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Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report
Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire is Iain Sinclair's foray into one of London's most fascinating boroughs 'As detailed and as complex as a historical map, taking the reader hither and thither with no care as to which might be the most direct route'Observer Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire is Iain Sinclair's personal record of his north-east London home in which he has lived for forty years. It is a documentary fiction, seeking to capture the spirit of place, before Hackney succumbs to mendacious green papers, eco boasts, sponsored public art and the Olympic Park gnawing at its edges. It is a message in a bottle, chucked into the flood of the future. 'An explosion of literary fireworks'Peter Ackroyd, The Times 'Gloriously sprawling, wonderfully congested, one of the finest books about London in recent decades'Daily Telegraph 'Sinclair adopts the roles of pedestrian, pilgrim and poet, magnificently illuminating the borough's historical and spiritual life'The Times 'Remarkable, compelling, bristles with unexpected, frequently lurid life. On Sinclair's territory there's nobody to touch him . . . a gonzo Samuel Pepys'Sunday Times Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of City of Disappearances.
581 pages, Paperback
First published February 5, 2009
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About the author
Iain Sinclair
120 books341 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 38 reviews
October 5, 2014
A bit of a muddle. As with all of Sinclair's work, the images arrest and move, though the interviews obscure his talents in this sprawling work. Orson Welles and Moby Dick keep bubbling to the surface, illustrating some grand unrealized desire. Sinclair's neighborhood Hackney is disappearing, or evolving. The material phantoms of progress is exacting a due. This formless exploration attempts a collage of evidence. The concluding sections featuring Will Self and Astrid Proll are remarkable.
October 5, 2013
Iain Sinclair doesn’t like things. He doesn’t like rules and regulations, Hackney Council, HSBC, cycle shops, writers who use researchers, gentrification, Tony Blair, the Olympics, the Royal Mail, or paying his council tax. He’s pretty rude about Stewart Home, amateur film makers, Lit and Phil societies, architects, and oh, yeah, Hackney Council. He doesn’t like change. He likes old stuff, weird stuff. He likes things staying the same. But I’m not interested in reading Iain Sinclair's gripes (although it's a pity that the book was written before Bo Jo won the mayoralty, I'd've liked to read Sinclair’s evisceration job on him); I’m interested in finding out about the people he casually references without footnotes: David Widgery, Derek Raymond, Maksim Litvnoff, Marc Karlin, Jock McFadyen, Chris Petit, George Raft, Paul Tickell, mostly men. Women, like his wife, Anna, are keeping the home fires burning, shopping, cooking, paying bills, occasionally allowed out to do a non-threatening job or a bit of sculpture.
The book is most engaging when Sinclair tells, not shows, lets other people speak (he does a number of interviews with Hackneyites telling their local, social history), it's when he decides that he's going to write that the prose becomes too purple, as difficult to wade though as the legendary, underground Hackney Brook, to wit, this para on Jayne Mansfield: “Mansfield, an intelligent woman on a global publicity assault, would travel anywhere with the same camera - caressing, Michelin-lipped smile, the four inch heels, transvestite abundance of hair, sheath dress that made walking, limo to church hall, a legerdemain of slithering juggling bodymass, stretched satin and threatened shoulder straps. Stateside, there would be two ratty chihuahuas, hairless, trembling, clutched over her exposed breasts.” Careful, Iain, you don't want to stain your manuscript.
But then again, he writes lovely lines like: “Blue plaques are the Islington equivalent of Hackney's Sky satellite dishes.” and “The sirens, a chorus Hackney dwellers accept as confirmation that they are in the right place, back home.” or “Reality shows like CCTV with sequins.”
Some of the people interviewed who moved into Hackney in the last 30 or 40 years, complain about the borough changing – one wonders if they think about the people who might have complained about them moving in in the 60s and 70s and setting up communes rather than living in a more traditional fashion.
