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Lights Out for the Territory
Walking the streets of London, Iain Sinclair traces nine routes across the territory of the capital. Connecting people and places, redrawing boundaries both ancient and modern, reading obscure signs and finding hidden patterns, Sinclair creates a fluid snapshot of the city. In Lights Out for the Territory he gives us a daring, provocative, enlightening, disturbing and utterly unique picture of modern urban life. And in the process he reveals the dark underbelly of a London many of us did not know existed.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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796 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 - 30 of 39 reviews
January 25, 2014
I liked parts of this book. Sinclair knows his way round a sentence and I enjoyed his self-conscious prose. However, this is more a collection of fairly fragmented essays on obscure artists, poets and film-makers, tied together with the vague conceit of the author as a tongue-in-cheek Flâneur in London. Although I enjoyed the sections on Patrick Keiller and Chris Petit and the brief cameo from Howard Marks I didn’t engage as much on some of the longer sections on conceptual and performance artists like Rachel Whiteread and Brian Catling. I wanted more of Sinclair’s writing on London and urban space, rather than his critiques of the artists he obviously admires. At times I felt I might have been better served taking out a subscription with the London Review of Books and going through their back issues on line, given that many of the chapters were adapted from essays from the journal. Throughout reading Lights Out for the Territory, I was constantly making notes of other books to read and films to watch. I would have preferred to be more engaged with what I was reading, instead of feel distracted by the visions and imaginations of artists other than the author.
December 30, 2019
London was mapped by these drunken and licentious cross-town scrambles, borough to borough, sacred site to sacred site: relics of saints, drums and beribboned phalluses. The walk, responding to astrological prompts, laid down narrative trails that should still be respected.Iain Sinclair wasn't writing about Lights Out for the Territory here, but these sentences seem directly applicable to his peripatetic project. Sinclair's subject in these collected essays, after all, is London—both The City proper (whose majuscule points to a miniscule bullseye at the center of the Thames-straddling metropolis) and that sprawling estate-agent's melanoma which outsiders are pleased to call "London."
—p.345
Patrick Keiller's London is not your London.Nor is Iain Sinclair's London my own... my one brief trip to London (lasting one paltry week back in 2013) did not prepare me in the least for the depth and richness of Sinclair's complex, allusive, and impossibly dense accounts. At times I was desperate for an English-to-English translator—if you know what a "crombie" is without looking it up, for example, you're already doing better than I did.
—p.301
~~~
Sinclair's collection of late 20th-Century essays about London had been on my mental to-read list for years, ever since I heard William Gibson recommend it during No Maps for These Territories (which is itself a fantastic film, although like Sinclair's book it wouldn't be to everyone's taste). I finally ran across this Penguin trade paperback quite by chance—my wife and I were looking through the shelves of British history at Powell's City of Books (unpaid plug), where its unassuming light-blue spine stood out to me like a glimpse of St. Paul's through fog.
That Penguin edition also implies, by using the same font for the author's name as for the title, that the name of this book could be read as Iain Sinclair Lights Out for the Territory—an allusion to the ending of Huckleberry Finn that Sinclair makes explicit near the end of this book.
That reading of the title makes a certain amount of sense. From the very first page, you can tell that Sinclair's not writing a travelogue or tourist guide:
Urban graffiti is all too often a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph. The tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic.Nevertheless, Sinclair employs the same care when cataloguing the graffiti he encounters during his walks across London that he uses with monuments and graveyard inscriptions.
—p.1
~~~
The main pleasure of reading Lights Out for the Territory was Sinclair's wandering style—his prose ambles metaphorically throughout London the way he and photographer Marc Atkins did physically, stopping to examine points of interest in detail, drawing connections to other points, without much regard for timetables or time of day.
That did make it hard for me to write a coherent review of the book, though. I noted a number of individual quotes that struck me during the course of the book... but not much to tie them together:
Be wary of fountains. The frolicsome play of water outside some municipal temple is the gush of misspent public funds, dubious set-dressing.
—p.38
Her family had no problem in drawing a distinction between the relative merits of blood ties and speculative literature. Their sense of tribal self-interest made the Mafia look like wimps with suntans. Fiction writing was, properly, a kind of hobby: unfortunate, but tolerable if it brought in cash or fame.
