation of a spiritual journey...
Ridley Road is one of the places that you feel is threatened in terms
of current development. Markets are crucial to the lifeblood of the city,
and Ridley Road has always been a very exotic market. It was originally
very much a Jewish market, and it became the scene of great dramas and
violence just after the Second World War, because Mosley’s blackshirts
had a headquarters on Balls Pond Road in an old Methodist Chapel. They
held regular meetings in Ridley Road, protected by the local police, many
of whom were sympathetic to their political notions. And they were attacked
by the Forty-Three group who were made up largely of Jewish ex-servicemen
who were appalled, having gone through the war and now knowing about the
concentration camps, to think that in London, and particularly in a very
Jewish part of London, that someone could now publicly espouse forms of
fascism again. So these battles went on with Ridley Road as the front
line, somewhat in the way that Brick Lane became the front line in the
BNP versus anti-racist riots in the 1970s, with battles every Sunday morning
down there. The pattern of the city is such that the ground where the
Olympic Park is being constructed was once some of the worst ground in
London. Industrial development and stinking factories were located away
from human settlement. You wanted a cheap labour source, so as the river
had these large communities of Irish settlers who were working on the
docks and so on, gradually it spread eastward and all the smelliest and
nastiest dirtiest things were dumped there and allowed to be there because
nobody else wanted that territory. Also it had access to water which was
rapidly poisoned. Well, you can’t just change that overnight.
It is literally the end of the world at Carpenter’s Road –
there’s nothing there except laminated notices of
compulsory purchase and Murphy’s signs and endless plywood walls
that run everywhere hiding everything.
It’s a blight, a terrible blight, instead of an ancient right of
way that passed out of east London and over the river, over Old Ford and
out to Stratford which was an important religious and commercial community.
After the Great Fire of London, Sir Christopher Wren planned that his
new city should become like Venice and these are exactly the terms we
are now hearing applied to East London. The Docklands developers and the
Olympic quangos want to develop something called ‘Water City’
which links all of those toxic backstreams into a kind of Venice. They
keep talking about Venice. It’s exactly what Christopher Wren did
in the great development after the Fire when the new Fleet River had a
little bridge over it and there were paintings commissioned that made
it look exactly like Venice. It was very grand. But, very rapidly, it
silted up and all the houses that overlooked this narrow stream chucked
their rubbish and their shit and everything into it and Smithfield Market
used it as a place to dump carcasses, offal, skinned lumps of meat –
all this stuff went there, from which generate the myths of the black
swine of the Fleet river. As if some other creature had knitted itself
together from all these bits and pieces of rubbish. And very soon it was
so foul and so stinking that it had to be covered over. And it’s
still there, but it’s now part of the subterranea, part of the mythology
rather than part of the actuality of London...
Screen Three
One of the oldest surviving legends of London is of the black swine
of Hampstead. Some pigs supposedly
escaped from Smithfield and got into the Fleet underground system where
they thrived like the alligators in New York in Thomas Pynchon, and now
supposedly down there is this tribe of blind black pigs that roam between
the mouth of the Fleet on the Thames and Hampstead, and occasionally are
seen or glimpsed. They are there either as actuality or as spirits of
the chthonic lost dead.
There are bits on the A-Z map that are secret. These white spaces are
under threat because you’ve got that panoptic, helicopter-eye view
of politics and landscape - which is just somewhere you fly over and if
there’s a horrible blank you say OK let’s generate something
and put it in that spot, especially if its anywhere near London. There
are soon going to be no blanks at all, which means there’s no room
for your imagination to move, which is why we are enduring such a loss
in East London, by losing this mysterious and grungy corridor which combined
landscape with ghosts of industry which are still there, and with water
you can navigate. We don’t want there to be a Venetian bus-service
running up and down the River Lea. You don’t want every inch of
the path to be laminated signs telling you what you should look at. You
don’t want herons wearing labels around their necks like a conference
of sales representatives, it’s ridiculous.
...The head of Bran, the Celtic Giant, is buried at Tower Hill: you
can’t see it but if it is ever removed, the city falls. Most of
our strength comes from burial and the erection of a series of walls and
I think when they moved Ayrton’s Minotaur from Postman’s Park
where it was relatively secret and you had to walk through the city in
a particular pattern to come across it, when it was removed and put into
the Barbican it was put into another system and it is now much higher
above ground and it’s much more visible, it represents itself much
more clearly – then I think at that point the city starts falling.
And we’ve seen that: we are now threatened with a complete development
make-over and the darker side is going underground and may have to find
other manifestations.
Ridley Road had that dark sense of violence and there are endless descriptions
of people staggering covered with blood out into the Kingsland Road and
wandering down, and the pubs round and about all sympathised with one
group or another, so if you went into the wrong pub it was likely to end
up very badly. There was one occasion when it turned into a major riot
and there were police horses charging up and down Kingsland Road trampling
old women. It was like some Battleship Potemkin scene happening in Hackney.
Ridley Road has got that, as well as more recent things to do with the
selling of jungle-meats of all kinds that are deeply suspect and kept
in insanitary conditions and always being challenged by the police and
there’s all that sense of smell and noise and paranoia. It’s
an important frontier between the new gentrified Hackney and the old immigrant
Hackney with its freedoms to operate, to sell on the street.
Waterden Road is spectacularly other-worldly, it’s like the Balkans
now, it’s the end of everything. And yet down there there’s
this block that has very dodgy clubs and mini-cab businesses and all of
that. But right next to it and hidden away on a secret island is this
allotment. There are eighty allotments tucked away around the back which
have been there for thirty years and they’ve achieved some of the
best soil and most fertile gardens in London. And of course these are
the ones who are being cleared away. There’s a fantastic photograph
that Stephen Gill took at the bottom of Waterden Road where you drive
towards this Olympic nowhere: it’s of the Queen arriving in her
limo looking like she’s had a terrible away-day to Kosovo, sitting
in this car with helicopters and police outriders, in the backend of nowhere.
Looking at previous Olympics, there are two pitches: it’s either
a monstrous way of underwriting a hideous political regime - the Berlin
Olympics were Hitler in a sense, and what’s going on with China
is a way of bringing China into the economic fold while sweeping aside
all human rights. Anyone who stands in the way of development there is
literally bulldozed aside - so you can build what you want. So there’s
that kind of Olympics. Or like the one in Barcelona which really did regenerate
zones of the city because nothing had happened in Barcelona because it
was a Republican city and so the whole Franco bias was against it. And
there was room to actually do something, in a place that was ready for
it, organically adapted to it. Well, London is definitely going the other
way and taking a wilderness and using the Olympic Games as an excuse for
mega-developments that were already in place before the Olympics were
ever mooted, to create this ‘New City’ the size of Leeds and
to tie together all kinds of dubious economic packages on the notion of
offering London as new kind of park-zone. What the hell use is a park-zone
out there, which is not available to anybody from most parts of London?
It already is a zone of the imagination in
that people can walk up the Lea valley or have allotments or travel by
water. There’s been a whole slew of stuff going on for centuries
which essentially will be swept aside - so instead of it being recreational
and regenerational it is the absolute opposite. It creates a fantasy that
nobody wants or needs.
This text is copyright Iain Sinclair 2006, and is not to be
reproduced with out permission.
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