Talking about regeneration

Iain Sinclair, the London novelist and poet, is always on the move. From the industrial sumplands of Woolwich to the jagged riversides of Gravesend, he rakes unfrequented zones for literary signs and symbols, locations of forgotten films and other arcana. His previous book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, revealed that Joseph Conrad had been a patient in the German Hospital in Dalston. Whenever I drive past that hospital (now converted into private flats), it resonates with the presence of the Congo-sick Polish author.

Typically, Sinclair explores London on foot, gathering all kinds of off-piste detail as he does so. The swimming pool in Jerzy Skolimowksi’s raw coming-of-age film Deep End, for example, stood on Cathall Road in Leytonstone, and had served as a (reekingly chlorinated) sexual trysting place until it was demolished in the early 1970s. Like the Polish-born Skolimowski, Sinclair views London through a distortingly surreal lens; a striking visual poetry and tart black comedy are extracted from even the most hopeless of London locations. Interestingly, though, Sinclair is not a Londoner; he was born in a Welsh mining town, the son of a Scots doctor.

Ghost Milk, Sinclair’s latest book, offers a mishmash of travel journalism and personal reminiscence. Much of it is taken up with reflections on the various kinds of work Sinclair undertook for Hackney borough council back in the 1970s. Strapped for cash, he toiled as a porter, gardener and bookseller. The drudgery of causal labour clearly moulded his vision of London. One of his odd jobs was rolling barrels round the cellars of Truman’s Brick Lane brewery. The brewery was plumb in the heart of Jack the Ripper’s London; tales of Jack and his depredations still circulated among the ullage men.