—pp.161-162
All museums, libraries and galleries, should be banished to Oxford. Let them be for the exclusive use of those who will walk there. London should be left to cutpurses, brigands, hustlers, ganefs, courtiers, actors, whores, and other creatures of business.
—p.176
Amid such pyrotechnics of prose, this significantly pithier epigram appears:
The dead are the most obedient of models.
—p.244
Sinclair occasionally veers into the science-fictional, too, a post-apocalyptic vision of capital excess that has only become more true-to-life in the decades since Lights Out for the Territory was published:
If the skyline was to be dominated by a crop of alien verticals, exclamation marks in mirror glass, then we must burrow like moles. We must eat earth.Sinclair's observations about ubiquitous video surveillance, barricades, suspicious security guards and other aspects of our current predicament serve as a reminder that our 9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum—that the props and flats of our present-day security theatre of the absurd were already being hammered together in 1990s Britain.
—p.245
I had the sense that it was time to retreat to further education, Dublin. This was a wise indecision, a good way of slowing down the inevitable: new light—soft, wet, grey.
—p.275
Blow-Up viewed as a video in 1995 provokes an overwhelming urge to rush the tape to the cutting-room for emergency amputation: lose those appalling rag day students, the tennis court mime, most of the secondary performances. Hack it to the bone: some urban driving, some interplay in the studio, the park. Reduce it to essence, to Cortazar's original story.
—p.351
~~~
The moral right of the author has been asserted
—Indicia. Absent period per original
I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of the way Sinclair characterizes Marc Atkins, his loyal companion for the walks that became these essays:
Promise him a free breakfast and the chance of running into a squall of long-legged black women and he'll walk through fire.Still, you could do much worse than to take a deeper dive into Marc Atkins' singular vision, which is criminally underserved by the few monochrome snapshots that appear as a tease in the center of Lights Out for the Territory.
—p.8
I do think it's telling that no women's names appear in Lights Out for the Territory until page 26, after dozens of discursive pages feature a parade of individuals ranging from Thomas Pynchon to crooner Dean Martin—and even then the first female Sinclair names is the late Marilyn Monroe, rather than any contemporary or fellow author (although, speaking of fellow authors, Sinclair does not seem to admire Jeffrey Archer or P.D. James much, either). This is most definitely a guy's book—where women are present, they are almost always distinctly secondary, although Sinclair does devote an entire essay later on to the work of artists Rachel Whiteread and his later coauthor Rachel Lichtenstein.
~~~
As you can probably tell just from the number of names and topics mentioned above, which is by no means close to the number Sinclair covers, Lights Out for the Territory has an Index like a phone book. Oh, okay, not really... it's only 11 pages long. But that's still a lot of references, and it means Sinclair's book ends well before you think it will, what with that Index, the Acknowledgements and Selected Bibliography that round it off.
So in conclusion... while I don't think Lights Out for the Territory will help you get to Hyde Park from Heathrow, or to figure out where John Snow's memorial pump stands in Soho, it is a reliably fascinating (albeit often frustrating) glimpse into the history of a place that might just be almost as significant to history as Londoners think it is...
September 20, 2013
Perhaps it is simply Sinclair overloard (1000 pages of his in two weeks), perhaps the concurrent surfeit of images from London dissuaded me. I felt this text was inferior to London Orbital; I also collapsed to a minimal degree per some of Sinclair's personal bifurcations (to cite Roubaud) which I felt flat. His poetic waxing on pitbull culture was an ever-so-prescient for a rasher of recent events. Sinclair's stories overflow with woe yet they amaze and elicit.
November 30, 2024
Not as ambitious as but certainly more accessible than the one where he walks around the whole of the M25...
Ian Sinclair, deranged shaman of Hackney, wanders around London making paranoid connections between (to take some examples) Jeffrey Archer, the Ashmolean, pitbull terriers, PD James, the IRA, William Blake and Rachel Whiteread. Obviously Sinclair has deep affection for the esoteric/cryptic/occult, but it's hard to tell whether he believes in any of it and sometimes it feels like a frustrating bit. Much more compelling is his deep respect for and knowledge of outsider art.
Sinclair's London at the close of the millennium feels older and stranger than London as I know it. More rooted in its own history, but also friendlier to the weird and the fringe and the things that exist in the gaps. I dread to think what he makes of that fucking axe-throwing bar on Hackney Wick.
