Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Track wanted to record the thing. It would play much better as a photograph. She stood foursquare in the road, a sturdy figure dwarfed by recent buildings, slabs of light; offices in which figures sat, or rose from their desks to talk to other seated figures, to stare at the windows, not out of them. There was no out, a moving screen, a future that belonged to a religion still waiting to be defined; a priesthood honouring the City’s persistent duality, a Manichean creed of darkness and light. Greed and fear. Flesh and spirit. Love and death.

London, I thought, regretting Snip, and sensing that I would never see him again in this world, belongs to barbers, tailors, gamblers. Cut, stitch, risk. Shave and shampoo. Send the corpse down the chute in best pinstripe, clean underwear, polished shoes. Accidental survivors like Aldgate Pump filled me with an inexpressible melancholy. Better let them rip the relics out, burn John Stow and his surveys, dismiss scholars and memory-men, Bill Fishman and his ilk. Characters like our Mitre Square dowser worried at a rind of pain, made lists, catalogues of the lost. Track was more sensible, no truck with nostalgia. She trotted beside me, headset pumping out Jah Wobble’s anthem to the A13 as celestial highway, a benediction to sales reps and Ikea warehouse persons in bright overalls: a smile on her face and a notebook to be filled.

New buildings meant old bones. Without development, Quatermass pits in London clay, there would be no hard evidence of plague deaths, helmets, brooches, Elizabethan theatres, coins, rings, oyster shells and broken clay pipes. The yellow dead, in their gaudy, would sleep for ever in the choke of claggy earth. Bulldozers fetched them out. More to display, more skulls to house. A louder story to narrate.

We were on the outside of the City gate where Geoffrey Chaucer was Keeper of Customs, a salaried bureaucrat. The original Swiss Re building housed, in its basement, a section of wall, a medieval arch from Holy Trinity Priory. The arch had been constructed from stone salvaged from Jewish houses, demolished after the expulsion ordered by Edward I in 1290. Or so the sign said. Swiss Re decorated their prize exhibit, all that was left of ‘one of the most powerful institutions in the Capital’, with prompt cards, genealogies, checklists of significant dates.

Track read aloud facsimile extracts from Victorian newspapers, pre-tabloid horror stories based on the Whitechapel Murders. The invention of that entity now known as Jack the Ripper. A more recent cutting must have been placed here because of its casual references to Swiss Re and the Holy Trinity Priory. This was a review of the film From Hell , in which the journalist argued that US global capitalism had nowhere left to invade — except the past. Regime change in Mitre Square and Berner Street was the preferred option.

History is there to be captured and colonised by a commando unit of highly trained and skilled professionals, using the most advanced technology known to the Western world. The military/industrial state sees film as an efficient way of burning (laundering, reinvesting, alchemising) money. Great Britain, that drifting, off-Europe aircraft carrier, is tolerated as a generator of exploitable myths: Dracula, Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter and the runic menagerie of J.R. Tolkien.

The arch in the basement of the Swiss Re building, close to where the body of the murdered prostitute Kate Eddowes was found in Mitre Square, is preserved — as a conversation piece. The arch belonged to one of the ten side-chapels where masses were sung for the souls of the City’s dead. Its provenance is explained on boards hung alongside Ripper caricatures and expressions of horror that such events could occur in the world’s greatest and most civilised metropolis.

From Hell , as a film, returns us to source, the penny-dreadful, the shilling shocker: a marketable product crafted to compliment the wave of predatory development that maligns history and treats the past as the final colony in the American world empire.

‘Standard riffs,’ I snorted. I’d used them myself, more than once. The problem, at my age, is that every statement sounds like an echo of something written or read. The worst of it, for journalists who stick around too long, is that we self-plagiarise to the point of erasure, quote our own quotes, promote fresh new talent, buried for years in Kensal Green or Nunhead. The madness of seeing London as text. Words. Dates. Addresses. No brick that has not been touched, mentioned in a book.

In a gloaming of wheelspray, wet light eddying around Aldgate Pump, we navigate a complex system of pedestrian crossings, underpasses, islets on which you could perch for a moment, reeling from fumes, before hazarding a rush at the next high kerb. Yellow fences, too tall to vault, have been designed specifically to balk random hikers. There never was a landscape so much factored on confusion: LOOK BOTH WAYS. Double red lines. Contradictory arrows. Taxis hauling business folk a hundred yards between meetings. Creased suits returning, flushed, from wine bars. Repmobiles trundling back from the dirty worlds of Dagenham, Rainham, Basildon. Sports commentators in loud shirts, airfixed hair, hoarse from calling the. arrows in the Circus Tavern, Purfleet: ‘One hundred and eighty!’

The Hoop & Grapes public house is a marker on the old road. We spotted the Mitre Square dowser coming out, unintoxicated, crackling with crisp packets like a Bacofoil-swathed marathon runner, in danger of imminent dehydration. Lips crusted with salt. The signboard swung, a heavy vintage of green grapes caught in a golden hoop, like another Ripper prompt. A nifty back reference to Stephen Knight’s eccentric notion of chief suspect, Sir William Withey Gull, feeding doped fruit to compliant Whitechapel whores, while they jolt over the cobbles in a closed hansom.

So indulge that theme for a moment, if you will. Old man (ex-hack) buying wine (white and sour) for young female artist, as the lights of the City come on and haloes form around the hot bulbs of streetlamps. The stolen hour when Track, three drinks in, remembers a story her mother told about trying to retrace the steps immigrants took, after coming ashore near Tower Bridge, walking to Heneage Street in Whitechapel.

The mother’s friend, a gentile from across the water, spoke ‘incessantly’ about the lavender fields of her youth, between Mitcham and Croydon. And how the smell stayed with her even now, through all the dirt and noise and bluster; it only took a pinch of lavender on her fingers to bring back the blue hills of Surrey.

It had been raining that day, and coming towards Fenchurch Street, crossing Commercial Road, Track’s mother was delighted to find the speckled-granite basin of a drinking fountain filled with water. An old lady was washing herself, her face, her hair. And singing. And some of the vagrant drinkers, the ones she had seen earlier, angry, affronted, were singing with her. Track’s mother loved that moment.

We were following the thread of the aboriginal A13, no question. Another leaping dog. Or, if you want to be pedantic, a South American jaguar. Jaguar . The bronze hound of Aldgate Pump transformed into a showroom token, guarding a display of £40,000 motors. (A direct swap, I thought, for one of Jimmy Seed’s paintings.) Vagrancy and conspicuous consumption loafed side by side in the tradition of this territory. Poverty and flash shacked up. If you haven’t got it, spend it. £62,725 will secure you a nice green car in a glass box (polished tile floor). Car as sculpture. You’d never risk one of these on the A13. Why trash your investment? Leave it in the gallery until it achieves its full market potential.

This hinterland — river, ghosts — won’t let Gothic themes fade; everything zooms back to the karma of the Whitechapel Murders. Kelly’s Foodhall commemorates, for slasher freaks, the name of the final victim, Marie Jeanette. PLEASE PAY HERE. The Minories trigger spectral sightings of the unfortunate Montague Druitt, Ripper fall guy, stones-in-the-pocket Thames suicide.