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Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics
From "an astonishingly original and entertaining writer" (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post ) and "our greatest guide to London" ( The Spectator ), an extraordinary book about a disappearing city
The Olympics, the story goes, have transformed London into a gleaming, wholly modern city. And East London--Olympic headquarters--is the city's new jewel, provider of unlimited opportunities and better tomorrows. The grime and poverty have been scrubbed away, and huge stadiums and grand public sculptures have taken their place. The writer Iain Sinclair has lived in East London for four decades, and in Ghost Milk , he tells a very different story about his that of a neighborhood turned upside down, of stolen history. Long-beloved parks have vanished; police raids can occur at any time; and high-security exclusion zones--enforced by armed guards and hidden cameras--have steamrolled East London's open streets and public spaces. To prepare for the most public of events, everything has been privatized. A call to arms against the politicians and public figures who have so doggedly preached the gospel of the Olympics, Ghost Milk is also a brilliant reflection on a changing landscape--and Sinclair's most personal book yet. In an attempt to understand what has happened to his beloved city, Sinclair travels farther he walks along the Thames from the North Sea to Oxford; he rides the bus across northern England; he visits Athens and Berlin, Olympic sites of the recent and distant past. Elegiac, intimate, and audacious, Ghost Milk is at once a powerful chronicle of memory and loss, in the tradition of W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, and a passionate interrogation of our embrace of progress at any cost.
The Olympics, the story goes, have transformed London into a gleaming, wholly modern city. And East London--Olympic headquarters--is the city's new jewel, provider of unlimited opportunities and better tomorrows. The grime and poverty have been scrubbed away, and huge stadiums and grand public sculptures have taken their place. The writer Iain Sinclair has lived in East London for four decades, and in Ghost Milk , he tells a very different story about his that of a neighborhood turned upside down, of stolen history. Long-beloved parks have vanished; police raids can occur at any time; and high-security exclusion zones--enforced by armed guards and hidden cameras--have steamrolled East London's open streets and public spaces. To prepare for the most public of events, everything has been privatized. A call to arms against the politicians and public figures who have so doggedly preached the gospel of the Olympics, Ghost Milk is also a brilliant reflection on a changing landscape--and Sinclair's most personal book yet. In an attempt to understand what has happened to his beloved city, Sinclair travels farther he walks along the Thames from the North Sea to Oxford; he rides the bus across northern England; he visits Athens and Berlin, Olympic sites of the recent and distant past. Elegiac, intimate, and audacious, Ghost Milk is at once a powerful chronicle of memory and loss, in the tradition of W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, and a passionate interrogation of our embrace of progress at any cost.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published July 7, 2011
12 people are currently reading
322 people want to read
About the author
Iain Sinclair
120 books342 followersIain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 25, 2012
I read this during the Olympics during which time I cycled past Iain Sinclair's house in Albion Drive, Hackney every day on my way to work. I was trying my hardest to get into the Olympic spirit but finding it very difficult not having a functioning TV or any tickets to any events. Enjoyed this book it was informative, poetic and grumpy.
October 20, 2011
Very disappointing. Sinclair has a specific style which takes bit of adjustment to, but this time around he's just lost the touch.
The thing is, whereas previous he came across as a critical voice, he just now sounds like a cranky old man. So much of this stuff edges on the observational comedy of the lamest 'my council does not take paper cheques any more, what's up with that?" sort.
While he bangs on about the Olympics and the 'Grand Project' so much of this book feels strung together with only cursory 'Oh, but there is an Olympic theme here too' link. There is also few references too many to Ballard and Chris Petit. Basically any time he touches upon West London, cars, mall, housing block or China (and it's a lot) he'll launch into a 'Oh, but Ballard'...
What made the book particularly unpalatable is his disastrous comparison between the Nazis and New Labour. Now, aside the fact that one might find this offensive, it's extremely lazy trick of calling someone a Nazi, particularly when parallels he is drawing out are fairly tenuous. You know, Hitler was from Austria and so many of New Labour leaders were Scottish. Clearly the same thing.
