Product Description

Once an Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty. Now, the Olympics, a final attempt to clamp down on a renegade spirit, seeks to complete the process: erasure disguised as ‘progress’. In this ‘documentary fiction’, Sinclair meets a cast of the dispossessed, including writers, photographers, bomb-makers and market traders. Legends of tunnels, Hollow Earth theories and the notorious Mole Man are unearthed. He uncovers traces of those who passed through Hackney: Lenin and Stalin, novelists Joseph Conrad and Samuel Richardson, film-makers Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard, Tony Blair beginning his political career, even a Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla on the run. And he tells his own story: of forty years in one house in Hackney, of marriage, children, strange encounters, deaths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45801 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

Review
'Sinclair at his best . . . One of the finest books about London in recent decades' --Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph

Review
'An explosion of literary fireworks'

Review
'Few books become causes celebres before they are published. But Sinclair's is one'

Customer Reviews

Disappointed
I was born in Hackney and lived in and around it for many years apparently, I discover, as a close neighbour of Mr Sinclair for a time, so this book was a must read for me. Sadly I have to say that I found it disappointing on a number of levels. The first aspect that troubles me is one that is endemic to his writings as a whole which rely on interviews and conversations ,that is the constant inclusion of his small coterie of friends to supply material. Chris Petit and now his son are referenced here as is Stewart Home. Less well known subjects in this book are generally other middle class "artists" who have washed up in the borough, the great unwashed have no voice here. The mass of Hackney residents are represented as winos, hoodies , beggars and chancers. The Holly estate for instance is discussed at length by people who live close to it but not those live on or in it, giving the impression that the place is something of a war zone but no sense of what it is like to live there.
The Four Aces a Legendary reggae and Ska venue has its history dismissed in a sentence while a brief period when their premises became part of the rave scene rates half a chapter, because he encounters someone who went there once. Other venues like Phebes and The All Nations are ignored totally. For me the significance of these places to black culture over a long period is is a more significant topic. But the nice white middle class residents that Mr Sinclair occupies himself with would know nothing about that and those who might are not in evidence.
Mr Sinclairs work is often referred to as offering a complex and multi layered treatment of his subject but there are a number of layers that are missing here, interestingly the ones that are generally missing from histories written by middle class academics So in this instance I feel that he has given us less of his subject than it deserves.

Another deranged London classic from Iain Sinclair
In this book Iain Sinclair brings together his fictional practices and his cultural journalism with stunning results. Sinclair has interviewed dozens of subterranean London figures such as Chris Petit and Stewart Home then, as he openly admits, rewritten their words to suit his own agenda. I've already had hours of fun trying to work out what is true and what is made up in this book, and I'm sure once more people have read it this will generate endless pub discussions too.

Much coverage is devoted to the Hackney Mole Man, and while the recollections of some of those who knew him back in the eighties (Stewart Home again and his friend Mark Pawson) appear to have some basis in reality, it would appear that the entire interview with this legendary figure is simply made up. However, this may just be a double-bluff on Sinclair's part. Who knows?

Sinclair's documentary fiction is considerably more accurate than the telephone checked stories of Fleet Street hacks.... and he doesn't let the Hackney borders contain him, since he devotes a chapter to the Golden Lane Estate just along from Smithfield Market, an area notorious as Pickt-hatch in the Jacobean era due to the many brothels it housed, but now the base of writers like Tom McCarthy and Chris Petit. "Hackney, The Rose Red Empire" is easily the best book I've read this year.

a brilliant cross-section of urban memory
Sinclair has lived in Hackney for over thirty years and this book is a fascinating take on the history of this neglected borough and the incredible variety of people who have lived there for one reason or another- artists, writers, musicians and film-makers, but also anarchists, drop outs and other refugees from 'normal' society. He is a wry observer who writes with verve and bite: some of the material is based on his own archive of recorded interviews, so that a tapestry of other voices is interwoven with his own memories. Like the best documentaries, it bears witness to the process of its own making, rather than presenting us with a conclusive picture. It's an addictive mixture of time, place and people, and I found it hard to put down.