Ian Sinclair, deranged shaman of Hackney, wanders around London making paranoid connections between (to take some examples) Jeffrey Archer, the Ashmolean, pitbull terriers, PD James, the IRA, William Blake and Rachel Whiteread. Obviously Sinclair has deep affection for the esoteric/cryptic/occult, but it's hard to tell whether he believes in any of it and sometimes it feels like a frustrating bit. Much more compelling is his deep respect for and knowledge of outsider art.
Sinclair's London at the close of the millennium feels older and stranger than London as I know it. More rooted in its own history, but also friendlier to the weird and the fringe and the things that exist in the gaps. I dread to think what he makes of that fucking axe-throwing bar on Hackney Wick.
October 21, 2012
At times brilliantly inventive and eye-opening, at times frustratingly oblique and obscure, I found this book a frustration and a delight in almost equal measure.
Sinclair's 'psychogeographic' meanderings through the underground history, culture and communities of various parts of London is an acquired taste, and a piece of writing that requires significant application by the reader.
Despite my interest in London geography(having studied the course at a London university) I found some of Sinclair's expositions impenetrable as they often require prior knowledge of the various poets, philosophers, writers and local personalities that he references. This said, the chapters that touched on topics as disparate as the history of St Pancras Old Church, the imagined community of the East End, the lives of the elites on the north bank of the Thames, and the alternative history of St Paul's Cathedral were profound, surprising and enthralling.
The idea of the flaneur, the urban explorer who wanders the city landscape in search of deeper meaning and making imaginative connections between place and people through time and space, is certainly a powerful method for interpreting the city and succeeds in explaining London as an organic and ever-developing morass of people, ideas, histories and experiences. In this way, Sinclair opens up new avenues of inquiry and brings to the surface aspects of London that could easily have been forgotten.
I would suggest that this book is better read as a series of short pieces of imaginative journalism, rather than one work with a running narrative. After all, the book is underpinned by a number of separate essays written by across a long period of time.
Also, given the importance of the writer's photographer companion on his London wanderings, I was disappointed that so few of the photographs were included in the book.
Sinclair's 'psychogeographic' meanderings through the underground history, culture and communities of various parts of London is an acquired taste, and a piece of writing that requires significant application by the reader.
Despite my interest in London geography(having studied the course at a London university) I found some of Sinclair's expositions impenetrable as they often require prior knowledge of the various poets, philosophers, writers and local personalities that he references. This said, the chapters that touched on topics as disparate as the history of St Pancras Old Church, the imagined community of the East End, the lives of the elites on the north bank of the Thames, and the alternative history of St Paul's Cathedral were profound, surprising and enthralling.
The idea of the flaneur, the urban explorer who wanders the city landscape in search of deeper meaning and making imaginative connections between place and people through time and space, is certainly a powerful method for interpreting the city and succeeds in explaining London as an organic and ever-developing morass of people, ideas, histories and experiences. In this way, Sinclair opens up new avenues of inquiry and brings to the surface aspects of London that could easily have been forgotten.
I would suggest that this book is better read as a series of short pieces of imaginative journalism, rather than one work with a running narrative. After all, the book is underpinned by a number of separate essays written by across a long period of time.
Also, given the importance of the writer's photographer companion on his London wanderings, I was disappointed that so few of the photographs were included in the book.
June 28, 2008
What a great odd (eccentric?) book about one's city which is called London. But it's a London that many will not know. The loose term would be psycho-geography. Touring one's city with fresh eyes or just to drift among the architecture and its people. One picks up history like it was trash left over the night before.
The Surrealists, specifically Andre Breton, started to walk through a cityscape without a map at times, but always keeping the eyes and ears open for new discoveries or new ways to frame 'history' in a new light. Guy Debord and company did the same with excellent results.
Iain Sinclair does the same, and if one would find fault with this book, he does drop a lot of names that only hardcore British London people would know. The Krays, and certain writers/photographers known in the Soho London world. But I love it for that reason alone. It's a mind wondering all over a location that one 'thinks' they know. But alas there are still mysteries in neighborhoods and sections - it's endless really. This is my type of 'travel' writing!
