Book review: Ghost Milk: Calling Time On the Grand Project

IT WAS only a matter of time before Iain Sinclair took one of his poetic perambulations around the London 2012 Olympics, that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the primary strategic objective to which we are so "deeply mortgaged", as he describes it.

GHOST MILK: CALLING TIME ON THE GRAND PROJECT

BY IAIN SINCLAIR

Hamish Hamilton, 432pp, 20

The Hackney author is an epic walker and, it should be stressed, an epic grump-a-dump. He is our leading exponent of psychogeography, defined by the French Situationist Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals".

For Sinclair, that involves setting out on foot from his home in Albion Drive, E8, documenting fine details. One of his best works, a walking guide to east London written for his friends, is sadly out of print. His most famous book, London Orbital, saw him stroll around the M25, riffing on the road to hell.

A "post-punk Pepys", one reviewer called him. However, while Samuel Pepys was generous enough to describe and document his world, Sinclair mainly uses his walks to inspire rancorous rhapsodies about vanishing spaces, vain politicians and corrupt developers. The Olympics, you sense, is just the sort of binding theme he has been waiting for.

Ghost Milk is a memoir and a series of expeditions undertaken to explore the hidden nature of today's grand projects. Subversively, it is dedicated to Jules Pipe, the mayor of Hackney, a constant inspiration, as he remakes the borough of Hackney into a model surrealist wonderland. (Sinclair's last project was a personal history of Hackney; his criticisms of the council led him to be disinvited from readings in its libraries.)

Newcomers to Sinclair should be warned. Ghost Milk… reads like some whimsical meld of poet Allen Ginsberg, comics writer Alan Moore and an anarchist's message board. There is no doubt that Sinclair is original, observant, a wonderful phrasemaker - Stratford is "a bulging varicose vein in the flank of the A11"; the Olympic stadium is a "gleaming white nest processed by corporate debt, in a wilderness of condemned terraces and discontinued industries".

He also compares the films based around Broadway Market and Portobello Road respectively - they get Notting Hill, with its ethnic cleansing and bumbling New Tory toffs; Hackney gets Eastern Promises, about Russian hoodlums, "the pantomime version of what is rumoured to be happening".

Nonetheless, it is telling that Sinclair's anger comes across most eloquently when he quotes other people, such as Tony Platia, the owner of a bustling Broadway Market caf until he was priced out by developers: "It is people like me, local traders who fought very hard to bring Broadway Market back into a proper community, who should be celebrating the Olympics. All the developers want to do is take the money coming into Hackney straight out the area."

Or the architect who offers a worrying insight into Olympic accountancy: "Everyone knows when it's all done we'll have a bill of at least 20 billion … The world of grand project accountancy is completely unreal, figures are just floated. If you tell the truth you won't get the job."

Sinclair's main point is that our arrogant and self-serving politicians haven't noticed that the modernisation they are promising is absurd and unnecessary. The pressure of regeneration, force-fed by the Olympics, is such that zones once tolerant of impoverished artists now have to turn every waste lot, every previously unnoticed ruin, to profit. To provide more theoretical housing, it is necessary to unhouse those who have already fended for themselves.

Sinclair clearly enjoys the irony as he documents the sporting improvements that were brought to Hackney Wick by 19th century philanthropists and remained there until they were redeveloped to make way for new sporting improvements.

"The post-Olympic facilities were here all along, getting on with their business, struggling for funds," he writes. "The nation didn't have to go into hock to pull in the punters. It occurred spontaneously, before the age of multi-layered development agencies, the tearing out of gardens, the expulsion of small traders, the removal of travellers."

However, what you want after such insights is committed investigation, analysis of the figures, a broader range of voices, some sense of how this might have been done better and what we can learn from it. The vaguest admission that some of us are actually looking forward to the Olympics might have helped. Or perhaps our Londons are less valid? Perhaps we simply lack his flighty genius?

The deeper irony of Sinclair's writing is that he somehow misses the city as most of us experience it. He stands apart from the crowd, a lone wanderer. He seems to be against the change that animates cities over time. The effect is highly alienating.