Hatchards Piccadilly with Iain Sinclair

John Rogers and Iain Sinclair at Hatchards Piccadilly
photo by Johanne Adams https://www.instagram.com/johanneadams/

What an amazing night at Hatchards Bookshop on Piccadilly with the great Iain Sinclair talking about my book, Welcome to New London and getting a preview of Iain’s forthcoming publication, Pariah Genius.

John Rogers and Iain Sinclair at Hatchards Piccadilly
John Rogers and Iain Sinclair at Hatchards Piccadilly
John Rogers and Iain Sinclair at Hatchards Piccadilly
John Rogers at Hatchards Piccadilly
Welcome to New London and This Other London at Hathcards Piccadilly

After the talk and book signing, I wandered with a friend up to the Old Coffee House in Soho to remind myself of the glory of Brodie’s Beer (brewed in Leyton), sinking a couple of pints of Piccadilly Pale. It seemed the most appropriate place to delve into Iain’s ‘fictionalised biography of the afterlife of the photographer John Deakin‘.
The Buxton reference in the Truman’s mirror nicely echoed the discussion with Iain over the influence of the Buxton family in East London and their mention in Welcome to New London. Iain also recalled his time working at Truman’s with the sculptor and author Brian Catling in the 1970s.

The Old Coffee House Soho
Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair on the bar of a Soho pub

Walking Swedenborg’s London screening

Screening of John Rogers film Walking Swedenborg's London at Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury 7th September 2023

Back on 7th September saw a wonderful event at Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury with a screening + Q&A of my film, Walking the visionary London of Emanuel Swedenborg. Back on a freezing January morning, with Iain Sinclair and Stephen McNeilly we retraced the footsteps of the hugely influential 18th Century scientist, philosopher, mystic and theologian. London played a huge role in the Swedenborg story, with Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury continuing his legacy.

Our walk started in Warner Street, Clerkenwell where Swedenborg had his most famous vision in a Chop House. We then walked on along the course of the River Fleet to Bakers Yard / Cold Bath Square where Swedenborg died in 1772. From here we continued along Saffron Hill and Hatton Garden to Fetter Lane, the site of the Moravian Chapel that Swedenborg attended. Our Swedenborg walk took us along Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill to Paternoster Square linking together a series of locations associated with Swedenborg’s publishing and writing career.
We then headed out to East London, passing along Leman Street, Cable Street, past Wilton’s Music Hall to Swedenborg Gardens where Swedenborg was buried in the Swedish Church, and the whole story of Swedenborg’s head, which deserves a book in its own right.

Iain Sinclair, Stephen McNeilly and John Rogers at Swedenborg Hall 7th September 2023

Watching the icy clouds of breath in the film offered some faint relief from the sweltering temperatures in the hall. The discussion was illuminating as ever with Iain Sinclair and Stephen McNeilly. The bust of Swedenborg ever present looming over our shoulders, and I was tickled to discover that it was modelled on the wrong mummified head.

Iain Sinclair, Stephen McNeilly and John Rogers at Swedenborg Hall 7th September 2023

Plaque unveiling in Swedenborg Gardens

Swedenborg Gardens plaque unveiling
Photo by Mark Riley

The other Saturday saw the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the association of Swedish philosopher, theologian, scientist and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg and Prince’s Square, Shadwell. Swedenborg Gardens now marks the area where the Swedish Church once stood and where Emanuel Swedenborg was originally buried.

Swedenborg Gardens plaque unveiling
Iain Sinclair at the unveiling of the plaque in Swedenborg Gardens
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair and John Rogers at Swedenborg Gardens

Stephen McNeilly from Swedenborg House and a Tower Hamlets Councillor unveiled the plaque, the Iain Sinclair spoke eloquently about the legacy of Emanuel Swedenborg’s relationship with London and the lasting imprint he left behind. I then spoke briefly about the recent video I made with Iain and Stephen tracing the footprints of Swedenborg’s London.