The Surrealists, specifically Andre Breton, started to walk through a cityscape without a map at times, but always keeping the eyes and ears open for new discoveries or new ways to frame 'history' in a new light. Guy Debord and company did the same with excellent results.
Iain Sinclair does the same, and if one would find fault with this book, he does drop a lot of names that only hardcore British London people would know. The Krays, and certain writers/photographers known in the Soho London world. But I love it for that reason alone. It's a mind wondering all over a location that one 'thinks' they know. But alas there are still mysteries in neighborhoods and sections - it's endless really. This is my type of 'travel' writing!
September 21, 2007
If you want a completely different view of London and all her secrets read this book! Sinclair and his fellow students of psychogeography (dread word!) tie up the connections between London ley lines, Hawksmoor's churches, Canary Wharf and "Blow Up" (vale Antonioni.)
Have an A-Z handy too...
Companion volume is London Orbital
Have an A-Z handy too...
Companion volume is London Orbital
December 8, 2023
Another one of Sinclair’s psychogeographical journeys through London put to prose, this one an interesting contract from The Last London in how almost cherry it feels? There’s still plenty of trademark English cynicism and biting wit, and it probably didn’t read as such at the time, but Sinclair sees London as a place with abundant mystery and mysticism to tap into, whereas his later impressions feels like a mourning for the London of Lights Out in light of post Olympics development and commercialism.
Other than that, there’s plenty of trademark Sinclair, walking journeys to meet obscure artists, lengthy descriptions of the works of other writers/directors/visual artists and their ties to place and space, plenty of history of neighborhoods and shops, and just really an overwhelming sense of Britishness to the whole thing. Some of my fav sections were his tour of Tory victory and Lord Archer’s estate and his (of course cynical) views of commercial fiction, his overviews of the directors of London and his history with the scrappy upstart scene, and his Graffiti describing and reflections upon it as artistic expression and city dressing. The feeling of place is as strong as ever, even as he drifts more I feel to describe personal histories and artists than he has in the past.
I liked it, but feel like what I experienced the first time I read him may have been a singular experience that can’t be matched fully (and it may have been just because it was my first exposure to this style of writing?)
Other than that, there’s plenty of trademark Sinclair, walking journeys to meet obscure artists, lengthy descriptions of the works of other writers/directors/visual artists and their ties to place and space, plenty of history of neighborhoods and shops, and just really an overwhelming sense of Britishness to the whole thing. Some of my fav sections were his tour of Tory victory and Lord Archer’s estate and his (of course cynical) views of commercial fiction, his overviews of the directors of London and his history with the scrappy upstart scene, and his Graffiti describing and reflections upon it as artistic expression and city dressing. The feeling of place is as strong as ever, even as he drifts more I feel to describe personal histories and artists than he has in the past.
I liked it, but feel like what I experienced the first time I read him may have been a singular experience that can’t be matched fully (and it may have been just because it was my first exposure to this style of writing?)
August 31, 2019
What a load of pretentious rubbish. This is the worst book I have read in a long time.
Sinclair has been on a load of walks in London with a photographer and looks and graffi and signs and talks about his opinions on things.
Terrible idea for a book and it is in the wrong medium. The way it was written was like I was listening to a podcast. A podcast or art gallery is fine for this kind of thing, a novel is not.
I read it properly up to page 105 and then skimmed after that because I could not take wasting my life anymore.
This is actually the second time I had read this book as I had to read it at Uni. I hated it then but had completely forgotten about it until I opened it up again!
Sinclair has been on a load of walks in London with a photographer and looks and graffi and signs and talks about his opinions on things.
Terrible idea for a book and it is in the wrong medium. The way it was written was like I was listening to a podcast. A podcast or art gallery is fine for this kind of thing, a novel is not.
I read it properly up to page 105 and then skimmed after that because I could not take wasting my life anymore.
This is actually the second time I had read this book as I had to read it at Uni. I hated it then but had completely forgotten about it until I opened it up again!
Read
August 11, 2011The subtitle, "9 excursions in the secret history of London," indicates what this book is about, and Sinclair does cover a lot of territory, both familiar and unfamiliar if not exactly secret. The excursion format allows for an enjoyably loose organization: this isn't a guidebook, and it joins together versions of several pieces that were written at different times for periodicals. Sinclair's London is in books and films as well as on the ground and in the imagination. For example, the section called "X Marks the Spot" refers to King's Cross, Boadicea, the meeting between Percy Shelley and his future wife at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave at Old St. Pancras, an epic poem by Aidan Dun, a graphic novel by Alan Moore, and more besides. I especially enjoyed the last section, in which Sinclair takes P. D. James to task for the shortcomings of her detective novel Original Sin, not least of which is her locating a Venetian palazzo in Wapping.
