LONDON: CITY OF DISAPPEARANCES
edited by Iain SinclairH. Hamilton, £22.50. 672ppIT IS A CITY THAT forgets. It is a city of the forgotten. You can still disappear without trace in London. It calls to those whose one desire is to vanish. Here you can, in the old phrase, “go under”. Here you can “break”. The city is built upon lost things. It is constructed in a literal sense on the ruins and debris of the past; it towers above forgotten underground rivers and discarded tunnels. It is built upon old graveyards and burial pits.
So the past is rarely visible in London. The city devours its former incarnations, leaving not a wrack or wraith behind. It buries its dead, and forgets where they lie. That is the source of its strength and its power. The living will in any case soon enough pass into darkness. The city itself will always rise again. It will be renewed when those who read these words have utterly disappeared and been forgotten.
Iain Sinclair has compiled what he calls an “anthology of absence”. There are stories of the outcast and the vagrant, the victims of an oppression that they themselves cannot define. The most celebrated is surely Ann of Oxford Street, the subject of Thomas De Quincey’s threnody of loss in Confessions of an English Opium-eater. He was her companion in London for a few weeks, before he was called away on business. When he returned she had disappeared. He never saw her again and his narrative becomes a dream of loss — of some friend or lover who has gone for ever. The dream demands the circumstance of crowded London.
There are stories here of other lost people — not dead but forgotten, relics of a past London culture that faded in the way that everything in the city fades. It is, also, a city of failure and disappointment that are the same thing as absence. That is why many wish to lose themselves within it.
There are streets that have disappeared. Catherine Street, Jewin Street, Golden Place are just three of the vanished thoroughfares named in a litany of sorrowful mysteries. Other streets have been curtailed. Swallow Street has been swallowed by burgeoning London. Grub Street has been renamed Milton Street.
Then there are all the London occupations that have gone — the hatters, the fishwives, the lamp-boys. There is also a lament on the dispersal of the Jewish East End, one of the many phases in that neighbourhood’s history that have passed over it without leaving a trace. Famous stores and shops have gone — Schmidt’s, Gunter’s, and the once ubiquitous Lyons Corner Houses. The old pubs have gone, with names like the “Mother Shipton”, the “ Running Footman” and the “Salutation and Cat”. It is as if the world were made afresh in every generation. An interesting exercise can be performed on the streets of London. Look around you, at the shopfronts and the traffic and the houses, and imagine these things as historical phenomena. Envision them as a temporary stage set in a drama with no ending. Then the true nature of the period will become apparent.
The memory of London is so obscure and dark that its origins are quite forgotten. Take Grub Street. Is it named after a refuse ditch known as a “grub” or “grube”', or after a landlord named Mr Grubbe? Is Billingsgate named after the Celtic chieftain Belinus or after a Mr Beling who once owned the land? Is Pentonville derived from the Celtic words pen and ton, meaning hill and spring, or from a Mr Penton? Perhaps all origins are true. Perhaps in London fable and fact have a habit of colluding. There are also places that seem never to have existed. Where are the Seven Sisters? The Nine Elms? What is the White City? And, as someone asks here, where is the park of Tufnell Park? It is a city whose origins are unknown. It is not even clear whether there was an ancient British settlement before the Romans. That is why London has become so naturally the site of myth and fantasy. If you don’t know where you really are, you must invent a place. It can even be called an invented city, the spectral creation of Blake and Dickens and a thousand other visionaries. If the past does not take material form, its vestiges may return in spirit. Its edifices are, in the phrase of one contributor here, “riddled with ghosts”. But there are many forms of ghost — the slight chill in the air, the savour of ancient stone, the darker shadow, all clustering around a site where once the old city flourished.
And there are the endless dead who, if they returned from their graves beneath the London soil, would far outnumber the living. It is a city of revenants built upon the dead, their bones part of the fabric.
And there is the final disappearance, the disappearance of London itself. In some unimaginable future it must return to the darkness from which it came. This does not represent the familiar yearning for desolation — the cliché of a broken London Bridge and a semi-submerged Saint Paul’s. This is the real thing, the image of final desolation. It is the return to the primeval seabed or to the Ice Age drifts. London excites such terminal fantasies.
There is a wildness and weirdness about the short narratives collected here, as if they had all contracted the contagion of London’s darkness. The authors seem haunted by the city. Some writers have become obsessed by an event — a crime, a disappearance, an accident — and are drawn back to its location again and again as if puzzling out the mystery of London itself. Others are obsessed by the area in which they live or were born. They scour its topography and history as if looking for part of their own selves. The native earth becomes their birthright.
Of all cities, London most powerfully touches the imagination. It is the landscape for these stories because no other place has the same capacity for labyrinthine obliquity. It elicits wonder and horror in equal measure. In Blake’s words, it has become “a human awful wonder of God”.
Critic’s chart, page 4