There's also some downright nonsense in it – “Hackney is poorly served by buses [there's nothing but buses in Hackney] and its railways stations are on a line that links only to the hubs of other twilight zones [like London Liverpool Street?]” and he complains about the new Dalston Junction station, saying it will go precisely nowhere – well, l I find it very useful actually, Iain. He sticks to his Hackney: Mare Street, De Beauvoir Town, London Fields, Hackney Wick, Haggerston, rarely straying into “my” Hackney: Clapton, Stoke Newington, Homerton, even Shoreditch. He doesn't record, for example, the Stoke Newington-based anti-fascist 43 Group or even that Diane Abbott MP lives on the oft-mentioned Middleton Road. Although when a writer claims that anything of any importance in the borough has taken place within 440 yards of his house, you do start to wonder about his solipsism.
Penguin classes the book as Travel/Fiction, but it is as sprawling as Hackney itself. It's more pyschodiarising than psychogeography. And although Sinclair acknowledges in the acknowledgements that some of the book is fiction, the join is often too obvious, e.g. an incident when he tries to see his dodgy Dalston Lane accountant, Hari Simbla, about his tax inspection, and the secretary denies ever having made an appointment seems like a scene from one of Sinclair’s favourite novels, Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife, particularly as the lowlife in question is called Harry as well. Again, watching an underground train zoom past in the Mole Man underground tunnels seems very far-fetched and Sinclair even makes up an alter-ego, the researcher (re-search, geddit?) Kaporal, who invents outrageous tales, and whom Sinclair, presumably referencing EA Poe, a Hackney resident in the 1820s, kills off half way through the book.
However, I preferred this book to the only other Sinclair travelogue I've read (London Orbital), partly because I recognised so much of it, have done my own urban wanderings to a few of the places discussed), and my road is on the back cover, but I wonder what people who live in Doncaster, Newcastle, Herne Hill care about Amhurst, Graham, Cassland Roads? The book was written seven years ago and published four years ago, so Hackney has already changed, long term residents have moved 12 postcodes away from E5 to E17, the nouveau east is here to stay. As Sinclair says: “We need breathing space somewhere nobody can find any good reason to regenerate.”
The book is most engaging when Sinclair tells, not shows, lets other people speak (he does a number of interviews with Hackneyites telling their local, social history), it's when he decides that he's going to write that the prose becomes too purple, as difficult to wade though as the legendary, underground Hackney Brook, to wit, this para on Jayne Mansfield: “Mansfield, an intelligent woman on a global publicity assault, would travel anywhere with the same camera - caressing, Michelin-lipped smile, the four inch heels, transvestite abundance of hair, sheath dress that made walking, limo to church hall, a legerdemain of slithering juggling bodymass, stretched satin and threatened shoulder straps. Stateside, there would be two ratty chihuahuas, hairless, trembling, clutched over her exposed breasts.” Careful, Iain, you don't want to stain your manuscript.
But then again, he writes lovely lines like: “Blue plaques are the Islington equivalent of Hackney's Sky satellite dishes.” and “The sirens, a chorus Hackney dwellers accept as confirmation that they are in the right place, back home.” or “Reality shows like CCTV with sequins.”
Some of the people interviewed who moved into Hackney in the last 30 or 40 years, complain about the borough changing – one wonders if they think about the people who might have complained about them moving in in the 60s and 70s and setting up communes rather than living in a more traditional fashion.
There's also some downright nonsense in it – “Hackney is poorly served by buses [there's nothing but buses in Hackney] and its railways stations are on a line that links only to the hubs of other twilight zones [like London Liverpool Street?]” and he complains about the new Dalston Junction station, saying it will go precisely nowhere – well, l I find it very useful actually, Iain. He sticks to his Hackney: Mare Street, De Beauvoir Town, London Fields, Hackney Wick, Haggerston, rarely straying into “my” Hackney: Clapton, Stoke Newington, Homerton, even Shoreditch. He doesn't record, for example, the Stoke Newington-based anti-fascist 43 Group or even that Diane Abbott MP lives on the oft-mentioned Middleton Road. Although when a writer claims that anything of any importance in the borough has taken place within 440 yards of his house, you do start to wonder about his solipsism.
Penguin classes the book as Travel/Fiction, but it is as sprawling as Hackney itself. It's more pyschodiarising than psychogeography. And although Sinclair acknowledges in the acknowledgements that some of the book is fiction, the join is often too obvious, e.g. an incident when he tries to see his dodgy Dalston Lane accountant, Hari Simbla, about his tax inspection, and the secretary denies ever having made an appointment seems like a scene from one of Sinclair’s favourite novels, Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife, particularly as the lowlife in question is called Harry as well. Again, watching an underground train zoom past in the Mole Man underground tunnels seems very far-fetched and Sinclair even makes up an alter-ego, the researcher (re-search, geddit?) Kaporal, who invents outrageous tales, and whom Sinclair, presumably referencing EA Poe, a Hackney resident in the 1820s, kills off half way through the book.
However, I preferred this book to the only other Sinclair travelogue I've read (London Orbital), partly because I recognised so much of it, have done my own urban wanderings to a few of the places discussed), and my road is on the back cover, but I wonder what people who live in Doncaster, Newcastle, Herne Hill care about Amhurst, Graham, Cassland Roads? The book was written seven years ago and published four years ago, so Hackney has already changed, long term residents have moved 12 postcodes away from E5 to E17, the nouveau east is here to stay. As Sinclair says: “We need breathing space somewhere nobody can find any good reason to regenerate.”
March 10, 2009
I so looked forward to getting this book from the library, having heard excerpts from it on Radio 4. What a disaster. The editors who knocked it into shape for "Book of the Week" must have really been worth their weight in gold: muddling through over 600 pages of self-indulgent slop cannot have been an easy job.
Having lived in the famous borough for two years, and lived near it in Tower Hamlets for two more, I was looking forward to reading about all my old stomping grounds: Stoke Newington, Clapton, Hackney Marshes, Mare Street, and Dalston. What I actually found was a book without head or tail, aimlessly wandering throughout Sinclair's 30+ years of obsessive/compulsive information gathering. Many of the places described - Old Ford, Bethnal Green, Victoria Park, are not even in the borough, but are part of Tower Hamlets. Each sentence wanders hither and thither. What were Sinclair's editors doing? What was the publisher thinking? Somewhere, there must be a definitive book about Hackney, but this one isn't it.
Having lived in the famous borough for two years, and lived near it in Tower Hamlets for two more, I was looking forward to reading about all my old stomping grounds: Stoke Newington, Clapton, Hackney Marshes, Mare Street, and Dalston. What I actually found was a book without head or tail, aimlessly wandering throughout Sinclair's 30+ years of obsessive/compulsive information gathering. Many of the places described - Old Ford, Bethnal Green, Victoria Park, are not even in the borough, but are part of Tower Hamlets. Each sentence wanders hither and thither. What were Sinclair's editors doing? What was the publisher thinking? Somewhere, there must be a definitive book about Hackney, but this one isn't it.
March 18, 2011
In the end, I got about two-thirds of the way through this book before giving up. By that point, the author was beginning to repeat himself, and the few nuggets of interesting information about Hackney had become buried beneath increasingly dense layers of waffle and repeated references to a small clique of writers and artists who appear to be the author's friends. Disappointing.
April 3, 2009
I embarked upon this book with some trepidation. I'm a Sinclair fan and feel he has been overlooked by prize givers, partly because of the thorniness of his meticulously crafted prose and the no holds barred obsession with the obscurities of London geography, as well as its lesser heralded artists, writers and film makers. A six hundred page book on the subject of just a single London borough promised to try all bar the most attentive of readers and I was ready to be disappointed. Had he gone too far this time?
Not so. This is a compelling account of a borough on the point of transformation due to the 2012 Olympics. His exploration of diverse neighbourhoods such as de Beauvoir Town, Dalston, Homerton and Hackney Wick really gets under the surface of these places. Interviews pepper the text and provide enjoyable relief from the more literary sentences constructed by Sinclair himself. Among the interviewees are Astrid Proll and Will Self; among the anecdotes are tales involving Orson Welles, the Mole Man of Mortimer Road, Jean Luc Godard and Julie Christie. Sure, the usual cast of Sinclair's characters all make an appearance - Stewart Home, Ian Askead, Chris Petit - and some of them are occasionally shoehorned into the text unnecessarily, but overall, this is a great account of seventies anarchism, renegade GPs, soaring crime and brutal gentrification. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay is the fact that it inspired me, book in hand, to make several expeditions into the borough in order to check out the places referred to at first hand.