Read
August 19, 2016Like the television work of Jonathan Meades, Iain Sinclair is devoted to taking the built environment apart piece by piece, history and biography and graffiti all at once, and does so with a particular talent for turning a phrase ("the Cypriot tailor who sent the Krays to the Old Bailey looking like Romanian secret servicemen at a wedding," par exemple). As a 'merican, I'm not getting half as much out of this as my British co-worker who periodically interrupts my work to chortle at a line from this as he follows Sinclair through his own old haunts in Brixton and Hackney, but I damn well enjoyed it, even if I needed to Wikipedia-check a few things from time to time.
July 11, 2011
I always felt the hidden gems of a city aren't something you'll find in a tourist guide, but hidden lives steadily lived. Iain Sinclair is a master at bringing the hidden people and economies of a city to surface. Sinclair's London and Luc Sante's New York writing are rare accounts of the the invisible architecture connecting a city to it's people.
I read this while on a recent trip to London thinking I'd also use the Museum of London's "streetmuseum" iPhone app, but I quickly realized the best way to augment reality is with, A BOOK.
I read this while on a recent trip to London thinking I'd also use the Museum of London's "streetmuseum" iPhone app, but I quickly realized the best way to augment reality is with, A BOOK.
July 30, 2012
Parts of this were brilliant, but after a while I started to feel like I was listening in on a conversation about people I don't know, that I was alone at a party where everybody else went back years and was full of news about old friends and acquaintances, about this person's new film project and that one's art installation and someone else's self-published poetic masterpiece, and the only way I could get in on the fun was to have read all the same books and participated in all the same happenings and attended all the same exhibits and known all the same people. And that got a bit tiring.
October 16, 2010
One of the best books about London ever written. Utterly brilliant. Staggering writing.
Read
January 25, 2015Read a 45 page excerpt for grad school.
October 28, 2020
Iain Sinclair has to be one of the most widely read and well-connected scholars/commentators on London. The challenge, however, for any reader of Sinclair is how to take something intelligible away from this corpus of knowledge. Part of both the joy and frustration of reading Sinclair is that much of his text (perhaps deliberately) reads as a stream of consciousness, blending fact and fiction. It is not short on invective, diatribe and digression; think of it as Herman Melville doing late-20th/ early-21st London.
"Lights Out For The Territory" is generally considered as one of his more accessible works. For a 2020 reader, it reads a little as a time capsule; one is taken back to the late-90s, the tail-end of the Conservative era, although remarkably little is mentioned re New Labour. In this work, Sinclair and his collaborator, the photographer Marc Atkins, embark on a series of London walks and encounters. Even if many of the references/ asides were lost on me, one certainly gets a novel perspective on London, its hidden aspects, its ever-evolving personality. Much that he writes is spot-on, incisive, even now. Some chapters are somewhat let down by Sinclair's tendency to see conspiracy theories everywhere. Nonetheless, this was mostly enjoyable and worth the perseverance. My favourite segments were on the City ('Bulls and Bears') and the South Bank near Vauxhall ('Lord Archer's prospects').
"Lights Out For The Territory" is generally considered as one of his more accessible works. For a 2020 reader, it reads a little as a time capsule; one is taken back to the late-90s, the tail-end of the Conservative era, although remarkably little is mentioned re New Labour. In this work, Sinclair and his collaborator, the photographer Marc Atkins, embark on a series of London walks and encounters. Even if many of the references/ asides were lost on me, one certainly gets a novel perspective on London, its hidden aspects, its ever-evolving personality. Much that he writes is spot-on, incisive, even now. Some chapters are somewhat let down by Sinclair's tendency to see conspiracy theories everywhere. Nonetheless, this was mostly enjoyable and worth the perseverance. My favourite segments were on the City ('Bulls and Bears') and the South Bank near Vauxhall ('Lord Archer's prospects').
