Sinclair is fiercely satirical towards the recent influx of nominally left-leaning media types, despite identifying himself as their precursor. He can’t understand why anyone would bother to live in Hackney just to sleep there, and to spirit themselves through the crime and the grime within the cocoon of a taxi. Look out for his hatchet job on the ‘Hackney Hardcore’, a group of successful TV producers and writers who live in the far west of the borough (Islington, practically) and meet, horror of horrors, in the Groucho Club. How ironic that a good chunk of this book’s readership will consist of these very interlopers, eager to get some literary purchase on their home borough and its precious ‘edginess’.

These moribund types are in sharp contrast to the people most celebrated by Sinclair. Hackney has been a home and hotbed for all sorts of political outsiders: anarchists, communists, fascists, even a Baader-Meinhof fugitive. Sinclair interviews many of them, rehabilitating the borough’s history as a refuge for the anti-establishment. And nowhere is his respect for resistance clearer than in his treatment of the Olympics, Hackney’s sword of Damocles. Here, Sinclair is adamant: the forces of top-down ‘regeneration’ are pernicious, and will bury precious local history forever. In one radiant paragraph he savages Sebastian Coe, who he envisages

throwing back the silken linings of his deep-blue jacket, like a fallen angel, to offer this virtual world, its mounds and stadia, to investors prepared to mortgage a city’s future on the demolition and ransacking of a mythical past.

There is an intellectual inconsistency in his position on the Olympics: surely this latest rush of development will entail just another wave of ‘disappearances’ of the type that he loves to uncover. But inconsistency is not a fair charge to bring against Sinclair, whose writing so closely resembles the experience of living in this vast, complex city of contradictions. London is lucky to have him. 

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