Not so. This is a compelling account of a borough on the point of transformation due to the 2012 Olympics. His exploration of diverse neighbourhoods such as de Beauvoir Town, Dalston, Homerton and Hackney Wick really gets under the surface of these places. Interviews pepper the text and provide enjoyable relief from the more literary sentences constructed by Sinclair himself. Among the interviewees are Astrid Proll and Will Self; among the anecdotes are tales involving Orson Welles, the Mole Man of Mortimer Road, Jean Luc Godard and Julie Christie. Sure, the usual cast of Sinclair's characters all make an appearance - Stewart Home, Ian Askead, Chris Petit - and some of them are occasionally shoehorned into the text unnecessarily, but overall, this is a great account of seventies anarchism, renegade GPs, soaring crime and brutal gentrification. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay is the fact that it inspired me, book in hand, to make several expeditions into the borough in order to check out the places referred to at first hand.
October 14, 2015
As someone who grew up in Hackney in the 1980s this hits many sweet spots. I suspect that for a lot of readers it will veer between whimsy, over-detailed introspection and even self-indulgence. It is certainly not an easy read - it requires both concentration and imagination just to handle the language - and at 600 pages it is best tackled in 60 page bites.
Sinclair continues his fascination with how the geography and myths of location affect our lives, but this is an intensely intimate portrait, a biography not of place but rather a particular pocket of time and left-wing politics that indelibly stamped Hackney as the place to be in the early Eighties for thinkers and writers. It was a terrible place to live - no-one had any money ever, but it was also living proof that money wasn't needed, and that a good story sufficed.
Sinclair manages to capture through multi-layered vignettes some of the chaotic semiotic meaning and meaningless of the place - all those who were there have a special affectionate bond with the place. This book is, one strongly suspects, written with them in mind, and those who weren't there may find the lack of identification hard going.
Sinclair continues his fascination with how the geography and myths of location affect our lives, but this is an intensely intimate portrait, a biography not of place but rather a particular pocket of time and left-wing politics that indelibly stamped Hackney as the place to be in the early Eighties for thinkers and writers. It was a terrible place to live - no-one had any money ever, but it was also living proof that money wasn't needed, and that a good story sufficed.
Sinclair manages to capture through multi-layered vignettes some of the chaotic semiotic meaning and meaningless of the place - all those who were there have a special affectionate bond with the place. This book is, one strongly suspects, written with them in mind, and those who weren't there may find the lack of identification hard going.
October 27, 2012
The unreadable ramblings of an old cynical man. Unbearable.
July 14, 2024
A singular peregrination through space, time and the geography of the Hackney that Iain Sinclair has lived in for most of his adult life. This weaves his own obsessions with local history, conspiracy theories and observations as he walks his manor, layering time and space as he goes. I find him by turns irritating and fascinating but every time I put this down in frustration I picked it up again because curiosity got the better of me.
I'm not sure that you ever know much more when you finish a Sinclair book than you do when you started it, and it's rather tricky attempting to pick through what suits the narrative to what is actually real. It's like a really complicated treasure hunt put together by someone who is constantly inebriated.
I'm not sure that you ever know much more when you finish a Sinclair book than you do when you started it, and it's rather tricky attempting to pick through what suits the narrative to what is actually real. It's like a really complicated treasure hunt put together by someone who is constantly inebriated.
October 1, 2018
I gave this a fair shot, until about halfway through I called off this self-indulgent effort. I'm not sure what it was, or what it was meant to be, and I wasn't a fan of Sinclair's prose and minor gripes.
The fundamental issue was that it was 'documentary fiction'. Whether that's so that he can expose certain council practices under the legal defence of fiction or whether it's to spruce up the dull reality I'm not sure. But it was too dull to be enjoyed as a story, and as I couldn't be sure it was genuine, I couldn't get emotionally involved. The interviews were a welcome break from the prose as they actually got to the point, but too often that was just a different formulation of 'it's not what it used to be.'
I wasn't sure what Hackney was meant to represent compared to its past. It was becoming invaded by the middle classes or various ethnic minorities, as residents harked back to a day when crime was a different sort of crime to that of today. But Sinclair didn't lead us out of the muddle, he merely added to it, scattering observations into sentences and making it a slog to read. Even if this was about my local area I think I'd have still given up out of boredom.