August 5, 2020
Reading, or attempting to read, 'Lights Out for the Territory' is a trial both disconcerting and immersive. Full of recondite references, cascading linkages of words, Sinclair's prose is half invocation, half stream-of-consciousness social history, eliciting the grimy, nearly-forgotten worlds of not-long-ago London which lie barely-hidden beneath more modern constructs. It is often so close to parody that you have to remind yourself it is a 'serious' book.
When it works it works well. A section on the funeral of Ronnie Kray evokes the queasy glamour of the gangster underworld of the fifties and sixties as well as making it feel part of some deeper seam of the mythos of London; but, not long after, a recounting of the thwarted publishing history of Aidan Andrew Dun's epic psychogeographical poem "Vale Royal" just feels self-indulgent.
Of course psychogeography is Sinclair's 'thing', and immersion in the visionary ocean of 'Lights Out for the Territory' is probably the only way to truly 'get' it, but this reader couldn't shake the sense that that Sinclair is after your discipleship rather than engaging you in a dialogue, and that always makes me feel a tad uneasy...
Approach with caution.
When it works it works well. A section on the funeral of Ronnie Kray evokes the queasy glamour of the gangster underworld of the fifties and sixties as well as making it feel part of some deeper seam of the mythos of London; but, not long after, a recounting of the thwarted publishing history of Aidan Andrew Dun's epic psychogeographical poem "Vale Royal" just feels self-indulgent.
Of course psychogeography is Sinclair's 'thing', and immersion in the visionary ocean of 'Lights Out for the Territory' is probably the only way to truly 'get' it, but this reader couldn't shake the sense that that Sinclair is after your discipleship rather than engaging you in a dialogue, and that always makes me feel a tad uneasy...
Approach with caution.
August 13, 2018
Appropriately there is no way to categorize this book in any of my pre-constructed categories unless I began a new one for psychogeography. I really want to read this book but this is my second attempt and I just can't get too far. Too many references to places and customs and people and artists who I don't know. And yet I love the language and recognize that this is my favorite kind of book, one about a person who is wandering through a place and weaving a web of cultural and historical snippets together to create a new palimpsest that overlays the landscape. The writing reminds me of James Ellroy, who Sinclair references and obviously respects, and although I can read early Ellroy, I have been unable to penetrate the density of his later work. I suspect both Sinclair and Ellroy of mania: the obsession with clever word play, the abundant flow of images and ideas, the strange connections discovered and forged. And that's a great thing too. I suspect the way to read this book, as another reviewer suggests, is one essay at a time.
October 30, 2025
A series of walks through London spanning from the early-to-mid 1990s, described in furious and poetic terms. A psychogeography that spans organised crime, public art, arcane history, brutal gentrification, notorious politicians, graffiti, and run-down graveyards. Accompanied by a photographer (though only a handful of photographs appear in the book), Sinclair finds beautiful and grisly images of a contemporary London ripe with stagnation and rot. One particularly good chapter sees him following the funeral procession of legendary gangster Ronnie Kray, while another has him profiling strange artists like his friend Brian Catling. A lot of this went over my head - the bibliography necessary to fully grasp it is enormous, I feel - but the parts that worked for me really worked. I lived in London about a decade after this was published, and some elements were very familiar to me, while others seemed almost alien. Good book, though heavy going, as I had to read it in short sessions so as not to be overwhelmed.
January 26, 2019
The idea of psychogeography is fascinating, and the chapter on the Grail interested me because I am interested in the Grail. However, if I were to explain that psychogeography is, my explanation would probably be found wanting. The feeling that I understand what it means, however is strong, and I thank the author for imparting the idea on me.
I gave the book two starts for sharing the idea with me, and I look forward to reading Alan Moore's Jerusalem to get to know a bit more about the idea. The chapter on the Grail and the Kray brothers also contributed to the two stars.
Apart from those three elements, I did not enjoy this book. Most of the people mentioned are very obscure, and a lot of the prose was a bit disjointed, moving from topic to topic, and then maybe coming back to the same topic in a later paragraph or chapter. Sometimes this works really well, but after 200 pages, I was mainly frustrated with the seeming lack of coherence, and realized that in the cases where it did work, the euphoria was not enough to balance out my irritation.
Furthermore, the tone was a bit negative. Maybe it was tongue in cheek, but I found it to be mostly catty and condescending.
