Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

Hackney in the east end of London, is a part of the city that has been in seemingly permanent decline since the late nineteenth century. Although it started life as a leafy and desirable suburb on the fringes of London, the city quickly spread out to engulf it and by the turn of the century it was a warren of grimy slums, factories, fever hospitals and poorhouses.

It has continued to be an unloved corner of London ever since, although it has gained some cachet of late as artists and trendy types have begun moving in. These days, it is a wonderfully diverse and bustling neighbourhood, with mosques and Pentecostal churches rubbing shoulders with Somali internet cafes and Turkish groceries.

Iain Sinclair has been living and working in Hackney since the 1960s and knows that part of London intimately. Though Sinclair has written extensively on other parts of London, concentrating mostly on the darker side of the city’s history, he has chosen to focus on his home turf for his most ambitious work to date.

Sinclair’s writing style is an elegiac mixture of local history, reminiscence and cultural history which he has termed ‘documentary fiction’.

In the book, Sinclair meets a cast of the dispossessed, including writers, photographers, bomb-makers and market traders. In particular, he chronicles the history of legions of famous names who have passed through Hackney down the years, Lenin and Stalin attending communist party conferences shadowed by the police, novelists Joseph Conrad and Samuel Richardson, film-makers Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard, even for a year or two, Tony Blair when he was beginning his political career, not to mention a Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla on the run.

And he tells his own story: of forty years in one house in Hackney, of marriage, children, strange encounters, deaths. His depth of knowledge, and the associations he makes, between Russian revolutionaries, local gangsters, various eccentrics and the pubs, clubs and parks of the area make for fascinating reading.

Sinclair has problems with many aspects of Hackney today. The main ground of the 2012 Olympics is being built in the borough and to Sinclair’s mind; a huge swathe of the area’s history is being wiped out by the project. He bemoans the modern London of traffic calming and CCTV, longing for a time when Hackney was a wilder, more unpredictable place.

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair
Published by Hamish Hamilton €25.00