In a way it's depressing but on the other hand demonstrates why people read fiction - characters are just more exciting than real life people you meet on the street, unless the second 300 pages were a reward for bearing the first 300. Then again, I've always found those 'Real Humans of...' pages a load of tripe, so perhaps I was the wrong audience from the start.
The fundamental issue was that it was 'documentary fiction'. Whether that's so that he can expose certain council practices under the legal defence of fiction or whether it's to spruce up the dull reality I'm not sure. But it was too dull to be enjoyed as a story, and as I couldn't be sure it was genuine, I couldn't get emotionally involved. The interviews were a welcome break from the prose as they actually got to the point, but too often that was just a different formulation of 'it's not what it used to be.'
I wasn't sure what Hackney was meant to represent compared to its past. It was becoming invaded by the middle classes or various ethnic minorities, as residents harked back to a day when crime was a different sort of crime to that of today. But Sinclair didn't lead us out of the muddle, he merely added to it, scattering observations into sentences and making it a slog to read. Even if this was about my local area I think I'd have still given up out of boredom.
In a way it's depressing but on the other hand demonstrates why people read fiction - characters are just more exciting than real life people you meet on the street, unless the second 300 pages were a reward for bearing the first 300. Then again, I've always found those 'Real Humans of...' pages a load of tripe, so perhaps I was the wrong audience from the start.
March 29, 2011
Loved it, though I think this is the longest it has taken me to finish a book. This is an incredibly dense and wandering study of Hackney at a moment in time when what is was is about to be wiped away. Sinclair is mourning the past, but I think also demonstrating that there is hope - precisely because Hackney has always been submerged under varying layers of obfuscation and in constant motion. It is nearly impossible to get a grip on. The characters in this book seem too eccentric to be true, until I remember some of the people I have stumbled across in my own life, especially in Albion. I will return to Hackney, not looking at it in the same way. There is a lot more there than you might imagine.
August 24, 2015
I have to admit it's taken me a couple f years to finish this. At one point I laid it aside in exasperation with the rambling stream of reminiscences about people I've never heard of. But I recently picked it up again and found it strangely captivating. He's an angry man – very angry with the destructive corruption of Hackney council and the Olympics Authority (or whatever they're called).
October 30, 2018
Loved this. I used to live in Hackney, before this is mostly set but during Sinclair's time there. So much of the book resonates with me, even an old friend is in it. Even more, Sinclair finds a way to construct a fascinating and readable book out of not very much at all. Literature by walking around.
June 9, 2021
The author Iain Sinclair gives us a record of Hackney the area he has called home for over forty years, in a display of documentary fiction where the characters from it's long past and myths of it's future exist in near super solid present tense an half real half imaginary place like Blake's Jerusalem . An interesting read all round to say the least
January 18, 2015
FINALLY.
After starting it twice, and an extended reading period of 2 years (no joke), I have finished this book. I feel proud (it's not an easy read), and also know a lot about the history of Hackney.
After starting it twice, and an extended reading period of 2 years (no joke), I have finished this book. I feel proud (it's not an easy read), and also know a lot about the history of Hackney.
May 7, 2014
As an east London dweller I found the personal testimony extremely interesting, but the authors poetic prose was a bit too hard to digest at length. I got about half way before I felt like I had read enough.
June 10, 2015
I realised I hadn't touched this in a year or more so moved to "read" and "I give up." I remember there being some good characters but i also remember it seeming very scattered, and it just didn't grab me enough to keep going.
October 24, 2019
Iain Sinclair never lets me down.. took a few chapters to get into the rhyme and rhythm of the writing but it didn't disappoint.. loved the history, characters and flavours of his Hackney Wick.. sadly it's all changed but thankfully his writing has 'saved' it.
January 14, 2021
This book was a slog. The subject matter is interesting and obviously quite a lot of t of work went into all the research and interviews. But the value of the source material is lost on Sinclair's personal search for relevance.
August 13, 2010
Iain Sinclair is clearly disgruntled with the way his life turned out.
September 11, 2016
I chipped away at this for way too long
November 30, 2012
Sometimes enjoyable, Inconsistently compelling. Thus took forever to read. Do it goes.
