Soft machines for living in

Iain Sinclair, Living with Buildings and Walking with Ghosts 
Published by Profile Books in association with Wellcome Collection

No sooner had Iain Sinclair, apparently tireless writer about London, walker of mean streets, grubber around in corners, tracer of psychogeographical force-fields, and seer of beauty in dilapidation, said his writerly ‘farewell’ to London*, than he’s at it again: walking and writing about the place in an account, made at the behest of the Wellcome Foundation, to explore the relationship between buildings and health. It’s not just London, though, that Sinclair visits. He’s off to Mexico, up to Scotland, and out to Marseille to visit Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. One almost expects him to reprise some of his visits (made for London Orbital) to the former asylums around the periphery of the capital, but instead, he looks at the site of the Royal Victoria military hospital, Southampton, with its memories of shell-shock. As the title-page of this book suggests, along with buildings come ghosts.

Although a commission, this is an intensely personal book. It comes most alive in the parts (the majority of the book) where he writes about his friends: the hardships they and those around them have faced and the way in which the buildings they occupy and use have affected them. ’Gentle’ is not the first adjective that might occur to one when thinking about Sinclair’s writing – he’s known and savoured for the kind of lively language that threatens to set the page on fire. But gentle, tender even, he can be. Writing about his friend the film-maker Andrew Kötting and his daughter Eden, who lives with Joubert’s Syndrome, Sinclair enumerates the effects of this disorder using the medical terms that it demands (‘hypertonia, ataxia, psychomotor retardation…’) but if this sounds cold, it’s in contrast to the warmth which which Sinclair describes her and her relationship with her father, with whom she early learned to ‘play, collaborate, hug and laugh out loud’. The flat in Deptford’s Pepys Estate that the family occupied when Eden was young might look a cold place too: the area was one in which the council narrowed the rubbish chutes to make it impossible to use them to dispose of ‘inconvenient bodies’. The place is a 1960s mix of low- and high-rise that John Betjeman denounced in a film (flying over Deptford, he concluded, ‘It can’t be right.’) Yet Kötting, his partner Leila Macmillan and their daughter Eden found it a nurturing place, a space they enjoyed living in, where they found friendship and support, and to which they look back fondly.

Sinclair’s book contains several stories concerning people in often challenging circumstances in buildings that might, from outside, seem unforgiving – Emma Matthews and her son Louis in Golden Lane, sculptor Steve Dilworth and his wife Joan on the island of Harris, Jonathan Meades in the Marseilles Unité (which belies its image as an overly hard-edged Corbusian ‘machine for living in’), artist Rebecca Hind at various locations. Sinclair never comes to the obvious conclusions; he doesn’t offer easy answers either. He’s after a more elliptical approach, one that presents the complexity of what we’re dealing with – people, their wellbeing, whole environments not just walls or rooms.

This is a rich book, full of the breadth of allusion that one might expect from Sinclair – Rembrandt, Sir Thomas Browne, W. G. Sebald. It’s studded too with bits of arresting language that make one sit up and pay attention – in a pleasurable way. I relish his turns of phrase, from the disturbing notion of body snatchers as ‘part of the local food chain’, to blazing images like the author burning inside ‘like an owl that has swallowed a firelighter’. It comes, too, with a good dose of Sinclairish appreciation of things ‘counter, original, spare, strange’.† But not just in architecture – in people too. It’s an attitude that is open-minded then, though now and then with a healthy does of scepticism – Sinclair, a doctor’s son, recalls ‘consulting room chatter’ along the lines of ‘Avoid hospitals like the plague’. But it’s animated also by the credo of Simenon’s Maigret and Sinclair’s father: ‘Understand and judge not’. Not a bad motto – for policemen, doctors, architects…and writers too.

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* See Iain Sinclair, The Last London (Oneworld Publications, 2017).

† I’m raiding Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘Pied Beauty’ here – though where Hopkins found beauty in trout and cows, Sinclair’s epiphanies are more likely to occur when encountering rust or flaking paint.

Newell Street, London

The wisdom of Solomon

In the dappled green shade of the churchyard of St Anne’s, Limehouse (see previous post) is a 9-foot-high stone pyramid. It seems to mark no grave, has no obvious purpose, and stands there, looking mysterious. In 19th-century engravings it is shown mounted on a square plinth but now stands on the ground. On one face is the inscription, ‘The wisdom of Solomon’. The pyramid is part of a group of arcane symbols that seem to cluster around Hawksmoor’s churches – pyramids, obelisks, and other borrowings from ancient civilizations – that set them apart and contribute to the alien character of these massive buildings. The best guess about the surprising presence of this particular pyramid is that it was intended to top one of the corners of the church. No one knows for sure.

Such things arouse the interest of psychogeographers, those writers who have examined the lives of places and their effects on people’s psyches. Mappers of hidden cultural contours; those who exhume forgotten histories or find alignments between the past and the present; soakers in atmosphere; reclaimers of evocative desolation and pleasing decay.

Iain Sinclair, for example. A whole section of Sinclair’s book Lud Heat (part poetry, part prose, ‘a writing’ as that other great London visionary, David Jones, would have called it) concerns Hawksmoor’s churches. It includes a map with lines that join their sites, creating triangles and pentagrams and alignments with other highly significant sites and buildings such as William Blake’s house in Lambeth and Cleopatra’s Needle. Sinclair mines all kinds of allusions, myths, and significances from these alignments, connections that enable him to incorporate into his text references to such writers as Blake, Pepys, and Sir Thomas Browne, parallels with myths from ancient Egypt and ancient Britain, and sinister histories ranging from the plague to the murders committed by Jack the Ripper.

Who knows how significant all this is? It’s possible to make all sorts of sites connect on a map, especially if the scale of the map is small and the lines joining the points are thick, as critics of ley-line hunters have pointed out. But I’m not looking for literal truth or Ordnance Survey precision in the alignments between pyramids, obelisks, and plague pits. What is more important is that Sinclair has built absorbing and sometimes brilliant writing out of this hoard of images and myths.

And Sinclair nails Hawksmoor’s style. He says of the churches: ‘Certain features are in common: extravagant design, massive, almost slave-built, strength – not democratic. A strength that is not connected to notions of “craftsmanship” or “elegance”. They are not easy on the eye, and do not enforce images of grace. Metaphors inflate at their own risk. The mind is not led upwards to any starry nest.’ Sometimes Sinclair could almost be describing his own writing here, prose that has a strangeness and a solidity that is true to Hawksmoor’s buildings, large, ponderous, and weird as they are. Words that are arranged in a modern, collage-like fashion, and yet draw on ideas that have been around for as long as the pyramids of Egypt.