Swedenborg Gardens
Emanuel Swedenborg plaque, Swedenborg Gardens

The World’s End – walking with Iain Sinclair through Tilbury

‘The Jungle began in London’

The second chapter of Iain Sinclair’s The Gold Machine opens with that line, ‘The jungle began in London’. This reflection comes beside a ‘fast-flowing’ brown river in Peru, following the footsteps of a journey made by his great-grandfather, Arthur Sinclair. ‘This Peruvian expedition had been an unspoken requirement most of my working life’, he writes. And in 2019 he finally made the journey with his daughter Farne and the filmmaker Grant Gee. But why had we come out to Tilbury to pick up the threads for this video?

The answers were littered along the walk we took from Tilbury Town to East Tilbury – from the Docks to Bataville. Stood outside a derelict boarded up guest house as Saturday traffic whizzed past, Iain looked up at the attic windows and explained:
“It’s very easy for me to imagine Joseph Conrad as a merchant mariner coming ashore in Tilbury and lodging there and looking out of this particular dirty pane of glass and dreaming the entire story of everything I’ve written ever since, or whispering in my ear and pushing me to write it, because the beginning the middle and the end of everything I’ve ever written begins in Dock Road Tilbury and it essentially begins with this building the wonderfully named Rourke’s Drift Guest House … those windows upstairs, just the faces are at the window. And I mean that’s it for me, this is where the ghost started to come through and push everything that follows.”

Iain Sinclair Downriver

We had not just gone in search of the origins of a journey to Peru, but the creation myth of Iain’s life of writing the hidden stories of London into existence. Once articulated, you realise Arthur Sinclair’s 19th Century travels as a planter to the tropics, are threaded through Iain Sinclair’s books, the tendrils from the jungle wrapped around the streets of East London and back down the Thames Estuary and out to sea.

John Rogers and Iain Sinclair

We stood on the wharf watching the passenger ferry pull out across the Thames for Gravesend. The sky so wide looking eastwards to the North Kent Marshes, and Iain talked of his great-grandfather’s first departure from this very spot bound of Ceylon. But also of Joseph Conrad’s Thames voyages and his own departure to the jungles of the Congo that became the basis of Heart of Darkness. A journey that also started at Tilbury. There were so many overlapping narratives that washed up along the foreshore as we walked. We wound up looking for the modernist espresso bar designed by architect Bronek Katz as a hub for the Bata Factory workers at East Tilbury, now butchered and blackened and operating as a kebak and burger joint called, Essex Kitchen. We never made it as far as Joseph Conrad’s house at Stanford-le-Hope, the best walks always act as preludes to future schleps. ‘The walk is the walk’, Iain said, whatever it contains is the narrative.

The Noise of Memory – walking with Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting

Walking with Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting from Rotherhithe to Queens Road Peckham

IS: Why did you put your fingers in your ears at this point?

AK: Just the noise, the noise

IS: Noise of my voice?

AK: The noise of memory. The noise of memory can become slightly overwhelming sometimes

The above exchange between the great London writer Iain Sinclair and visionary film-maker Andrew Kötting took place as we approached Canada Water Station on the London Overground walk we were filming for my documentary of Iain Sinclair’s book of the same name. Iain had just read the passage from the book aloud, on the hoof, describing this stage of the walk when he and Andrew had made the original circuit. These were Kötting’s memory grounds. From what he describes as the ‘Tarkovskian zone’ of the mid-1970s docks around Greenland Dock and Norway Dock, to his years living on the Pepys Estate. Editing the footage for the feature documentary, premiered at the Rio Cinema in Dalston 2016, my focus was on the journey of the book. So much of the material from this day in July 2015 had been unused. In fact most had remained unwatched since the initial rough cuts.