April 23, 2013
Not easy to read, and not as informative/interesting as I'd hoped.
April 2, 2023
Some exquisite writing, but mostly unreadable waffle. It's quite something when you get to the end of a 600-page book and can't say what said book is about.
March 17, 2017
We met to discuss Iain Sinclair's 2009 'documentary fiction', Hackney, that rose-red Empire, his personal local history of the London borough in which he lives. Wherein he mixes accounts of and interviews with characters he deems representative of the area's past, his own domestic history, and an on-going report of his researches for and construction of the book itself. Spiced, at some length, it has to be said, with references to a few famous names whose connection to the place is fleeting, tenuous or simply speculative: Jayne Mansfield and Julie Christie (fleeting); Jean Luc Godard (tenuous); and Orson Welles (speculative). Neither does he stint to give the reader the benefit of his caustic views on a number of social matters: vanity and corruption of local government; vanity and corruption of the London Olympics project; massive petty crime; retrograde modern architecture; vanity and corruption of Tony Blair; ineptitude of the NHS; pernicious motorists and cyclists; bendy buses; etc. - as regular punctuations to his narrative.
It was this last aspect which, Malcolm suggested, might qualify him as one of the grumpiest old men in print. Not so, according to Tim. Others quibbled too - clearly, a hotly contested niche, that one. Anyway, isn't he celebrating a not-too-happy past in the face of what he considers an ignorant future? Nostalgie de la boue, if you asked Malcolm. But he shows optimism about his characters, protested Tim, he shows them as interesting. The only problem with the book is that it is such an unedited collection of articles and goes on far too long. As Sinclair is only too well aware! Jenny pointed out. At one point one of his interviewees protests about 'fools who think cobbled together interview transcripts make a proper book'. He may well be having a laugh.
What about the crime? Sinclair wades through crime-scenes and squad cars whenever he leaves his house. Jenny had a friend who was mugged in Tudor Road. Sara has one who lives not far away from Sinclair's house whose car had been repeatedly vandalised. But Malcolm had been visiting friends right on Sinclair's street for over 20 years, taking children to the local parks, attending the communal garden fete, and had been blissfully ignorant of the carnage going on around him. No, Sara insisted, Hackney is as Sinclair descibes it, a war-zone, OK? OK, no arguing with that, is there?
One topic of interest was how much he'd made up. One character, an unlikely bicycling book-merchant (Driffield) was very real – Sara had experience of him in her previous life as a librarian and produced his Drif's Guide, 'a scabrous collection of insults, jokes, prejudices and abuses about bookshops and their owners.' Another one, Kaporal, a seedy-sounding researcher of scandal who hangs himself, we'd bet was pure invention. Malcolm knew personally Sinclair's 'art-historian' neighbour who is supposed to advise him on the whereabouts of Leon Kossoff's paintings, but drew a complete blank when the trail takes him to an 'influential magazine' a 'former Graham Road hack owned and edited'. William Taylor, 'clergyman-author-chairperson' of the 'Boas Society', certainly exists and was once a guest author at a meeting of this Readers' Group(!), although the society itself is a bit harder to track down. The moral seems to be to take it all with a fairly big pinch of salt – Sinclair himself writes: 'Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire is a documentary fiction; where it needs to be true, it is.' Begging the question whether any requirement at all is placed upon it.
For Malcolm and Rory, it was an exuberant exercise in name-dropping, from West Ham and England footballer Martin Peters (related to Jenny, she'd have you know!) to Stalin (now when and where was he in Hackney?) We had a sceptical split: Jenny thought Sinclair implied too much cultural significance to his topic, whereas Sara applauded his genuine enthusiasm for the likes of Godard and Welles. It was a memoir. It was that. Malcolm pointed out we should now have, on completing the text, a full medical history of the author and his family, legs, teeth, births, appendectomies, the works.
