Fusty Contrarianism

With the Olympics coming in on time and under budget, it's now down to the professional miserabilists to keep up the disdain that just a few years ago almost everyone claimed to feel for the whole wretched business. And at least Iain Sinclair's been consistent: he hated it then, and he hates it now. In fact he has a new book on the subject: 

Beginning in his east London home many years before it will be invaded by the Olympian machinery of global capitalism, Sinclair strikes out near and far in search of the forgotten and erased...

He's not shy about publicising it either. You can listen to him here, on BBC's Today programme. He starts off by complaining about the current improvements to Victoria Park: part of what he takes to be "an almost psychotic state of grand projectism...the building work never finishes, that's the whole point." Well of course it finishes: the man does get carried away by his rhetoric. But publicly funded improvements are not to his taste - and privately funded improvements even less so, one imagines: the machinery of global capitalism and all that. Improvements of any kind are not to his taste. Unlike the other local residents, he prefers a seedy yet poetic decay, where the ghost of London past is glimpsed in the litter and dereliction, where hardened Cockney chancers train their fighting dogs in the park's dark corners, and muggers lurk to catch the unwary. Just the place for the genteel writer to get that frisson of yer genuine Kray Brothers East End ambience before heading safely home to write it all up for the London Review of Books. 

David Aaronovitch has a go in today's Times (£) (under a brief video of Sinclair with nature writer Richard Mabey waffling along the Greenway by the Olympic Park):

What he [Sinclair] offers instead is an attack on the inauthenticity of grand projects. They do not emerge, grubby and organically from the flabby but human bosoms of local people, but from the vainglory of the rich and powerful. So Sinclair “circumambulates” (never walk round a thing when you can circumambulate it) the site, grieving for all the things that will be lost in the regenerative surge. The allotments, the abandoned factories with their tyre heaps spilling into the Bow back-rivers, the flowering weeds colonising the cracks in crumbling concrete, the peculiar inhabitants of “edgeland”, the crap shops, the soggy sofas put out on street corners, the occasional Victorian villa (with “creeper”, naturally). All to be lost in the attempt to create an overperfect vista of parks, water, shops and stadiums, as a memorial to moneymen.

This kind of scruffy authenticism, this bomb-site nostalgia, proliferates at the moment. It is full of regret and negativity. It prefers neglect to action, Detroit to Shanghai; it imagines that Dirty Old Town is not a love song about a girl, but a love song about a gasworks. Because it is the spiritual province of people who could always escape these conditions if they chose (and many weekends they do choose), it is imagined that those forced to inhabit unregenerated areas enjoy them and wouldn’t move at the very first opportunity that they got.

It is a really odd kind of modern Leftism that is suspicious only of progress, that believes that nothing is real unless it has been there for a century or fallen down. A lugubrious priesthood has risen up to tell us what is inauthentic...

For the best take on Sinclair though (via), read architect Charles Holland:

[H]e offers an aestheticised vision of, for want of a better term, shittyness. At one point during his film he pointed to a breakers yard and declared it as good as a Joseph Beuys artwork. This is the urban hipster version of shabby chic, an effete observation that recalls the British painters of Saint Ives patronising (in every sense) Alfred Wallis. At other points he wanders around expressing exasperation at builder's hoardings causing him some minor inconvenience or rails at the cleaning up of the boating lake in Victoria Park. But these seem like the gripes of the terminal misanthrope, a Victor Meldrew-ish exasperation of life at its most petty and a hopeless railing against any form of change. It's hard when knocking Sinclair not to come across as some vapid boosterist and one can sympathise with his visceral dislike of the language (and the effects) of regeneration, but he also has that hopeless, miserable English disease of thinking the worst of everything. The Olympics will be a disaster, he seems to say, simply because everything is. Like Marvin the Paranoid Android wandering Hackney Marshes, he suggests that all new building is pointless, all attempts at planning doomed and any development always the product of base venality.

But buildings always replace other things. They are always about destruction as well as construction and we celebrate ones now that must have appeared insensitive behemoths when they were completed. As an architect it is impossible to share Sinclair's deep but affected cynicism about new building. Sure, much of it is shit but then again, most of the buildings in the Olympic Park emphatically aren't. A couple even look genuinely beautiful. And if you can't build a new urban park in a place like Stratford, where can you? And this is the point. Sinclair's vision ultimately suggests an ever tinier and more myopic introversion, a celebrating of the incidental, peripheral, neglected and marginal to the point where you can't see anything else or do anything else ever again. He's right to rail against the class cleansing inherent in regeneration projects (although other people like Patrick Wright and Owen Hatherley have done this much better and with less sentimentality), but it's hard to get away from his own bourgeoisie conceits and fusty contraryism. Whatever, his eeyor-ish traipsing around East London made me look forward much more to the 100 metres.

I knew the Olympic Park area pretty well. As I wrote here, I used to cycle round there on summer evenings, where the only sound would be the furious barking of the guard dogs in the breakers yards as they leapt up against the fence when I went past. What attracted me, which is what I assume also attracted Sinclair, was that post-industrial atmosphere of decay; the gaunt warehouses; the buddleia and barbed wire; and maybe the feeling that, after a day at the office, this was something grittier, more real. But to want to preserve that would be as foolish as to want to preserve, say, the industrial ruins of Detroit simply because they're so photogenic. If an opportunity arises for development, as it did for this grim corner behind Stratford, then it shoud be taken.