Friday, September 11, 2020

Iain Sinclair walks around The Last London

Time for a walk with the daddy of London psychogeographers, Iain Sinclair.

His 2017 book The Last London was reviewed in the Guardian:

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 out, or being moved out. The city seems to want him out too. He receives cards from estate agents urging him to "sell up, cash in, get out". 
His children and grandchildren have been forced out by rising rents, part of the great London exodus to the coast: "Artists settling, mobbing like gulls at the tideline, after being expelled from their London warehouses and railway arches." (Sinclair himself bought a flat in St Leonards-on-Sea a few years ago, though he’s yet to sever the umbilical cord completely). 
Global capital and political meddling have conspired to bring about, he concludes, "a strategic destruction of the local".

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