The style of Sinclair's writing? Tim had it down as observational notes, Jenny as Joycean. Her favourite bit was a celebration of a café near Victoria Park once visited by Julie Christie, ending: 'The old England of fog and noose. Now countered by this vision in khaki, walker of Hackney's parks and graveyards: Julie Christie. Patron of independent bookshops, street markets, cafés. The radiant future we have left behind.' For Malcolm, Sinclair was moved to his finest pitch by the challenge of the disgraced, necrophiliac doctor, Swanny, who catered to the Kray twins: 'That never-extinguished torch burning a hole in bulging, semen-stained corduroys.' Didn't get better than that.
On the whole, we appeared to have found the thing interesting enough, but it was a different animal to Sinclair's London Orbital, which the group took on some years ago. That book was a dense local history travelogue with some personal anecdote. This one was more of a collection of personal anecdote with some local history squeezed in. Gonzo stuff
It was this last aspect which, Malcolm suggested, might qualify him as one of the grumpiest old men in print. Not so, according to Tim. Others quibbled too - clearly, a hotly contested niche, that one. Anyway, isn't he celebrating a not-too-happy past in the face of what he considers an ignorant future? Nostalgie de la boue, if you asked Malcolm. But he shows optimism about his characters, protested Tim, he shows them as interesting. The only problem with the book is that it is such an unedited collection of articles and goes on far too long. As Sinclair is only too well aware! Jenny pointed out. At one point one of his interviewees protests about 'fools who think cobbled together interview transcripts make a proper book'. He may well be having a laugh.
What about the crime? Sinclair wades through crime-scenes and squad cars whenever he leaves his house. Jenny had a friend who was mugged in Tudor Road. Sara has one who lives not far away from Sinclair's house whose car had been repeatedly vandalised. But Malcolm had been visiting friends right on Sinclair's street for over 20 years, taking children to the local parks, attending the communal garden fete, and had been blissfully ignorant of the carnage going on around him. No, Sara insisted, Hackney is as Sinclair descibes it, a war-zone, OK? OK, no arguing with that, is there?
One topic of interest was how much he'd made up. One character, an unlikely bicycling book-merchant (Driffield) was very real – Sara had experience of him in her previous life as a librarian and produced his Drif's Guide, 'a scabrous collection of insults, jokes, prejudices and abuses about bookshops and their owners.' Another one, Kaporal, a seedy-sounding researcher of scandal who hangs himself, we'd bet was pure invention. Malcolm knew personally Sinclair's 'art-historian' neighbour who is supposed to advise him on the whereabouts of Leon Kossoff's paintings, but drew a complete blank when the trail takes him to an 'influential magazine' a 'former Graham Road hack owned and edited'. William Taylor, 'clergyman-author-chairperson' of the 'Boas Society', certainly exists and was once a guest author at a meeting of this Readers' Group(!), although the society itself is a bit harder to track down. The moral seems to be to take it all with a fairly big pinch of salt – Sinclair himself writes: 'Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire is a documentary fiction; where it needs to be true, it is.' Begging the question whether any requirement at all is placed upon it.
For Malcolm and Rory, it was an exuberant exercise in name-dropping, from West Ham and England footballer Martin Peters (related to Jenny, she'd have you know!) to Stalin (now when and where was he in Hackney?) We had a sceptical split: Jenny thought Sinclair implied too much cultural significance to his topic, whereas Sara applauded his genuine enthusiasm for the likes of Godard and Welles. It was a memoir. It was that. Malcolm pointed out we should now have, on completing the text, a full medical history of the author and his family, legs, teeth, births, appendectomies, the works.
The style of Sinclair's writing? Tim had it down as observational notes, Jenny as Joycean. Her favourite bit was a celebration of a café near Victoria Park once visited by Julie Christie, ending: 'The old England of fog and noose. Now countered by this vision in khaki, walker of Hackney's parks and graveyards: Julie Christie. Patron of independent bookshops, street markets, cafés. The radiant future we have left behind.' For Malcolm, Sinclair was moved to his finest pitch by the challenge of the disgraced, necrophiliac doctor, Swanny, who catered to the Kray twins: 'That never-extinguished torch burning a hole in bulging, semen-stained corduroys.' Didn't get better than that.
On the whole, we appeared to have found the thing interesting enough, but it was a different animal to Sinclair's London Orbital, which the group took on some years ago. That book was a dense local history travelogue with some personal anecdote. This one was more of a collection of personal anecdote with some local history squeezed in. Gonzo stuff
March 29, 2024
Lots of weaving, listing, impressionistic reminiscences, short clauses occasionally interpolated with flowery, verbose and yet beautifully artful sentences disappearing up Dalston Junction...
Written in the late noughties, gentrification already well underway. I'd moved into Stokey in 2004, then Upper Clapton in 2009, then Lower Clapton in 2011. The notorious Murder Mile (namechecked as such even in US cop show Castle around the time). That weekend the dodgy pub hosted a fatal stabbing. But in truth the gang warfare was already starting to move to pastures new.
It's refreshing to read a book so entrenched in your everyday environment, even if it is populated with semi-mythical figures like Godard, Julie Christie, Sheila Rowbotham, David Widgery et al. And of course the Mole Man.
It's somewhat meandering in style and structure, but fascinating in parts.
Written in the late noughties, gentrification already well underway. I'd moved into Stokey in 2004, then Upper Clapton in 2009, then Lower Clapton in 2011. The notorious Murder Mile (namechecked as such even in US cop show Castle around the time). That weekend the dodgy pub hosted a fatal stabbing. But in truth the gang warfare was already starting to move to pastures new.
It's refreshing to read a book so entrenched in your everyday environment, even if it is populated with semi-mythical figures like Godard, Julie Christie, Sheila Rowbotham, David Widgery et al. And of course the Mole Man.
It's somewhat meandering in style and structure, but fascinating in parts.
June 2, 2025
Weird experience where most of Sinclair's cultural fetishes (Godard, Welles, Burroughs) remain present in a certain popular consciousness, an Annoying Guy vernacular I also speak, most of the landmarks and pre-2012 Olympic Hackney history discussed is all foreign to me, despite having lived here for the past six years
August 28, 2017
A MUST-read for anyone interested in London. And I now have a whole reading list of forgotten British novels and authors. Sinclair at his best.
February 21, 2018
In the tradition of the Situationists, and as an unrepentant Conradian, Sinclair invites us to read this book with 'Heart of Darkness' as its key.
Lying prone in his Hackney cot, reeling from the ravages of colonialism, Conrad cast off the twin phantoms of his fever, the madness of a "soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear", and its dogged pursuer sent out from home. Hanging in the air, this binary of horror awaits earth born carriers to begin the game afresh.
In the new millennium, in an inversion of Conrad's journey, we see bodies mangled by violence and corruption on a massive scale; the Olympic project describing a reverse globalisation within the capital city.
Sinclair, the descendant of Knights Templar, a meticulous tracer and archivist, a living compendium of London's cultures, is absorbed into Conrad's bequest to the East End. But if he is to strut his stuff as a modern day Marlow, who on earth will we get to play Kurtz?
Lying prone in his Hackney cot, reeling from the ravages of colonialism, Conrad cast off the twin phantoms of his fever, the madness of a "soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear", and its dogged pursuer sent out from home. Hanging in the air, this binary of horror awaits earth born carriers to begin the game afresh.
In the new millennium, in an inversion of Conrad's journey, we see bodies mangled by violence and corruption on a massive scale; the Olympic project describing a reverse globalisation within the capital city.
Sinclair, the descendant of Knights Templar, a meticulous tracer and archivist, a living compendium of London's cultures, is absorbed into Conrad's bequest to the East End. But if he is to strut his stuff as a modern day Marlow, who on earth will we get to play Kurtz?
July 12, 2010
Iain Sinclair gives us a pure form of "Psychogeography", a kind of ecstatic writing and memoir invented by situationist leader Guy Debord. Here, Sinclair doesn't just recount the history of the East End borough of Hackney, but his personal history living there, emotional memories of starting a family and being an experimental writer and filmmaker. He finds that to do so, he must investigate connections and the connections to those connections which delve further into the world of art and the experimental, avant-garde world of of London in the Sixties to find out where his roots lie in a place that has never seemed to warrant his full attention.
August 23, 2012
I bought this book in Florence two years ago, and it has been on my to-read file for some time. As I prepare to invade Tasmania for ten days, I need a Good Book to read on the plane, when snowed in, when fogbound, to ease the pain of frostbite. This will be a good choice. I am up to page 12 and kicking myself for not getting to it sooner.
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