'Where JG Ballard lauds the sexual aesthetics of the M25, Sinclair gives voice to those living and working beneath it, creating fresh narratives to replace those that the developers steal from us.’
Description
A New Statesman Book of the Year
London. A city apart. Inimitable. Or so it once seemed.
Spiralling from the outer limits of the Overground to the pinnacle of the Shard, Iain Sinclair encounters a metropolis stretched beyond recognition. The vestiges of secret tunnels, the ghosts of saints and lost poets lie buried by developments, the cycling revolution and Brexit. An electrifying final odyssey, The Last London is an unforgettable vision of the Big Smoke before it disappears into the air of memory.
Reviews
‘A coming together of everything that has made this great chronicler of the English capital such a compelling and perceptive guide… When late 20th- and early 21st-century London pass into distant history, it is Sinclair who will make sense of a time when “everything is pop-up, nothing is true”.’
‘Very few authors have fashioned a London more real than the one we see… Here in this brilliant, crackling series of final walks through the London landscape, he finds the dissolving identity of the city increasingly disconcerting.’
‘One can only marvel at Sinclair’s eye for telling detail and his sense of the subtle ironies of modern London life…With its elegantly civilised melancholy for what is lost, neglected or hidden, Sinclair’s position is highly seductive.’