Iain Sinclair Andrew Kötting

It was a big day for me. Both Iain and Andrew had been enormous influences on my work. It was after watching Kötting’s Gallivant at the Sydney Film Festival in 1997 that I went out and bought a Super 8 camera with the intent on making filmed travelogues. Iain Sinclair’s writings are a constant source of inspiration. He’s been laying down traces across the city for over 50 years that London perambulators find themselves following, whether knowingly or not. Both of them are continiously setting new standards with each work they produce. So it was a special experience to revisit the rushes from this shoot and cut a full length version.

Iain Sinclair Andrew Kötting

There was the whole scene in the Cafe Gallery in Southwark Park, an important nodal point in Andrew Kötting’s artworld. Tales of scrap metal (and Bakerlite) trading days around South London, book dealing and Camden Market selling, the foot donated to Sinclair’s father and delivered at dinner time. They survery the ever changing skyline from Bridgehouse Meadows. And there are multiple readings in-situ by Iain Sinclair from London Overground.

What is still left to be shared at some point is the extended conversation the pair have in Andrew’s favourite cafe, La Cigale on Lower Road Surrey Quays. That’s a fascinating exchange – but I’ll save that for another day.

 

Eden’s Dreaming – The Whalebone Box

Whalebone Box

The Whalebone Box by Andrew Kötting

The dark cave of the box room where I write and make videos was the perfect lockdown hideaway to watch Andrew Kötting’s hypnotic odyssey The Whalebone Box. It’s a further collaboration with Psychogeographer in Chief Iain Sinclair, a dream ticket that began with Offshore in 2007 and continued through By Our Selves, Swandown, and Edith Walks (and you could add Iain’s book London Overground which I then filmed with Kötting playing a major role).

The star of this film though is the film-maker’s daughter Eden Kötting, now an established artist in her own right, who first beguiled us as a child in her father’s debut feature Gallivant (1996). Eden is the sage, the spirit guide for the journey that lies ahead, to return a whalebone box carved by artist Steve Dilworth on the Isle of Harris thirty years before, lined with lead and filled with calm water and placed in the care of Iain Sinclair. The Whalebone Box spent the intervening years on the London magus’ desk whispering to him as he produced a string of highly influential works predicting the future shape of London. Eden wonders if returning the ‘animal battery’ to its source will stop the flow of words.

The Whalebone Box
The film unfolds as Eden’s dream in a forest, gun on lap, hunting. The box drifts through the pine trees like the Rendlesham Forest UFO. Later whales swim between the twisted trunks of a gnarly copse. Eden casts Sinclair as ‘The Man’ (in black) ‘he wants to tell things … (he has) knowledge about this moment’.
Writer Philip Hoare relates how whales have the heaviest bones as they are full of oil. And the box has been lined with lead, filled with water and sealed with beeswax. The aim of the quest is to return the whalebone box to the beach where the whale washed up, to test whether the calm water sealed inside possesses healing powers and return health to the body of the sick. The box must first traverse the landscape, mountain tops and forests, the Fells, a tower to be charged with ‘insane energy’. The poet MacGillivray enchants a mermaid voice into the whalebone box in a church through haunting song. Kötting trails Sinclair to the ruined Cathar castle at Montségur, ‘the plug of the entire mythological system’. Philip Hoare tells us that whales can breach dimensions. Eden hears witches in the trees. At the Callanish Stones Sinclair says that this is where ‘the person dissolves in the place … we’re in this long dialogue with our ancestors’.

The Whalebone Box

The magic extends to the form of the film with its multi-layered soundtrack of present tense non-synced voice, sounds from the archives, whale-song, music conjured from peculiar instruments. The images merge between archive film, animation, and iPhone movie clips but in Kötting’s hands, ‘This isn’t a phone, it’s a 16mm camera’.
The whalebone box makes its eventual return to the beach where it washed up, accompanied on its final leg by the voices of Jonathan Meades and Peter Whitehead. Eden stands by the sea at night, in silhouette, it’s cold and she wants to go home. Is the journey complete? I’ve a feeling that this is another chapter in an on-going saga that will take us who knows where next.

 

Watch The Whalebone Box on Mubi until the end of April 2020