“Fever dreams empty the streets and let the old ghosts out.”
Iain Sinclair, Pariah Genius
“Fever dreams empty the streets and let the old ghosts out.”
Iain Sinclair, Pariah Genius
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.
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.
Chuffed to be doing an event with Iain SInclair at the wonderful Hatchards Bookshop on Piccadilly, 25th January 2024. Get tickets here https://JohnRogersAtHatchards.eventbrite.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.