All in all, Sinclair's writing maybe used to be intriguing, but now he's just another old hippie cook who calls everyone a Nazi and thinks it's hilarious to refer to New Labour as Nude Labour. Basically, the internet is full of old ranters who will go on about 'Tony Bliar' to read 400 pages of similar bleating from Iain Sinclair...
The thing is, whereas previous he came across as a critical voice, he just now sounds like a cranky old man. So much of this stuff edges on the observational comedy of the lamest 'my council does not take paper cheques any more, what's up with that?" sort.
While he bangs on about the Olympics and the 'Grand Project' so much of this book feels strung together with only cursory 'Oh, but there is an Olympic theme here too' link. There is also few references too many to Ballard and Chris Petit. Basically any time he touches upon West London, cars, mall, housing block or China (and it's a lot) he'll launch into a 'Oh, but Ballard'...
What made the book particularly unpalatable is his disastrous comparison between the Nazis and New Labour. Now, aside the fact that one might find this offensive, it's extremely lazy trick of calling someone a Nazi, particularly when parallels he is drawing out are fairly tenuous. You know, Hitler was from Austria and so many of New Labour leaders were Scottish. Clearly the same thing.
All in all, Sinclair's writing maybe used to be intriguing, but now he's just another old hippie cook who calls everyone a Nazi and thinks it's hilarious to refer to New Labour as Nude Labour. Basically, the internet is full of old ranters who will go on about 'Tony Bliar' to read 400 pages of similar bleating from Iain Sinclair...
November 13, 2014
This is a typical Iain Sinclair book, but a better read than the rather weak eulogy to Hackney and all things Hackneyish (i.e. anyone who had ever been there, it seemed). The current volume is ironically dedicated to the Mayor of Hackney for remaking the borough as a 'model surrealist wonderland' and this line is perhaps the key one to this long screed of slightly incoherent prose. Ostensibly a polemic on the use of architectural grand projects to 'renew' cities, epitomised by the Olympics/Westfield Axis in Stratford (which built on the superlative success of the Dome), as embraced by New Labour (in the footsteps of Albert Speer, as we are reminded many times), the book does nevertheless follow the familiar pattern of poetic rambling - literally so, as Sinclair embarks on many long urban walks and writes them up in his trademark gonzo-flaneurist style (there are such interesting hikes in Manchester, Berlin [brilliantly], Athens and San Francisco here, for a change in direction of travel). It rarely makes any 'sense' as a whole (most of the chapters are previously published essays) but there are, as ever, great moments and shafts of illuminating prose on a wide variety of cultural topics (novels, films, architecture) and we get a sense of alternative and strange worlds beyond our everyday mundane view of life that make one want to look again at the city we live in. That seems to be a victory of sorts, to me.
December 27, 2011
A banal reading of Ghost Milk might lead to an interpretation of the book as being about attempts at urban regeneration that are kick-started through the staging of events such as the Olympic Games. On this surface level the text is concerned not just with London 2012, but also earlier Olympic contests in Berlin, Athens, Munich and Mexico City — as well as other urban renewal schemes. Digging down into the deeper strata of this book, it is far more than merely a joke-laden treatise about that notoriously tricky and slippery authorial construct known to the world as "Iain Sinclair"; it is also a step by step guide to bringing poetry back to contemporary capitalist societies that are characterised by a sense of post-modern disenchantment...
Read the whole review here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pra...
Read the whole review here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pra...
March 12, 2017
Sinclair writes about places, particularly London and its Edgelands, how they have changed and indeed in the interest of whom they have changed. One of London's biggest recent changes has of course been the Olympic Park. This project has followed a well trodden path which Sinclair calls "The Grand Project".
He creates a sense of place that is more than just physical. The prose comes at a frenetic pace and draws inspiration from old evocative black and white images, poetry, art, film and literature. It is then put together like a collage of images, some real and some imagined from literary characters. Combined they give the sense of a what the place is like yet the picture is always slightly blurred by time and history.
He calls on, for example, the Divine Commedy to describe the financiers and other businessmen involved in the Olympic Park: lost wrenches who prostitute themselves for gold and silver. The tormentors waiting for usurpers in red braces. Bankers with heavy bellies, advocates of fiscal alchemy, let them dance on hot coals and wade, up to the chin, in tides of their own excrement. (or words to the effect).
Films add to the narrative, such as The Long Good Friday which ushers in an era of local given corruption, bent coppers, Kray hoodlums making overtures to the New York mafia with their property lawyers etc.
Whether one agrees with Sinclair's central argument or not we need people like him to release that the past and indeed the present are complex and multi-dimensional. The future may become or indeed may have already become an environment which is much less rich and nuanced and serve only a small group of people or corporations.
January 17, 2020
Often, I would get to the end of a Sinclair paragraph and realise it was about something other than what I thought it was about.
March 10, 2020
Descriptive.
May 25, 2013
I had a harder time finishing this book than any I've read in a while. I think it might've been that I was trying to read it right after school finished, when it's always hard for me to concentrate. But I think, too, there was a disconnect for me, between the big picture, that huge projects like the Olympics tend to lead to bad things, and the specifics, which were way too local for me to follow. Without understanding the nuance, it felt for a while that Sinclair was just repeating something that wasn't too profound the first time time.
But I persevered, and quite liked it by the end. Sinclair has a punchy prose style-- lots of lists, fragments, but also really prolix run-on sentences. It's rarely elegant, but it had an equal mix of energy and deeply cerebral stuff going on. He's also got a vocabulary that outstrips nearly anyone I can think of having read in a while. It's hard to think of that being an attraction in itself, but I really enjoyed it and it added something to the experience of reading this.
There are some funny, sometimes horrible things reported here; I liked the idea of qualifying things as GP or Grand Projects, and the concept of "direction of travel," wherein as long as you're heading someplace interesting (from your perspective), whatever it takes to get there is beneath your notice (obviously, Sinclair means to challenge that concept, but it's a good one to recognize as being out there). As a concept, the titular ghost milk was oddly unclear to me-- at one point, he describes it as real milk from an imaginary thing, like I guess real civic improvements from a Utopian Olympic dream, only that's not what he means at all, so I kept getting confused. It's a resonant image, even if I have no idea what it means.
An interesting book, at any rate, a weird bit of reportage and political philosophy. I kept forgetting, when reading it, that the Olympics did happen in London and were considered a success, at least by most measures. In Sinclair's book, that possibility seems so far from likely.
But I persevered, and quite liked it by the end. Sinclair has a punchy prose style-- lots of lists, fragments, but also really prolix run-on sentences. It's rarely elegant, but it had an equal mix of energy and deeply cerebral stuff going on. He's also got a vocabulary that outstrips nearly anyone I can think of having read in a while. It's hard to think of that being an attraction in itself, but I really enjoyed it and it added something to the experience of reading this.
There are some funny, sometimes horrible things reported here; I liked the idea of qualifying things as GP or Grand Projects, and the concept of "direction of travel," wherein as long as you're heading someplace interesting (from your perspective), whatever it takes to get there is beneath your notice (obviously, Sinclair means to challenge that concept, but it's a good one to recognize as being out there). As a concept, the titular ghost milk was oddly unclear to me-- at one point, he describes it as real milk from an imaginary thing, like I guess real civic improvements from a Utopian Olympic dream, only that's not what he means at all, so I kept getting confused. It's a resonant image, even if I have no idea what it means.
An interesting book, at any rate, a weird bit of reportage and political philosophy. I kept forgetting, when reading it, that the Olympics did happen in London and were considered a success, at least by most measures. In Sinclair's book, that possibility seems so far from likely.
August 13, 2014
Enjoyed this more than I expected in the end, or at least I expected to enjoy it a lot until I started it. At that point I realised I was in for a 415 page rant. That's what I got but an entertaining rant I was pleased to discover.
The book takes aim at the grand projects of the modern era with a focus in the London Olympic Park but going back in time as far as the Berlin games of 1936–the first modern grand project to Sinclair's mind. Also takes in smaller projects like the rebranding of various places as cities of culture–slap up a new museum, put on a festival and bam, you can reinvent an old mill town just like that.
Draws heavily on themes of capitalist progress as a driver for change, loss of community, private gain, status and prestige, all wrapped in the guiding principle that it's all a swindle. And he may be right. He talks a lot about J. G. Ballard too. I'm not entirely sure why; haven't read Ballard but figure there's some connection with themes of urban dystopia.
As well as the rant it's a ramble, mainly across London, southeast England and back and forth on the M62. If you know the places it's deeply evocative.
As a footnote it's interesting to think about grand projects as NZ embarks on a five year WW1 commemorative programme. It's some kind if grand project of the mind and of our history.
The book takes aim at the grand projects of the modern era with a focus in the London Olympic Park but going back in time as far as the Berlin games of 1936–the first modern grand project to Sinclair's mind. Also takes in smaller projects like the rebranding of various places as cities of culture–slap up a new museum, put on a festival and bam, you can reinvent an old mill town just like that.
Draws heavily on themes of capitalist progress as a driver for change, loss of community, private gain, status and prestige, all wrapped in the guiding principle that it's all a swindle. And he may be right. He talks a lot about J. G. Ballard too. I'm not entirely sure why; haven't read Ballard but figure there's some connection with themes of urban dystopia.
As well as the rant it's a ramble, mainly across London, southeast England and back and forth on the M62. If you know the places it's deeply evocative.
As a footnote it's interesting to think about grand projects as NZ embarks on a five year WW1 commemorative programme. It's some kind if grand project of the mind and of our history.
January 15, 2013
As all his books are, this is quite strange and heavy-going in places. His style is not for everyone, but if you have read any of his other works you will be familiar with it - lots and lots of words, much observational description of the places he passes through and lots of literary and historical allusion. This book was published ahead of the London Olympics, of which he was highly critical (the date is 2011 not 2001 as in the details here), but there is much more to this book than that. He looks at the Olympics in the context of other big "vanity" projects, without labouring the point of the comparisons too much (there's an interesting excursion north to see the ruins of the M62 project, which swallowed a lot of money, and he takes in Berlin and the remnants of the 1936 games, with all that that stood for). Refreshing to have someone prepared to step out of line on these issues - many of us feel the same way but the inexorable propaganda machine rolls on and labels us "naysayers". Ah, well.
Not an easy book to read, but worth persisting with it.
Not an easy book to read, but worth persisting with it.
September 5, 2012
A bit too rambling and broad to be compared with Sinclair's best, this is nevertheless a huge improvement on Hackney: That Rose Red Empire, a book that almost made me give up on him. Ghost Milk isn't as obsessed with the London Olympics as you might think, taking in other Grand Projects such as Will Alsop's M62 Supercity in a rare journey up north. The idea is that these projects are fun if just conceived, disastrous if actually built.
August 8, 2012
It was a happy coincidence that I was reading this in the run up to the Olympics. Sinclair shares my cynicism about the project, and grand projects in general, so it was easy to accept the general thrust. His accounts of recent travels, less coloured by sentimentality, proved more fertile ground for interesting cultural references.
November 17, 2013
While Sinclair is occasionally a little bit too grumpy for my taste (especially during his chapter on Berlin), overall the book is worthwhile. His prose hauntingly evokes an endangered East London. Highly recommended.
May 4, 2020
At times I got lost / irritated, but these moments were far outweighed by passages of brilliance. Sinclair is someone I need long spaces of time to read, and when those moments occur I can't think of a better companion.
February 10, 2012
3.5 stars.
I read about 90% of this before it had to be returned to the library.
I read about 90% of this before it had to be returned to the library.
July 26, 2012
A very good read. With bonus insights into the late, great J G Ballard too.
September 2, 2012
i wanted to like this i really did but despite the fact that it was well written and well researched i didnt find myself enjoying it
October 24, 2012
As is usually the case with Sinclair this book operates at different levels - often hard to read and at times wilfully obscure, it is still a brilliant read.
December 14, 2012
20% amazing, 80% dull, alternating in unpredictable stretches. I am glad I read it but probably one book was enough.
February 28, 2015
What was lost in constructing new Olympic stadium, facilities in his old neighborhood.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews