The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City by Iain Sinclair

Author:Iain Sinclair [Sinclair, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781786071750
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2017-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

VOICE OF THE HUTS

The last London is a lost London, a city of fracture and disappearance. I set out early one morning, with notebook and pocket camera, to map the emerging favela of huts. I mean those secret places – riverside shacks, containers, empty packing cases – where urban explorer collectives have established their hides. Two things became clear very quickly. There were many more of these alternative free-Airbnb accommodations than I’d previously suspected. And they weren’t all operated by Bradley L Garrett and his crew. The germ of the idea was out there now and it was spreading fast, facilitated by technologies I scorned or misunderstood: fractal worlds beyond the reach of my Nokia duncephone.

My crudely assembled chart, very much like the one I produced, many years ago, for the alignment of Hawksmoor churches, was outflanked before it began. All this stuff was already available on YouTube and a dozen apps. Streamed with ads for Santander bikes, MYRUN TECHNOGYM (the intelligent home treadmill) and WALK LONDON MAYFAIR VELVET STUDDED LOAFERS. I spotted one cod-psychogeographical plan of Hackney, contrived from mystical pentagrams and triangles, emblazoned on the rear flank of a silver hire car, right over the petrol-flap.

How to tell pirate shacks from the legitimate ones that appeared in new places every morning? On the flat roofs of developments frozen in limbo. In the front gardens of Victorian houses divided into units where neighbours are strangers. On wasteground that might once have been school allotments. How to separate the cabins of urban explorers from those of council-sanctioned, road-digging invaders? This was the beauty of the scheme: the huts were identical.

Everywhere I looked, potential hideaways were revealed. I marked down four definites and three possibles in the City, in close proximity to anonymous block-buildings from the 1950s or ’60s, their survival dependent on Secret State affiliations: phone-tapping operations, redirection of post, immigration filters sifting the dubious identity papers of money-market cooks and cleaners. The windows of these buildings were dirty and unreadable, entrances dim and protected by policed barriers. Angles of approach were covered by banks of surveillance cameras. But an orange jumpsuit and a yellow hardhat gave the hut-builders a free pass. For recreation, they climbed to the top of the latest towers and swung in the breeze from giant cranes, watching drones swirl and mob in intricate patterns like starlings coming to roost.

Seven crosses in the City, three in Bethnal Green, two in Shoreditch and eleven in Hackney. The squatted nexus around Corbridge Crescent, the railway-bridge camp, the narrowboats with pirate flags, felt like a good place to start. But it was all too obvious. There were shelters. There were squats. And anarchists with busy stencils: IF YOU WORK FOR A LIVING, WHY DO YOU KILL YOURSELF WORKING. RIP. But no visible or invisible stopover shacks. The canalside container suburb was so tight that I passed a young black man raging at the locked gate, tapping his security code, yelling and whistling, to gain access to his expensive shared desk.

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