Stuart Walton

A Managed City

The Last London, Iain Sinclair, Oneworld, September 2017, £18.99, 336 pp. (hardcover)

To a certain temperament, London is best scrutinised from the optic of distance. Sylvia Plath, out on Parliament Hill in the half-light at new year, sees the city melt like sugar, no place for gulls turned fractious from drifting inland, a whitish indeterminate smudge settling over Kentish Town. Henry Dawson's canvases traced the Victorian transformation of Westminster under a sun-blasted violet sky from the river's breadth in 1857. His group of gallants gathers on Greenwich Hill in 1870 to squint through a telescope at the twin domes of the Hospital, the winding river and the factory chimneys, from a scrubby eminence flanked by sheltering trees.

Taking in the prospect from Greenwich Park today, Dawson's group would see Canary Wharf rising behind the scene, a flash-mob of towering thugs attired in ill-gotten bling, loitering with intent on the Isle of Dogs, hotels run with machine-tooled anonymous precision for transient moneymakers, serviced apartments for the opulent absent, the offices of the Financial Conduct Authority amid those of companies whose financial conduct it is ostensibly regulating.

'Everything is pop-up. Nothing is true,' says Iain Sinclair towards the end of this final volume in his heptalogy on London, an intermittent forty-year record of the city's transmogrifications and convulsions, its churning innards and glaring new reflective exterior, its forgotten ghostlands and its all-tooremembered development sites. If the tone seems poised in a suggestive hesitancy between mesmerised and sickened, that reflects the effect that London has had on one of the most attentive anatomists of this time of transition. There are pop-up coffee-stops and bicycle repair shacks along

stretches of the city's eastern waterways, while the redeveloped zones– Canalside Hackney Wick, Tottenham Hale Retail Park, Canary Wharf itself, the hubristic sprawl of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park ('Olympicopolis' to Sinclair)–look freshly sprung from the splayed pages of pop-up books, temple complexes of evangelistic commerce for a flattened city.

This sequence was inaugurated by Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997), and has continued through ambulant odysseys informed by the baggy loop of the M25, the branching polyp of the London Overground (or Ginger) line, linking Barking to Croydon by way of Haggerston, Hoxton and Shoreditch, and by retracing the steps of John Clare, as he fled the Epping Forest asylum in 1841 to tramp eighty miles of the Great North Road home to the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Northborough.

Sinclair has walked many of these routes alone, and when he is accompanied, it is by poets, photographers, film-makers and musicians of the margins and the interstices, people certain to be prefixed with the designator 'alt-' on internet biographies, noticers of chewing-gum on pavements, of runic graffiti, ley-lines, discarded Melanesian wood masks, drowned novels, immobile derelicts waiting out the depthless days on park benches. In the final entry of the present volume, 'Brexit Means Brexit', a convocation of 'six proud walkers' sets off from Waltham Abbey, possible final restingplace of King Harold Godwinson, last of the Anglo-Saxon monarchical line done for at Hastings, to St Leonard's, where on a seafront plinth in eroded Victorian stone, the dying king has his face cradled in the solicitous embrace of his common-law wife, Edith Swan-Neck. And thence to Hythe, St Leonard's church and its thousand-skulled ossuary.

Skeins of historical time wind through the drumming and improvised singing of the queerly costumed group as it picks its way through Iron Age earthworks, retail developments, buttercup-speckled meadows and caravan parks, while the ever-present superimposes itself through the fissiparous hell that the EU referendum has made of an already deranging Britain. The point where Outer/Greater/Not-Quite London debouches into the

unforgiving shires is where the red banners of VOTE LEAVE take over, where an angry householder comes out and yells at Sinclair not to dare take a picture of her poster:

Her discreet advertisement, the size of the widest pub-screen TV, was not intended for unapproved consumption. It stood on private property … I had misunderstood the sign's function. It was an order: fuck off.

