A Small Catalogue of the Uncurated / Features / Untitled Books

The world regenerates as you degenerate: at which point you return to the archive, reforgotten books and lost authors.

A Small Catalogue of the Uncurated

IAIN SINCLAIR has been charting London's forgotten corners for decades, bearing witness to the ebb and flow of development and its fast fading histories. His new book about Hackney is a hymn to the changing East End and its importance as an archive. He traces its progress through previous generations of Hackney writers.

Alexander Baron’s narrator is a man of the streets, an unemployed Hofmann presser, an unlucky gambler, a compulsive autodidact.

Walking out one morning, head down, to discover that a slab of landscape, so familiar that it barely registers, is no longer there, is a shock to the system, an ice-cold douche. The perimeter fence, blue chipboard, freshly painted on a daily basis to cover up guerrilla slogans, is also a screen on which any version of the future approved by promoters and politicians can be projected. The virtual overwhelms the actual. Computer-generated fictions outrank traditional methods of documentation. I witnessed photographers on bicycles being turned away. Bored security operatives hassle edge-land wanderers: 'What are you doing? Where are you going? Who do you represent?' Walking as reverie, as meditation, is no longer permitted. Inconvenient garden allotments are ploughed up. Communities of travellers are expelled. Estates are detonated. Long-buried industrial waste seeps into the water table. It will be a marvel, when it happens, if it happens, but not yet. Not now. There is no now. Legacy is the thing that must be trashed so that it can come into being, untold years down the line. I have heard people talking like eye-witnesses about the virtues of buildings that have not been built - but which, up there on their laminated panels, are more real than the real: flawless and shining for this new day. Occupied by simulacra who never drew breath.

I'm talking about the Lower Lea Valley, Hackney Wick. And old Hackney too, the chain of settlements along the line of the submerged Hackney Brook. Forty years in one place, changing as it changes, until you find yourself painfully out of synch with development. The world regenerates as you degenerate: at which point you return to the archive, reforgotten books and lost authors. When the 'local' is surgically extracted from locality, it becomes necessary to treat place as a fiction, to recover and celebrate those who have done the job before you: in heat, humour, and compassion. My new book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, cannibalises a catalogue of forerunners from the days before libraries became Idea Stores. Bright, breezy and sounding like cousins to Ikea. Post-architectural warehouses of good intentions to replace the stacked municipal archives where so many Hackney writers found their original inspiration. Harold Pinter, Steven Berkoff and others, less well known but just as interesting.

Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington by Benjamin Clarke, reissued by the London Borough of Hackney in 1986, from newspaper articles written by a medical man in the late-19th century, is a useful template. Pedestrian ramblings across the borough by a citizen, comfortable with his own status, proud of the quiddity of the overwhelmed village in which he finds himself. A sensitive inquisitor probing the shape and structure of his neighbourhood with genial diagnostic improvisations: to provoke memory, to join the procession. 'To follow,' as he says, 'the leading of the almost immortal Pepys, and his more staid compeer Evelyn, in introducing here and there little bits of anecdote or gossip.' Clarke is a sturdy walker, a self-taught historian; a man who values the past so much that he wants to recompose it. He inspired me to create novels out of topography, fictional mappings of a real place.

In 1951 Roland Camberton published a well-received Hackney book called Rain on the Pavements. And then he disappeared from the scene. There was no Camberton. The name was contrived to disguise the identity of Henry Cohen, to keep news of this heresy from his orthodox Jewish family. Here was a refracted autobiography, a delirious recovery of self, a lively sequence of portraits, people and places.

'It was necessary,' Camberton wrote, 'to know every alley, every cul-de-sac, every arch, every passageway; every school, every hospital, every church, every synagogue; every police station, every post office, every labour exchange, every lavatory; every curious shop name, every kids' gang, every hiding-place, every muttering old man or woman whose appearance alone was enough to terrify them. In fact everything; and having got to know everything, they had to hold this information firmly, to keep abreast of change, to locate the new positions of beggars, newsboys, hawkers, street shows, gypsies, political meetings.'

And this, under Camberton's inspiration, became my impossible creed. A psychogeographical manifesto. While poets invent techniques of memory, politicians assure us that there is no viable past, just an infinitely elastic future. A rosy-red dawn that never quite breaks.

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, published in 1963, was the final testament for a long tradition of Jewish realist novels. Harold Pinter's The Dwarfs, written around the time of Camberton's Rain on the Pavements, was not issued (in revised form) until 1990. Baron, Pinter, Camberton (and Steven Berkoff too) were pupils at Hackney Downs School. Pinter's stage name, David Baron, so Ken Worpole believes, was a direct homage to Alexander Baron, a very successful post-war novelist who grew up on the same streets.

By 1961, editors and publishers were turning away from East London, looking north, finding the energy and aggression of a different kind of working-class fiction. Alexander Baron was a skilled traditionalist, a contriver of plot-driven, socially perceptive meditations on place. In The Lowlife, Baron gives an account of the migratory passage, out of the Whitechapel ghetto, through Hackney, to the safety and comfort of Golders Green: a route the author would follow, where his character, Harryboy Boas, remained stranded on the borderline, the foothills of Stoke Newington. Between the chaos of Ridley Road Market and the orthodoxy of Stamford Hill. Already, without knowing it, the inhabitants of the lodging house in this novel are rubbing shoulders with amateur terrorists, bomb-makers, the disaffected of Cambridge and Essex. Within a couple of streets, you find Jewish families, collectivists from the Angry Brigade, and the basement flat in Evering Road where Reg Kray butchered Jack 'The Hat' McVitie.

Alexander Baron's narrator is a man of the streets, an unemployed Hofmann presser, an unlucky gambler, a compulsive autodidact. A binge-reader drained of energy. He lies, with melancholy tenderness of spirit, on his narrow bed, listening to the new sounds of more recent immigrants. Listening and approving. Knowing, beyond everything else, how glorious it is to be redundant. As the poet Ed Dorn said: 'So poetry is real obsolete. It makes me feel great. It makes me feel like I'm working with something good enough to be obsolete.'

By 1991 Patrick Wright could subtitle A Journey Through Ruins, his Dalston Lane book, as 'The Last Days of London'. Wright arrived in Hackney, by choice and by accident, and found the ideal territory for his literary style: discursive, polemic, researched through walks and trawls of local libraries. His was a fresh and invigorating approach to an old place. The man could tease a chapter from a stranded bus queue, could draw pertinent lessons from random collisions, cullings found in the Hackney Gazette, that surreal mix of horror and real estate, used cars and abused persons.

'How do I string this together?' Wright asked. 'Other people will do that for me. I took Dalston Lane as a yardstick and measured it up. I felt that everything you capture, you fix. I found myself even trying to fix the billboards. When the economy is booming, billboards move very fast. There were moments at the end of that era when the economy sank into complete inertia. You would find bankrupt estate agents who still had windows full of prices from twenty or fifty years previously.'

Wright echoed Roland Camberton: the urban inventory, the catalogue of intimate jottings, a city of particulars. And we realise, reading these books one after another, that authors are never more than servants of place. They tell the same story in many voices, the rules never change. The spirit of Hackney is unique, most revealed when it argues with itself, solicits its own destruction. That is the charm of the thing, feeding on entropy, turning scorn back to affectionate exasperation: living with what we've got, the mapping that does not, and cannot, escape its fate. Erasure. Recovery. Delight.

Monday, 9 February, 2009