Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The buzzword was realpolitik ; clear-eyed, stand-up-and-be-counted, a streetgang of warriors. For less than £150,000 you could purchase a few cubic feet of the old Bryant & May match factory, a kiosk tricked out in the style of a blue-ribbon transatlantic liner (tourist class, natch). Or, more accurately, as if the set for such a vessel had been tastefully vamped in plasterboard, chrome, and plastic mouldings for a Noël Coward revival ( Sail Away ?) This former cathedral of industry was now partitioned into a series of mock-deco hutches: waiting rooms for some futurist dentist. And everywhere the gaunt spectres of the sulphur-jawed skivvies were invoked in sepia-tinted prints. The Bow Quarter was a shrine to the authentic. Volunteer inmates were barricaded against the outside world, eager to turn a blind eye to the railway, and the ramps of petrol-burning lemmings who dirt-tracked within yards of the perimeter fence. (If this is the Bow Quarter, who needs the other three-quarters?)

Sonny paced between fridge and window; where he gazed, olive carton in hand, ruminating, upon the squadron of builders’ skips that packed the inner courtyard. It was time to put a flame under a few dozing projects. Obviously, Spitalfields was burnt out (caned by the supplements) — but Bow was effervescently marginal, a desert crying aloud for re-enchantment.

‘I think we’ve got a genuine lever here,’ Sonny lectured. I had agreed to meet him, not because I had any expectation that our film project could be resurrected, but because I felt that the Bow Quarter itself would stand a little research. It was a fortress for New Money, not for the seriously wealthy river-spivs. These proper people, the traditionally liquid, had staked out Wapping, years ago, while the here-today-gone-tomorrow boys ravished the Isle of Dogs, laundering their blagswag: leaving such previously despised outposts as Bow to small-change tobacconists, hairdressers, media hustlers, and oral-hygiene mechanics.

‘Francis Smart has flitted — the producer who once met your mate, Eric Whatsisname — so Hanbury’s script is on the spike. It’s in limbo. It won’t be cancelled, but it won’t be cleared either. Forget the kill fee. There’s no fizz left. They’re putting Hanbury out to grass in Dorset, Open University rap, the Valium beat. Smart has cashed in his credits. Now — this is strictly off the record — I don’t want to read it in Private Eye , you must promise…’

‘Oh, naturally,’ I replied, smirking with insincerity, ‘I know the rules.’

‘Well, what happened was — the old fart let some Oxford chum run a graveyard series on “The Chivalry of War”; twenty episodes, bottle-necking Sunday nights. Hours of dreadful stock footage, voice over, rostrum trawls across The Rout of Ran Romano ; flutes and drums, talking heads; purple, cabbage-skinned passed-over brigadiers thumping maps — and young Lochinvar poncing about in tailored sour-cream fatigues around every battlefield he could think of from Carthage to Marathon, Bull Run to Saigon. The expense sheet’s been framed: it’s a legend. And in exchange, quid pro quo , Smart gets a sabbatical year, recharging the batteries among the dreaming spires. He’ll shuffle back at the end of the cricket season to see if there’s anything on the boil at the Palace: tread water until the knighthood comes through. Might put in for Controller of Channel 4, or cop the Arts Council as a consolation prize. Then there’s always The Times . And the antiquarian bookshop.’

He yawned, bored with the inevitability of it all. ‘The fat cats,’ he continued, ‘the boys in the red braces have packed away their cellular phones and departed. You can’t make a deal anywhere in the Corporation. It’s all accountable. I’m trying to get a hook on “The Last Show”, our latest attempt to put insomniacs on a culture drip. The rolling credits look hugely impressive — until you read the christian names. Strictly, “son of”. Kindergarten Athenaeum. But they do need plenty of fillers (they don’t use anything else). We can change the title of your treatment and resubmit. Take a few more snapshots, find some new faces. Pop in the odd cutting from the glossies. You’ll be on for a research fee. Your agent cops his percentage. Everybody’s happy.’

Without further debate we plunged recklessly into the streets, the broad channel of Bow Road. ‘I’m getting the twitch,’ screamed Sonny, above the traffic. ‘We’re on to an activated possibility.’

I agreed: it was my policy at that time to agree with everything, to play Russian roulette with whatever fate threw at me, to break — by paths I could not anticipate — into the madness of the city. I would lead Sonny to the redoubt of Imar O’Hagan, the secret Bracken Bunker. Sonny was beginning to see the shape I had already prepared for him.

‘I like it!’ he shouted, as he bounced a pensioner into the path of an oncoming 35cwt van. ‘It’s got realpolitik and balance. This solitary anchorite, O’Hagan, labouring in his cave. Modest, employing horizontal forms, working only with what is available to him — free of sponsorship. A re-enchantment of that which was never previously enchanted. Yes! And we set that against the state art of the Silvertown Memorial, those bragging vertical energies, laying claim to emotions they have not earned. The public river and the unregarded wasteland. God, it’s almost a title! We’ve got it. We’ve got our pitch.’

Sonny beat his hand against his side (altogether missing the historic tablet that stood with its Noah’s Ark, named Courage, to honour the memory of the match-girls). He was awkwardly squaring his fingers to screentest the statue of Mr Gladstone that rose out of the curve of the Gents on an island in the middle of the road, around which swept an enraged scum of drivers, catapulting from the flyover.

‘Who is that? What’s the church? Bow? The bells? You mean, this is it ? The epicentre? We’re there, in there, there there, at it — we’ve arrived.’

He advanced at a run towards Gladstone, emitting idiocies like a froth of ectoplasm. The Grand Old Man’s right hand gestured prophetic scorn back towards the Bow Quarter, in bird-limed resignation.

‘Brilliant! This anonymous vision of the great liberal patriarch. It’s biblical. Decency. Authority — by respect. An earned authority. Feel the humanity burning in those eyes. My God, he’s actually supported by a cairn of books. What’s that? Dante? Of course, Juventus Mundi . And a third volume whose title is turned away from the spectator; thus preserving the essential mystery of personality. That’s us. The third force, the mediators between spiritual heaven and material hell. We must shoot our film with the same sense of unegoic communality espoused by the modest craftsman who created this statue. Come on, yes — do you see it? — let’s go.’

He vaulted the protective fence, to hurl himself among the hog-run of cars. I could not bring myself to point out the sculptor’s name, larger than life, cut into the side of the pedestal: Albert Bruce Joy. Sonny spun past corrugated fences that surrounded soon-to-be-demolished municipal mausoleums: the fences were plastered with fly-pitched posters for rock groups whose names had all been lifted from the canon of modernist literature. A hyperactive collage of quotations; many from William Burroughs, some from Joyce, some even from Jean Rhys. Authors whose works would finally exist only as names on hoardings: memento mori to bands who went out of business before the paste was dry. The hallucinatory wave patterns of the fence metamorphosed a leering Derek Jameson into an avatar of the Elephant Man.

Devons Road opens to the north from a submerged precinct, half-developed, half-boarded for the bulldozers: nothing happens until you duck under the railway bridge. Sonny was rambling euphorically, pirouetting in tight circles: panoramas of blight — ‘yes, yes’ — grass humps, horizons of aborted social experiments. These were the final killing fields of the welfare state: bleak towers, mud gash, red cliffs of hospital charity. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Sonny’s camera/eye swept from the dead nettles of the embankment to the spark-grid of the south-flowing railway cutting, from the marshes to the distant docks. This island earth: a dab of infected lint helplessly staunching a terminal haemorrhage.