The bit on Aiden Dun's Vale Royal was fabulously written, but I couldn't help but be left with the feeling that Iain Sinclair rejoices the identifying works of genius that are so unique that only he can truly understand the genius. But I suppose that is catty and condescending too, and Ill stop there.
I gave the book two starts for sharing the idea with me, and I look forward to reading Alan Moore's Jerusalem to get to know a bit more about the idea. The chapter on the Grail and the Kray brothers also contributed to the two stars.
Apart from those three elements, I did not enjoy this book. Most of the people mentioned are very obscure, and a lot of the prose was a bit disjointed, moving from topic to topic, and then maybe coming back to the same topic in a later paragraph or chapter. Sometimes this works really well, but after 200 pages, I was mainly frustrated with the seeming lack of coherence, and realized that in the cases where it did work, the euphoria was not enough to balance out my irritation.
Furthermore, the tone was a bit negative. Maybe it was tongue in cheek, but I found it to be mostly catty and condescending.
The bit on Aiden Dun's Vale Royal was fabulously written, but I couldn't help but be left with the feeling that Iain Sinclair rejoices the identifying works of genius that are so unique that only he can truly understand the genius. But I suppose that is catty and condescending too, and Ill stop there.
December 1, 2022
Woo, this is one excursion I will take a hard pass on thanks! The one IN the book. The book itself is definitely a trip you want to take! This really reminded me of the Robert Hansen case and his favourite story ‘The Most Dangerous Game’. Not only is this a steady building story of mystery and suspense, it is also a look at a group of diverse and complex individuals and an exploration via dual timelines into how family dynamics and life events can impact and shape the people we become. There is also some great, accurate neurodiverse representation which we definitely need more of in books. Although a little slow even for me in places, overall I thought this was a really atmospheric read - especially great for winter!
February 4, 2024
Whilst this is classic Iain Sinclair, it wasn't my favourite of his books. I really enjoyed reading it, but it's incredibly dense and filled with anecdotes and non sequiturs about people that most readers won't be familiar with. I'd say that this book does require advanced knowledge of the city. If you haven't visited London before or do not know the city really well, it won't be an enjoyable read.
With that said, however, when one is reading about the depths and intricacies of the world's greatest city, there is always something new to learn and something unexpected to uncover. No one writes about London quite like Sinclair and no one knows the city quite like him either. If you want to immerse yourself in this great city, look no further than a book by Iain Sinclair.
With that said, however, when one is reading about the depths and intricacies of the world's greatest city, there is always something new to learn and something unexpected to uncover. No one writes about London quite like Sinclair and no one knows the city quite like him either. If you want to immerse yourself in this great city, look no further than a book by Iain Sinclair.
May 30, 2023
Proud of myself for getting through this. I originally chose this book before a trip to London as I was intrigued by the description and a chance to get to know the city via the psychogeographic writing style. Rather than an account of the city with a compelling story line (as I hoped) this was more of a collection of long essays about specific London art forms and locations.
That said, I enjoyed reading about some of the places I visited well after the trip ended, and I like his writing style. Would not recommend if you want a fun story.
That said, I enjoyed reading about some of the places I visited well after the trip ended, and I like his writing style. Would not recommend if you want a fun story.
November 29, 2018
I think this book requires a resident's understanding of London. I can enjoy the writing, but the observations of geography and culture are never going to hit home for me. To be dipped into, when in the mood.
March 27, 2025
I was not able to finish it in the time I had from the library, but overall I enjoyed this read. A bit intellectual dude-bro at times, it was quite an exciting romp in pre-Cool Britannia and esotericism.
September 16, 2017
This idiosyncratic book is sometimes amusing, sometimes irksome. I suppose you might learn something about London, but I as I read I thought, "this guy is trying to show how clever he is".
February 20, 2022
Superlative exploration of the psychogeography of London town. Gets a bit indulgent near the end but never loses its capacity to surprise and make all sorts of bizarre and intruiging connections.
