The Last London [Read aloud to Adelle]
I got this book because we were reading London Orbital, Sinclairs book about a walk around London in the acoustic footprint of the M25 and didn’t want it to finish. More about that book later. This was a tricky read, with complex sentences that didn’t come out in one breathe. His writing style is intense, with many observations on people and things he encountered on his walks.
The majority of the book revolves around his locality in Haggerstone, spiralling outwards to eventually end up recreating a force march to the battle of Hastings with a parade of misfits lead by an unattached bride. This is a political discourse on the turmoil of Brexit, both before and after, an observation of the schisms in the mentality of the country.
I knew a surprising number of the places through which the recorded walks passed, and was offered a view different from those I have seen during my own ambling, with a peak into the ancient or, more often recent history, of places.
One such place I didn’t know about was Mortimer Road, home of The Mole Man of Hackney, a mere couple of miles from my first flat in London, where an eccentric Irishman burrowed an extensive network of tunnels. Karen Russo said the Mole Man proved to be extraordinarily difficult to work with, and we are left with only a few pictures of the contents of his tunnelling.
London Orbital was where it started, this was a book I read not long after it came out at the beginning of the century. It captured a time in my life when the orbital was central, when discovery of things off the tarmac was a view into a world that was not there, that did not exist because you join, you drive, find your junction and leave. There is something in all those miles in between. And, for the most part, it is asylums or plague hospitals, places to put the unseen of Victorian society so they remain unseen. And they remain unseen, for different reasons now.
I read this book to Adelle too, and was reminded of the hopeful future that pervaded my life at the time of my own escape from the gravitational capture of the capital. It is a book of its time, a time now passed, making it a history of sorts, I am pleased to note that there is a 20 year celebration on film.
Wanderlust makes me consider other walks that could yield similar works, but my control of the language falls far short of that in these books. The A14 was an obvious candidate, at one point, now there is more appeal to the liminal nature of the north Norfolk coastal path.