At the outset of The Last London, Sinclair goes in pursuit of a set of six stained-glass windows removed from the deconsecrated St Augustine's priory on Hackney Road and stored in the crypt of St Mary Magdalene on Munster Square NW1, now a day-care centre for the elderly. Created in the 1930s and '40s by Margaret Rope, they depict scenes of a London caught between national emergencies, clinging to what remained of its mythic self-perception as crisis washed at the door-sills. Small boys in shorts and sloppy socks play cricket in an alley, watched by a docile terrier. St Paul gazes up in unmingled rapture on Wren's monument to him. The prioress stands in rear view before St Augustine's, viewed through a window inset with a Pears soap advertisement. An electrically haloed St Leonard is depicted at the moment of revelation, while a red double-decker bus passes before his eponymous Shoreditch church. He is the patron saint of prisoners, whose miracles burst the shackles of those who invoked him in pitch-dark dungeons. Could any more obvious tutelary figure be summoned now to strike the chains from a city fettered by its own addiction to, or victimisation by, venture capital?

'Red buses, lads playing cricket, St Paul's cathedral. Basically all the things you might now fall under suspicion for photographing,' notes Sinclair. If there is an open and inclusive London full of licensed performance art and artisan coffee outlets, there is also the panopticon London of underpaid security workers patrolling enterprise parks that haven't opened yet and railway termini reconfigured as labyrinthine shopping opportunities. If it remains fiendishly difficult to spot the odd freelance jihadi in a Transit van, bridal-gowned lay singers and purveyors of reforgotten poetry in daft

hats are easy meat, although as Sinclair is often pleased to report, it's hard for security personnel to decide what particular offence they might have committed.

Through it all churns an entity given the name of the ' monad', in ironic homage to Leibniz's windowless individual, hermetically enveloped in its own sensory system, dependent on nothing outside it. Sinclair's monad is the London crowd, a collectivised biomorph that streams on hired cycles and trainered feet through the redeveloped parks and gardens and along the repurposed towpaths. If death had overtaken the horde Eliot saw tramping to work in lockstep over London Bridge, it has now been electrochemically revitalised, permanently welded to hand-held communication devices, doing financial business before even getting to work, rehearsing a muchiterated bit of gobshite anew for a fresh pair of ears. At intervals, the text breaks into capitalised interludes of one-sided dialogue from these overheard jabberings, like looped samples cut into an audio mash-up. It isn't pretty.

The style in which these reports from the edges have been written through successive volumes is an imagistic journalese, the detail accreting in constellations of descriptive verbless anti-sentences without overt propositional value. Haggerston Park now incorporates a city farm amid the interminable construction work. 'Cockcrow drowned by drills and sirens. The heartbreaking resignation of donkeys. Therapeutic animals on contaminated land.' Language slips free of the straitjacket of what the Frankfurt School called instrumental rationality. Its effect is better than grimly functional, but also more telling than mistily poetic. A favoured epithet is 'managed': 'managed alienation', 'managed excitement', 'managed English melancholy'. It speaks simultaneously of therapeutic containment, in the manner of anger management, and of the corporate control that extends its sway over every last droplet of what we used to call experience.

It's the last London, note, not the lost London, as we might have expected. It's both of course, but the title intends a septuagenarian full stop to nearly half a century of recording the city's quiddities, its stubborn historical residues,

and the gargantuan effort, from Lady Thatcher's abolition of the GLC to the evictions and clearances that paved the way for the Olympic Games, to erase them. The journey is ending not with a sense of conclusion – far from it – but of a final exasperation that has overtaken the happy surprises and the work of diligent memoration in which the art interventionists and poets of Sinclair's travels have played their part. This has been no Beat-like drift through the capital in semi-easternised California fatalism, but a purposeful cartography of vanishing London.

The problem, as always, with lamenting fundamental change is that you can never see where it began. Rake back in search of less corrupted times and it turns out there were always spoors within them of the degraded present, which is to say nothing other than that change, like the poor, has always been with us. Sinclair has been anything but a ‘Land of Lost Content’ nostalgist, though, more a chronicler of the process by which contentment is lost and replaced with something more noxious. Call it managed satisfaction. To view the city from a distance, he ascends with his wife Anna to the Shangri-La infinity pool on the 52nd floor of the Shard. Bobbing across a preternaturally blue medium distantly resembling water, he can see surveillance helicopters chopping the air beyond the full-drop triple-glazed windows, while below, the whole city is laid out in detailed relief, down to the tiny steeples, toy buses and vagrant bench-sleepers.