June 18, 2022
Fascinating psycho geography when you are in the mood. Only in the mood for the Kray twins walk
June 8, 2024
Started well- loved the bits about Hackney, the Krays and graffiti. Unfortunately degenerated into rather an esoteric account of artists I’d never heard of
July 6, 2016
There's no doubting the erudition of Sinclair, which sparkles in virtually every sentence. The book is supposedly about London, but really the places and people he visits or describes are launch pads for a disquisition on whatever interests him, from graffiti to houses to the river to all sorts of individuals, recognizable and obscure. At the level of detail and abstraction he gets to it demands close reading and can be difficult to follow. So, while often fascinating, it is abstruse at times. For example, the section on the artist Brian Catling who seems to operate in a world abstracted from everyday life, while living very much in the material world. Or, when comparing Catling to Henry Moore he says of Moore's sculptures "These grave forms do not so much affect memory as displace it, decant their own weight, position themselves in our mappings of the city like railway temini." Whilst I kind of get the gist of it, this is either profound or gobbledegook and I'm unsure which. And so it is in many parts of the book. When he disapproves of or dislikes something he shows it: "The toilet-club sit down ravers" in reference to "deregulated shamans, equal opportunity visionaries" in London.
Incredible, impressive, prodigious collections of details are thrown in casually all over the place. For example, referring to a London School of Film course on technique in a discourse on cinema, he notes that the critic David Thomson is one of the exceptions who actually noted attendance there as a credit on his resume. Where does he get it all from?
Cinema Purgatorio is perhaps the most straightforwardly readable chapter and fluently humorous, as he describes his attempts, minor successes and failures to build a career in the world of cinema.
Then there is substantial space given over to Lord Jeffrey Archer and his apartment overlooking the Thames. Sinclair obtains agreement to visiting Archer's apartment and which sends him off on a riff about the elitism of art and the lives of people who can afford it and who seek to enhance their status through their baubles, while living in a universe disconnected from the realities of most people. I was a young adult at the time Jeffrey Archer was at the top of his game in Thatcher's government and as a trashy novelist. I also experienced some degree of schaden freude at his fall from grace, when he was caught in a lie over the use of prostitutes. So, Lord Archer's Prospects is a chapter that was easier to follow and engage with. And maybe that's the weakness of the book - without prior knowledge or contextual insight on his various themes, it can be hard to track.
He has a fixation on PD James and does not hold back on writing he is unimpressed by; and on films like Antonioni's Blowup, which allows him to venture off into digressions on various characters of differing artistic modes and to occasionally draw us back to some part of London that started him off. One of these is Maryon Park, from which he springs into stories about the photographers McCullin and Bailey, and the Beatles and Lynn Redgrave and Terence Stamp and various other characters like the Kray brothers who make appearances too. In his penultimate paragraph, he admits to being "fond .... of these arbitrary leaps". No kidding. A fitting, admission at end of a clever, quite brilliant book built on them.
Incredible, impressive, prodigious collections of details are thrown in casually all over the place. For example, referring to a London School of Film course on technique in a discourse on cinema, he notes that the critic David Thomson is one of the exceptions who actually noted attendance there as a credit on his resume. Where does he get it all from?
Cinema Purgatorio is perhaps the most straightforwardly readable chapter and fluently humorous, as he describes his attempts, minor successes and failures to build a career in the world of cinema.
Then there is substantial space given over to Lord Jeffrey Archer and his apartment overlooking the Thames. Sinclair obtains agreement to visiting Archer's apartment and which sends him off on a riff about the elitism of art and the lives of people who can afford it and who seek to enhance their status through their baubles, while living in a universe disconnected from the realities of most people. I was a young adult at the time Jeffrey Archer was at the top of his game in Thatcher's government and as a trashy novelist. I also experienced some degree of schaden freude at his fall from grace, when he was caught in a lie over the use of prostitutes. So, Lord Archer's Prospects is a chapter that was easier to follow and engage with. And maybe that's the weakness of the book - without prior knowledge or contextual insight on his various themes, it can be hard to track.
He has a fixation on PD James and does not hold back on writing he is unimpressed by; and on films like Antonioni's Blowup, which allows him to venture off into digressions on various characters of differing artistic modes and to occasionally draw us back to some part of London that started him off. One of these is Maryon Park, from which he springs into stories about the photographers McCullin and Bailey, and the Beatles and Lynn Redgrave and Terence Stamp and various other characters like the Kray brothers who make appearances too. In his penultimate paragraph, he admits to being "fond .... of these arbitrary leaps". No kidding. A fitting, admission at end of a clever, quite brilliant book built on them.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews