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Lud Heat: A Book of Dead Hamlets
Iain Sinclair's classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic 'heat' as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book's many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the 'psychogeographical' tone for much of Sinclair's mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore's From Hell.
140 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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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 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 24, 2021
I honestly really loved this but I don't think I could recommend it to anyone. It holds probably some of the most perfect language out of any book of prose or poetry than I've ever read, but 75% of what is being said goes right over my head. It tracks a group of gardeners through their care of the Nicholas Hawksmoore churches in London and associates the psychogeography of these churches with many of the murders and other great events that happened over the course of their history. It then proceeds to associate these ideas with Stan Brakhage's film of an autopsy, moving towards our own autopsy on the world around us, to something about a surgery of the sun. It's clearly a brilliant work of art that could only be written by an author with a few extra senses than the average human. It also may be the book I've read that I can honestly say I understood the least. That doesn't mean I didn't love it though - I just need someone to explain it to me, and there don't seem to be many (if any) secondary sources about this. Anyone able to point me somewhere?
March 6, 2024
I had hoped for lyrical bend but found myself flummoxed. There were links here to the previous book I had finished City of Stairs as both prefigure a search for the divine in the strata of the urban. Blake and Blavatsky feature prominently in the Sinclair, harbingers of his later, grander projects. Rituals and ley lines coincide with architectural rhyming, a playing of the dozens across lines-of-escape. I just didn't care for this, and the verse was the worst aspect, it recalls the weakest of Olson.
lost-interest-in
February 12, 2018I wanted to read this to complete the Peter Ayckroyd-Alan Moore-Iain Sinclair triangle but ugh. There's impenetrably obscured and then there's whatever this is.
(I am also sick of the male psychogeographical magick thing but that's a rant for another time. Where are the queer femme poc psychogeographers? Please?)
(I am also sick of the male psychogeographical magick thing but that's a rant for another time. Where are the queer femme poc psychogeographers? Please?)
May 2, 2019
Yeah I understood like nothing this book was saying but it was a relaxing read bc of that so lmao
April 8, 2021
I quite enjoyed the opening portion of this, which focuses on Hawksmoor's churches and his obsession with pyramids. This is appealing, and I share Sinclair's sentiment that walking London with a mind full of the past is an interesting and worthwhile pursuit. It's good to indulge strange fancies. They may lead to many fantastic adventures. But, unfortunately, Sinclair never seems to have them. His prose and poetry is, to my sensibility, utterly joyless. I suppose one might charitably describe this as 'collage'... I'm just unsure what is meant to keep the reader interested.
June 18, 2013
Sinclair is a polarizing author and this, I suppose, his most polarizing book. The poetry sections are profoundly uneven, lanky imitations, seemingly, of J.H. Prynne (whom I admire!); what they lack in rhythm, though, they make up occasionally with a felicitous turn of phrase ("the chromosomes/ are snookered"). All that is lacking in the poetry is found, ironically enough, in the prose: Sinclair's is a brilliant, inimitable voice, perfectly married here to the content: the occult connections that shape London, as much an architecture of time as space. In this respect, his "project" is apposite W.G. Sebald's, though he's happy to pursue it fully within the confines of the M25...
January 5, 2025
"He had that frenzy, the Coleridge notebook speed, to rewrite the city..."
A rambling, maddening map of mystical London, I found myself at turns amazed and frustrated by Sinclair's poem. Having read From Hell and Hawksmoor, I was prepared for the broad themes of London's mystical associations that Sinclair grapples with, but nothing could have readied me for the feeling of reading this book. At turns Sinclair's speaker seems to rant at you like a street-corner preacher, or whisper secrets in conspiratorial privacy, combining dizzyingly complex allusions, shifts between prose and verse and hieroglyphs, and the use of illustrations, photos, and unusual visual layouts.
"Information fattens to excess," his narrator declares, and this is nothing if not a text full to bursting with scattered voices and ideas. I can't claim to have fully understood, or fully enjoyed, LUD HEAT, and wonder if there's a version of the poem out there with a reliable key to its allusions, but I'll probably continue to think about it for quite some time.
