Secrets of the City with Iain Sinclair

Oh just met the great writers in Clara Luper Street Station and we are walking through the city just cross London War I've not really idea where we're going today it's a bit of a magical mystery tour but if you want anyone to give you a magical mystery tour through London and it's seeing Sinclair right Wonderware will wonder where we'll end up today I love this wall this pregnant wall you actually can put your hand on it avoiding the Chango and you take the temperature of another era of London the beginnings of modernism coming out of this completely medieval city and this is a sight that crosses for me in 1856 when because of the huge engine of capital that city of London had becomes rich had its tentacles into the whole world the two most visionary characters were proto modernism Vincent van Gogh and Rambo Arthur Rambo both in London at the same time unknown to each other and both making series of exploratory Doreen Rambo more more visionary end of his career and the walks are much more drug induced and labyrinth II whereas van Gogh has not found himself he's only sketching he's never painted in color and he's still trying to be a man of business and he comes right here to Austin friars church not this church because the old Austin Friars Church disappeared but this church shows was auctioning off print of the drawing that van Gogh made of Austen friars church with his own script underneath it one of the few drawings that he he did in London most of the drawings are little black-and-white sketches attached to letters and he came here all the way from West London out near London Airport where he was saying working in a school to the city for several reasons one of which was he was collecting money due to the school and he would have to go around the city and while he was doing that he found this was the Dutch church and he came here and made a drawing so I mean I think this is a good spot to start and it overlaps with my other projects if you look on the church there's a figure of a Dutchman of the 17th century but his head is completely surrounded by a halo of arrows as if he's gone off as a Dutch trader into the world and been martyred by indigenous people which connects up with my own family history are we going to follow as well [Music] so much a dip the link here for me is coffee which is now this roasted baker's artisan tastemakers coffee stuff that lands here because my the book I'm doing about my great-grandfather who went off to Peru to work for the Peruvian corporation of London who'd been given an immense tranche of land at the time that the government of Peru was bankrupt after the War of the Pacific with Chile and they couldn't pay their bonds on the railways they were making so they just said to the Peruvian corporation who were based in London you can have all this land in exchange for our debt and we let you run the railways and everything else the mining for 60 years and to buy a great grand for another man called Alexander Ross who'd both been planters were chosen to take this trip into totally unexplored upper Amazon Territory to see what could grow there and so they went off on this year-long expedition and decided you could grow coffee which is what they'd been growing in Peru in Sudan they'd been coffee planters in salon both of them and Arthur my great-grandfather had made a fortune by the time he was 14 having grown up very poor on a Scottish farm and basically being thrown off his land and ended up going to salon as was Srilanka retired at 40 all going well and then the harvest the coffee harvest was obliterated by bugs and fungus totally wiped out and it had been like tulips there was a huge boom in coffee the city was investing in coffee money for coffee was rolling in so this current vogue for coffee sits very well with with what the story is will kind of fill that in to where we're going to walk and it was very interesting that van Gogh arrived in the heart of coffee land when he was wrestling with his own demons and deciding what what he should do to eventually to become a spiritual seeker and a walker and a painter always a walk completely mad Walker are we near London's first coffee house yeah we are we're going to pass it actually gonna pass London's first coffee house which I had noticed I couldn't remember where it was hmm and in the course of doing this war the other day ah there is London's first coffee house because the thing with this city and the money and expansion is everything interconnects coffee coffee money coffee real estate foreign countries just as engines of capital you know all of that the City of London is by far and away the most coded enclosure once you start to look at the buildings there's so much manifestation of different Masonic ideologies and magics that around the occulted notion of money you know you look at any building it's just absolutely symbol [Music] kind of difficult to keep up with the route that we're taking we just gone through the Royal Exchange and now we're going over corn Hill and IANS the perfect person to ask about my idle speculation that corn hill is one of the one of the hills of the City of London he looks wasn't it also one of the potential sites for a pre Roman settlement I don't know yeah sure I mean well obviously just geographically because of what the defense was any any slight Hill or mound around would have been a center for original settlement and then once the Romans come in I mean let in Leadenhall market becomes the falling and this is the the origins of settlement really as far as London is concerned [Music] so Gracechurch Street is where the gallery the Van Gogh used to visit in the city was located somewhere when I tell you where it is in gross history not much trace to it now there's a family of framers who also ran galleries selling largely prints from topographical so Van Gogh obviously could have very easily come here from where we were in Austin France very very nicely warm [Music] getting that your [Music] you and this building here was the headquarters of the Peruvian corporation of London up at the top now you see the sort of pyramid structure rearing above it but it would have been a quite an impressive building in its day with a again a series of the Egyptian masonic temple buildings at the top and one of those offices was where my great-grandfather arthur was Scottish planter turned up it's quite an elderly guy in his 60s as was thought then and was given this contract 100 pounds a month to go into unexplored territory in the upper Amazon and make a report I've been to the building in Brussels where Joseph Conrad got his contract to become a boat captain on the Congo River with disastrous consequences mentally and physically for him but with a great piece of writing sir Arthur's piece of writing wasn't quite in that category but it was it was a book that defined his life and has led to me trying to go back to understand my own life through through what he did and the kind of writing he did in a book published in 1895 [Music] this is called a plantation house because of the coffee plantations and this is where the big puffy auctions and tea auctions took place actually going through onto mincing lane which we're going to go on to around the corner so all of the estates in the colonies used to send back samples of their coffee and you traders would come down here and sniff at them and test them and buy them as futures this is kind of a future investment boom boom boom financially I'm any trace of it now is just in the name plantation house so people must walk past that other time and not really consider plantation do you want to celebrate that and these are essentially eco slave plantations and the most horrifying aspect of all is that Kew Gardens were right at the back of all of this nefarious dealing they paid people to go into the rubber planting areas and steal plants because it wasn't a British colony steal as much as they could ship them back to cure propagate them in queue and then send them to salon or Malaya and essentially destroy the native rubber industry and they successfully did it and they were they were funded by the British Secret Service at the time they were a branch of the British Secret Service so Q Gardens for all its present eco piety was a absolute biopiracy of the late Victorian period [Music] what my lens and my fancy take some of the rain off what were you saying about the booth I was saying because I got asked to do an introduction to Charles a lovely new addition from Thames Hudson no Charles booze poverty maps which are an amazing thing and the starting point for a lot of booze walks were in time B Hall which overlaps with Stephen Watson disabled again but booth while booth was exploring that the dark poverty side of London and making these Street by street maps with a series of people sent out an epic walks on the other side of his life he was a ship owner from Liverpool the booths shipping line initiated the first traffic to the Amazon you could go up you could go right up to the Amazon to manao sand Iquitos on a booze ship and booth sailed off himself to do it and so his ships were very much implicated in the trade of colonial exploitation biopiracy rather all of that that the traders in that were using this fleet at the same time as he's describing London as a kind of jungle of Darkness heart of darkness all of the things here are a metaphor for what's happening in capital with the other side of his life which gives him the money to be able to patronize poverty studies in London this founding myth and symbol of the city is mistress the double-headed light and dark everything that you touch in the City of London is schizophrenic the frontage and then the the seething underbelly and the two things coexist and they have done from the start the wealth and the scale of IANS knowledge is quite incredible isn't it and all these connections the way that everything seems to link together one thing left to colonize is the past and what would you've achieved everything you just throw down your own heritage version of history onto the floor like a load of golden [Music] mr. Ralph Andre Sheldon again this this little bit here has got this Keeler II feel to it it's a bit like the stuffy troops transom poles basically the coffee and all of these products and coming into the private docks here and then up to mincing lane for the auctions and the prices going up and up and up and up until nature decides to have a laugh and and wipes the whole harvest out destroys them completely thereafter they start to goatee and in salon rather than coffee and the coffee moves out to Peru with horrendous consequences for the indigenous people [Music] this is um one of the historians of London yeah what is this place I've never had a big shake is it a hotel I don't you haven't come across here before you can probably have to print out the correct Welsh I think the Brid the grin grin but the actual Tower Hill rather than the mound is the sacred mound with a head of brand the blessing mmm which is why London is really a Welsh is it obviously a binocular and bran this giant comes to London and his head his chopped off and buried under the white hill the white mound and while it remains undisturbed the fate of London is is secure it's a prophetic head it also figures in Elizabeth Gordon's London mounds and prehistoric sir in which there's a triangulation between Parliament Hill torch hill and the Penton mound which is in Islington and lines the force and energy sweep across London between these significant signs which was a inspiration for me at the time I was working down the river here in in Limehouse and huapi cutting the grass and putting together Lud heat and the tower cut figures in that I guess [Music] we have to know Tim's barges laughing [Music] terribly impacted labyrinth een sense of the city with all its secrets and within 12 15 minutes walk you're on the river and you know you knew really sense the business of the world coming in and out of here and all that other stuff has already dropped away completely [Music] being exposed when a term is lying they look quite like an old sea dog I feel my work so it looks like you've been back from some expedition to the ends of the world and coming back a moment to tell the tale [Music] we came here when we were doing the film of London Overground and I think sort of bits of readings on the book dig out Oh dropping a bit of Ian reading from down river in this park and this is where there were these monkeys running about in the trees the marmosets have gone a graveyard attached to its hosts a church tower faking a period grandeur with its body tumbles wantedly into decay behind the heart corrugated iron fencing from the low steps of San John's Scandrick Street I mourn the loss of another secret locale at eminence remaining sacred because we do not need to visit it it's there and that's enough the balance in our psychic map of the city is unharmed but now another disregarded in the scape has been noticed and dragged from cyclically time to pragmatic time and has been asked to justify itself Shannen landscapes of the chosen agents of reality red-bearded slow-moving giants in check shirts have the renovation contract the nautical graves of bulldozed the Sepulcher retained as captive features the Brut undergrowth has been uprooted and the ghosts are being put to the torch all the totemic animals have fled marmosets lemurs Janet's tamarins sugar gliders brought ashore covertly and traded from the public houses along the highway and this is the tidied up result of what was happening when I came here in 1987 1988 this this wilderness is now this ghost of a graveyard opposite the restored Church there was a plaque the Levellers over here which had been unveiled by tony benn which had been just before he died over thought absolutely well obviously that wasn't there in the time of downriver and it was amazing to have the connection with the Levellers and tony bear I never knew that this is really a significant spot this is Thomas Rheinsberg buried in the churchyard on the 14th of November 1648 after a funeral procession organized by the level of movement rains myrrh rains burro was a spokesman for the Levellers and a colonel in the New Model Army killed by royalist raiding party during the siege of Pontefract on the day of the funeral a leveler leaflet recorded the inscription on rangerous tomb if propane brains Byrd made Kings Lords commoners and judges shake cities and committees quake he was it said just valiant and true and it ended with the words that here reigns bura bids the noble Levellers adieu plaque unveiled by councillor Rania khan writer john reese and politician tony benn in 2013 so we're actually honoring one of the Levellers and that gives it a a spirit that i missed on my early account in downriver the Netherlands and the diggers are very much associated with a river that further down in Putney where they had the great debates in Putney with the army commanders as to what was going to happen after they'd won the Civil War register the sensation of it which is I think what happens with these walks you're drawn repeatedly to certain sights and the sights can reveal themselves bit bit by bit as having had a significant increment of London history that evolves generation by generation that's how it works I get that Stephen Watts thing is you're not understanding totally whether you are performing a role that's already been written in a book whether Machinery of the book actually was enacted by you you don't know whether you're an author participant actor faker what you are your status disappears and you just become detritus of London [Music] apart from this strange little pub Turner's old star which was where he hid his mistress mrs. booth away and kept a private life quite close to the Thames which he loved the same sight is associated with Lydia Rodgers who was accused of witchcraft and found guilty of allowing the devil to draw blood from her and to form an evil pact in 1658 so not too long after rains brother leveler was buried a short way away in an adjacent graveyard [Music] almost walking in Reverse the walk that we did for London Overground the film I made of IANS book of that name and we walked down one day from Shadwell to whopping a slightly different slightly different route it's interesting to be back down here within [Music] it needn't see me here today [Music] this is a very interesting form of psycho Geographic to read where I'm just following somebody something which has been done before in psychogeography terms but the fact is I'm following one of the one of the great figures of British psychogeography or psycho geography in general which adds another layer to this quest now idea what we're going he ends up here somewhere this London plane tree here is marks the burial spot of the scientist and mystic who spoke to the dead emanuel swedenborg who lived in well close square which was just behind us and that's one of the reasons I wanted to see Sweden Berg's burial spot is that there's a connection here with where we're going in the Seybold walk to the Jewish burial ground because rabbi Lowe the Kabbalistic rabbi is buried in that burial ground that you didn't get into with the seybolt house the Austerlitz house nearby and when Sweden Bergen lowered living both living in well close square just at the end they got to know each other and rabbi Lowe apparently he was a an expert in sex magic among other things and they had long conversations both about the Swedenborgian idea that the dead are with us and converse with us and rabbi Lowe's sense of all the Kabbalistic and gola mystic mysteries of London so these two great figures were very close by and we're now in the body of what was a church and when Sweden Berg was buried it was a great fashion for collecting skulls and the church verges allowed in some tourists party who cut off the head of Sweden Berg and took it away subsequently the head was apparently recovered and reunited with the body and a Swedish warship was sent to bring the body and the head back to up Salah in Sweden but unfortunately they got the wrong head and the right head eventually emerged in a junk shop in Swansea and was authenticated and tested and so another hat appeared and it's now been sent to the right place and in Sweden burg house there's a cast I think of the wrong head in a box that which I have written about in the past this chain of heads is quite odd because we spoke about the head of bran the blessèd at the white man by the Tower of London so he's there Sweden burg with his missing head is here there's a crossroads right behind us on Cable Street and at that crossroads the body of the wrapped if highway murderer was was buried after he'd been accused but hadn't already been executed he committed suicide in prison and as a suicide he was buried at the crossroads his head was cut off mistakes through his heart and the head again disappeared with rumours that it was in the in the pub there which was a pub used by sewer men in which I used occasionally to drink in and they did have a collection of skulls under the bar and so these these prophetic heads of London shadow the river and move all the way down from the tower to Limehouse each one accumulating myth as it goes [Music] [Music] famous age in their siege house he joins this peculiar ruling tag yes but the house of horrors Ian wanted to take me back to the street mentioned in WG say boards celebrated novel outlets where I had recently walked with the artist bottom Roberta Smith following Ian's instructions we're back in alderney Road Ian wants to show me the actual site of the of the ostlers house being a little overconfident to state the actual house because obviously there is no actual house but just going on the elements in his text we can find an actually fictional house that has the atmosphere and description that he touches on and I felt one of the elements that it has to have is it has to physically overlook the burial ground there has to be this complete connection it can't just be one of these here any random house so then there's really two choices and I'll show you and I think you know in a sense because it doesn't exist it could be either you made you make your own choice of it the elements are that does in traveling from regularly from Norwich to Liverpool Street they've all reported that his train frequently stalled and stopped at a particular spot very close to here and while he was wiling away the time looked across the train window and saw the walls of what he took to be a Jewish burial ground and he he wanted to come there and investigate it when he got together with Stephen Watts who lived in Shadwell and knew the East End very well or he found it on his own who knows but this this is it and obviously this has the atmosphere of the house he describes but this is probably not it because this is this belongs to the burial ground itself and wouldn't being occupied by a caretaker but it has the mysterious look at it now against the dark sky has the quality but it's a second contender for me to it to the one on the other side please do not feed the foxes behind the walls we have the eternal presence of rabbi lo who connected with emanuel swedenborg when they both lived near welco Square and held these long conversations Sweden Berg and his dusty black velvet suit living on cups of coffee a gaunt haunted presence who came ashore in London as a man condemned because on his first visit he was on a plague ship and there was in quarantine but he couldn't wait to engage with English scientists so he he came ashore legitimately and was arrested and if you broke quarantine at that time you would be hanged but because his uncle was a bishop in sweet and they pulled a few strings and they didn't hang him and he carried on to have this moment of vision when he was in a chop house in Farrington and heard a voice saying don't eat too much which became a curious prophetic sign and the same presence came to him later that night in his lodgings and from there on London was a sight of vision and permissions because there was a liberal publishing policy in London he could publish books that you couldn't have published in Sweden or be accused of heresy and if you ever got a person who could communicate with the dead then this was one of the places to do it and the whole said boldly and exercises or is a form of communication with the dead the books have a kind of European comedy but they're also in a way posthumous they seem to represent a vanishing culture and it's really nice that we've been able to walk out of the buzz and heat of the city to this relatively calm spot in which this book are still it's cooked in which you've already tracked down in the presence of an artist my personal take and it's only my interpretation is that this is the right house for a lot of reasons it's got a phenomenal atmosphere and this room here it looks right over the over the graveyard you'd go in at that door the wall here has all kinds of shapes and signs in it it's it's a gift for a writer and I think I think he'd have fallen for this particular house this is the one I nominate this is the archive here where Ian did a lot of visa research or for Lud's he the stuff that the Peter Aykroyd then was inspired by shall we say carried it away into I suppose you might say influenced Anna more as well the research that Alan told me he was given it by Neil Gaiman right back at shortly after it was published Miss Alan's always a voracious reader and Neil Gaiman was very interested in these weird mysteries of London and he he picked it up Alan Moore said yeah I think this will be a good one for you Alan and indeed Alan drew quite a lot from it which he used in from hell including all kinds of cultured mappings [Music] well thank you to Ian behind me here for an amazing walk from the city through the East End unraveling mysteries as we go now we're going to unravel the mystery of traveling on the central line and I'll see you on the next walk wherever that may be who could have predicted this one [Music]

Channel: John Rogers

Views: 87,304

Keywords: London, This Other London, psychogeography, london walks, london travel, urban adventure, John Rogers, John Rogers walks, London walking tour, London walk, Iain Sinclair, City of London, east end, Sebald, Swedenborg, Alan Moore

Id: CHyizbQ6Tmc

Length: 38min 13sec (2293 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020