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The Last London is (depending on how you count them) Iain Sinclair’s 18th book about the capital, but really they are one long book of which this is the final chapter. He started with Lud Heat (1975), a prose poem about the occult alignment of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. After that came a series of astonishing books that reinvented the London novel – White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987); Downriver (1991); Radon Daughters (1994) – as well as a steady stream of essays, films and samizdat poetry pamphlets that were circulated like relics among those in the know.
What publishers like to call the “breakout book” was London Orbital (2002), which documented a year-long tramp around the “acoustic footprint” of the M25 motorway in the lead-up to the millennium. More walking books followed: Edge of the Orison (2005), in which Sinclair walked out of the city in the tracks of the poet John Clare; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), a “confidential report” on the London borough in which he’s lived for 50 years; and Ghost Milk (2011), a sort of anti-manifesto written against the “Olympicopolis” of the London 2012 games. In true hipster fashion, his early champions haven’t tired of telling people they were reading him before it was either profitable or popular to do so. “It’s great to be where it’s happening,” Sinclair observes in The Last London, “before it actually is.” It’s now possible to speak of Sinclairian London in the same way that we talk about Dickensian London. What, then, does his city look like today?
The Last London is an elegy for a London that is now over. The artists, the homeless, the eccentrics – the people Sinclair has always been on the side of – are moving...