A rambling, maddening map of mystical London, I found myself at turns amazed and frustrated by Sinclair's poem. Having read From Hell and Hawksmoor, I was prepared for the broad themes of London's mystical associations that Sinclair grapples with, but nothing could have readied me for the feeling of reading this book. At turns Sinclair's speaker seems to rant at you like a street-corner preacher, or whisper secrets in conspiratorial privacy, combining dizzyingly complex allusions, shifts between prose and verse and hieroglyphs, and the use of illustrations, photos, and unusual visual layouts.
"Information fattens to excess," his narrator declares, and this is nothing if not a text full to bursting with scattered voices and ideas. I can't claim to have fully understood, or fully enjoyed, LUD HEAT, and wonder if there's a version of the poem out there with a reliable key to its allusions, but I'll probably continue to think about it for quite some time.
January 21, 2019
This is an odd book. Some average poetry, with the occasional smart phrase and some interesting prose. I have never read any Iain Sinclair before & came to this book via Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor'.
I do feel like there is knowledge I am missing that would make this a smoother or better read. It does make you think about landscape, time and I suppose what is now what we call psychogeography. I do have a fascination with the idea that certain places have a magnetic power that attracts the 'Gods' to them. The places where there were sacred groves or lakes or rivers before there were temples before there were Churches. Places where perhaps things happen within and without the flow of time. Places that are haunted. But perhaps this was a bit too esoteric for my own good.
It reminded me of Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines'.
And that's all I have to say. Perhaps one day, when I've got time and access to a good research library I might take another slower look at this book. Meanwhile, I've finished with it and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.
I do feel like there is knowledge I am missing that would make this a smoother or better read. It does make you think about landscape, time and I suppose what is now what we call psychogeography. I do have a fascination with the idea that certain places have a magnetic power that attracts the 'Gods' to them. The places where there were sacred groves or lakes or rivers before there were temples before there were Churches. Places where perhaps things happen within and without the flow of time. Places that are haunted. But perhaps this was a bit too esoteric for my own good.
It reminded me of Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines'.
And that's all I have to say. Perhaps one day, when I've got time and access to a good research library I might take another slower look at this book. Meanwhile, I've finished with it and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.
December 9, 2024
I love the idea that Iain Sinclair kind of bases the book around; that is, a conception of the city as out of time, wherein the past plays upon the present, and the actions of the past are changing the actions of present and future individuals. Now, I'm not sure how far I believe the occult-mysticism-stuff that Sinclair puts forward, but, I can't help but accept that the architecture, layout etc. of built environments effect one's life. Sinclair fits this all in some really great writing.
Sinclair creates bodies everywhere - we are bodies, the city is a body, there are bodies underneath us. Perhaps the only way to really experience a real 'autopsy' is to reach under the skin of the city, this is as close as anyone can get to peeling back their own membranous outer layers. To know one's place is to know one's self.
Sinclair creates bodies everywhere - we are bodies, the city is a body, there are bodies underneath us. Perhaps the only way to really experience a real 'autopsy' is to reach under the skin of the city, this is as close as anyone can get to peeling back their own membranous outer layers. To know one's place is to know one's self.
November 22, 2022
A seriously strange, inspired autopsy/exhumation of London's many compressed histories, and the energy exuded by their collision.
December 30, 2022
jag tror det iallafall? den var cool men det kändes som att jag missade något
January 17, 2023
Freaky.
May 28, 2023
Poetry isn't usually my thing, but, to some surprise, I enjoyed this.
December 23, 2024
A cornucopia of words from London's master pyschogeographer
February 28, 2015
Got on an Iain Sinclair kick while in London for a week. All about how cities grow and decay and revive. He mourns the loss of cool funky stuff, happening at an accelerating rate as money moves in - here, NYC, and elsewhere
October 19, 2015
The prose sections are intriguing - even if you don't quite sign up to his proposed interpretations.
Poetry only so-so and the autobiographical section of working on a council team instantly forgettable.
Poetry only so-so and the autobiographical section of working on a council team instantly forgettable.
August 4, 2023
A mesmerizing mix of poetry and essay on psychogeography and gardening.
November 23, 2025
a unique postmodernist experience to find out and be plunged into roads' psychological charges (10/10).
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews